2017

Recently, British geneticist Richard Buggs defended the view that a modern human pair could have escaped a genetic bottleneck: It is easy to have misleading intuitions about the population genetic effects of a short, sudden bottleneck. For example, Ernst Mayr suggested that many species had passed through extreme bottlenecks in founder events. He argued that extreme loss of diversity in such events would promote evolutionary change. The matter was taken up at The Skeptical Zone where population geneticist Joe Felsenstein, among others, replied, skeptical but not ruling the idea out. Now Buggs has replied at the Zone to comments by Felsenstein and Schaffner: First, I note that both Schaffner and Felsenstein agree with my point that the bottleneck hypothesis has Read More ›

We have come to the point where leftists in power no longer feel the need to even pretend they are anything other than fascists.  See here. Why are we surprised that their students are fascists when that is what the professors teach them to be?

From ScienceDaily: Life on Earth originated in an intimate partnership between the nucleic acids (genetic instructions for all organisms) and small proteins called peptides, according to two new articles from biochemists and biologists. Their ‘peptide-RNA’ hypothesis contradicts the widely-held ‘RNA-world’ hypothesis, which states that life originated from nucleic acids and only later evolved to include proteins. … Co-author Peter Wills, PhD, professor of physics at the University of Auckland, said, “Compared to the RNA-world hypothesis, what we’ve outlined is simply a much more probable scenario for the origin of life. We hope our data and the theory we’ve outlined in these papers will stimulate discussion and further research on questions relevant to the origins of life.” The two scientists are Read More ›

We didn’t predict this one and it’s not the story you think. Recently, geneticist Richard Buggs defended the possibility in principle that a human population bottleneck could consist of one fertile couple. At the Zone (founded by former UD commenters among others), Vincent Torley writes: Geneticist Richard Buggs, Reader in Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London, has just written an intriguing article in Nature: Ecology and Evolution (28 October 2017), titled, Adam and Eve: a tested hypothesis? Comments on a recent book chapter. It appears that Buggs is unpersuaded that science has ruled out Adam and Eve. He thinks it’s still theoretically possible that the human race once passed through a short, sharp population bottleneck of just two Read More ›

From Gregory Chaitin at UFRJ: In Chapter 8 of his 1996 Oxford University Press masterpiece The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers speculates on using information theory as the basis for a fundamental theory of consciousness. Building on his work, we attempt to flesh out an updated version of the Chalmers proposal by taking into account more recent developments including algorithmic information theory, quantum information theory, the holographic principle and the Bekenstein bound, and digital philosophy as sketched in two little-known monographs in Italian: Introduzione alla filosofia digitale and Bit Bang: La nascita della filosofia digitale … In the two decades since Chalmers published his panpsychism thesis that any physical system that processes information is conscious, it has become possible to put Read More ›

Where science means: Anything goes (with some targeted exceptions). From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: Modern science, beginning in Europe in the 18th century, has been dominated by educated European men. But their dominance was not a principle of science. The principles were the laws and theorems that apply an internationally recognized thought pattern to nature. “Hidden figures” who sought and gained equality applied the same principles to the same effect. But for post-modernists, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) provided liberation: “Anything goes.” One outcome is that social justice activists have shifted away from helping marginalized people qualify in science toward questioning its principles, supposedly on behalf of the oppressed. We hear that objectivity is “cultural discrimination” (or sexist), Read More ›

Coming from a long and detailed discussion about the limits of Natural Selection, here: What are the limits of Natural Selection? An interesting open discussion with Gordon Davisson I realized that some attention could be given to the other great protagonist of the neo-darwinian algorithm: Random Variation (RV). For the sake of clarity, as usual, I will try to give explicit definitions in advance. Let’s call RV event any random event that, in the course of Natural History, acts on an existing organism at the genetic level, so that the genome of that individual organism changes in its descendants. That’s more or less the same as the neo-darwinian concept of descent with modifications. A few important clarifications: a) I use Read More ›

Whatever dark matter is, is not what was expected. From Dan Hooper at Physics: The latest results from two dark matter searches have further ruled out many theoretically attractive dark matter particle candidates. The lack of a definitive detection of dark matter particles, in both underground experiments and at the Large Hadron Collider [4–7], has had a palpable effect on the community of scientists that study particle dark matter. Even though a discovery could very plausibly be right around the corner, there is a widespread view that many of the most theoretically attractive candidates for dark matter should have been detected by now, based on their predicted properties. In the absence of such a discovery, the field has begun to Read More ›

With a number of apt quotations. From Ann Gauger on J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It at Evolution News & Views: Turner’s book is fascinating, stimulating, and befuddling by turns. He has interesting ideas but little to back them up, and in places the prose goes fuzzy, perhaps because there is little to go on. His ideas are only in the beginning stages, and need to be tested and evaluated, because they are controversial. For example, we already know that organisms modify their environments to fit their physiological needs, whether it be microbial mats, termite mounds, or human beings. That is not controversial. I find the idea of Read More ›

No shortage of speculations as to where ET life might be hiding. From Mike Wall at LiveScience: E.T. may be out there, silently swimming in frigid oceans beneath miles and miles of ice. … Last week, planetary scientist Alan Stern offered up another idea: Maybe intelligent life is widespread throughout the galaxy but most of it lives in deep, dark subsurface oceans that are cut off from the rest of the cosmos. … For starters, Stern said, such buried oceans may be common across the Milky Way. Indeed, they should be, if our own solar system is any guide: Liquid-water oceans slosh beneath the frigid shells of the Jupiter moons Callisto, Ganymede and Europa, for example, as well as the Read More ›

The Alt-Right spouts “blood and soil,” white identity, and nationalism.  The Antifa is a child of totalitarian tolerance manifested in political correctness and identify politics.  While at first blush they might seem radically different, they are in fact fundamentally the same. They are fundamentally the same because they are both manifestations of materialist politics, and as such they are both antithetical to the liberal (in the old sense of that word) Christian principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence.  The Declaration appeals to the inherent dignity of every person created as they are Imago Dei, in the likeness and image of God.  At Gettysburg Lincoln insisted that as a people we are dedicated not to a tribe or a Read More ›

Bruce Buff and Robert J. Spitzer write: But when it comes to the mind, this idea [i.e., emergence] has its issues. First, all scientifically observed emergence is actually unanticipated behavior resulting from known physical properties, and not new properties that exceed what physics can explain. Some materialists suggest that consciousness might emerge from physical processes on the quantum level, but any emergence there would be disrupted by anything that has an effect on quantum physics — such as holding up a cell phone to your head or getting an MRI. Simply put, emergence depends on properties that already exist in the system’s constituent parts. It doesn’t matter how many Legos are assembled in incredibly complex arrangements, they will never generate Read More ›

Keep them mad. Maybe serious science is coming up for oxygen… just maybe. From Emma Marris at Nature: On 23 October, a group of current and former volunteers posted an open letter to the central March for Science organization in New York City, alleging that it is secretive, insensitive to the concerns of its volunteers, and unwilling to share power or information with organizers of its many affiliated ‘satellite’ groups around the world. The volunteers also claim that the organization sidelined and stonewalled experienced activists who wanted the movement to focus on how science can be used in ways that perpetuate racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. In a statement to Nature, the March for Science said that it Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: In Human Zoos, Dr. West explores the shameful legacy of pseudo-scientific racism that has trailed Darwinian theory from its inception down to today, with the emergence of the so-called alt-right. The film will premiere at the Oregon Documentary Film Festival on Saturday evening, November 11. It will release to the general public next year. More. The pseudo-scientific racism was  predictable from the get-go, once humans were proclaimed to be not special (we became subject to science-based reckonings as if we were animals). And once the Darwinian worldview was adopted by Big Cool Science, the racism became something those who wanted to get ahead just did not talk about. Call Darwinian racism, if you Read More ›

Lizzie Wade shares her worries about the new Museum of the Bible at Science: The grandiose new venture is bankrolled by the Greens, the billionaire family that owns the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores. Since 2009, the Greens, evangelical Christians known for their successful Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health insurance plans pay for birth control, have amassed a private collection of 40,000 artifacts—both ancient and modern—relating to the Bible and the ancient Near East. The $500 million Museum of the Bible is a separate, nonprofit entity, but Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, chairs its board, and the family has donated hundreds of artifacts to the museum. Forty thousand artifacts? Wow. Some of the Read More ›