2017

Notes. See also: An evolutionary challenge: explaining away compassion, philanthropy, and self-sacrifice

A friend sends us some thoughts from well-known persons for our reflection: Physicist George Ellis on the importance of philosophy and free will, in an interview with science writer John Horgan (July 27, 2014): Horgan: Einstein, in the following quote, seemed to doubt free will: “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the Earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” Do you believe in free will? Ellis: Yes. Einstein is perpetuating Read More ›

The Grand Design Here: Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of The Grand Design is that the attempts made to support Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s case are, in many cases, simply unsophisticated, unsupportable, naive, and even fallacious. I believe that in a college class on logic, philosophy, or religion, this book would receive a failing grade. For example, the question is posed, “Are there any exceptions to the laws of physics?” or “Are miracles possible.” The answer given is, “…the modern scientists answer to question two [exceptions to the laws of physics]…is…a scientific law is not a scientific law if it holds only when some supernatural being decides not to intervene.” This is a clear example of the logical fallacy of “begging Read More ›

From Shannon Hall at Nature: The fact that scientists don’t fully understand these cosmological tools is embarrassing, says the latest study’s lead author, Griffin Hosseinzadeh, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “One of the greatest discoveries of the century is based on these things and we don’t even know what they are, really.” It’s not for lack of trying: astronomers have put forth a range of hypotheses to explain how these stellar explosions arise. Scientists once thought that the supernovae were built uniformly, like fireworks in a cosmic assembly line. That changed in the 1990s, when astronomers noticed that some of the supernovae were dimmer than the others. More. Relax. We weren’t asking you guys to be Read More ›

Suzan Mazur asks neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, who offers some thoughts at HuffPost: Suzan Mazur: What is your understanding of when, historically, humans thought up religion? British anthropologist Maurice Bloch has said humans largely live in their reflective imagination, something that first arose 40,000 to 50,000 years ago and that “[t]he kind of phenomena that the English word “religion,” and the associated word “belief,” can be made to evoke have, at most a history of five thousand years.” You’ve said religious and spiritual ideas have been around “since the dawn of civilization.” When would that be—-“the dawn of civilization”? And what is the evidence? Andrew Newberg: Certainly, a more formalized aspect of religion has been around for about 5,000 years going Read More ›

From Massimo Pigliucci at Footnotes to Plato: Theoretical biology’ is a surprisingly heterogeneous field, partly because it encompasses ‘‘doing theory’’ across disciplines as diverse as molecular biology, systematics, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Moreover, it is done in a stunning variety of different ways, using anything from formal analytical models to computer simulations, from graphic representations to verbal arguments. A few years ago I co-organized a workshop on this topic at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for theoretical biology in Vienna, and then published an edited volume of the journal Biological Theory collecting all contributions. It certainly sounds as though Pigliucci talking about the shot heard round the world, The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry (2009), though he does Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: New geochemical research indicates that existing theories of the formation of the Earth may be mistaken. The results of experiments to show how zinc (Zn) relates to sulphur (S) under the conditions present at the time of the formation of the Earth more than 4 billion years ago, indicate that there is a substantial quantity of Zn in the Earth’s core, whereas previously there had been thought to be none. This implies that the building blocks of the Earth must be different to what has been supposed. The work is presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Paris. More. Paper presumably to follow. One of the nice things about science, when it actually works, is that it isn’t Read More ›

From Paul Giem at Loma Linda U: You disagree? Fine. Please, no SJW. No bicycle chain. Try civilized arguments. You might grow to like them.

From Sarah B. Puschmann at LiveScience: In 2014, one of Roy Caldwell’s octopuses went missing. Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, had kept the reef octopuses (Abdopus aculeatus) he and his team collected on Lizard Island in Australia in separate, sealed tanks. Puzzled, he peered into the female octopus’s tank and found spermatophores, the capsules that contain octopus sperm, floating in the water. He looked closer and found the male there, too, buried in the gravel. The only way the male octopus could have made it into the female’s tank, Caldwell said, is for the male to have wriggled through the pipe that fed water into both octopuses’ tanks, an act some might deem Read More ›

From Joseph Silk at Nautilus: The strongest tool for discovery of dark-matter particles would be a new particle collider. Fast-forwarding some three decades from now, physicists plan to build a collider with seven times the power of the LHC. Studies are underway both in China and in Europe. Crudely scaling up from the LHC, it would cost $25 billion in today’s dollars. Shared among nations and spread over the decades, that might just be feasible. But it is probably the limit. Even if physicists had unlimited resources, nothing would be gained by building anything larger. At that point, any unknown particle would have to be so massive that, were the particle produced in the same way as its lighter counterparts, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists reveal that a fault in the process that copies DNA during cell division can cause epigenetic changes that may be inherited for up-to five generations. They also identified the cause of these epigenetic changes, which is related to the loss of a molecular mechanism in charge of silencing genes. Their results, which will be published in Science Advances on 16 August, will change the way we think about the impact of replication stress in cancer and during embryonic development, as well as its inter-generational inheritance. Paper. (public access) – A. Klosin, K. Reis, C. Hidalgo-Carcedo, E. Casas, T. Vavouri, B. Lehner. Impaired DNA replication derepresses chromatin and generates a transgenerational inherited epigenetic memory. Science Advances, 2017 DOI: Read More ›

Our atheist friends delight in preening over their rejection of the “irrational” and “magic.”  Not so writes David Bentley Hart: All of which is to say (to return to where I began) that it is absurd to think that one can profess atheism in any meaningful way without thereby assenting to an entire philosophy of being, however inchoate one’s sense of it may be. The philosophical naturalist’s view of reality is not one that merely fails to find some particular object within the world that the theist imagines can be descried there; it is a very particular representation of the nature of things, entailing a vast range of purely metaphysical commitments. Principally, it requires that one believe that the physical order, which Read More ›

Asked at Phil Sci Archive: It is suggested that the apparently disparate cosmological phenomena attributed to so-called ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ arise from the same fundamental physical process: the emergence, from the quantum level, of spacetime itself. This creation of spacetime results in metric expansion around mass points in addition to the usual curvature due to stress-energy sources of the gravitational field. A recent modification of Einstein’s theory of general relativity by Chadwick, Hodgkinson, and McDonald incorporating spacetime expansion around mass points, which accounts well for the observed galactic rotation curves, is adduced in support of the proposal. Recent observational evidence corroborates a prediction of the model that the apparent amount of ‘dark matter’ increases with the age of Read More ›

From Burak Bekdil at Gatestone Institute: More recently, in July, Turkish Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz revealed that the final version of Turkey’s national school curriculum left out evolution and added the concept of “jihad,” as part of Islamic law, in the books. The new curriculum will be put into execution for first, fifth, and ninth graders beginning this year, and will extend to other classes in the 2018-2019 academic year. According to Yilmaz: “Jihad is an element in our religion; it is in our religion… The duty of the Education Ministry is to teach every concept deservedly, in a correct way. It is also our job to correct things that are wrongly perceived, seen or taught”. Although the Turkish government Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Chimpanzees of all ages and all sexes can learn the simple circular relationship between the three different hand signals used in the well-known game rock-paper-scissors. Even though it might take them longer, they are indeed able to learn the game as well as a young child. Jie Gao of Kyoto University in Japan and Peking University in China is lead author of a study in the journal Primates, which is the official journal of the Japan Monkey Centre, and is published by Springer. The research compares the ability of chimpanzees and children to learn the rock-paper-scissors game. … The findings show that chimpanzees can learn the circular pattern at the heart of the game. However, it took them Read More ›