2017

From ScienceDaily: Dr Brocks said the rise of algae triggered one of the most profound ecological revolutions in Earth’s history, without which humans and other animals would not exist. “Before all of this happened, there was a dramatic event 50 million years earlier called Snowball Earth,” he said. “The Earth was frozen over for 50 million years. Huge glaciers ground entire mountain ranges to powder that released nutrients, and when the snow melted during an extreme global heating event rivers washed torrents of nutrients into the ocean.” Dr Brocks said the extremely high levels of nutrients in the ocean, and cooling of global temperatures to more hospitable levels, created the perfect conditions for the rapid spread of algae. It was Read More ›

In order to prepare ourselves for the upcoming solar eclipse on Monday, August 21, David Coppedge posted a YouTube video showing the Great Baja Eclipse of 1991 and people’s reactions to it.

Read More ›

Announcing from on high that it is Against Discrimination, Nature tells us: Science cannot and should not be used to justify prejudice.  No indeed. But is there any general wish that it did? Then, Difference between groups may therefore provide sound scientific evidence. But it’s also a blunt instrument of pseudoscience, and one used to justify actions and policies that condense claimed group differences into tools of prejudice and discrimination against individuals — witness last weekend’s violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the controversy over a Google employee’s memo on biological differences in the tastes and abilities of the sexes. A nice touch that, to equate hapless engineer Damore’s ejection from the Goolag with white supremacist violence. The two Read More ›

Earlier today, we were looking at Sara Walker’s recent paper on origin of life and information (public access). Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts: Sarah Walker has worked in OOL research for almost a decade, getting her experience under Paul Davies at ASU. Davies is a theoretical physicist who also manages to write a pop-sci book every year. He has one or two on the OOL problem, and was a coauthor on at least one paper with NASA scientist Richard Hoover. All that to say that the mainstream media has for the most part ignored Davies and Walker’s contributions. When Davies was a co-author on the “arsenic shadow biosphere” paper, the Darwinistas attacked it with full throated Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: As a postscript to Brian Miller’s reply to MIT physicist Jeremy England, see this from the famed synthetic organic chemist James Tour, writing for the online journal Inference. In “An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Tour sets out this way: Life should not exist. This much we know from chemistry. In contrast to the ubiquity of life on earth, the lifelessness of other planets makes far better chemical sense. Synthetic chemists know what it takes to build just one molecular compound. The compound must be designed, the stereochemistry controlled. Yield optimization, purification, and characterization are needed. An elaborate supply is required to control synthesis from start to finish. None of this is Read More ›

Jeremy England’s origin of life claims have been in the news lately. A friend points us to a paper by Sara Walker: Origins of Life: A Problem for Physics Abstract: The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of complexity that are anywhere near that of even the simplest living systems. A key challenge is identifying the properties of living matter that might distinguish living and non-living physical systems such that we might build new life in the lab. This review is geared towards covering major viewpoints on the Read More ›

Remember that if you are stuck for something to say.  From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost, interviewing neuroscientist Paul Silvia: Paul Silvia: The 2015 paper was our first toes-in-the-water. The whole brain view is really a good way to think about it. Traditionally with creativity and brain work, investigations have addressed: What’s the creative part? Where’s creativity in the brain? What’s the part that lights up? And traditionally, the view has been: The right side is the creative part. But there’s really no part or piece or even single system. Creativity is a very complex thing. Our earlier study was really a pilot study. We had a small number of people and we were pretty limited in how we were looking at Read More ›

Like we said, plenty of time for Darwinians to beat their iron rice bowls into hatchets. From zoologist Jules Howard at Guardian,: Some still attack Darwin and evolution – How can science fight back?  I can save you the effort of reading AN Wilson’s “exposé” on Darwin, which did the rounds over the weekend, characterising the famous scientist as a fraud, a thief, a liar, a racist and a rouser of nazism. Instead, head over to Netflix and watch the creationist made-for-TV movie A Matter of Faith, which covers many of the same arguments – and also includes a final scene in which a fictional evolutionary biologist, standing alone in his study, holds a rubber chicken in his hands and Read More ›

Documentary evidence offered here Didn’t they used to say that the bugs get everybody in the end? See also: From Philip Cunningham: Darwinian Materialism vs Quantum Biology

From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: When I use the term fake news, I do not mean deliberate sabotage of news sites by, for example, Russia’s troll house. Or opposition research marketed as news. Or false information that merits retraction and results in dismissals as at CNN recently. Nor material that is outed by traditional media sources themselves as fake news. Consider, for example, the BBC’s displeasure at the glut of fake anti-Trump stories (“Many people on the left right now are feeling overwhelmed and fearful and unsure of what’s going to happen next”), many of which have also been debunked by Snopes as“patterns of falsehoods.” At some level, the people creating the news have to know that Read More ›

Trigger warning!: Donald Trump mentioned. 😉 From Nicholas Staropoli at Epigenetics Literacy Project: This week’s features: A professor’s troubling politicization of epigenetics in Gizmodo, Men’s Health quotes me on male fertility but mistakes correlation for causation. Plus see what’s trending on the Epigenetics Literacy Project. On a larger scale, the amount of stress that Americans are going through now, because of Trump—there is going to be an evolutionary consequence. Peter Ward Professor, Department of Biology, University of Washington More. Although Ward’s appointment is in biology at U Washington, as Staropoli notes, his main publications have been in astronomy and paleontology. One of Ward’s better-known works is Rare Earth (2000), on why Earth is especially habitable (now free at the link as Read More ›

From Michael Greshko at National Geographic: “We’ve been looking for ape fossils for years—this is the first time we’re getting a skull that’s complete,” says Isaiah Nengo, the De Anza College anthropologist who led the discovery, supported by a National Geographic Society grant and the Stony Brook University-affiliated Turkana Basin Institute. Roughly the size of a lemon, the skull belongs to a newly identified species of early ape named Nyanzapithecus alesi. Some of its features resemble those of today’s living Old World monkeys and apes, and the face bears a striking resemblance to today’s infant gibbons. What’s more, N. alesi offers insight into early apes’ brains, the team reports in their study, published today in Nature. With a volume of Read More ›

From Heather Heying, weighing in on the Google foray into post-modern truth, which smacked an unwary engineer upside head, at Quillette: Should We “Stop Equating ‘Science’ With Truth”? Damore’s heresy turns on innate differences between men and women that have never been noticed by anyone in the history of human life on the planet except him. So, of course, the entire obsolescent traditional media melted down in shock. Heying: Evolutionary biology has been through this, over and over and over again. There are straw men. No, the co-option of science by those with a political agenda does not put the lie to the science that was co-opted. Social Darwinism is not Darwinism. You can put that one to rest. There Read More ›

The Third Way of Evolution is a group of non-Darwinian or minimally Darwinian evolutionary biologists. From Tom Heneghan at Religion News: Since scientists succeeded in sequencing the genome in the late 1990s, they have found that epigenetic markers that regulate patterns of gene expression can reflect outside influences on a body. Even simpler living objects such as plants contain a complex internal genetic system that governs their growth according to information they receive from outside. To theologians who see a “new biology” emerging, this knowledge points to a more holistic system than scientists have traditionally seen, one more open to some divine inspiration for life. In this view, the fact that epigenetic markers can bring outside pressures to bear on Read More ›

From Evan Allgood at New York Mag: A few years ago, psychological scientist Kurt Gray came across the final statements of 500 Texas inmates executed between 1982 and 2013. (The state’s Department of Criminal Justice posts them online.) As he read these inmates’ surprisingly sanguine last words, Gray wondered if their positivity was a fluke or part of a broader psychological trend. So he conducted a study at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which compared the words of death row inmates and terminally ill patients to those simply imagining they were close to death. This research —published this summer in Psychological Science — suggests that while it’s natural to fear death in the abstract, the closer one actually Read More ›