2017

Steve Meyer is the author of Darwin’s Doubt. Your time here. To join, go here.

At New York Times: Almost all people believe that it is a crime to kill an innocent human, but not to kill an innocent tapeworm. And almost all people regard tapeworms as incapable of innocence in any case — not because they are always guilty, but because the distinction between innocent and guilty does not apply to them. They are the wrong kind of thing. We, however, are the right kind of thing. So what kind is that? Do any other beings, animal or otherwise, belong to it? And what follows? These questions lie at the center of philosophical inquiry today, as they have since the ancient Greeks. In a thousand ways we distinguish people from the rest of nature, Read More ›

To him it’s all  real simple: It happens because some people reject expert information when it goes against their personal values … For its part, the American public is in the grip of a sullen, almost paranoid, narcissism about science and experts. This is not a function of education; the anti-vaccine movement, for example, is actually concentrated among parents with more education than their poorer counterparts. Indeed, ignorance has become hip, with some Americans now wearing their rejection of expert advice as a badge of cultural sophistication. (Consider the number of otherwise intelligent people who advocate consuming raw milk, for example, against the advice of a horrified medical community.) Instead, the public rejection of science is an extension of our Read More ›

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: Five neuroscientists argue that fancy new technologies have led the field astray. John Krakaeur, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has been asked to BRAIN Initiative meetings before, and describes it like “Maleficent being invited to Sleeping Beauty’s birthday.” That’s because he and four like-minded friends have become increasingly disenchanted by their colleagues’ obsession with their toys. And in a new paper that’s part philosophical treatise and part shot across the bow, they argue that this technological fetish is leading the field astray. “People think technology + big data + machine learning = science,” says Krakauer. “And it’s not.” He and his fellow curmudgeons argue that brains are special because of the behavior they Read More ›

Asks Anil Ananthaswamy at Nautilus: For his theory of emergent gravity, Verlinde takes the bold leap that the entropy of spacetime has an additional component that scales with volume. His thinking is that our universe, which approximates a spatiotemporal geometry called de Sitter space, is expanding at an accelerated rate, and so has a cosmological horizon—a distance beyond which we cannot see, because galaxies are receding faster than their light can reach us. Such a horizon is very similar to the boundary of a black hole and, by Bekenstein’s and Hawking’s arguments, implies an entropy. This entropy must be counted in addition to the entropy that physicists already ascribe to spacetime, and—crucially, according to Verlinde—it is not localized at the Read More ›

From Charles Q. Quoi at LiveScience: Fossils unearthed in China appeared to be strange patchworks of extinct and modern human lineages, with the large brains of modern humans; the low, broad skulls of earlier humans; and the inner ears of Neanderthals, a new study reported. These new fossils suggest that far-flung groups of ancient humans were more genetically linked across Eurasia than often previously thought, researchers in the new study said. “I don’t like to think of these fossils as those of hybrids,” said study co-author Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “Hybridization implies that all of these groups were separate and discrete, only occasionally interacting. What these fossils show is that these groups were basically Read More ›

Well, there are some limitations: From John Timmer at Ars Technica: Nothing about DNA is 100 percent accurate or even as close to the accuracy we’ve come to expect from our electronic bit storage media. Simply synthesizing DNA of a desired sequence will sometimes result in an error, as will amplifying it or decoding it again. And some specific sequences are especially error prone, like long runs of a single base (like TTTTTTTTTT) or stretches that are a mix of Gs and Cs. So any encoding method has to be robust to these issues. Fortunately, we’ve already developed encoding algorithms that stand up to data loss. The authors went with Fountain codes, which allow packet-based data to be transmitted over Read More ›

From Hugh Ross, author of Improbable Planet, at the Reason to Believe: For plants, animals, and advanced life to possibly exist, the liquid water and ultraviolet habitable zones must sustain their region of overlap for at least a few billion years. This longevity requirement creates a problem for all stars more massive than the Sun. Such stars burn up much faster than the Sun and their luminosities change much more radically than does the Sun’s. The faster and more dramatic burn-up histories of stars more massive than the Sun eliminates the planets orbiting such stars from possibly possessing plants, animals, or advanced life. As noted earlier, for a planet to remain habitable it must avoid at least five different kinds Read More ›

From 2015, but curiously relevant, at his blog Scientia Salon: The Harris-Chomsky exchange, in my mind, summarizes a lot of what I find unpleasant about SAM (skeptic and atheist movements): a community who worships celebrities who are often intellectual dilettantes, or at the very least have a tendency to talk about things of which they manifestly know very little; an ugly undertone of in-your-face confrontation and I’m-smarter-than-you-because-I-agree-with [insert your favorite New Atheist or equivalent]; loud proclamations about following reason and evidence wherever they may lead, accompanied by a degree of groupthink and unwillingness to change one’s mind that is trumped only by religious fundamentalists; and, lately, a willingness to engage in public shaming and other vicious social networking practices any Read More ›

Debate rages about whether scientists should get political. This story crossed the desk, and it might be food for thought: From Ian Goodwin and Yuri Trusov at the Conversation: By the late 1920s, as director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Vavilov soon amassed the largest seed collection on the planet. He worked hard, he enjoyed himself, and drove other eager young scientists to work just as hard to make more food for the people of the Soviet Union. However, things did not go well for Vavilov politically. How did this visionary geneticist, who aimed to find the means for food security, end up starving to death in a Soviet gulag in 1943? nter the villain, Trofim Lysenko, Read More ›

Can protein folding complexity be formed by stochastic processes? With 14 intermediate steps?
JILA Team Discovers Many New Twists in Protein Folding

Biophysicists at JILA have measured protein folding in more detail than ever before, revealing behavior that is surprisingly more complex than previously known. . . .
They fold into three-dimensional shapes that determine their function through a series of intermediate states, like origami. Accurately describing the folding process requires identifying all of the intermediate states.
The JILA research revealed many previously unknown states by unfolding an individual protein. For example, the JILA team identified 14 intermediate states—seven times as many as previously observed—in just one part of bacteriorhodopsin, a protein in microbes that converts light to chemical energy and is widely studied in research.
“The increased complexity was stunning,” said project leader Tom Perkins, a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) biophysicist working at JILA, a partnership of NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder. “Better instruments revealed all sorts of hidden dynamics that were obscured over the last 17 years when using conventional technology.”
“If you miss most of the intermediate states, then you don’t really understand the system,” he said.
Knowledge of protein folding is important because proteins must assume the correct 3-D structure to function properly. Misfolding may inactivate a protein or make it toxic. Several neurodegenerative and other diseases are attributed to incorrect folding of certain proteins.

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From Stuart Clark at New Scientist: The universe’s ultimate speed limit seems set in stone. But there’s good reason to believe it might once have been faster – and may still be changing now Light’s constant, finite speed is a brake on our ambitions of interstellar colonisation. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, and it is more than four years’ light travelling time even to Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun and home, possibly, to a habitable planet rather like Earth. More. Oddly, such a position was once widely derided as a young Earth creationist one. It’s getting harder to be a respectable bigot these days. Just pounding the lectern in favor of a rock hard position Read More ›

Avoiding flap doodle is becoming important today. We are living in an age of well-funded fake physics (space aliens could be hiding in dark matter and such). At the end of the day one would want to learn something… A friend says that Luke Barnes’s A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Cosmos is a good resource: Over the last forty years, scientists have uncovered evidence that if the Universe had been forged with even slightly different properties, life as we know it – and life as we can imagine it – would be impossible. Join us on a journey through how we understand the Universe, from its most basic particles and forces, to planets, stars and galaxies, and back Read More ›

Noel Rude, a specialist in native American languages Nez Perce, Sahaptin, Klamath, wrote to offer some thoughts on Tom Wolfe’s takedown of Noam Chomsky’s language theories in The Kingdom of Speech. Chomsky’s theories dominated linguistics for decades. His progressive politics, which were, strictly speaking, irrelevant to his work are often considered to play a role in his prominence. Along the way, he clashed with linguist Daniel Everett who had, with an inexcusable lack of political correctness, found an apparent exception to Chomsky’s theories in a remote Brazilian language, Piraha. Wolfe chronicles the conflict from both sides, making clear that current theories about the origin of human language are not useful. Here is the perspective of Noel Rude, an ID-friendly linguist (a Read More ›

No, really. See this: PLEASE read https://t.co/vEUBmgqcwL Terrifying. Sinister social-media bots read minds & manipulate votes. Explains mystery of Trump & Brexit — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 27, 2017 Dawkins now appears to be channelling persons who cannot handle the new non-gatekeeper world of online media, who think it must all be a big plot involving fake news, the alt right, the Russians, and all things that scare them.     Memo From: UD News To: UD News Robotics Dawkinsbot II Special Project Re: Retooling needed for Dawkinsbot II – urgent Our revamped Dawkinsbot has been performing fabulously to date.* But AI experts are warning that our introduction of a ramped-up politics algorithm could endanger the entire mechanism. We have Read More ›