2017

Hitchens (1949–2011) was one of the four New Atheist horsemen.  From Larry Alex Taunton at First Things: In December 15, 2011, Christopher Hitchens died of esophageal cancer. Some remember him as a man of the left who, after 9/11, converted to a kind of neoconservatism; others remember him as an atheist provocateur and serial blasphemer. For me, Christopher Hitchens was much more than either of these things. He was, as he put it, my “debate partner” and friend. And the subject of Taunton’s book, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist. The book received ample praise, with Booklist calling it “loving” and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews hailing it as “beautiful.” The Gospel Coalition declared Read More ›

From the editors of Nature, on science and the new US admin: Scientists must fight for the facts Trump threw a bone to scientists with a pledge to explore space and to battle disease, but one of the first documents posted on the White House website was a bare-bones energy plan that emphasizes fossil-fuel development and makes no mention of the threat of climate change. The plan takes aim at “burdensome” environmental regulations and says that the Environmental Protection Agency should focus on protecting air and water, as opposed to the climate. Although it mentions — but does not define — “clean coal technology”, the plan ignores the struggling nuclear-energy sector as well as a burgeoning renewables industry that could Read More ›

By now, fulsome comparisons of Darwin to Lincoln as a “great liberator” should be tumbling down the byteway once again. The push for a national Darwin Day in the United States may have lost a little of its oomph! recently, due to changes in personnel in elected office. At the same time, there is a new addition to the cultural Darwin mix: serious attention paid to the proudly Darwinian and racist alt right. As it happens, anti-white racism is picking up the Darwinian theme more explicitly as well this year, though with less free publicity. (See the context here). The beginning of a banner year maybe… Groups like Darwin Day and Evolution Weekend (Clergy Letter Project) help—doubtless unwittingly —by their seeming silence. As Read More ›

From Matthew Hutson at Nautilus: The second strategic model of suicidality is the bargaining model, which relies on the notion of “costly signaling.”6 A colorful example of costly signaling is the peacock. Managing a big, eye-catching tail is costly, in that it wastes energy and draws predators. But the fitter a peacock, the less costly a big tail, and so big tails have evolved to signal genetic fitness to peahens. They are attractive not despite their costliness but because of it. In addition to communicating fitness, costly signals can also communicate need. Consider baby birds. They don’t need to chirp for food if their mother is right there, and chirping attracts predators, making it costly. But the more hungry or Read More ›

From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist: For more than 300 years we have been asking ourselves about the true nature of reality – what, ultimately, stuff is made of. Time and again, we have found another layer beneath what we thought was the lowest. What’s more, with each new depth we plumb, our old understanding of reality is swept aside. Now we could be on the cusp of another revolution, thanks to efforts to reconcile our two most successful but incompatible theories of reality. Not particles, energy, space,time or anything else we might think of as fundamental truly is: instead, the essence of reality is a thing whose workings we’re only just beginning to grasp. (paywall) More. Ananthaswamy may not mean Read More ›

Someone asked. Essentially, a great deal of important biological information is captured and stored outside of our DNA, as opposed to arising, Darwinism-style, through random genetic mutations. Neo-Darwinian evolution means that all new traits are due to mutations in DNA, acted on by “natural selection.” Jonathan Wells summarizes the problem here: [T]he idea that embryo development is controlled by a genetic program is inconsistent with the biological evidence. Embryo development requires far more ontogenetic information than is carried by DNA sequences. Thus Neo-Darwinism is false.” (Wells, “Membrane Patterns Carry Ontogenetic Information That Is Specified Independently of DNA,” BIO-Complexity And in Chapter 14 of Darwin’s Doubt, Steve Meyer offers: These different sources of epigenetic information in embryonic cells pose an enormous Read More ›

From Nature Ecology and Evolution: Frequency-dependent female genital cutting behaviour confers evolutionary fitness benefits Female genital cutting (FGC) has immediate and long-term negative health consequences that are well-documented, and its elimination is a priority for policymakers. The persistence of this widespread practice also presents a puzzle for evolutionary anthropologists due to its potentially detrimental impact on survival and reproductive fitness. Using multilevel modelling on demographic health survey datasets from five West African countries, here we show that FGC behaviour is frequency-dependent; the probability that girls are cut varies in proportion to the FGC frequency found in their ethnic group. We also show that this frequency-dependent behaviour is adaptive in evolutionary fitness terms; in ethnic groups with high FGC frequency, women Read More ›

 From Kerry Grens at the Scientist: Last week, the Texas Board of Education approved a draft of revisions made to its science education standards. While board members approved nearly all of the changes suggested by a committee of educators, they also voted to partially replace cuts made to controversial language regarding the teaching of evolution. “What they did . . . was accept two of our recommendations [to change evolution teaching standards], but added some language that reintroduced the creationist open-door policy,” Ron Wetherington, a committee member and professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told The Scientist. “The committee of school teachers on which I served is going to be upset about this.” The board members and two committee Read More ›

Or correct. Or incorrect. Nothing is. Physicists are simply beginning to act as though they realize that and it’s okay. We are animals and animals are never wrong. We just win or lose power struggles. Yesterday, we noted that Peter “Not Even Wrong” Woit thinks that 2016 was the worst year ever for fake physics. He noted an item by Marcus Woo, at ScienceFriday, “Why the Multiverse Isn’t Just Madness” The multiverse—the idea that infinite universes stretch beyond our own—has gained traction among physicists. But others think it’s just a multi-mess. Alternate realities, parallel dimensions, and multiple universes. Whatever you call it, the notion of other versions of existence is one of the most popular tropes in science fiction. In Read More ›

From Victoria Gill at BBC: With thousands of hours of listening as the apes communicated, the researchers found that the animals embedded several different bits of information in their squeaks. The team compared this to how we might use more than one word to convey the same meaning – saying “car” but also “automobile” and “vehicle” “They seemed to make doubly sure that the message was received, so they would send the same message with different [kiss squeak combination] signals,” The scientists say their study suggests that, rather than a concerted effort to form complex words, it might have been this “redundancy” – forming different sounds that had the same meaning, in order to reinforce a message – that drove Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Perhaps the most disturbing thing has been seeing the way in which people’s access to information about the larger world has become more and more dominated by what has become known as “Fake News”: stuff which is not true, but which someone with an agenda successfully gets others to believe. This is a problem that goes far beyond obvious nonsense fed to rubes on Facebook, to the point of including what a lot of my well-educated colleagues believe because they read it on the front page of the New York Times. Goodness. For a moment there, we thought he was going to finish the sentence with: to the point of [rubbish Read More ›

A couple of years ago, I went to trial in a breach of contract case in which the defendant’s entire defense rested on denying that he knew something he obviously knew. I had a little fun with this.  When it came time to argue the case to the jury I pointed out that the defendant had employed the “Captain Renault Defense,” and to explain what I meant by this, I played this clip from Casablanca.  You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I won that case. I was reminded of this by one of the responses to my last post.   I pointed out that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been caught massaging the global temperature numbers, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Evolution is often thought of as a gradual remodeling of the genome, the genetic blueprints for building an organism. But in some instances it might be more appropriate to call it an overhaul. Over the past 100 million years, the human lineage has lost one-fifth of its DNA, while an even greater amount was added, report scientists at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Until now, the extent to which our genome has expanded and contracted had been underappreciated, masked by its relatively constant size over evolutionary time. Humans aren’t the only ones with elastic genomes. A new look at a virtual zoo-full of animals, from hummingbirds to bats to elephants, suggests that many vertebrate genomes have Read More ›

From Tom Bethell in Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates: “The scientific evidence for evolution is not only weaker than is generally supposed, but as new discoveries have been made since 1959, the reasons for accepting the theory have diminished rather than increased.” (Page 45) “Darwinian evolution can be seen as a way of looking at the history of life through the distorting lens of Progress. Given enough time, society in general, including human beings, would be transformed into something superior and perhaps unrecognizably different.” (Page 248) Reading over Bethell’s book last night, I was struck by the fact that most intellectuals today do not believe in progress. They do believe that we are living Read More ›

From Jef Akst at The Scientist: While animal cells undergo two rounds of reprogramming during reproduction to wipe clear most of the methyl marks that decorate their DNA and histones, plants leave their epigenomes largely intact from one generation to the next. In plants, this results in epialleles—stably inherited alleles encoded by methylation, rather than by gene sequence—that control subtle phenotypes, such as timing of flowering or fruit ripening. Most of the differences [between individuals] that we see are caused by genetic variation,” says Colot. “But it’s not all caused by genetic variation. What would be caused by this epigenetic variation could be as important.” Whether these epialleles can be adaptively altered by the environment remains a matter of debate, Read More ›