From Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, who struggls with a disability, reviewing a sci-fi film at Tor: I Belong Where the People Are: Disability and The Shape of Water On the surface, there are many things to like about The Shape of Water. The main characters, the ones in the right, they are all outsiders. They are people like me. With the exception of Children of a Lesser God, it is the first time I have ever seen a disabled woman as an object of desire. It is the first time I have seen someone swear in sign in a mainstream film. It is one of the only films out there to address some of my feelings about my body or depict them Read More ›

Maxwell’s Demon (sometimes, “Max”) has long been a fictional device for discussing how if we have access to information we can manipulate molecular scale particles to extract work. Now, physics dot org is discussing a case: >>Physicists have experimentally demonstrated an information engine—a device that converts information into work—with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics. Instead, the engine’s efficiency is bounded by a recently proposed generalized second law of thermodynamics, and it is the first information engine to approach this new bound . . . . [R]ecent experimental demonstrations of information engines have raised the question of whether there is an upper bound on the efficiency with which an information engine can convert information into work. Read More ›

In order for evolution to have occurred, the intricate embryonic development stages of species must have evolved. Indeed, the developmental pathways of the species would be crucial in such a process. If we are to believe the evolutionary claim that the species spontaneously arose, then untold embryonic development pathways must have somehow undergone massive change. But while evolutionists expected the study of such evolution of development to yield great insight into the evolutionary process and history, it has underwhelmed. This shortcoming is well known, as exemplified in this 2015 paper:  Read more …

From Ferris Jabr at Smithsonian: It’s Official: Fish Feel Pain: Moreover, the notion that fish do not have the cerebral complexity to feel pain is decidedly antiquated. Scientists agree that most, if not all, vertebrates (as well as some invertebrates) are conscious and that a cerebral cortex as swollen as our own is not a prerequisite for a subjective experience of the world. The planet contains a multitude of brains, dense and spongy, globular and elongated, as small as poppy seeds and as large as watermelons; different animal lineages have independently conjured similar mental abilities from very different neural machines. A mind does not have to be human to suffer. More. Post-March for Life, we are all thinking the same thing, Read More ›

Today is the March for life in Washington DC. Speakers include: Rep. Paul Ryan, Pam Tebow, Matt Birk and others. We have someone on the ground from the UD family and will be giving updates as we get them across the day. Remember, globally, the abortion holocaust toll rises at a million or thereabouts per week, on Guttmacher-UN figures. The total since the early 1970’s exceeds 800 millions. For shame! So, developing: U/D No 1: I found a live stream here. (I won’t even try an embed with this one.) U/D 2: US Pres Trump is to address the MFL by satellite feed, 100,000 expected. A first. U/D 3: Live address is to be at 1 pm EST, and will Read More ›

That is, if we took your claims seriously. Linguist Noel Rude writes to say, — Human language is geared to purpose, to consciousness, to agency. The majority of verbs, as I may have noted before already, have “valence” for the semantic roles of Agent and/or Dative–Agent being defined as “the animate instigator of an event” and Dative (we’re talking semantic roles here–not noun cases) as “a participant whose consciousness is relevant to the proposition”–both of which are illusions to the hard core materialist elite. And so how then is the materialist to talk? What verbs can he use when blabbering about evolution? Aside from be, remain, rust, coagulate, etc., most verbs suggest consciousness and agency. Let’s consider ambitransitive verbs. Not Read More ›

From Elizabeth Howell at Space.com: Our solar system may be an oddball in the universe. A new study using data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope shows that in most cases, exoplanets orbiting the same star have similar sizes and regular spacing between their orbits. By contrast, our own solar system has a range of planetary sizes and distances between neighbors. The smallest planet, Mercury, is about one-third the size of Earth — and the biggest planet, Jupiter, is roughly 11 times the diameter of Earth. There also are very different spacings between individual planets, particularly the inner planets. … “The planets in a system tend to be the same size and regularly spaced, like peas in a pod. These patterns Read More ›

In the Tabby’s Star”extraordinary claims” follow-up thread, one of the usual objector personas tried to pounce on the corrective: To do so, he tried to counter-pose the concept of Bayesian analysis, then professes to find that a discussion of the difference between risk and radical uncertainty is little more than meaningless verbiage. This is, however, little more than a play to keep going on business as usual in science in the teeth of warning signs: Where, we must also reckon with the subtleties of signals and noise: I have responded onward and think it worth the while to headline: KF, 53 : >>Let me clip Barsch as a public service for those dipping a tentative toe in the frigid, shark-infested Read More ›

Over the past several days, JS has been self-unmasked as a troll at a notorious anti-UD forum site.  As a public service, to demonstrate the tactics and mentality we are up against, I now headline an exchange with a likely second “sock[puppet]” that popped up to try to project accusations: MK, 139: >>I have gone back and read through many, although not all, of JSmith’s comments. Although I disagree with many of his views, I don’t see anything that would warrant the venom and viscous [sic] accusations that you are tossing his way . . .  [–> note, this is a claimed school-marm]>> Here we see the tag team backup in the form of what is very likely a concern Read More ›

From Alex Barash at Slate: The not-quite life forms have a bad rap. But they’re a reliable sign of life, and it would be exciting to find them in space. For one thing, viruses are an excellent indicator for life itself: Wherever there’s life on Earth, there are viruses, too, and almost invariably in far greater numbers. Some scientists think that’s been true from the very beginning. While we know that RNA, the genetic material that makes up some viruses, came before DNA, the genetic material required by everything else, the fact that all modern viruses depend on cells to reproduce has led to something of a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. The NIH’s Eugene V. Koonin has spent decades investigating the evolution Read More ›

Three days ago, I put up a couple of comments that I think are worth headlining on what was a commonplace, common-sense understanding of Logic 101, all of 2,000 years ago. First, a tie-in from core distinct identity to the principle of induction: >>I feel inclined to start with this . . . to illustrate the principle of induction and its connexion to the law of identity: Matt 5:13 “You are the [d]salt of the earth; but if the salt has [e]lost its taste (purpose), how can it be made salty? It is no longer good for anything, but to be thrown out and walked on by people [when the walkways are wet and slippery]. 14 “You are the light Read More ›

From the Babylon Bee: One Oregon man, who rejects the idea that humanity can even be sure the universe exists in any meaningful sense, was nonetheless disturbed by the idea that websites could publish completely false information, for anyone in the world to read. “It’s just absolutely wrong, in my opinion,” said the man who doesn’t believe in absolute ideals of right and wrong at all. “What if someone reads the information and gets like, deceived? That just seems totally wicked.” More. Probably, the fabled Oregonian thinks that all news of which he disapproves is—for that very reason—fake. It makes sense. He feels he should have the power to shape the world or else command that news which he disapproves Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A small group of fishes — possibly the world’s cleverest carnivorous grazers — feeds on the scales of other fish in the tropics. The different species’ approach differs: some ram their blunt noses into the sides of other fish to prey upon sloughed-off scales, while others open their jaws to gargantuan widths to pry scales off with their teeth. A team led by biologists at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories is trying to understand these scale-feeding fish and how this odd diet influences their body evolution and behavior. The researchers published their results Jan. 17 in the journal Royal Society Open Science. “We were expecting that with this specialized scale-eating niche, you would get specialized morphology. Read More ›

Devolution means that a life form jettisons valuable qualities just to survive, often by becoming  parasite or “freeloader” (see below). From Nancy Pearcey at CNS: King’s vision of equal rights is no longer “self-evident” to many of America’s opinion makers in media, politics, and academia. Why not? Because they have embraced secular ideologies that sabotage King’s ideal. Listen in on some of the thinkers who are busy destroying King’s vision of inalienable rights. In a UNESCO lecture, the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty observed that throughout history, societies have excluded certain groups from the human family—those belonging to a different tribe, class, race, or religion. Historically, Rorty noted, it was Christianity that gave rise to the concept of universal rights, derived from Read More ›

By evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland, who seems to have adopted that role: Evolution unleashed: Is evolutionary science due for a major overhaul – or is talk of ‘revolution’ misguided? If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by the natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, Read More ›