From Suzan Mazur at Oscillations: One of the stickiest origins projects Templeton has recently funded is “Cooperation and Interpretation in the Emergence of Life,” which looks to find purposeful RNA fragments that agree to cooperate. Six hundred thirty thousand dollars ($630,000) has been awarded for said project to the team of Christopher Southgate-–a British theologian/biochemist, and Portland State University chemistry professor Niles Lehman. … We have a wall between church and state in America, but in recent years we’ve seen attempts to destabilize that wall. The 2015-2017 $3M funding by NASA & Templeton to two dozen religious scholars was one of them. The Freedom From Religion Foundation took action filing a Freedom of Information Act request for documents regarding the Read More ›

Most people who frequent these pages are familiar with the Turing Test.  Turing proposed that a judge would evaluate text responses from a machine and a human.  If the judge could not tell which was human, the machine would have passed the test.  The Turing Test measures machine intelligence based on a communication metric.  In other words, if the AI can talk like a human, it is as intelligent as a human. Some researchers, like our own Robert Marks, think the Turing Test is too easy.  They say creativity, not mere communication, is the real measure of human intelligence, and they have advanced the “Lovelace Test” as a superior alternative.  An AI would pass the Lovelace Test by doing something Read More ›

Darn. From Andrew Masterson at Cosmos: This was an exciting find. The separation of dark matter from “normal” visible matter is predicted in cosmology – but only if dark matter interacts with additional forces as well as gravity. The Abell 3827 data seemed to provide a strong indication that this was in fact the case, leading scientists a little bit closer to understanding the nature of the mysterious substance that is estimated to account for 27% of the universe. Alas, in evidence presented to the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science just concluded in the English city of Liverpool, the same group of researchers report that a more recent set of observations have shown that the separation of dark Read More ›

Says Karl J. Stephan, offering a parable at MercatorNet: “For one low price,” the magician said, “I can give you the power to change your servants into perfectly obedient machines. They’ll look just like they do now, but you won’t have to feed them or let them sleep or rest. And they will do your every bidding exactly the way you want.” “Hmm,” said the king. “Sounds too good to be true.” “I have references!” said the magician. And he pulled out a sheaf of letters written by kings of nearby kingdoms, some of whom King Minsky even knew. They all swore by the magician’s abilities and said they were delighted with what he was offering. “Well, all right, how Read More ›

A few years ago Paul Nelson debated Joel Velasco on the topic of design and evolution. Nelson masterfully demonstrated design in nature. For his part Velasco also provided an excellent defense of evolution. But the Epicurean claim that the world arose via random chance is not easy to defend, and Velasco’s task would be challenging. Consider, for example, the orphans which Nelson explained are a good example of taxonomically-restricted designs. Such designs make no sense on evolution, and though Velasco responded with many rebuttals, none were very convincing. Since that debate the orphan problem has become worse, as highlighted by a new study of brochosomes.  Read more

From RJS at Patheos: Ten years ago, when I first started writing on science and faith, Intelligent Design was a hot topic. It was in the news and high on the agenda for many in my local church. Today it has slid into the background, occasionally mentioned, but there are often other fish to fry. Greg Cootsona devotes a case study in his recent book (Mere Science and Christian Faith: Bridging the Divide with Emerging Adults) to the topic of intelligent design but not more than this because it is not one of the major issues for the emerging adults in his target audience.More. Okay, but with respect to the term “emerging adults,” are we talking about Millennials, many of Read More ›

From astrophysicist Ethan Siegel at Forbes: Again, Earth is our only laboratory for this, but let’s be optimistic in the absence of evidence, and assume there’s a 1-in-1,000 chance that a world that starts with a primitive, replicating, information-encoding strand of life can lead to something like the Cambrian explosion. That gives us 10,000 worlds in the Milky Way teeming with diverse, multicellular, highly differentiated forms of life. Given the distance between the stars, that means there’s likely another planet where this has occurred just a few hundred light years away. … The uncertainties here are huge, and any number that you can pick is as ill-motivated as any other. Someday in the future, we’ll have the capability of performing Read More ›

But isn’t the big story about why so many people thought it would be any different? From human paleontologists James Ohman and Asier Gomez-Olivencia at The Conversation: But despite this harsh life of the hunter gatherer, our research indicates that some Neanderthals lived to be fairly old and even had some of the signs of age related illnesses – such as degenerative lesions in the spine, consistent with osteoarthritis. Our research also found that an adult male Neanderthal survived bone fractures. And when he died, he was buried by members of his group. … Denis Peyrony, the director of the excavation when La Ferrassie 1 was found, indicated that this individual was lying in a “funeral pit”, a purposefully dug Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at ENST: “Human Zoos tells the shocking story of how thousands of indigenous peoples were put on public display in America in the early decades of the twentieth century. Often touted as “missing links” between man and apes, these native peoples were harassed, demeaned, and jeered at. Their public display was arranged with the enthusiastic support of the most elite members of the scientific community, and it was promoted uncritically by America’s leading newspapers. This award-winning documentary explores the heartbreaking story of what happened, shows how African-American ministers and other people of faith tried to push back, and reveals how some people today are still drawing on Social Darwinism in order to dehumanize others. The film also Read More ›

From astrophysicist Adam Becker at Aeon: Falsifiability doesn’t work as a blanket restriction in science for the simple reason that there are no genuinely falsifiable scientific theories. I can come up with a theory that makes a prediction that looks falsifiable, but when the data tell me it’s wrong, I can conjure some fresh ideas to plug the hole and save the theory. The history of science is full of examples of this ex post facto intellectual engineering. In 1781, William and Caroline Herschel discovered the planet Uranus. Physicists of the time promptly set about predicting its orbit using Sir Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation. But in the following decades, as astronomers followed Uranus’s motion in its slow 84-year Read More ›

From Nicola Davis at the Guardian: Before being laid, bird eggs form a hard calcium-rich shell with three main layers. While it was already known that these thin from the innermost out as a chick grows in preparation for hatching – with calcium from the shell being incorporated into its skeleton in the process – quite what happens at the molecular scale has been something of a mystery. Now scientists say they have discovered that eggshells have a nanostructure, and that it appears to play a key role in the strength of the shell. “Everybody thinks eggshells are fragile – [when] we’re careful, we ‘walk on eggshells’ – but in fact, for their thinness they are extremely strong, harder than Read More ›

Technically, Earth is a sphere, of course, as in a baseball rather than a dinner plate. From CBS: A new survey has found that a third of young millennials in the U.S. aren’t convinced the Earth is actually round. The national poll reveals that 18 to 24-year-olds are the largest group in the country who refuse to accept the scientific facts of the world’s shape. More. Now, this came out on April 5, not April 1. Two things: If you had attended a cathedral school a millennium ago, you would have known the Earth – like all the “heavenly bodies” – is a sphere. You might not have learned much else by way of science but you would have learned Read More ›

More rubbish about evolution at a highbrow US mag? From David Klinghoffer at ENST: … no matter what you say, no one will challenge you other than some of those intelligent design rascals and you know you can automatically dismiss anything they say. Case in point: former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson’s recent article for The Atlantic, “The Last Temptation,” tracing the supposed “shame” and “disgrace” of Evangelical Christians who support Trump back to an original sin, namely — of all things — their rejection of evolution. I wrote about that earlier here. In a new ID the Future episode, Jay Richards talks with Mike Keas about this lengthy article, and encourages everyone to read it in full. Gerson is an Read More ›

From mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Way back in 2005, soon after the emergence of the “String Landscape” and the ensuing debate over whether this made string theory untestable pseudo-science, Cumrun Vafa in response started writing about the “Swampland”. In contrast to the “Landscape” of effective field theories that are low energy limits of string theory, the “Swampland” is the space of effective field theories that are not low energy limits of string theory. One motivation here is to be able to claim that string theory is predictive, since if you can show a theory is in the Swampland, then string theory predicts that doesn’t describe our world. I wrote a couple blog postings about this back then, Read More ›

From Allan Adamson at Tech Times: Astronomers have been hunting for phosphorus in the universe because of the role it plays in life on Earth. If the element is lacking in other parts of the cosmos, it could be difficult for alien life to exist. A new study presented at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science meeting now suggests that life as we know it is more unusual than previously thought because the universe substantially lacks phosphorus. More. But then who needs phosphorus when we have imagination?!