Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

“Complete surprise”: Stars are not necessarily born in the way we thought. Also, galaxies can form much faster than thought

From Cardiff University at Eurekalert: The birth of stars from dense clouds of gas and dust may be happening in a completely unexpected way in our own galaxy and beyond. This is according to an international team of researchers, including scientists from Cardiff University, who have found that long-held assumptions about the relationship between the mass of star-forming clouds of dust and gas and the eventual mass of the star itself may not be as straightforward as we think. The underlying reasons as to why a star eventually grows to a specific mass has puzzled scientists for some time. It has been assumed that a star’s mass mostly depends on the original structure – known as a star-forming core – Read More ›

Tips for recognizing spin in science papers

A handy guide from Tasnim Elmamoun at PLOS blogs: So… how do we identify spin? As Chiu and colleagues point out, spin can take a variety of forms, including: 1) “inappropriate study given study data;” 2) “inappropriate extrapolations or recommendations for clinical practice;” 3) “selective reporting;” 4) and “more robust or favorable data presentation.” Let’s unpack these a little bit. The first of these types, “inappropriate study given study data,” occurs when findings simply are interpreted incorrectly. Specifically, Chiu et al. found that this type of spin is commonly used in conjunction with casual (or colloquial) language, which in many cases has the potential to alter interpretation of the data. So how do researchers strike a balance between using scientific Read More ›

PBS: Apes’ inability to use symbolic language may just be “nurture”

From Rachel Nuwer at PBS Nova Next: Humans and apes share nearly 99% of the same DNA, but language is one thing that seems to irreconcilably differentiate our species. Is that by necessity of nature, though, or simply a question of nurture? “It could be that there’s something biologically different in our genome, something that’s changed since we split from apes, and that’s language,” says Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “But another possibility is that they might have the cognitive capacity for language, but they’re not able to physically express it like we do.” … Scientists have been trying to teach chimps to speak for decades, with efforts ranging from misguided to tantalizingly Read More ›

Cop shows give a misleading picture of the gloomy state of forensic science today

From ScienceDaily: Many of the “forensic science” methods commonly used in criminal cases and portrayed in popular police TV dramas have never been scientifically validated and may lead to unjust verdicts, according to an editorial in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. … “We wanted to alert people that this is a continuing and a major issue: that many of the forensic techniques used today to put people in jail have no scientific backing,” says senior author Arturo Casadevall, MD, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and the Alfred & Jill Sommer Professor and Chair of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. … The structure of the field of forensic science inhibits vital reforms. Read More ›

Michael Flannery on Ken Miller’s podcast at Scientific American: “More nonsense”

Podcast with Steve Minsky:  A transcript is to be made available. Science historian Michael Flannery is, we hear, not a fan of Brown University Darwinian biochemist Ken Miller’s new book, The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will. Re the accompanying podcast, he writes, More nonsense from Miller. Miller’s new book is largely science and theology “explained” by double talk. He argues for human uniqueness and then proceeds to argue against it. He argues for free willl and then proceeds to argue against it. He complains about the term “Darwinism” and then uses the term himself (repeatedly). He talks about design only to argue against it. He writes against what he calls the “scientific creationists” Read More ›

Stephen Hawking’s final theory scales back multiverse

From ScienceDaily: The theory of eternal inflation that Hawking and Hertog put forward is based on string theory: a branch of theoretical physics that attempts to reconcile gravity and general relativity with quantum physics, in part by describing the fundamental constituents of the universe as tiny vibrating strings. Their approach uses the string theory concept of holography, which postulates that the universe is a large and complex hologram: physical reality in certain 3D spaces can be mathematically reduced to 2D projections on a surface. … Hertog and Hawking used their new theory to derive more reliable predictions about the global structure of the universe. They predicted the universe that emerges from eternal inflation on the past boundary is finite and Read More ›

All rotifers are female (we think) – but the underlying explanation has been challenged

And maybe they are not all female. From ScienceDaily: A new study has cast doubt on leading theory for how tiny creatures have evolved for tens of millions of years — without ever having sex. … they are all female, and their offspring are clones of their mothers. Bdelloids are microscopic animals that live in freshwater and damp habitats across the world. Despite their apparent lack of sex, we know they have evolved for tens of millions of years into more than 500 species. By studying their genomes — the set of all the genes that define an animal’s characteristics — researchers thought they had identified an explanation for how bdelloids had ‘gotten away’ with no sex for millions of Read More ›

Did Neanderthals sail the Mediterranean? Some interesting evidence.

Okay, you say, enough about Neanderthals. Just one more thing for now: From Andrew Lawler at Science: A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans. The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates modern humans, says Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who gave an Read More ›

Why a four-eyed fossil lizard is a problem for Darwinism

Yes, four eyes. From Gunter Bechly at ENST: Based on two fragmentary fossils, Smith et al. (2018) just described the new monitor lizard Saniwa ensidens from the 49 million year old Bridger Formation in Wyoming. Both known specimens surprisingly had four eyes! Additional to the normal pair of lateral lens eyes, and the usual parietal third eye of lizards, this new species actually had a forth pineal eye like a lamprey. Not a single other jawed vertebrate has something remotely like this, even though this fossil lizard is the closest relative of the modern monitor lizard genus Varanus and thus deeply nested within modern land vertebrates. What? This sounds almost too weird to be true. Yet since the article was Read More ›

Human evolution: Did large brains cause Neanderthals to go extinct?

From George Dvorsky at Gizmodo: New research published today in Scientific Reports suggests important differences in cognitive and neural function between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals led to differences in behavior that may have resulted in the conditions under which anatomically modern humans succeeded and Neanderthals failed some 45,000 years ago. To reach this conclusion—and in one of the first studies of its kind—scientists conducted a comparative analysis of Neanderthal and early modern human skulls to infer brain function. But because no other archaeological evidence was provided to bolster the case, and because the shape and size of brains cannot be definitively tied to cognitive capacity and behavior, the question of what caused Neanderthal extinction remains very much unsettled. However, many Read More ›

Dramatic recent finding: There is a new DNA structure in our cells, beyond the double helix

From Peter Dockrill at Science Alert: For the first time, scientists have identified the existence of a new DNA structure never before seen in living cells. The discovery of what’s described as a ‘twisted knot’ of DNA in living cells confirms our complex genetic code is crafted with more intricate symmetry than just the double helix structure everybody associates with DNA – and the forms these molecular variants take affect how our biology functions. “When most of us think of DNA, we think of the double helix,” says antibody therapeutics researcher Daniel Christ from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia. “This new research reminds us that totally different DNA structures exist – and could well be important for Read More ›

Kirk Durston: What progress have we made over six decades in understanding the origin of life?

From Kirk Durston at P2C-Change: So what progress has science made over the past 60 years? I just counted the number of papers and articles on the origin of life I have filed on my computer—54, and that is only a small sampling of what is out there. Reviewing this collection, the news is not good … we are still working on a plausible, reproducible process for the first step. A recent review paper provides a current summary… “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 Read More ›