A philosophical question to wake you up. A reader directs our attention to a 2015 piece by cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin at Inference Review (2015): THE ANSWER to the question, “Did the universe have a beginning?” is, “It probably did.” We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV theorem gives us reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed. More. He offers the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem by way of evidence: Loosely speaking, our theorem states that if the universe is, on average, expanding, then its history cannot be indefinitely continued into the past. More precisely, if the average expansion rate is positive along a given world line, or geodesic, then this geodesic must terminate after a Read More ›

Discussing the current push to give animals human-like rights, Maggie Koerth-Baker tells us at Five Thirty Eight: Animals don’t stack up the way you’d expect. “[Pigeons have] knocked our socks off in our own lab and other people’s labs in terms of what they can do,” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Iowa. “Pigeons can blow the doors off monkeys in some tasks.” Experts who study animal intelligence across species say we can’t rank animals by their smarts — scientists don’t even try anymore — which means there’s no objective way to determine which animals would deserve more human-like rights. A little more than 100 years ago, scientists started to amass the data necessary Read More ›

From Harry Pettit at the Daily Mail: The ‘Cambrian explosion’ is one of the most significant events in the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history and ultimately led to the arrival of complex animals like humans. New research shows the event – which took place between 500 and 540 million years ago – was a much more gradual process than first thought. More. Via Eurekalert: A team based at Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the University of Lausanne carried out the most comprehensive analysis ever made of early fossil euarthropods from every different possible type of fossil preservation. In an article published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences they show that, taken together, the total fossil record Read More ›

From Sophie Hebden at FQXI: A radical theory replaces the cosmic crunchers with fuzzy quantum spheres, potentially solving the black-hole information paradox and explaining away the Big Bang and the origin of time. … If the core of a black hole isn’t confusing enough, things get worse when you consider its surface—or “event horizon”—which marks an imaginary boundary surrounding the black hole. Anything that crosses the event horizon, even light, will be sucked in towards the black hole’s core and crushed into the singularity. At first it was thought that nothing that falls in to a black hole can ever escape. But in 1974, Stephen Hawking calculated that, thanks to quantum effects, black holes can slowly radiate energy from their Read More ›

The other day, I ran across the Wiki article on Laws of Science. While there is much good there, such as: The laws of science, scientific laws, or scientific principles are statements that describe or predict a range of phenomena as they appear in nature.[1] The term “law” has diverse usage in many cases: approximate, accurate, broad or narrow theories, in all natural scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy etc.). Scientific laws summarize and explain a large collection of facts determined by experiment, and are tested based on their ability to predict the results of future experiments. They are developed either from facts or through mathematics, and are strongly supported by empirical evidence. It is generally understood that they Read More ›

It is clearly time to hammer selective hyperskepticism again. Here is AK at 49 in the Answering thread: A/Mats are skeptical of extraordinary claims. And I don’t apologize for that. BA, UD President (and a lawyer familiar with correcting fallacies) duly hammered the fallacy: BA, 50 – 53 : >>50: . . . Like the extraordinary claim that a bag of chemicals configured in just the right way suddenly becomes subjectively self-aware? Funny, I’ve never met an A/Mat who was skeptical of that extraordinary claim. Can you point me to one? 51: . . . Like the extraordinary claim that non-living chemicals spontaneously combined in just the right way to become living things? Funny, I’ve never met an A/Mat who was Read More ›

David Nguyen outlines the history of the Warburg effect at Think Tank Learning: See also: Science News Fact Check: Did Craig Venter create life? With David Nguyen

From Nathan H. Lents, author of Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, at Undark: Of course there’s an explanation (sperm like to develop at lower temperatures). But really: What intelligent designer could have come up with this? It sounds as though Lents has never heard of the concept of “optimal”: best possible solution in given environment, as opposed to best theoretical solution as an abstraction. The fact is that there is no good reason that sperm development has to work best at lower temperatures. It’s just a fluke, an example of poor design. If nature had an intelligent designer, he or she would have a lot to answer for. But since natural selection Read More ›

In his final paper, with Hertog, scaling back the multiverse? From Philip Goff at the Guardian: But if all of the universes have exactly the same laws – as in Hawking and Hertog’s proposal – the problem returns, as we now need an explanation of why the single set of laws that govern the entire multiverse is fine-tuned. Hertog seems not to agree, arguing that the paper does make progress on fine-tuning: “This paper takes one step towards explaining that mysterious fine-tuning … It reduces the multiverse down to a more manageable set of universes which all look alike.” However, this merely puts off the explanation of fine-tuning, for the result is that the laws underlying the generation of the Read More ›

From Stuart Vyse at CSICOP: One of the most noteworthy aspects of belief in astrology is that it is more often embraced by liberals, which places it in the company of the anti-GMO and anti-vaccination movements (Vyse 2015). A 2009 Pew Research Center study found that people who described themselves as liberal were almost twice as likely to say they believe in astrology than self-described conservatives: 30 percent of liberals compared to 16 percent of conservatives (Liu 2009). Similarly, a 2015 study using data from the General Social Survey data of the National Opinion Research Survey at the University of Chicago found that conservatives were more likely to endorse the statement, “we trust too much in science and not enough Read More ›

The book, Darwin’s Secret Sex Problem: Exposing Evolution’s Fatal Flaw: The Origin of Sex, by Bible commentator F. Lagard Smith,m is endorsed by emeritus biology prof (Cedarville University), John E. Silvius. From the publisher at Amazon: Darwins Secret Sex Problem What Darwin Ignored . . . For all his revolutionary insight into the fascinating processes of evolution so useful to current scientific research, health care, and technology, Darwin never seriously confronted the crucial, insurmountable gap in his grand theory between asexual replication and sexual reproduction. Nor could Darwins famed natural selection have provided simultaneous on-time delivery of the first male/female pair of millions of sexually unique species required for evolutions bedrock premise of common descent, a fundamental flaw fatal to Read More ›

For sea slugs, via RNA transfer. At Discover: There’s a couple of reasons why I don’t think this is evidence of “memory transfer”. Firstly, what was transferred here was hardly a memory in the usual sense of the word. It is simply an increase in the sensitivity of a set of neurons, a single reflex pathway. This ‘memory’ is not specific to any particular stimulus. The training consisted of shocking the animals, which makes them more likely to withdraw in response to touch – not to shock, but any touch. It’s just “turning up the dial” on that reflex. It is hard to see how this relates to the far more complex types of memory in humans. More. See also: Read More ›

From Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo: A team of researchers from the United States and New Zealand took a look at how likely species were to go extinct and how likely new species were to appear during a 60-million-year period, long before humans evolved. Upon analyzing fossil data, it seemed to them as if astronomical cycles led to climactic effects that ultimately aligned with new species of plankton appearing and going extinct on Earth. “Our results… show that known processes related to the mechanics of the Solar System were shaping marine macroevolutionary rates comparatively early in the history of complex life,” the authors write in the study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. More. It certainly Read More ›

From Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff, in a discussion sparked by The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) at New York Review of Books: When the molecular structure of DNA was discovered in 1953, it became dogma in the teaching of biology that DNA and its coded information could not be altered in any way by the environment or a person’s way of life. The environment, it was known, could stimulate the expression of a gene. Having a light shone in one’s eyes or suffering pain, for instance, stimulates the activity of neurons and in doing so changes the activity of genes those neurons contain, producing instructions for making proteins or other molecules Read More ›

From National Geographic: They trained Kim by creating a gentle tool to repeatedly bring her from one platform to the other. This conditioned the spider to eventually start jumping to the target without the assistance of the tool. They used 3D CT scanning and high-speed cameras to capture and research the spider’s jumps.More. It seems odd to think of teaching an arachnid something but this method might get past usual barriers by addressing something the spider does anyway and avoiding the need for the spider to know it is interacting with another life form. The researchers’ aim is jumping microbots. See also: Does intelligence depend on a specific type of brain?