About time too. From Jim Daley at The Scientist: The biological species concept, proposed by Ernst Mayr in the 1940s, defines a species as a group of individuals that can make fertile offspring only with one another, a notion he termed “reproductive isolation.” But that idea doesn’t jibe with Detwiler’s observations of monkeys in Gombe. By analyzing the mitochondrial DNA from epithelial cells found in 144 monkeys’ poop, she showed that red-tailed guenons (Cercopithecus ascanius) and blue guenons (C. mitis) have been mating and producing hybrid offspring for many generations. Using the sequencing data, she found that all of the monkeys in the park—hybrids, red-tails, and blues alike—can trace their ancestry back to an original group of female red-tailed guenons Read More ›

Sometimes, but not necessarily. Despite the powerful cultural messages around the subject. From Susan Milius at ScienceNews: Many creatures that routinely kill their own kind would be terrifying, if they were larger than a jelly bean. Certain male fig wasps unable to leave the fruit they hatch in have become textbook examples, says Mark Briffa, who studies animal combat. Stranded for life in one fig, these males grow “big mouthparts like a pair of scissors,” he says, and “decapitate as many other males as they possibly can.” The last he-wasp crawling has no competition to mate with all the females in his own private fruit palace. In contrast, big mammals that inspire sports-team mascots mostly use antlers, horns and other Read More ›

Asks Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: University press offices and grant agencies put out irresponsible hype about the work of one their faculty or grantees. In this case, it’s Taming the multiverse: Stephen Hawking’s final theory about the big bang from Cambridge, and Stephen Hawking’s last paper, co-authored with ERC grantee Thomas Hertog, proposes a new cosmological theory, in which universe is less complex and finite from the European Research Council. And, of course, pop science media run with it, even if it’s old and debunked news. Woit laments, This is rather depressing, making one feel that there’s no way to fight this kind of bad science, in the face of determined efforts to promote fake physics Read More ›

From Daniel Muth at Living Church, reviewing Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt: I am fairly certain that there are thoughtful and potentially influential intellectual movements that have been subjected to more shameful and inexcusable misrepresentation and ill treatment than Intelligent Design (ID), but the list is not long (Roman Catholic teaching on artificial birth control comes to mind). To be fair, ID theorists have invited critique in no small part by tending to hold theirs out as a valid area of scientific research while mainly publishing popular books rather than peer-reviewed articles. If their intention was not to be lumped in with creationists, it has not worked. From the disastrous Dover School Board lawsuit to the propaganda screeds of the New Read More ›

From Brian Miller at ENST: In a previous article I described how scientific training can condition some scientists’ minds to resist the evidence in nature for intelligent design. Now, I will demonstrate the effects of this process using as a case study the book Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, co-authored by Dennis Venema. I must begin by stating that I have never met Dr. Venema, but I have met several of his colleagues, and from my encounters with them I have no reason to doubt that Venema desires to operate with complete integrity and to present scientific claims and arguments that are of the highest academic quality. The challenge he faces lies not with his character Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at ACSH: Randa Jarrar, an English professor at Fresno State, is rightfully in hot water. In a Twitter tirade, she called the recently deceased Barbara Bush an “amazing racist” and said she was “happy the witch is dead.” For good measure, she wished death upon the rest of the Bush Family. Let’s set aside the issues of free speech and tenure to focus on a bigger underlying concern: The psychology of pure, unadulterated hatred. How does a person become so consumed with animosity for a fellow human being? Apparently, the subject has been studied, and Berezow provides some helpful pointers from an FBI analyst: Though his article is about the behavior of hate groups, such as Neo-Nazis, Read More ›

From David Nguyen at Think Tank, TTC Learning: Many other science-related claims made in popular media seem to confuse causation and correlation. Dr. Nguyen’s vids are a clear, simple resource for students and interested adults who appreciate tips on sorting the claims out: Cause or correlation? See also: Science vs Scientists, with David Nguyen. Asking, what is more prone to error: Science or scientists

From ScienceDaily: Queensland University of Technology (QUT) researcher Dr Robyn Araujo has developed new mathematics to solve a longstanding mystery of how the incredibly complex biological networks within cells can adapt and reset themselves after exposure to a new stimulus. … “Proteins form unfathomably complex networks of chemical reactions that allow cells to communicate and to ‘think’ — essentially giving the cell a ‘cognitive’ ability, or a ‘brain’,” she said. “It has been a longstanding mystery in science how this cellular ‘brain’ works. “We could never hope to measure the full complexity of cellular networks — the networks are simply too large and interconnected and their component proteins are too variable. “But mathematics provides a tool that allows us to Read More ›

Thirty-five thousand kya. From ScienceDaily: A flint flake from the Middle Paleolithic of Crimea was likely engraved symbolically by a skilled Neanderthal hand, according to a study published May 2, 2018 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Ana Majkic from the University of Bordeaux, France and colleagues. The authors developed a detailed framework for interpreting engravings on stone artifacts. … Following microscopic examination of the grooved lines on the flint cortex, the researchers concluded that the incisions represent deliberate engravings that would have required fine motor skills and attention to detail. These engravings appear to have been made with symbolic or communicative intent. If this interpretation is correct, this engraved flake would join a growing list of signs that Read More ›

From science historian Michael Flannery at ENST, a review of Brown University’s Ken Miller’s The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will Miller is one of those “settled science” bullies. Here he sets his sights on essayist Marilynne Robinson’s 1998 collection, The Death of Adam. According to Miller, Robinson is wrong in asserting the demeaning and destructive influence of Darwinism. For Robinson, the reductionist materialism of the Darwinian paradigm has left humanity bereft of meaning and value, corroding the moral and ethical foundations on which Western civilization was built. Miller, a Darwinian theist, insists that Robinson is completely mistaken: Let me be clear that I do not believe that the scientific core of [Darwinian] evolution Read More ›

Asking, what is more prone to error: Science or scientists? See also: Known iconoclast physicist Freeman Dyson can talk about scientists’ blunders, including Darwin’s

From Suzan Mazur at Oscillations, an interview with Iranian-born astrophysicist Niayesh Afshordi: Niayesh Afshordi on Holographic Universe Media Spin & the Iranian Brain Drain Suzan Mazur: How close is the goal of combining Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum physics? Something Kostas Skenderis at the University of Southampton has described as a new paradigm for physical reality. Niayesh Afshordi: We don’t know. Physicists have been chasing this goal for the past 80 years. We’d like to think that we’re closer than before. There have been new insights, theoretical and observational insights. But whether those are real, it’s difficult to say. Suzan Mazur: Your holographic universe research has been widely touted as “the first observational evidence that our universe could be Read More ›

From Michael Greshko at National Geographic: Someone butchered a rhinoceros in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived—but who? But the age of the remains makes them especially remarkable: The carved bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old, with researchers’ best estimate coming in around 709,000 years old. The research—partially funded by the National Geographic Society—pushes back occupation of the Philippines to before the known origin of our species, Homo sapiens. The next-earliest evidence of Philippine hominins comes from Luzon’s Callao Cave, in the form of a 67,000-year-old foot bone. … “It’s really, really exciting—it’s now becoming increasingly clear that ancient forms of hominins were able to make significant deep-sea crossings,” says Adam Read More ›

From Brian Langerhans and Mick Kulikowski at NC State University: A North Carolina State University study examining the effects of urbanization on the evolution of fish body shape produced both expected and surprising results: One fish species became more sleek in response to urbanization, while another species became deeper bodied in urban areas. Generally, urbanization produces conditions that make water in streams flow more variably and more quickly during rain storms. So NC State biologists hypothesized that fish would quickly evolve a body shape that improves swimming efficiency in response to changes in stream water velocity caused by urbanization. “We wanted to test rapid body shape evolution in western and central North Carolina stream fish in response to urbanization,” said Read More ›

Adam Perkins offers a revealing example at Quillette: But why do we specifically need free speech in science? Surely we just take measurements and publish our data? No chit chat required. We need free speech in science because science is not really about microscopes, or pipettes, or test tubes, or even Large Hadron Colliders. These are merely tools that help us to accomplish a far greater mission, which is to choose between rival narratives, in the vicious, no-holds-barred battle of ideas that we call “science”. For example, stomach problems such as gastritis and ulcers were historically viewed as the products of stress. This opinion was challenged in the late 1970s by the Australian doctors Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, who Read More ›