From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at her blog, BackRe(action): The idea that we live in a multiverse – an infinite collection of universes from which ours is merely one – is interesting but unscientific. It postulates the existence of entities that are unnecessary to describe what we observe. All those other universes are inaccessible to experiment. Science, therefore, cannot say anything about their existence, neither whether they do exist nor whether they don’t exist. I hope that showcasing the practical problem, as the EAGLE paper does, will help clarify the unscientific basis of the multiverse hypothesis. Precisely. Critics are not saying that it isn’t true or that it can’t be true. Rather, like Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at ENST, on Darwinism and the recent find that junk DNA can alter genitalia: The “junk” view, once a prized piece of evidence for neo-Darwinian theory, is thus reduced to the province of the benighted, the reactionaries who “still refer to [it] as ‘junk’ DNA,” after science has already passed them by. Having volumes of garbage lying around was a logical prediction of Darwinism that is in the process of being falsified. Now, it seems likely that non-coding regions have not trivial but “drastic effects.” This reversal helps explain why evolutionists like Richard Dawkins have radically revised a key claim. Dawkins himself, in the space of three years, went from assuring us that junk validates Darwinism to claiming Read More ›

From Cassandra Willyard at Nature: Since 2000, estimates have ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. The latest attempt to plug that gap uses data from hundreds of human tissue samples and was posted on the BioRxiv preprint server on 29 May1. It includes almost 5,000 genes that haven’t previously been spotted — among them nearly 1,200 that carry instructions for making proteins. And the overall tally of more than 21,000 protein-coding genes is a substantial jump from previous estimates, which put the figure at around 20,000. But many geneticists aren’t yet convinced that all the newly proposed genes will stand up to close scrutiny. Their criticisms underscore just how difficult it is to identify new genes, or Read More ›

From Physics Central: Incredibly, a group at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in South Korea has just published some findings in Physical Review Letters indicating that the traditionally robust laws of thermodynamics may not hold up in the quantum world. Instead, they argue that for certain situations equilibrium is not reached, regardless of the amount of time allowed to pass. As they explain, this is like a slice of pizza that starts out unevenly heated—but instead of equalizing over time, the hot and cold spots just stay there indefinitely! The team, composed of theoretical physicists Thudiyangal Mithun, Yagmur Kati, Carlo Danieli, and Sergej Flach, started off examining what is known as a Gross-Pitaevskii lattice. Although the terminology is daunting, Read More ›

From at ScienceDaily: Mammals will develop ovaries and become females unless the early sex organs have enough of a protein called SOX9 at a key stage in their development. SOX9 causes these organs to become testes, which then direct the rest of the embryo to become male. The amount of SOX9 produced is controlled initially by the SRY protein encoded by the Sry gene, which is located on the Y chromosome. This is why males, who have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome, usually develop testes while females, who have two X chromosomes, do not. Only 2% of human DNA contains the ‘code’ to produce proteins, key building blocks of life. The remaining 98% is ‘non-coding’ and was once Read More ›

A 2018 book by political scientist Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, tackles the effects of AI on social issues. From editorial reviews: “[A] must read…On par with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed or Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. It’s rigorously researched, phenomenally accessible, and utterly humbling. While there are a lot of important books that touch on the costs and consequences of technology through case studies and well-reasoned logic, this book is the first one that I’ve read that really pulls you into the world of algorithmic decision-making and inequality, like a good ethnography should.” ―danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated “Eubanks argues that automated systems separate people from resources, classify and criminalize people, Read More ›

From Ben Blum at Medium: Whether you learned about Philip Zimbardo’s famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” [1973] in an introductory psych class or just absorbed it from the cultural ether, you’ve probably heard the basic story. Zimbardo, a young Stanford psychology professor, built a mock jail in the basement of Jordan Hall and stocked it with nine “prisoners,” and nine “guards,” all male, college-age respondents to a newspaper ad who were assigned their roles at random and paid a generous daily wage to participate. The senior prison “staff” consisted of Zimbardo himself and a handful of his students. The study was supposed to last for two weeks, but after Zimbardo’s girlfriend stopped by six days in and witnessed the conditions in Read More ›

From Richard Weikart at ENST|: In an article for Nautilus, Cristine Legare explains “Why Social Science Needs Evolutionary Theory.” An associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, she laments that the social sciences are missing out, because they ignore the findings of evolutionary theory. She states, “The lack of willingness to view human cognition and behavior as within the purview of evolutionary processes has prevented evolution from being fully integrated into the social science curriculum.” … The emptiness of her approach is even more evident when she provides a concrete example to illustrate her point that “Applying evolutionary theory to social science has the potential to transform education and, through it, society.” The example she proffers is Read More ›

From Phoebe Southworth at the Daily Mail: Scientists have found ‘strong evidence’ that dogs use gestures to communicate with people in one of the first systematic attempts to decode their language. … Sometimes dogs use a variety of signals in order to get their message across if it is not understood the first time, the study showed. And different dogs were found to use different signals for the same request. Amazing. Simply amazing. It appears that most of the time the object of interest is their food bowl. More. What’s more, there is anecdotal evidence that some dogs will even bring the food bowl, the water bowl, the leash, or the ball to their human friends, in case anyone forgot the Read More ›

From Steve Laufmann at ENST, on Nathan Lents’s book  Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes.  As a systems architect, I’ve spent decades designing and implementing large and complex systems of information systems — often involving thousands of individual systems. Such systems are normally embedded in complex processes that may span days, months, or even years. They integrate information systems with human activities, often across multiple organizations. These systems have a lot of moving parts. It turns out that a number of key design principles are essential for building and modifying complex systems of systems. Get the design principles right, and everything works better. Mess up the design principles, and everything is harder — and Read More ›

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you do know that just ain’t so. — Mark Twain According to the overrated philosopher, David Hume, we should not try to draw logical conclusions about objective morality based on our knowledge of the real world. This was his smug way of claiming that humans are incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Through the years, his devoted followers have tweaked his message into a flat out declaration: We cannot derive an “ought to” (a moral code) from the “is.” (the way things are). Just to make sure that we don’t misunderstand, they characterize this formulation as “Hume’s Law.” The only problem with this philosophy Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at American Council for Science and Health: Scientists have a common saying about models: “Garbage in, garbage out.” That means if you put bad data into a model, you can fully expect for the model to spit out bad conclusions. The same is true for organizations. If a newspaper hires improperly educated, hyperpartisan people who possess merely a casual relationship with the truth, we can fully expect the newspaper to produce absolute rubbish. And that’s exactly what has happened at the New York Times. Consider the following: – Just two days ago, a piece in Slate criticized the NYT for its coverage of topics like “wellness” and “detox.” The NYT has entire pages dedicated to these wishy-washy Read More ›

  From astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, reviewing Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at Forbes: The history of physics is filled with great ideas that you’ve heard of, like the Standard Model, the Big Bang, General Relativity, and so on. But it’s also filled with brilliant ideas that you probably haven’t heard of, like the Sakata Model, Technicolor theory, the Steady State Model, and Plasma Cosmology. Today, we have theories that are highly fashionable, but without any evidence for them: supersymmetry, grand unification, string theory, and the multiverse. … Yet unlike in the past, these dead-ends continue to represent the fields in which the leading theorists and experimentalists cluster to investigate. These blind alleys, which have Read More ›

Mechanobiology is an engineer’s vision of the cell: How do forces and mechanisms in cells and tissues contribute to cell development, differentiation, function, and deterioration (disease). From Suzan Mazur at Oscillations: The mechanobiology field actually goes by assorted names, among them: soft matter, the new condensed matter physics, morphomechanics, morphometrics, biomechanics, biophysics, mathematical biology (partial list), and importantly integrates life across the board: animals, plants, fungi, microbes—which has to include viruses. It also encompasses materials science. So you can put active matter under the mechanobiology umbrella (but without Lee Cronin’s “Alien chemist“). When I say mechanobiology is all the rage, I’m not simply referring to lab research and scientific conferences on the subject, although they are, of course, central. But Read More ›

From Jay Richards at ENST: On a new episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards talks with host Mike Keas about a recent Atlantic article from former National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger on “How the Enlightenment Ends” with the rise of artificial intelligence. Richards … explains that AI is about statistical processing, not budding consciousness; and the ethical concerns it raises are both important yet in some ways not so new. More. Podcast: Jay Richards is the author of a forthcoming book (June 19), The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. In other news, Chicken Little is said to be having a nervous breakdown over his advance copy.  It is wrecking the  a-shock-alypse industry. Read More ›