From ScienceDaily: In 2013, the discovery of two giant viruses unlike anything seen before blurred the line between the viral and cellular world. Pandoraviruses are as big as bacteria, and contain genomes that are more complex than those found in some eukaryotic organisms (1). Their strange amphora shape and enormous, atypical genome (2) led scientists to wonder where they came from. The same team has since isolated three new members of the family in Marseille, continental France, Nouméa, New Caledonia, and Melbourne, Australia. With another virus found in Germany, the team compared those six known cases using different approaches. Analyses showed that despite having very similar shapes and functions, these viruses only share half of their genes coding for proteins. Read More ›

The next time you hear a progressive hurl the epithet “war on science” against an ID proponent, I  hope you will think of this article.  When did we fall through the rabbit hole and land in a world where the first and second place finishers in the girls’ race are boys?  God help us.

From Bill Dembski at Freedom, Technology, Education: Artificial Intelligence’s Homunculus Problem: Why AI Is Unlikely Ever to Match Human Intelligence So how can we see that AI is not, and will likely never be, a match for human intelligence? The argument is simple and straightforward. AI, and that includes everything from classical expert systems to contemporary machine learning, always comes down to solving specific problems. This can be readily reconceptualized in terms of search (for the reconceptualization, see here): There’s a well-defined search space and a target to be found and the task of AI is to find that target efficiently and reliably. … If intelligence were simply a matter of finding targets in well-defined search spaces, then AI could, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: One day in Myanmar during the Cretaceous period, a tick managed to ensnare itself in a spider web. Realizing its predicament, the tick struggled to get free. But the spider that built the web was having none of it. The spider popped over to the doomed tick and quickly wrapped it up in silk, immobilizing it for eternity. We know the outline of this primordial worst-day-ever because the silk-wrapped tick subsequently was entombed in amber that may have dripped from a nearby tree. Its fate, literally, was sealed. … “It’s really just an interesting little story — a piece of frozen behavior and an interaction between two organisms,” he said. “Rather than being the oldest thing or the Read More ›

Notoriously, the Second International Congress on Eugenics [1921] defined Eugenics as the self-direction of human evolution and saw eugenics as applied evolutionary science with intellectual, logical and factual roots in several linked branches of science, medicine and scholarship. If you doubt this, simply examine the logo to the right. Perhaps the best summary of the then prevailing mentality comes from Scientific Monthly, in an article on the congress — noting how it highlights a keynote by a son of Darwin: >>THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EUGENICS In this journal special attention has always been given to problems of evolution, heredity and eugenics. As older readers of the THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY will remember, it gave the first American publication to Read More ›

A friend writes to mention this page (2016) at National Center for Biotechnology Information: — The following genetic codes are described here: 1. The Standard Code 2. The Vertebrate Mitochondrial Code 3. The Yeast Mitochondrial Code 4. The Mold, Protozoan, and Coelenterate Mitochondrial Code and the Mycoplasma/Spiroplasma Code 5. The Invertebrate Mitochondrial Code 6. The Ciliate, Dasycladacean and Hexamita Nuclear Code 9. The Echinoderm and Flatworm Mitochondrial Code 10. The Euplotid Nuclear Code 11. The Bacterial, Archaeal and Plant Plastid Code 12. The Alternative Yeast Nuclear Code 13. The Ascidian Mitochondrial Code 14. The Alternative Flatworm Mitochondrial Code 16. Chlorophycean Mitochondrial Code 21. Trematode Mitochondrial Code 22. Scenedesmus obliquus Mitochondrial Code 23. Thraustochytrium Mitochondrial Code 24. Pterobranchia Mitochondrial Code 25. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: An international team of academics undertook a large-scale review of research into turn-taking behaviour in animal communication, analysing hundreds of animal studies. Turn-taking, the orderly exchange of communicative signals, is a hallmark of human conversation and has been shown to be largely universal across human cultures. The review, a collaboration between the Universities of York and Sheffield, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, reveals that this most human of abilities is actually remarkably widespread across the animal kingdom. While research on turn-taking behaviour is abundant, beginning more than 50 years ago with studies of the vocal interactions of birds, the literature is currently fragmented, making Read More ›

“Just like primates can.” From Colin Barras at New Scientist: The skill could help the birds forage for food and avoid predators, suggesting that there are good evolutionary reasons why pigeons might instinctively understand percentages. (paywall) More. This recalls the Monty Hall dilemma: From Charles Q. Choi at LiveScience: Scientists tested six pigeons with an apparatus with three keys. The keys lit up white to show a prize was available. After the birds pecked a key, one of the keys the bird did not choose deactivated, showing it was a wrong choice, and the other two lit up green. The pigeons were rewarded with bird feed if they made the right choice. In the experiments, the birds quickly reached the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In research published in the journal Science, Australian and French researchers tested whether honey bees can rank numerical quantities and understand that zero belongs at the lower end of a sequence of numbers. Associate Professor Adrian Dyer, from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, said the number zero was the backbone of modern maths and technological advancements. “Zero is a difficult concept to understand and a mathematical skill that doesn’t come easily — it takes children a few years to learn,” Dyer said. … But bee brains have fewer than 1 million neurons — compared with the 86,000 million neurons of a human brain — and little was known about how insect brains would cope with being tested on Read More ›

From J. R. Miller at More than Cake: Sadly, the record shows that the strongest advocates of UCD were racists in the guise of scientists who set-out to prove that the non-white features of blacks and aboriginal tribes were markers of an inferior pre-human species. As Jon Mooallem wrote in the NY Times: No living humans had skeletal features remotely like these [Neanderthals], but King was under the impression that the skulls of contemporary African and Australian aboriginals resembled the Neanderthals’ more than “ordinary” white-people skulls. So extrapolating from his low opinion of what he called these “savage” races, he explained that the Neanderthal’s skull alone was proof of its moral “darkness” and stupidity. “The thoughts and desires which once Read More ›

A reader asks about resources for non-Darwinian evolution theory and this might be a good time to recognize Peter Saunders and Mae-Wan Ho, and their lifetime study of epigenetics: Abstract: Description: Ever since Darwin, there have been challenges to the claim that the natural selection of small random variations is a sufficient explanation of evolution. Even mainstream evolutionists are now beginning to accept that something more is required. The question is whether this will be merely a few add-ons that leave the paradigm unaltered, or whether the whole framework of explanation, including its application to other disciplines, will be changed. – PT Saunders, Theor Biol Forum, 109 (1-2), 123-130 2016 Jan 1 Back in 1979, there was Ho MW, Saunders Read More ›

From O’Leary for News at ENST: Writing at The Conversation, psychology professor Jeremy Shapiro at Case Western Reserve University proffers his opinion on why many laypeople doubt the scientific consensus on questions such as climate change and biological evolution:  As a psychotherapist, I see a striking parallel between a type of thinking involved in many mental health disturbances and the reasoning behind science denial. As I explain in my book “Psychotherapeutic Diagrams,” dichotomous thinking, also called black-and-white and all-or-none thinking, is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder. Dr. Shapiro seems not to have read much writing by ID theorists and it is a good bet he has not done psychotherapy with them. He goes on to explain: Read More ›

In recent days, I have taken time to show that while subjects study the logic of structure and quantity (= Mathematics, in a nutshell), the body of knowledge — including axiomatised systems — is objective. Where, “objective” effectively means, tied to such a body of accountable warrant and to foundational self-evident facts that the substance of that body of knowledge is credibly an accurate description of facets of reality, as opposed to being dubious (though not necessarily false) figments of a subject’s imagination. Of course, while objectivity implies credible truth (truth being the accurate description of relevant reality) it cannot guarantee utter freedom from error or gaps; especially after Godel’s key incompleteness results. Why is that? For one, it has Read More ›

Contextual Bias David Nguyen is with Think Tank Learning. See also: Asking, what is more prone to error: Science or scientists?

Software developer Brendan Dixon writes in response to physicist Rob Sheldon who was recently heard to scoff at the idea that self-driving cars will catch on. Rob Sheldon: The guys building the technology, like the fellow in Florida who died in a Tesla doing 75mph on Autopilot, are “first adopters”. They really want the future to be now. Most of us just want to get to work without the hassle of fighting the traffic. And honestly, it takes a lot of brainpower to shave 5 minutes off the commute. Why would I use a safety conscious computer that will never bend the traffic rules? The car is a tool, not an end in itself. And now, Brendan Dixon: I do not Read More ›