Did you know Mars is going backwards? For the past few weeks, and for several weeks to come, Mars is in its retrograde motion phase. If you chart its position each night against the background stars, you will see it pause, reverse direction, pause again, and then get going again in its normal direction. And did you further know that retrograde motion helped to cause a revolution? Two millennia ago, Aristotelian physics dictated that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Aristarchus’ heliocentric model, which put the Sun at the center, fell out of favor. But what Aristotle’s geocentrism failed to explain was retrograde motion. If the planets are revolving about the Earth, then why do they sometimes Read More ›

From Elizabeth Pennisi at Science: The evolutionary histories of some groups of organisms record repeated transitions from single-celled to multicellular forms, suggesting the hurdles could not have been so high. Genetic comparisons between simple multicellular organisms and their single-celled relatives have revealed that much of the molecular equipment needed for cells to band together and coordinate their activities may have been in place well before multicellularity evolved. And clever experiments have shown that in the test tube, single-celled life can evolve the beginnings of multicellularity in just a few hundred generations—an evolutionary instant. Evolutionary biologists still debate what drove simple aggregates of cells to become more and more complex, leading to the wondrous diversity of life today. But embarking on Read More ›

With some justification. The question arises, who has the right to say so? From Alex Berezow at ACSH: The topic came up on Twitter, the world’s foremost outlet for intellectual discourse. Writer and historian Audra Wolfe, who holds a PhD in the history of science, posted this bizarre tweet: Actually, no, it hasn’t, no matter what the Bunny’s sign says. The scientific method is designed specifically to root out bias and false assumptions, including political ones. Sure, individual scientists can be political, but the scientific method is not. Its ideological agnosticism is why it works so well. In fact, the self-correcting nature of science means it is the best source of secular knowledge that humankind possesses. However, Dr. Wolfe’s characterization Read More ›

Winston Ewert, one of the authors of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics has a new paper at BIO-Complexity: Abstract: The hierarchical classification of life has been claimed as compelling evidence for universal common ancestry. However, research has uncovered much data which is not congruent with the hierarchical pattern. Nevertheless, biological data resembles a nested hierarchy sufficiently well to require an explanation. While many defenders of intelligent design dispute common descent, no alternative account of the approximate nested hierarchy pattern has been widely adopted. We present the dependency graph hypothesis as an alternative explanation, based on the technique used by software developers to reuse code among different software projects. This hypothesis postulates that different biological species share modules related by a dependency Read More ›

From John P. Slattery at Religion Dispatches: In fact, a movement has been underway to resurrect, as it were, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a renewed foundation for theological reflection. According to a November report in America magazine, Pope Francis is already considering removing the “warning” attached to Teilhard’s historical writings, and more recently the National Catholic Reporter reported on an online movement to name him a “doctor of the Church.” Recent scholarly research, however, should cast doubt upon any such movements, as Teilhard’s positive influence may not be able to overcome his commitment to and employment of a philosophy of eugenics and social Darwinism. … Evolution, for Teilhard, is the hermeneutic key for understanding the place of Christ within Read More ›

From John Timmer at Ars Technica: LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves came almost exactly a century after Einstein had formulated his general theory of relativity and an ensuing paper mathematically describing the possibility of gravitational waves. Or at least that’s the story as it was presented to the public (including by yours truly). And in some ways, it’s even true. But the reality of how relativity progressed to the point where people accepted that gravitational waves are likely to exist and could possibly be detected is considerably more complicated than the simple narrative described above. In this week’s Nature Astronomy, a group of science historians lays out the full details of how we got from the dawn of relativity to Read More ›

From SETI’s Seth Shostak, who surely doesn’t welcome this news, at NBC: A recent paper by three researchers at the University of Oxford is throwing shade on those who feel confident that the cosmos is thick with extraterrestrials. … If we own up to the true extent of these uncertainties and do the requisite math, the Oxford study finds that there’s at least a 53 percent chance that we’re alone in the Milky Way and at least a 40 percent chance that we’re alone in the visible universe. Homo sapiens could be the smartest thing going. This result, they claim, melts the Fermi Paradox like butter on a hot griddle — maybe no one has colonized the galaxy because no Read More ›

William Basener writes to say, I posted a conference presentation I gave on my work with John Sanford on the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection with Mutations, posted on YouTube here. The talk was the keynote address at the International Conference on Ecology, Ecosystems, and Conservation Biology, in Toronto Canada (a fairly small but fully secular conference). I was able to give a broadly understandable exposition of the theorems and what they mean to populations. I also included a discussion of what Fisher’s theorem has meant to Neo-Darwinism in the past, what I believe our new result means to the future of Neo-Darwinism. The main result is a formula showing the effect of mutations in combination with selection. Mutations provide Read More ›

From Michael Egnor at Mind Matters Today: The hallmark of human thought is meaning, and the hallmark of computation is indifference to meaning. That is, in fact, what makes thought so remarkable and also what makes computation so useful. You can think about anything, and you can use the same computer to express your entire range of thoughts because computation is blind to meaning. Thought is not merely not computation. Thought is the antithesis of computation. Thought is precisely what computation is not. Thought is intentional. Computation is not intentional. A reader may object at this point that the output of computation seems to have meaning. After all, the essay was typed on a computer. Yes, but all of the Read More ›

From design theorist William Dembski at Mind Matters Today: The computational literature on No Free Lunch theorems and Conservation of Information (see the work of David Wolpert and Bill Macready on the former as well as that of Robert J. Marks and myself on the latter) imply that all problem-solving algorithms, including such a master algorithm, must be adapted to specific problems. Yet a master algorithm must also be perfectly general, transforming AI into a universal problem solver. The No Free Lunch theorem and Conservation of Information demonstrate that such universal problem solvers do not exist. Yet what algorithms can’t do, humans can. True intelligence, as exhibited by humans, is a general faculty for taking wide-ranging, diverse abilities for solving Read More ›

Such acell might shed some light on the origin of life, researchers hope. From Suzan Mazur at Oscillations: Not to be outdone by Dutch, German and other Europeans now officially dabbling in synthetic cell research, America’s National Science Foundation has thrown its hat into the ring on funding synthetic cell development, per its April 18, 2018 letter to colleagues inviting proposals on the design and engineering of synthetic cells and cell components ($100K for relevant conferences, $300K re multicomponent subsystems, and up to $1M for research on the “pseudo-cell”). In May, following its call for proposals, NSF co-sponsored a synthetic and artificial cells roadmap meeting in Alexandria, Virginia with a handful of scientists already working in the field presenting and Read More ›

From Ruth M. Bancewicz at Science + Belief, on key points offered by Dutch philosopher Professor René van Woudenberg at a recent Faraday workshop, including: There are all sorts of ways in which scientists find some theories more satisfying than others, but science itself is not always a deciding factor in the decision. Logic, reason, experience, intuition, aesthetics, personal preference – all of these can play a part. As time goes on, and more data are gathered, we can become more certain which theory is an accurate reflection of reality. Eventually some theories have so much data behind them – gravity or the common ancestry of all living things, for example – that they are treated almost as facts. More. Read More ›

From Carl Sagan: Consider this claim: as I walk along, time – as measured by my wristwatch or my ageing process – slows down. Also, I shrink in the direction of motion. Also, I get more massive. Who has ever witnessed such a thing? It’s easy to dismiss it out of hand. Here’s another: matter and antimatter are all the time, throughout the universe, being created from nothing. Here’s a third: once in a very great while, your car will spontaneously ooze through the brick wall of your garage and be found the next morning on the street. They’re all absurd! But the first is a statement of special relativity, and the other two are consequences of quantum mechanics (vacuum Read More ›

All that follows is WJM’s: Modern physics has long ago disproved the idea that “matter” exists at all. Timothy’s position might as well be that because we all perceive the sun moving through the sky from east to west, it is a fact that it is the sun that is doing the moving. Just because we perceive a world of what we call “matter” doesn’t change the fact that we know no such world actually exists regardless of what our perception tells us. What we call “matter” is a perceptual interpretation of something that is not, in any meaningful sense, “matter”. We know now (current science) that matter is, at its root, entirely “immaterial”, despite what our macro sensory perceptions Read More ›

Some things can’t change. From a piece at ENST, A Classic Evolutionist’s Error, Berra’s Blunder Revs Up Again Tim Berra had tried to compare biological evolution to the evolution of the Corvette. In his book Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, Johnson aptly pointed out the intuitively obvious difference: Of course, every one of those Corvettes was designed by engineers. The Corvette sequence — like the sequence of Beethoven’s symphonies to the opinions of the United States Supreme Court — does not illustrate naturalistic evolution at all. It illustrates how intelligent designers will typically achieve their purposes by adding variations to a basic design plan. Even if comparisons can be made, one cannot logically use designed things to explain un-designed things. Read More ›