A turtle fancier wonders: About a week ago, as I went to feed my 10-year-old pet turtle Grover a bunch of dried turtle pellets, I looked deep into his eyes and wondered: “Does he even know who I am?” “Does he trust me?” Or even, dare I ask, “Does he love me?” Obviously he gave me no indication of his affection, or lack thereof: He just chomped on those pellets without any regard for my feelings whatsoever. It was weird to think that I’ve had my reptilian friend for more than a decade now, and yet, I have no idea whatsoever how he views me. Van Hooker decided to ask animal behaviorists and came up with a Top Ten list, Read More ›

Most people think we are more than just live bodies but what is the “more”? Frank Turek explains, Here are some types of dualism: 2. Varieties of Dualism: Ontology 2.1 Predicate dualism 2.2 Property Dualism 2.3 Substance Dualism 3. Varieties of Dualism: Interaction 3.1 Interactionism 3.2 Epiphenomenalism 3.3 Parallelism (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy) More. If you don’t think you are 99.44% chimpanzee nd that consciousness is an illusion, you might want to consider what sort of dualism you are. Hat tip: Ken Francis See also: Alternatives to dualism: Post-modern science: The illusion of consciousness sees through itself and From Scientific American: “we may all be alters—dissociated personalities— of universal consciousness.”

The ID issue has long been a focal point for intense, often deeply polarised debate on our origins and world roots as informed by science. Science, being a major source of knowledge and understanding about our world, which also energises technological innovation and economic growth. Science is often treated as though it is the grounds for seeing evolutionary materialism as effectively self evidently true but crucially depends on our being responsibly and rationally sufficiently free to think logically, establish mathematics as a domain of rationally grounded truth about abstract structures and quantities that are necessary for any possible world, and more. Such already deeply challenges the world-picture painted by the magisterium of lab coat-clad atheists. That is only a gateway Read More ›

The physicist who answers is Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018) and she responds, saying (among other things) If you want every elementary particle to each have a universe inside, you need to explain why we only know 25 different elementary particles. Why aren’t there billions of them? An even bigger problem is that elementary particles are quantum objects: They get constantly created and destroyed and they can be in several places at once. How would structure formation ever work in such a universe? It is also a generally the case in quantum theories that the more variants there are of a particle, the more of them you produce. So why don’t we produce Read More ›

Not any time soon, according to an analyst at Bloomberg: It’s important to note that machine learning hasn’t yet made its mark on the economy — to paraphrase economist Robert Solow, you can see the machine learning age everywhere but in the economic statistics. Employment levels have returned to healthy levels, and there’s no evidence that machines are taking many of our jobs yet. … The authors generally don’t envision a world of full automation, with machines replacing humans at every step of the production process. Instead, they see machine learning being deployed selectively at some nodes of the value chain where data is plentiful, leaving human judgment to focus on the rest. Though “judgment” is a fuzzy word, Agrawal Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A University of Montana researcher has discovered that mountain pine beetles may avoid certain trees within a population they normally would kill due to genetics in the trees. UM Professor Diana Six made the discovery after studying mature whitebark and lodgepole trees that were the age and size that mountain pine beetle prefer, but had somehow escaped attack during the recent outbreak. After DNA screening, survivor trees all contained a similar genetic makeup that was distinctly different from the general population that were mostly susceptible to the beetle. “Our findings suggest that survivorship is genetically based and, thus, heritable,” Six said, “which is what gives us hope.” In western North America, whitebark pine, a high elevation keystone species Read More ›

Amber is, in some ways, like a very-slow motion vid. From ScienceDaily: Flowering plants are well known for their special relationship to the insects and other animals that serve as their pollinators. But, before the rise of angiosperms, another group of unusual evergreen gymnosperms, known as cycads, may have been the first insect-pollinated plants. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on August 16 have uncovered the earliest definitive fossil evidence of that intimate relationship between cycads and insects. The discovery came in the form of an ancient boganiid beetle preserved in Burmese amber for an estimated 99 million years along with grains of cycad pollen. The beetle also shows special adaptations, including mandibular patches, for the transport of Read More ›

That seems counterintuitive, but consider: Retractions can be a way of sweeping misconduct under the rug, when a thorough investigation is really what is needed. The retracted paper is co-authored by researchers who used to collaborate with Yoshihiro Sato, a now-deceased bone researcher who has accrued dozens of retractions. But investigation tends to stop with the retraction, which mean that the problems may continue. In a recently published paper, Grey and his team reported that after they contacted a dozen journals that had published nearly two dozen clinical trials co-authored by Sato that had been flagged as potentially problematic, they didn’t receive a single useful response. (You can read more about our thoughts on how journals shy away from discussing Read More ›

Human lifespans have not changed over the millennia: People in the past were not all dead by 30. Ancient documents confirm this. In the 24th century B.C., the Egyptian Vizier Ptahhotep wrote verses about the disintegrations of old age. The ancient Greeks classed old age among the divine curses, and their tombstones attest to survival well past 80 years. Ancient artworks and figurines also depict elderly people: stooped, flabby, wrinkled. Hunter-gatherers today have a normal lifespan of about 70 years too, of course, but hardships reduce the likelihood that a given person will reach that age. The maximum human lifespan (approximately 125 years) has barely changed since we arrived. It is estimated that if the three main causes of death Read More ›

Dark energy. Even the name is intriguing. Isn’t it a line of cosmetics already? But the evidence base is getting murkier all the time. The conjecture, if true, would mean the density of dark energy in our universe cannot be constant, but must instead take a form called “quintessence” — an energy source that will gradually diminish over tens of billions of years. Several telescope experiments are underway now to more precisely probe whether the universe is expanding with a constant rate of acceleration, which would mean that as new space is created, a proportionate amount of new dark energy arises with it, or whether the cosmic acceleration is gradually changing, as in quintessence models. A discovery of quintessence would Read More ›

At one time, it wathought that the mechanisms by which water transports the H+ and OH− ions were mirror images of each other, though in recent years, asymmetry was glimpsed: A team of scientists has uncovered new molecular properties of water—a discovery of a phenomenon that had previously gone unnoticed. Liquid water is known to be an excellent transporter of its own autoionization products; that is, the charged species obtained when a water molecule (H2O) is split into protons (H+) and hydroxide ions (OH−). This remarkable property of water makes it a critical component in emerging electrochemical energy production and storage technologies such as fuel cells; indeed, life itself would not be possible if water did not possess this characteristic. Read More ›

Moshe Averick, author of The Confused World of Modern Atheism (Mosaica Press, 2016), asks us to look at the facts: For those who lean towards secularism in the Western world, it is the Scientist who has taken over the role of the priest, clergyman, and medicine man. Men and women of Science are looked upon with a sort of awe and have been conferred with something akin to a demi-god status. They are the holders of hidden “mystical” knowledge and perform magical technological and medical feats. The simple fact, of course, is that scientists are no different than anyone else. … For those who actually believe that scientists – homo scientistus – exist on a higher, exalted plane than the rest of Read More ›

Recently, we noted the peculiar state of affairs by which atheists, who appear to dominate Top Science, have disproportionately progressive views and yet seem oblivious to the current progressive war on science. Here are two more shots at math: Rochelle Gutiérrez Title: Mathematx: Towards a way of Being The relationship between humans, mathematics, and the planet has been one steeped too long in domination and destruction. What are appropriate responses to reverse such a relationship? How do we do work now (inside and outside of schools) that will reverberate and touch the lives of future generations? Drawing upon Indigenous worldviews to reconceptualize what mathematics is and how it is practiced, I argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge Read More ›

New Scientist is now rehabilitating the Neanderthals. We once thought of Neanderthals as crude and unintelligent – not any more. Archaeological evidence suggests they were capable of symbolic thought, had some capacity for speech, and probably carried out elaborate burial rituals. They may even have taught modern humans new skills when the two species met and interbred. … Contrary to expectations, some Neanderthals were even vegetarian. Others seasoned their food with wild herbs. And they were making porridge 32,000 years ago, long before farming was invented. New Scientist Staff, “New Scientist Live: the sophisticated home life of Neanderthals” at But let’s be clear about one thing. The reason “we once thought of Neanderthals as crude and unintelligent” was the Darwinian Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The vocal tract and larynx is similar in form and function amongst virtually all terrestrial mammals, including humans. However, relative to humans, non-human primates produce an extremely limited range of vocalisations. Published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, the new research investigates whether the reason primates are incapable of producing speech is because they lack the brain mechanisms needed to control and coordinate vocal production. … The academics, from Anglia Ruskin University and Stony Brook University, found a positive correlation between the relative size of cortical association areas and the size of the vocal repertoire of primates, which can range from just two call types in pottos to at least 38 different calls made by bonobos. Lead author Read More ›