People will take ownership of their own data, cutting out the giant “middle man.” George Gilder is an early sympathizer of intelligent design and taken his lumps for that. It wasn’t how the media wanted to perceive a tech sector guru. His most recent book, Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, offers a more hopeful view of the world after AI, based on the creativity of uniquely individual human beings. Gilder thinks that the enormous tech companies will be replaced by flattened hierarchies in which people take ownership of their own data, cutting out the giant “middle man.” He calls the successor era he envisions the “cryptocosm,” referring to the private encryption Read More ›

Hydrogen. One outcome of the exploration of Pluto and the surrounding area: So, what is this wall? We call it “space,” but space isn’t completely empty. Even in between stars there are some stray atoms and bits of dust. Clouds of neutral hydrogen atoms float through interstellar space, but the sun can affect how they’re distributed. Our local star emits a continuous stream of charged particles, which we call the solar wind. This outward force expands into a “bubble” around the solar system. The neutral hydrogen near our solar system slows down when it hits the solar wind, causing the atoms to build up into a “wall” structure. The researchers are fairly confident in their assessment of the hydrogen wall, Read More ›

f course, once he uses the term “emergent,” it’s game over.  Philosopher Paul Humphreys explains, While atomism is all about burrowing down to basic building blocks, emergence looks upward and outward, to ask whether strange new phenomena might pop out when things get sufficiently large or complex. … Emergence was popular in philosophy of science more than a century ago. Reputable figures such as John Stuart Mill, Henri Bergson and C D Broad suggested that chemistry and biology would struggle to account for the origins of life; perhaps life could only be said to ‘emerge’ from these domains, demanding its own special laws and explanations. Beginning in the 1930s, though, advances in quantum chemistry and the discovery of the structure of DNA Read More ›

I posted a link to the W.E.Loennig interview with English subtitles here July 20, with comments off. Dr. Loennig recently wrote me saying, “At Uncommon Descent, there is generally a civilized discussion, so I would not have closed the comments there. Would it be advisable to repost the link at Uncommon Descent with open comments?” Sure, and I will also repeat the intro from July 20. I think you can assume that Dr. Loennig will read and appreciate your comments. Wolf-Ekkehard Loennig, who worked for 25 years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, is now retired but still writes often on the topic of Darwinism and Intelligent Design. You can Read More ›

An interesting new paper on how the genetic code minimizes the impact of mistranslations: Statistical and biochemical studies of the standard genetic code (SGC) have found evidence that the impact of mistranslations is minimized in a way that erroneous codes are either synonymous or code for an amino acid with similar polarity as the originally coded amino acid. It could be quantified that the SGC is optimized to protect this specific chemical property as good as possible. In recent work, it has been speculated that the multilevel optimization of the genetic code stands in the wider context of overlapping codes. This work tries to follow the systematic approach on mistranslations and to extend those analyses to the general effect of Read More ›

Philip Cunningham writes to note for us such moments in the literature: Abstract: (open access) Why life persists at the edge of chaos is a question at the very heart of evolution. Here we show that molecules taking part in biochemical processes from small molecules to proteins are critical quantum mechanically. Electronic Hamiltonians of biomolecules are tuned exactly to the critical point of the metal-insulator transition separating the Anderson localized insulator phase from the conducting disordered metal phase. Using tools from Random Matrix Theory we confirm that the energy level statistics of these biomolecules show the universal transitional distribution of the metal-insulator critical point and the wave functions are multifractals in accordance with the theory of Anderson transitions. The findings Read More ›

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor doesn’t mince words: I despise Darwinism. It is, in my view, an utterly worthless scientific concept promulgated by a third-rate barnacle collector and hypochondriac to justify functional, if not explicit, atheism. Richard Dawkins got it right: Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. A low bar, admittedly, but “natural selection” satisfied, and still satisfies, many. Even bright Christians, regrettably. Darwin still has some cache among design advocates — the usual trope is that he provided evidence for common descent and explained microevolution. In this I differ from some of my friends and colleagues sympathetic to ID/Thomism. Darwin’s “theory” is completely worthless to science, a degradation of philosophy, and lethal to culture. As Jerry Fodor Read More ›

David Quammen, author of The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life, a biography of Darwin skeptic Carl Woese, who discovered the Archaea, offers a long reflection at the New York Times on how biology is moving away from Darwinism: Woese was a rebel researcher, obscure but ingenious, crotchety, driven. He had his Warholian 15 minutes of fame on the front page of The Times, and then disappeared back into his lab in Urbana, scarcely touched by popular limelight throughout the remaining 35 years of his career. But he is the most important biologist of the 20th century that you’ve never heard of. He asked profound questions that few other scientists had asked. He created a method — clumsy and Read More ›

The world-class symposium features several controversies long the lines of 1) Should we build a synthetic cell and 2) Aren’t we really doing that under another name anyway? Suzan Mazur reports at her blog, Oscillations: The late Carl Woese, who was awarded the Leeuwenhoek Medal by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992), opposed the idea of making a synthetic cell, telling me in a 2012 interview weeks before he died that he thought the push for a synthetic cell was all about “Power” and scientists “thinking they’re God.” … The Dutch conference promo never actually defines life. It does, however, address why the country has decided to build a synthetic cell. It repeats the mantra that the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Animals that have either migrated to or been introduced in Central Europe — such as the Asian bush mosquito or the Asian ladybeetle — feel extremely comfortable in their new homes due to changing climatic conditions. If these newcomers are genetically compatible with local species, they may crossbreed and produce hybrids, which can continue to evolve under local environmental conditions — a process that has been shown to have taken place during human evolution, between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals for example. New genes contributed by foreign species provide new genetic combinations that can be beneficial and are thus favoured by natural selection. According to hybrid swarm theory, interbreeding between hybrid species and parent species may then lead to Read More ›

“At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs – as long as no one is watching, anything goes.” Lawrence Kraus Given recent allegations against Kraus, this statement is deliciously ironic.

 From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: In June, I wrote a piece here at MercatorNet, “A shambolic atheist community faces some tough choices,” reflecting on the discontent of some members of that community. It attracted a good many comments and at least one riposte shortly afterward. The riposte garnered 114 comments too. Clearly, the piece struck a nerve. That said, fewer readers than I had expected took up the issue that seemed most significant to me: “‘Eiynah’ fears that the [atheist] movement is going ‘right wing.’” I don’t think the atheist movement is going right-wing so much as that some prominent atheists are re-evaluating their relationship with progressivism. It’s about time too. Considering how many atheists see science as a worthy Read More ›

As philosopher Michael Polanyi has noted, much that we know is hard to codify or automate. From Denyse O’Leary at Mind Matters Today We have all encountered that problem. It’s common in healthcare and personal counseling. Some knowledge simply cannot be conveyed—or understood or accepted—in a propositional form. For example, a nurse counselor may see clearly that her elderly post-operative patient would thrive better in a retirement home than in his rundown private home with several staircases. The analysis, as such, is straightforward. But that is not the challenge the nurse faces. Her challenge is to convey to the patient, not the information itself, but her tacit knowledge that the proposed move would liberate, rather than restrict him. More. Reality Read More ›

Ann Gauger, a senior scientist at the Biologic Institute, writes to defend homo erectus from charges that laziness led to his his extinction. She writes, This anthropologist is not looking at the broader picture. H erectus is estimated to have appeared somewhere in Africa 1.9 mya. By 1.8 mya H erectus is found in Dmanisi, Georgia. Not the US state. And in Europe and Asia not long after. They dispersed from Africa in 100 kya. Or about as long as it took H sapiens to do so. Who’s calling who lazy? They had a long run as a successful species. In fact, they co-existed with Neanderthals and depending on your point of view, even to the time of H sapiens, Read More ›