Abstract: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin loved the world, but, theologically and spiritually, he often tried to leave it behind. This essay shows that from the 1920s until his death in 1955, Teilhard de Chardin unequivocally supported racist eugenic practices, praised the possibilities of the Nazi experiments, and looked down upon those who he deemed “imperfect” humans. These ideas explicitly lay the groundwork for Teilhard’s famous cosmological theology, a link which has been largely ignored in Teilhardian research until now. This study concludes that such support requires a reconsideration of how Teilhard is used in twenty-first century theology. (paywall) – John P. Slattery, Dangerous Tendencies of Cosmic Theology, The Untold Legacy of Teilhard de Chardin, Philosophy and Theology, Volume 29, Issue Read More ›

From Mind Matters today: Recently, we looked at Moravec’s Paradox, the fact that it is hard to teach machines to do things that are easy for most humans (walking, for example) but comparatively easy to teach them things that are challenging for most humans (chess comes to mind). Another paradox worth noting is Polanyi’s Paradox, named in honor of philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), who developed the concept of “tacit knowledge” … … Here’s [Polanyi’s] Paradox, as formulated by law professor John Danaher, who studies emerging technologies, at his blog Philosophical Disquisitions: We can know more than we can tell, i.e. many of the tasks we perform rely on tacit, intuitive knowledge that is difficult to codify and automate. We have Read More ›

We don’t hear as much old-fashioned moralizing these days as we used to but this looks like the authentic product from ScienceDaily: Laziness helped lead to extinction of Homo erectus An archaeological excavation of ancient human populations in the Arabian Peninsula during the Early Stone Age, found that Homo erectus used ‘least-effort strategies’ for tool making and collecting resources. This ‘laziness’ paired with an inability to adapt to a changing climate likely played a role in the species going extinct, according to lead researcher Dr Ceri Shipton of the ANU School of Culture, History and Language. “They really don’t seem to have been pushing themselves,” Dr Shipton said. “I don’t get the sense they were explorers looking over the horizon. Read More ›

Paleontologist Gerta Keller attributes the extinction 66 million years ago of three-quarters of Earth’s species, including all dinosaurs, not to an asteroid hit but to a series of volcanic eruptions. A writer goes with her on a field trip: The prestige of science is solidly behind the asteroid: The impact theory provided an elegant solution to a prehistoric puzzle, and its steady march from hypothesis to fact offered a heartwarming story about the integrity of the scientific method. “This is nearly as close to a certainty as one can get in science,” a planetary-science professor told Time magazine in an article on the crater’s discovery. In the years since, impacters say they have come even closer to total certainty. “I Read More ›

 In a review of science writer Anil Ananthaswamy’s Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality, science writer Philip Ball captured the essence of the sheer oddity of quantum mechanics: What’s odd is that the interference pattern remains — accumulating over many particle impacts — even if particles go through the slits one at a time. The particles seem to interfere with themselves. Odder, the pattern vanishes if we use a detector to measure which slit the particle goes through: it’s truly particle-like, with no more waviness. Oddest of all, that remains true if we delay the measurement until after the particle has traversed the slits (but before it hits the screen). Read More ›

Researchers Iranzo and Koonin ask: Typically, natural selection results in deletions of harmful genes, so the main question is, why hasn’t natural selection wiped out genetic parasites? They mean “transposons, plasmids, viruses” etc., that offer no benefit to the hosts. They offer a hypothesis: In a new study published in EPL, researchers Jaime Iranzo and Eugene V. Koonin at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, have found that horizontal gene transfer may be one of the keys to understanding the persistence and spread of genetic parasites over evolutionary timescales. In horizontal gene transfer (HGT), genetic information is transferred to an organism by a variety of mechanisms other than the traditional parent-to-offspring process of transferring DNA. For example, an Read More ›

But how would we know? What is the reference population? “Similarly, rapid expansion of brain size and cognitive abilities in humans has been key to our evolutionary success,” says study senior author David Kingsley, a developmental geneticist at Stanford University. However, at the same time, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia impact more than 3 percent of the world population. Kingsley reasoned this vulnerability to mental disorders might also stem from recent evolutionary changes controlling human brain size and structure. – Charles Choi, “Could Human Evolutionary Changes Be Behind Mental Disorders?” at Discover Do we know that life forms with far more limited intelligence do not suffer in the same way? If a bear had bipolar disorder or a cat had schizophrenia, how Read More ›

Focusing on stopping progress, barring new power plants, dismantling chemical facilities, mobilizing against Israel, and other reactionary pursuits, Ivy institutions are pursuing the fancies of a declining intellectual and business elite, full of chemophobic nags and luddite lame-ducks quacking away on their miasmic pools of old money as the world whirls past them. George Gilder, Life After Google:  The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy Would that it were so.

New Scientist, where it is known that all things come of evolution and we make nothing ourselves, does not know whether we “evolved” domestic violence: Why is domestic violence so horrifyingly common around the world? According to a study out today, men who are violent towards their partners have more children in societies without birth control. This implies that evolution favours domestic violence – but can that really be true? Yes. No. Maybe. It is true that allowing Political Correctness to rule your thoughts and not believing that you have free will can lead to conniptions. The researchers studied the Tsimane people of Bolivia, who have a pre-industrial culture with no access to contraception. Shockingly, 85 per cent of women Read More ›

From a review of The Equations of Life: The Hidden Rules Shaping Evolution by astrobiologist Chares Cockell, The book uses many examples of living things on our own planet, most convincingly the ladybug, to explain eloquently why everything from microbes to large animals are the way they are. For example, why does the ladybug not fall off a leaf? How does it manage to breathe without lungs? How does it survive winter or fly—considering its aerodynamics are very different from an airplane’s? Having shown that physical factors limit the solutions for life on this planet, Cockell extends the argument to extraterrestrial life. He expects us to find only carbon-based life elsewhere in the universe, which, he contends, is likely to Read More ›

News from the Ediacaran era (600 – 542 million years ago), when many animals were genuinely hard to distinguish at first from plants, sharpens the question: So-called Ediacaran organisms have puzzled biologists for decades. To the untrained eye they look like fossilized plants, in tube or frond shapes up to 2 meters long. These strange life forms dominated Earth’s seas half a billion years ago, and scientists have long struggled to figure out whether they’re algae, fungi, or even an entirely different kingdom of life that failed to survive. Now, two paleontologists think they have finally established the identity of the mysterious creatures: They were animals, some of which could move around, but they were unlike any living on Earth Read More ›

And starts to come to terms with the difference that makes: If the revelation that humans are probably alone in our universe stands, and as that revelation sinks into our collective psyche, it could effect a second, weirder Copernican revolution in culture. To begin with, it’s really hard to square humanity’s status as perhaps the only intelligent species in all of time and space with the idea that we are insignificant. To the contrary, the everyday breath of the least of us contains meaning in so concentrated a form that a cup’s worth of it could be doled out to a dozen star systems, transforming the arid matter into a garden of significance. There’s been a lot of talk in Read More ›

As opposed to a denier: I propose a basic test to determine who has earned the benefit of the doubt on whether to be labelled a denier or not. Does the person have an academic or professional background in atmospheric science or climatology? If the answer is yes, then they earn the benefit of the doubt and should not be called a denier. Does the person have an academic or professional background in another discipline and not a climate-related field? If the answer is yes, then they have not earned the right to be called anything other than a denier. Brian Brettschneider, “Climate Change Skeptic Or Denier?” at Forbes Reader Otto Pellinen writes to say, This article has an interesting take Read More ›

  From Mind Matters Today: Many tweaks later, is Zo correct enough? Is everyone pleased? Well, maybe the digital teen is too Correct now. From Quartz, where Chloe Rose Stuart-Ulin has been checking in with Zo for over a year and finds her “sort of convincing,”speaking “fluent meme”: But there’s a catch. In typical sibling style, Zo won’t be caught dead making the same mistakes as her sister. No politics, no Jews, no red-pill paranoia. Zo is politically correct to the worst possible extreme; mention any of her triggers, and she transforms into a judgmental little brat. One wonders, what is the market potential for judgmental little brats? More. See also: GIGO alert: AI can be racist and sexist, researchers Read More ›

For one thing, advanced dinosaurs existed much earlier than thought. From ScienceDaily: “We were surprised to find a close relative of Diplodocus in East Asia 174 million years ago. It’s commonly thought that sauropods did not disperse there until 200 million years ago and many of their giant descendants, reached this region much later, if at all,” explained study co-author Professor Paul Upchurch (UCL Earth Sciences). “Our discovery of Lingwulong demonstrates that several different types of advanced sauropod must have existed at least 15 million years earlier and spread across the world while the supercontinent Pangaea was still a coherent landmass. This forces a complete re-evaluation of the origins and evolution of these animals.” The new evidence also reinforces the Read More ›