At Biology Direct: Abstract: This essay highlights critical aspects of the plausibility of pre-Darwinian evolution. It is based on a critical review of some better-known open, far-from-equilibrium system-based scenarios supposed to explain processes that took place before Darwinian evolution had emerged and that resulted in the origin of the first systems capable of Darwinian evolution. The researchers’ responses to eight crucial questions are reviewed. The majority of the researchers claim that there would have been an evolutionary continuity between chemistry and “biology”. A key question is how did this evolution begin before Darwinian evolution had begun? In other words the question is whether pre-Darwinian evolution is plausible. Marc Tessera, “Is pre-Darwinian evolution plausible” at Biology Direct The paper is open Read More ›

A science writer explains, Our early Sun’s rate of rotation may be one reason we’re here to talk about it, astrobiologists now say. The key likely lies in the fact that between the first hundred million to the first billion years of its life, our G-dwarf star likely had a ‘Goldilocks’ rotation rate; neither too slow nor too fast. Instead, its hypothetical ‘intermediate’ few days rate of rotation guaranteed our Sun was active enough to rid our newly-formed Earth of its inhospitable, hydrogen-rich primary atmosphere. This would have enabled a more habitable, secondary atmosphere composed of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen to eventually form. Bruce Dorminey, “Early Sun’s ‘Goldilocks’ Rotation Rate May Be Why We’re Here” at Forbes It’s Read More ›

Reading the claims for ape generosity in The New York Times, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offers a clarification: There is a fallacy about the human mind that regularly appears in research on animal behavior, and this fallacy is related to the pervasive misunderstanding about machine “intelligence.” It is a misunderstanding about the most basic characteristic of the human mind—that the human intellect and will are immaterial. That the human intellect and will are immaterial abilities is supported by a mountain of logic and empirical research. It is precisely this immateriality that animals and machines lack. Science writer Carl Zimmer has an essay in the New York Times, “Seeking Human Generosity’s Origins in an Ape’s Gift to Another Ape” (September 11, 2018) Read More ›

We know that the octopus is smart but the hardware “has little in common with the mammalian design”: While the octopus has a large central brain in its head, it also has a unique network of smaller ‘brains’ within each of its arms. It’s just what these creatures need to coordinate the mind-boggling complexity of eight prehensile arms and hundreds of sensitive suckers, which provide the octopus with the equivalent of opposable thumbs (roboticists have been taking note)… For instance, an octopus escaping a predator can detach an arm that will happily continue crawling around for up to 10 minutes. Indeed, until an experiment by Kuba and colleagues in 2011, some suspected the arms’ movements were independent of their central Read More ›

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor tells us that computer engineer Jeffrey Shallit, known for attacking ID, has responded to his recent parable explaining why machines can’t learn. According to Shallit, a computer is not just a machine, but something quite special: Computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit takes issue with my parable (September 8, 2018) about “machine learning.” The tale features a book whose binding cracks at certain points from the repeated use of certain pages. The damage makes those oft-consulted pages easier for the next user to find. My question was, can the book be said to have “learned” the users’ most frequent needs? I used the story about the book to argue that “machine learning” is an oxymoron. Like the book, machines Read More ›

Holloway distinguishes between meaningful information and artificial intelligence: What is meaningful information, and how does it relate to the artificial intelligence question? First, let’s start with Claude Shannon’s definition of information. Shannon (1916–2001), a mathematician and computer scientist, stated that an event’s information content is the negative logarithm* of its probability. So, if I flip a coin, I generate 1 bit of information, according to his theory. The coin came down heads or tails. That’s all the information it provides. However, Shannon’s definition of information does not capture our intuition of information. Suppose I paid money to learn a lot of information at a lecture and the lecturer spent the whole session flipping a coin and calling out the result. Read More ›

At one time, the cell membrane was thought of as something like a building block made of lipids. Suzan Mazur interviews Swedish physical chemist Tommy Nylander about the study of living cells through neutron scattering (to avoid contamination, the Swedes do the studies without nuclear power or mercury) at Oscillations: Tommy Nylander:I’m very interested in different structures that can occur in living cells. In particular, structures generated by lipids, or fats, if you want. Previously lipids were considered as only a building block with no or very minute function. Merely a support. Suzan Mazur: Cell membranes are made of lipids. Tommy Nylander: Yes. Today it’s realized that lipids can perform various functions that can be very important for cell maintenance Read More ›

Readers will remember science writer David Quammen’s new book, The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life, a biography of Carl Woese, who first identified the Archaea (and doubted Darwinism). They will also doubtless remember Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who does not life Tangled Tree, and… Well, he still doesn’t like it and has been holding forth of late: Most of the publicity about the book—to be sure, publicity pushed by Quammen himself—centers on HGT. It is, we’re told, something that radically overturns Darwin’s view of the “tree of life” and of evolution, and even revises our own view of “what it means to be human” (after all, we’re also told, a substantial part of our genome is dead, Read More ›

Recently, some readers asked whether the recent Dickinsonia fossil “fats” find from 558 mya featured cholesterol. Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon explains further: Cholesterol was not found by these researchers, nor did they make announcements of soft tissue in a fossil. What they did find were the breakdown products of cholesterol called “sterols”. Plants make phytols that break down similarly. There might be hundreds to thousands of breakdown products of these biochemicals. When these materials are run through a mass spectrometer, the device sorts them by chemical weight. Really good mass specs (like the ones I used to design for NASA) can even separate isotopes of carbon and hydrogen. Then a simple molecule like CH4 might have four or five Read More ›

The world’s simplest animal is trichoplax adhaerens. It is so simple that researchers wisely decided to forego the venerable Biological Species Concept that depends on an animal’s form (tricoplax doesn’t have much of a form) and just use genetics. But when evolutionary biologist Michael Eitel sequenced the genomes of several thousand of them, he was in for a surprise: A quarter of the genes were in the wrong spot or written backward. Instructions for similar proteins were spelled nearly 30 percent differently on average, and in some cases as much as 80 percent. The Hong Kong variety was missing 4 percent of its distant cousin’s genes and had its own share of genes unique to itself. Overall, the Hong Kong Read More ›

“Claims that the Universe is designed for humans raise far more troubling questions than they can possibly answer,” says evolutionary psychologist David P. Barash: Welcome to the ‘anthropic principle’, a kind of Goldilocks phenomenon or ‘intelligent design’ for the whole Universe. It’s easy to describe, but difficult to categorise: it might be a scientific question, a philosophical concept, a religious argument – or some combination. The anthropic principle holds that if such phenomena as the gravitational constant, the exact electric charge on the proton, the mass of electrons and neutrons, and a number of other deep characteristics of the Universe differed at all, human life would be impossible. According to its proponents, the Universe is fine-tuned for human life. This Read More ›

We are told so at Commentary, using the Soviet Union by way of demonstration: Bolshevik ethics began and ended with atheism. Only someone who rejected all religious or quasi-religious morals could be a Bolshevik because, as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and countless other Bolshevik leaders insisted, success for the Party was the only standard of right and wrong. The bourgeoisie falsely claim that Bolsheviks have no ethics, Lenin explained in a 1920 speech. No, he said; what Bolsheviks rejected was an ethical framework based on God’s commandments or anything resembling them, such as abstract principles, timeless values, universal human rights, or any tenet of philosophical idealism. For a true materialist, he maintained, there could be no Kantian categorical imperative to treat Read More ›

He had promised, he says, not to touch the subject again but… Looking back on what’s happened (and hasn’t happened) in the last fifteen years: A prime example is Richard Sternberg, a Ph.D. in biology (Molecular Evolution) from Florida International University and a Ph.D. in Systems Science (Theoretical Biology) from Binghamton University. He is not a lightweight. From 2001-2007 he was staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information; 2001-2007 a Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Hell broke loose when he authorized in 2004 the publication, in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, an organ of the Smithsonian Institution, of a peer-reviewed article, The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher taxonomic Read More ›

Make what you will of studies but this just in: A study of 788 people in the UK, France and Spain concluded that atheists and agnostics think of themselves as more open-minded than those with faith, but are are actually less tolerant to differing opinions and ideas. Religious believers “seem to better perceive and integrate diverging perspectives”, according to psychology researchers at the private Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium’s largest French-speaking university. … Dr Uzarevic said: ““The idea started through noticing that, in public discourse, despite both the conservative/religious groups and liberal/secular groups showing strong animosity towards the opposite ideological side, somehow it was mostly the former who were often labeled as ‘closed-minded’. Greg Wilford, “Atheists are less open-minded Read More ›

If the measure is blind belief, maybe so: Darwin, for instance, is part of the House of Progress, which is why so many people will accuse you of being a creationist if you offer any criticism of his theory of Natural Selection (amusingly, this happens even to atheists). He was “right,” you see, so any opposition to him or any doubts as to his theory must be mere unthinking reactions. Likewise, look at the treatment of scientists who question the extent, cause, or proper response to climate change: they are simply labeled “deniers” and dismissed, rather than engaged. You see? In the Middle Ages, educated men disputed each other by putting their opponent’s case in the strongest possible light before Read More ›