Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

“Compelling new evidence” claimed for comets generating phosphates for earliest life

From ScienceDaily: Little was known about a key element in the building blocks, phosphates, until now. University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers, in collaboration with colleagues in France and Taiwan, provide compelling new evidence that this component for life was found to be generated in outer space and delivered to Earth in its first one billion years by meteorites or comets. The phosphorus compounds were then incorporated in biomolecules found in cells in living beings on Earth. The breakthrough research is outlined in “An Interstellar Synthesis of Phosphorus Oxoacids,” authored by UH Manoa graduate student Andrew Turner, now assistant professor at the University of Pikeville, and UH Manoa chemistry Professor Ralf Kaiser in the September issue of Nature Communications. … Read More ›

Researchers: We tend to overrate dog intelligence

From ScienceDaily: People who think dogs are exceptionally intelligent are barking up the wrong tree, new research shows. Scientists reviewed evidence that compared the brain power of dogs with other domestic animals, other social hunters and other carnivorans (an order including animals such as dogs, wolves, bears, lions and hyenas). The researchers, from the University of Exeter and Canterbury Christ Church University, found the cognitive abilities of dogs were at least matched by several species in each of these groups. The study examined more than 300 papers on the intelligence of dogs and other animals, and found several cases of “over interpretation” in favour of dogs’ abilities. … “They are often compared to chimpanzees and whenever dogs ‘win’, this gets Read More ›

It’s likely impossible to find out how many species there are

But don’t tell Mother Jones’s readers: The Census of Marine Life closing ceremony was meant to celebrate the fact that humans had, for the first time, estimated how many species there were in the sea. The Sloan Foundation, which partially funded the $650 million, 10-year project, organized the event. Scientists had been trying to uncover this magic number for at least 250 years. Previous estimates had put the number somewhere between three million and 100 million species on Earth—a nice way of saying they had no idea. But on this day, Mora and his team were supposed to unveil a much more specific conclusion. Reporters swarmed the museum, hoping to get the scoop on the scientists’ discovery. The spokespersons for Read More ›

Neanderthals practiced some forms of health care 1.6 mya

For one thing, they had to cope with injuries inflicted by large wild animals they were hunting: Researchers investigated the skeletal remains of more than 30 individuals where minor and serious injuries were evident, but did not lead to loss of life. The samples displayed several episodes of injury and recovery, suggesting that Neanderthals must have had a well-developed system of care in order to survive. … “We have evidence of healthcare dating back 1.6 million years ago, but we think it probably goes further back than this. We wanted to investigate whether healthcare in Neanderthals was more than a cultural practice; was it something they just did or was it more fundamental to their strategies for survival? “The high level of injury Read More ›

Sokal hoaxes strike social science again!

Even the most alert reader may not recall our piece on how gender theory can turn a dog’s life into a, well, dog’s life: Turns out, it may have been another Sokal hoax: Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a Read More ›

Pioneer’s Fool’s Errand

This image was famously attached to the Pioneer spacecraft.  The idea was that if extraterrestrials happened upon the craft they would learn something about its designers. After having listened to materialist arguments for many years, I must sadly conclude that NASA failed miserably here, having sent the spacecraft on a fool’s errand.  The materialists have insisted repeatedly in these pages that there are no objective indicia of design on the spacecraft from which an alien could distinguish the craft as a whole — or the image attached to it — from random space debris.  I don’t know about you, but I am outraged that NASA would squander hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds on such an obviously quixotic Read More ›

Michael Denton: Every major science advance for 200 years shows unique fitness of Earth for life

Michael Denton has a new book out, Children of Light: The astonishing properties of sunlight that made us possible, on the fitness of sunlight for life: In this book, I have described the fitness of the radiation emitted by the Sun for life on Earth: the fitness of the atmosphere to ensure sufficient IR radiation is absorbed to warm the surface of the planet, preventing water from freezing and animating matter for chemical reactions; the fitness of the atmosphere to let through the visible light to the Earth surface to enable photosynthesis which generates the oxygen and reduced carbon fuel necessary to support our “light eating,” energy-demanding lifestyle; and the fitness of the same light for high-acuity vison in beings Read More ›

Extraterrestrial civilizations: When all else fails, try Bayesianism

From ScienceDaily: Could there be another planet out there with a society at the same stage of technological advancement as ours? To help find out, EPFL scientist Claudio Grimaldi, working in association with the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a statistical model that gives researchers a new tool in the search for the kind of signals that an extraterrestrial society might emit. His method — described in an article appearing today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — could also make the search cheaper and more efficient. … The advantage of Grimaldi’s statistical model is that it lets scientists interpret both the success and failure to detect signals at varying distances from Earth. His model employs Bayes’ Read More ›

Did the ancient Incas leave behind writing after all?

People have often wondered how the Incas could have built such a complex civilization without writing anything down. Maybe they did write it down: The Incas may not have bequeathed any written records, but they did have colourful knotted cords. Each of these devices was called a khipu (pronounced key-poo). We know these intricate cords to be an abacus-like system for recording numbers. However, there have also been teasing hints that they might encode long-lost stories, myths and songs too. In a century of study, no one has managed to make these knots talk. But recent breakthroughs have begun to unpick this tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the first signs of phonetic symbolism within the strands. Now two anthropologists Read More ›

Were humans in North America 130,000 years ago? Some evidence considered

Archeologists offer some thoughts: Humans may have been in North America much earlier than previously thought. Here’s the evidence: chipped rocks, crushed mastodon bones, and reliable dates showing the remains are 130,000 years old. Is that enough to rewrite the history? SAPIENS co-hosts Chip Colwell and Jen Shannon talk to Steven and Kathleen Holen, archaeologists and co-authors of a controversial discovery. And they further evaluate the claims with the help of anthropologist Todd Braje. podcast, “The Mastodon in the Room” at SAPIENS Last year, SAPIENS covered the mastodon find: In the fall of 1992, a construction crew made an unusual discovery during a freeway expansion in a coastal area of San Diego County. Buried deep within the silty soil were the Read More ›

Neurosurgeon: Neither books nor brains learn, only minds learn

Recently, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offered a parable about whether machines really learn. The tale features a book that “learned” to fall open at the right places. Computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit responded, claiming that machines really CAN learn!, and Dr. Egnor responded to him, pointing out that a baseball glove can “learn” the game if adjustment to circumstances is all we are counting. But he also wanted to make clear to Dr. Shallit, brains don’t learn either. Only minds learn: Shallit implies that the reinforcement and suppression of neural networks in the brain that accompanies learning means that brains, like machines, learn. He is mistaken. Brains are material organs that contain neurons and glia a host of cells and substances. Brains Read More ›

Jerry Coyne is unhappy again. This time it is Templeton

The most recent thing we had heard that Darwinian biologist Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne was unhappy about was David Qualen’s book on Carl Woese. The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life has far too much about horizontal gene transfer for a Darwinist’s liking. Before that, we heard that skeptical mathematician David Berlinski had vexed him. Hey, say what you want about Jerry; he allows his complaints about life to be heard! This time, it is about Templeton, for funding a study of atheism. Lois Lee, a religious scholar whom I’ve written about before, is the lead investigator on a big Templeton grant, or, as The Conversation describes her in erroneous spelling, “Principle [sic] Investigator on the Understanding Unbelief Read More ›

Medieval science fiction?

Yes, Intro of and why not? Take the medieval romances that feature Alexander the Great soaring heavenwards in a flying machine and exploring the depths of the ocean in his proto-submarine. Or that of the famous medieval traveller, Sir John Mandeville, who tells of marvellous, automated golden birds that beat their wings at the table of the Great Chan. Like those of more modern science fictions, medieval writers tempered this sense of wonder with scepticism and rational inquiry. Geoffrey Chaucer describes the procedures and instruments of alchemy (an early form of chemistry) in such precise terms that it is tempting to think that the author must have had some experience of the practice. Yet his Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale also displays Read More ›