Is it only selective attention that causes us to see order in the universe? There is another, more interesting, explanation for the structure of the laws of nature. Rather than saying that the universe is very structured, say that the universe is mostly chaotic and for the most part lacks structure. The reason why we see the structure we do is that scientists act like a sieve and focus only on those phenomena that have structure and are predictable. They do not take into account all phenomena; rather, they select those phenomena they can deal with. Some people say that science studies all physical phenomena. This is simply not true. Who will win the next presidential election and move into Read More ›

We humans must have originated in some kind of a cement mixer, to judge from recent reports. Making stone tools (Oldowan technology) is believed to have started in East Africa 2.6 million years ago and spread from there. But archaeologists recently found stone tools and butchered animals on a high plateau in Algeria: The newly discovered limestone and flint tools are about 2.4 million years old — almost the same age as the oldest known such tools, which were found in Gona, Ethiopia, and are 2.6 million years old. The discovery means that hominins were present in the Mediterranean fringe of North Africa around 600,000 years earlier than previously thought. Aisling Irwin, “Algeria fossils cast doubt on East Africa as sole Read More ›

 A philosopher claims that neuroscience has proven thoughts do not exist. Eric Holloway looks at the neuroscience and examines the claim: There is a problem with this sort of reasoning. One could make the same argument about computer code, as follows: There is no code. It’s all just assembly language. Or, there is no assembly, it’s all just machine code. Or, there is no machine code, there are just voltage levels on transistors. One could continue following this chain of reasoning to the point where the transistors don’t exist. It’s just a bunch of electrons doing their thing. Of course, the electrons don’t really exist either. They’re just a bunch of quarks and leptons. In which case, the program your computer requires Read More ›

No, they haven’t all come to their senses and seen that of course the frame of reality we live in is designed. Like Larry Krauss and Francisco Ayala, astronomer and science popularizer Tyson has been #MeToo’d: Dr. Katelyn N. Allers, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Bucknell University, told me that she was “felt up” by Tyson at an after-party following a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in 2009. AAS didn’t have a mechanism for reporting sexual harassment at the time, but Dr. Allers says she probably would report the incident if it had happened today … David G. McAfee, “Two More Women Accuse Neil deGrasse Tyson of Sexual Misconduct” at Patheos Readers will remember Tyson from Read More ›

Robert J. Marks is one of the authors of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, with design theorist William Dembski and Winston Ewert. There’s little danger, he thinks, in computers ruling us but considerable danger that we can use them to magnify the impact of our errors. More. Here’s the podcast. See also: Human consciousness may not be computable One model of consciousness would mean that conscious computers are a physical impossibility. (Robert Marks)

Plants couldn’t do anything that can’t be explained by the selfish gene, you see: The sheer complexity of the communications systems plants demonstrate astonishes us to the point that scientists have refused to believe the evidence. In 1983, plant scientists Jack Schultz and Ian Baldwin reported that maple saplings that were exposed to maples damaged by herbivores increased their own defenses. They attributed the increase to the chemical signals released by the injured trees, signals to which the saplings responded. But, as Cossins recounts, many researchers would not accept that plants could behave so as to benefit neighboring plants but not themselves. Such behavior contradicted evolution theory; it would not be “evolutionarily stable.” However, by 2000, the behavior was demonstrated in Read More ›

Artificial intelligence crashes are historically common: First, what caused previous AI winters? There was one straightforward reason: The technology did not work. Expert systems weren’t experts. Language translators failed to translate. Even Watson, after winning Jeopardy, failed to provide useful answers in the real-world context of medicine. When technology fails, winters come. Nearly all of AI’s recent gains have been realized due to massive increases in data and computing power that enable old algorithms to suddenly become useful. For example, researchers first conceived neural networks—the core idea powering much machine learning and AI’s notable advances—in the late 1950s. The worries of an impending winter arise because we’re approaching the limits of what massive data combined with hordes of computers can Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Kent studied details of Palaeolithic and Neolithic art featuring animal symbols at sites in Turkey, Spain, France and Germany. They found all the sites used the same method of date-keeping based on sophisticated astronomy, even though the art was separated in time by tens of thousands of years. Researchers clarified earlier findings from a study of stone carvings at one of these sites — Gobekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey — which is interpreted as a memorial to a devastating comet strike around 11,000 BC. This strike was thought to have initiated a mini ice-age known as the Younger Dryas period. They also decoded what is probably the best known ancient artwork Read More ›

At her blog, Oscillations, Suzan Mazur offers suggestions for panelists and explains why more public input is needed in this area, which is ramping up in the United States: NSF says it cares about the “social and ethical dimensions of such research.” So who gets to say what synthetic cell research meets society’s approval? I think creating a responsible US citizens panel is urgent. … As of now, the NSF plan is to “educate” the American people about synthetic cell development after selections are quietly made by insiders who we don’t know. This approach cannot remain unchallenged. Suzan Mazur, “America Needs a Citizens Panel on Ethics & Synthetic Cell Development” at Oscillations She notes that Germany is taking a more proactive Read More ›

Researchers knew that jumping spider (Toxeus magnus) young didn’t leave the nest for twenty-one days and adults were not observed to bring back food for them. So they checked it out: They looked more closely and noticed that the mother was secreting a liquid from its upper abdomen onto the surface of the nest, which the spiderlings ate. After a week, the spiderlings sucked the milk directly from the mother. Even though they were able to leave the nest and feed themselves after 20 days, they continued suckling the milk for another 18 days. If these were humans, they’d be featured on a cable TV program. Once the spiderlings matured, the mother attacked the males that returned while females were Read More ›

Error alone does not apparently explain the discrepancy in these figures: For some methods, which rely on using the light from supernova and pulsing stars called Cepheid variables to determine their changing distance, it appears that objects move away from the Earth 73 kilometers per second faster for every 3.26 million additional light-years, also called a megaparsec. For other measuring methods, which rely on the electromagnetic radiation that reaches us from the early universe called the cosmic microwave background, the value is around 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec. … Most recently, a new result from scientists running the Dark Energy Survey has muddied the waters. Using measurements from supernovae, they in fact measured a Hubble constant of 67.7 kilometers Read More ›

Our physics color commentator, Rob Sheldon, was looking at two physicists’ recent salvos and offers some thoughts: Nicole Yunger Halpern (Theoretical physicist: My field is not going to the dogs vs. The point of view represented by Sabine Hossenfelder (Theoretical physicist: Present phase of physics “not normal” – stagnation, not crisis) and Sarah Scoles (Is cosmology in crisis over how to measure the universe?) Halpern’s response is typical. She’s a young, female, postdoc with jobs at MIT and Harvard. Of course, the future looks bright! Now if it had been a white, male, 40-ish, on his third-postdoc at a 2nd tier school, the story would have been very different. But Halpern is exactly who Sabine Hossenfelder is talking to. What Read More ›

Confession: Some of us never took evolutionary psychology (a discipline whose subject died a very long time ago but allegedly lives on in all of us) seriously enough to wonder if it could actually create controversies in psychology. Apparently so: In terms of the political bias among social psychologists, Buss and von Hippel found that 95 per cent were mostly liberal and left-wing in their views (also, among the US respondents, only 4 had voted Republican in the prior Presidential election while 305 had voted Democrat). Quizzing the social psychologists on their views of evolutionary theory, Buss and von Hippel found that they overwhelmingly accepted the principles of Darwinian evolution and also that it applied to humans, but when it came Read More ›

A helpful list of the 11 biggest questions about dark matter starts with this: Originally, some scientists conjectured that the missing mass in the universe was made up of small faint stars and black holes, though detailed observations have not turned up nearly enough such objects to account for dark matter’s influence, as physicist Don Lincoln of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab previously wrote for Live Science. The current leading contender for dark matter’s mantle is a hypothetical particle called a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, or WIMP, which would behave sort of like a neutron except would be between 10 and 100 times heavier than a proton, as Lincoln wrote. Yet, this conjecture has only led to more questions… Read More ›

Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed has the story: Academic freedom is meant to protect scholars with controversial ideas. But a group of philosophers says academic freedom isn’t protection enough in an era of campus speech debates, internet trolls and threats against professors — and that academics now need a place to publish their most sensitive ideas pseudonymously. That venue, The Journal of Controversial Ideas, will launch next year. Co-founder Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and no stranger to controversial ideas, mentioned the idea for such a journal in a 2017 interview. But plans for it took shape in a BBC Radio 4 documentary on viewpoint diversity, Read More ›