November 2018

Climate contrarian uncovers scientific error, upends major ocean warming study “The findings of the … paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.” Really?  A casual review of the first page by one person with a modicum of skepticism found issues that a whole team of experts missed in their peer review process? Yes.  Why?  Easy.  When it comes to climate change, the politics come first.  Facts take the hindmost.  And sometimes that winds up biting them in their, ahem, nether regions, Read More ›

Geneticist John Sanford is also the author of Genetic Entropy: and one of the editors of Biological Information: New Perspectives: Proceedings of a Symposium Held May 31 Through June 3, 2011 at Cornell University Note: In a distinctly unsavoury move, devout Darwinians managed to get Biological Information dropped by Springer. It is all the more valuable to read for that reason. Nick Matzke famously got the publishing company Springer to suppress the publication of the papers of a conference held at Cornell. See here. He did this without having seen, much less read, any of the papers. Obviously, his motivation could not have been the content of the papers. He was motivated by the mere fact that several of the Read More ›

Here: While Stephen Colbert has called Michael J. Behe the “Father of Intelligent Design,” Behe’s arguments have been called, “close to heretical” by the New York Times Book Review, and Richard Dawkins has publicly taken him to task for his “maverick” views. Wherever he goes, Behe makes waves, but has remained singularly focused on doing rigorous scientific analysis that points to controversial but incredible results that other scientists won’t touch. Twenty years after publishing his seminal work, Darwin’s Black Box, Behe shows that new scientific discoveries point to a stunning fact: Darwin’s mechanism works by a process of devolution, not evolution. On the surface, evolution can help make something look and act different, but it doesn’t have the ability to Read More ›

Get a load of this: More recently, scientists have pointed out that if one tweaks many of the dimensionless physical constants — numbers like pi that are independent of units and simply exist as fundamental ideas — none of the cosmos we see would exist. One of these numbers is omega, the density parameter, which pits gravity’s pull against the expanding push of dark energy. If gravity were stronger, the universe would have long since ceased expanding, and would have collapsed back down in a reverse Big Bang, often called the “Big Crunch.” If dark energy were stronger, then the universe would race away from itself so that no matter would stick together and stars, planets, and people could never Read More ›

And have to leave academic science. Factually correct answers do not matter now if they are not politically correct. In a review of Adam Becker’s What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books, 2018), mathematician and physicist Sheldon Lee Glashow tells us No one can doubt that quantum mechanics is strange. Who could believe that particles can briefly violate energy conservation so as to pass through otherwise impenetrable barriers?1 Who could believe that a body’s position and velocity could not both be known to an arbitrary degree of precision, yet this is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Who could believe that not more than one electron can occupy the same quantum state, yet this is Pauli’s exclusion Read More ›

But they aren’t the ancestors of the modern ones. They died out, but why? From ScienceDaily: “We know that birds in the early Cretaceous, about 115 to 130 million years ago, were capable of flight but probably not as well adapted for it as modern birds,” said Atterholt, who is now an assistant professor and human anatomy instructor at the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California. “What this new fossil shows is that enantiornithines, though totally separate from modern birds, evolved some of the same adaptations for highly refined, advanced flight styles.” … If enantiornithines in the late Cretaceous were just as advanced as modern birds, however, why did they die out with the dinosaurs while the ancestors Read More ›

According to the Standard Model of our universe, beginning with the Big Bang, there is no difference between matter and antimatter (although they annihilate each other on contact). Why then do we see all matter, no antimatter? A group of physicists decided to test a new theory: From ScienceDaily: About ten picoseconds after the Big Bang — right about the time the Higgs boson was turning on — the universe was a hot plasma of particles. “The technique of dimensional reduction lets us replace the theory which describes this hot plasma with a simpler quantum theory with a set of rules that all the particles must follow,” explains Dr. David Weir, the corresponding author of the article. “It turns out Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences breaks down the genetic history of 1,700 species of ants and 10,000 plant genera, and the researchers found that the long history of ant and plant co-evolution started with ants foraging on plants and plants later responding by evolving ant-friendly traits. … “There are a number of different structures plants make that are specific for ant use,” explains Nelsen, who led the study with his fellow Field Museum researchers and co-authors Rick Ree and Corrie Moreau. “Some plants have evolved features that persuade ants into defending them from attack from other insects and even mammals. These include hollow thorns that ants will live inside, or extra Read More ›

Today I coin a new Latin phrase in honor of our frequent interlocutor daveS.  Here it is:  Argumentum ad Gannitum – the argument from whining.  (“Gannitum” being Latin for “whining”). The argument from whining takes this form: Person A makes an argument supported by logic and evidence that he believes compels a conclusion. Person B, instead of making a counter argument based on logic and evidence, says something like “Admit that you may be wrong” or “It’s not my job to show you how you are wrong.” Here is an example from a recent combox discussion with daveS: Barry makes the following argument: Either there is a God or there is not. If there is a God, meaning is possible. Read More ›

The BBC has also thought that chimpanzees were entering the Stone Age. And now: Eminent anthropologist Frans de Waal explains that politicians have a lot to learn from how chimpanzees show empathy. “How chimpanzees reveal the roots of human behaviour” at BBC Reality: Chimpanzees don’t seek humans out the way dogs do. In many ways, dogs are more like humans than chimpanzees are and better able to communicate with us emotionally. Dogs don’t seek out chimpanzees, come to think of it, though recently, some researchers needed to convince themselves that something like that was happening between monkeys and wolves. (Uh, no.) Physical resemblance is apparently not all it’s cracked up to be. Serious study might be worthwhile. Follow UD News Read More ›

It had to happen: Someone making epigenetics stand in for the selfish gene, an all-purpose gene-splain: If epigenetic research utilizing these new technologies will successfully shed some light in disease prevention, diagnosis, and therapy, then the research can expand to study epigenetics related to human behavior and moods. Aggression, violence, adultery, sexual preferences, risk-taking, happiness, depression, and even spirituality may all be affected by gene regulation, including epigenetics, via mechanisms not yet precisely defined. There also is much evidence that diet, sleep, fasting, exercise, and stress regulate gene expression but here, too, the way they do it needs to be explored. Incorporating these new epigenetic technologies when examining the multiple biological factors that regulate gene expression will better illuminate whether Read More ›

One of the commonest objections we meet when we discuss design inferences — especially concerning the genetic code, is that a claim is “just an analogy” (with implied conclusion that analogies are weak or fallacious). This then extends to inductive arguments used. This common error must be corrected and (as will be shown) the principle of distinct identity helps us to do so. Before we show that, let us pause to note from the Stanford Enc of Phil, just to counter-weight the tendency of many objectors to be quickly dismissive of anything said by “one of those IDiots” without bothering to actually address the substantial issue at stake: >>An analogy is a comparison between two objects, or systems of objects, Read More ›

The skeleton was of a 32-year-old man: Neanderthals walked upright, had spines straighter than those of modern man, would have been strong and sturdy, and breathed deeply from their bell-, not barrel-shaped ribcages, according to a recently published article written by an international team of scientists. Busting open the myth of the arm-dragging, hunched-over caveman, the scientists, based at universities in Israel, Spain, and the United States, drew their conclusions from a recently completed 3D virtual reconstruction of the ribcage of the Kebara 2 skeleton — aka “Moshe” — the headless but almost complete Neanderthal remains unearthed in 1983 in a northern Israel cave.Amanda Borschel-Dan, “3-D model of Neanderthal rib cage busts myth of ‘hunched-over cavemen’” at Times of Israel Read More ›

We used to think the picture was pretty simple but not any more: By sequencing and analyzing 15 ancient genomes found throughout the Americas—six of which were older than 10,000 years—these researchers determined that, around 8,000 years ago, the ancestors of Native Americans were still on the move, migrating away from Mesoamerica (what is today Mexico and Central America) toward both North and South America. These groups moved rapidly and unevenly, sometimes interbreeding with local populations, complicating the genetic—and historical—picture even further. George Dvorsky, “Three New DNA Studies Are Shaking Up the History of Humans in the Americas” at Gizmodo Apparently, they traveled “great distances at breathtaking speed.” Potter said genetic data is wonderful, but it doesn’t tell us the Read More ›

From Mind Matters: Much popular literature leaves the impression that living organisms are machines or even billions of them linked together. For example, at Medium, we learn, Brains receive input from the outside world, their neurons do something to that input, and create an output. That output may be a thought (I want curry for dinner); it may be an action (make curry); it may be a change in mood (yay curry!). Whatever the output, that “something” is a transformation of some form of input (a menu) to output (“chicken dansak, please”). And if we think of a brain as a device that transforms inputs to outputs then, inexorably, the computer becomes our analogy of choice… … But organisms differ Read More ›