Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

CRISPR Babies and the Genetic Code

A  software developer friend brought this article in The Atlantic to my attention:  The CRISPR Baby Scandal Gets Worse by the Day And he writes: I find it amusing that they keep referring to this kind of thing as “editing”.  They’re going to need to figure out if they’re going to keep using “editing” as the concept they want to convey and as such provide an opening for ID proponents to make the connection to the semiotic nature of genetic code (and thereby creating testimony against interest) or begin utilizing a different concept to bulwark their materialist approach. Even the notion of DNA being “code” is going to require alteration.  Granted, DNA is an amazingly efficient data storage mechanism, but again Read More ›

New analysis: Siberian “unicorns” co-existed with people

According to a recent study dating the 23 available fragments of the bones of the giant, extinct rhinoceros, Elasmotherium sibericum (3.4 tonnes): The results were surprising: they were dated to a range of times after the animals were thought to be extinct, with the most recent being between 35,000 to 36,000 years ago. By this time, humans had started populating the steppe of Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Northern China. But the researchers don’t think humans wiped them out: “If we look at timing, it’s during a period of climate change, which wasn’t extreme, but it did cause a whole bunch of much colder winters that we think really altered the extent of the grassland in the area,” Alan Cooper of Read More ›

Previously unknown human brain region identified

Could be unique to humans: It turns out we humans may have an extra type of thinky bit that isn’t found in other primates. A previously unknown brain structure was identified while scientists carefully imaged parts of the human brain for an upcoming atlas on brain anatomy. Neuroscientist George Paxinos and his team at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) have named their discovery the endorestiform nucleus – because it is located within (endo) the inferior cerebellar peduncle (also called the restiform body). It’s found at the base of the brain, near where the brain meets the spinal cord. This area is involved in receiving sensory and motor information from our bodies to refine our posture, balance and movements.Tessa Koumoundouros, “Neuroscientists Have Read More ›

Lots of Neanderthals in our family tree, says new report

Something you probably already suspect: It happened many times: The presence of these chunks, making up 2%, on average, of the genome of anyone with roots in Europe, Asia, Australia or the Americas, pointed to a single period of intermingling – probably 50,000 to 60,000 years ago – not long after Homo sapiens emerged from Africa. But that simple story was complicated by the discovery that people in East Asia have up to 20% higher Neanderthal ancestry than present-day Europeans. … Evidence for multiple matings already exists, in the form of a 40,000 year old human fossil from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor, whose Neanderthal DNA nonetheless did not become part of modern-day human genomes.Dyani Lewis, “Humans and Neanderthals Read More ›

Can beavers contribute to evolution by transforming the tundra?

Anyone familiar with beavers will know that the big busy rodents can transform roads into ponds. They are making a comeback in Alaska: Beavers may be infiltrating the region for the first time in recent history as climate change makes conditions more hospitable, says Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Or maybe the expansion is a rebound after trapping reduced beaver numbers to imperceptible levels in the early 1900s, he says. Nobody knows for sure. And the full range of changes the rodents are generating in their new Arctic ecosystems hasn’t been studied in detail. But from what Tape and a few other researchers can tell so far, the effects could be profound, and most of Read More ›

Hi tech mogul tells campus autocrats to grow up or get lost

Well, PayPal’s Peter Thiel put it more politely but… that’s the bottom line. We don’t usually hear tech moguls talking this way. More frequent news is stuff like Is it Google-com or Google.gov? or Digital dictatorship. But Thiel thinks the riot is over: “The reformation is going to happen,” Thiel added, noting it won’t come from within, but from the “outside.” Thiel made the comments in a keynote speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Collegiate Network editors’ conference. The group funds independent and conservative-minded campus news outlets at universities across the nation, and Thiel is an alumnus of the 39-year-old nonprofit, founding the Stanford Review in the late 1980s. … In reality, higher education is in trouble, he said, citing Read More ›

Media are flabby from a diet of junk science

Should we believe them when they tell us that the drinking four cups of coffee daily lowers our risk of death people with spouses live longer? A statistician and a physician team up to explain why not: A subtler manifestation of dishonesty in research is what amounts to statistical cheating. Here is how it works… If you try to answer one question – by asking about levels of coffee consumption, for example, to test whether drinking certain amounts a day are associated with more or less cancer; or whether being married is associated with increased longevity — and test the results with appropriate statistical methods, there is a 5% chance of getting a (nominally) statistically significant result purely by chance Read More ›

Without free speech, science would be back in the Stone Age

Every new idea, good or bad, has had its establishment detractors who want Something To Be Done about the hateful people who make them uncomfortable. Joe Miller and guests talk about science and free speech at More Than Cake: In the tradition of natural law theorists such as John Stuart Mill, Free Speech is considered one of the most fundamental of human rights, yet this right is attacked today as a vestige of racist white Western civilization that oppresses minorities and gender-equality warriors. Today the guys look at attacks on free speech happening on our college campuses and argue from a Christian worldview why protecting this right matters to all of us regardless of political affiliation. It makes as much Read More ›

Quantum physicist: The particle itself does not know where it is

In this 2018 video, quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger explains the essence of quantum physics for a general audience: The skinny, courtesy Philip Cunningham: 40 sec: Every object has to be in a definite place is not true anymore… The thought that a particle can be at two places at the same time is (also) not good language. The good language it that there are situations where it is completely undefined where the particle is. (and it is not just us (we ourselves) that don’t know where the particle is, the particle itself does not know where it is). This “nonexistence” is an objective feature of reality… 5:10 min:… superposition is not limited to small systems… 7:35 min:… I have given Read More ›

Gene that controls for animal size may have been identified

From ScienceDaily: The birder and biologist was Tom Smith, who has spent his career studying finches — specifically, black-bellied seedcrackers (Pyrenestes ostrinus) — in Cameroon and in his lab at the University of California-Los Angeles. He and his colleagues have spent years investigating why some of these finches have small beaks while others have large beaks. Much of their original work identified differences in the hardness of the seeds they eat, a story quite similar to that of Darwin’s finches. Smith, who is a professor at UCLA as well as the founding director of the Center for Tropical Research, established a breeding colony of these finches to understand the inheritance of beak size. The result was startlingly and elegantly simple: Read More ›

Stephen Hawkings’ views outside physics were more noted than notable

That’s a common problem when we ask great figures their opinion about things they haven’t studied. From a review of Stephen Hawking’s (1942–2018) last book (or the last book that could be put together plausibly under his name), Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Because of the likelihood of a nuclear confrontation or an environmental catastrophe, we should work out how to leave the planet and colonise space, Hawking reckons. “Spreading out,” he says, “may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves.” He concedes that move will involve abandoning the flora and fauna of Earth, but Hawking seems to believe that humans deserve more of a future than other species. Leaving all other life to fend for itself is Read More ›

Can AI help scientists formulate ideas?

Yes, if you mean “dumb AI,” and there ain’t no “smart AI”: Quantity is definitely a solved problem. STM, the “voice of scholarly publishing” estimated in 2015 that roughly 2.5 million science papers are published each year. Some are, admittedly, in predatory or fake journals. But over 2800 journals are assumed to be genuine. From all this, we can deduce that most scientists have not read most of the literature in their field, though they probably read immediately relevant or ground-breaking findings. But the question has arisen whether, in some cases, scientists have even read papers in which they are listed as authors. A report in Nature (September 2018) revealed that “Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days” Read More ›