When pea aphids (Acyrthosiphon pisum) are fleeing a browsing cow, the tiny ones try to ride the much larger ones to safety: In a lab setup, hitchhiking got very young aphids safely across open ground about four times faster than scrabbling to safety on their own, the researchers found. These newborn aphids, not even 12 hours old, were not just seeking some object to clamber onto. They soon lost interest if presented with beads or dead adults but held on to live grown-up aphids in motion, the researchers report December 6 in Frontiers in Zoology.Susan Milius, “Pea aphid youngsters use piggyback rides to escape a crisis” at ScienceNews Only some adults would let them ride (5% succeeded) and kinship didn’t Read More ›

Reflections on a recent study of Neanderthal children’s teeth and one other (5000 ya): Teeth are a really useful indicator of past environments. This is possible because teeth have biological rhythms, and key events get locked inside them. These faithful internal clocks run night and day, year after year, and include daily growth lines and a marked line formed at birth. … Previously, my colleagues and I discovered that an 8-year-old Belgian Neanderthal was weaned at 1.2 years of age. This probably was atypical, as the nursing signal dropped off rapidly and the individual showed stress in its first molar at this exact time. We’re not sure if this means that it was separated from its mother or just really Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Astrophysical evidence suggests that the universe contains a large amount of non-luminous dark matter, yet no definite signal of it has been observed despite concerted efforts by many experimental groups. One exception to this is the long-debated claim by the DArk MAtter (DAMA) collaboration, which has reported positive observations of dark matter in its sodium-iodide detector array. The new COSINE-100 experiment, based at an underground, dark-matter detector at the Yangyang Underground Laboratory in South Korea, has begun to explore DAMA’s claim. It is the first experiment sensitive enough to test DAMA and use the same target material of sodium iodide. COSINE-100 has been recording data since 2016 and now has initial results that challenge the DAMA findings. Those Read More ›

Why is this topic important? (Why a series, now on no 3 (see 1 and 2)?) Here at UD, the phrase “first principles of right reason” and similar ones (e.g. “reason’s rules”) have often come up. Others talk about “the laws of thought,” which in a post-Kant world hints of “the ugly gulch” between the inner world of mental, conscious phenomena and the outer world of things in themselves. In that context, we have often highlighted that evolutionary materialistic scientism is irretrievably self-referentially incoherent and have pointed out how this means it is necessarily false. We have also pointed to “self-evident” first truths and principles, including the principle of distinct identity and its immediate corollaries, non-contradiction and the excluded middle. Read More ›

Computer engineering prof Robert J. Marks, first author of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, explains, When I was boy, my father explained free will and predestination to me: I dig a fence post hole. · Did I create the hole because of my own free will? · Or was the hole already there and I simply removed the dirt? If true, the hole was predestined. The question cannot be answered by examining the evidence. In philosophy terms, it is “empirically unanswerable.” That is the sort of stuff that philosophers debate. Religious people might point to scripture to support one conclusion over the other. In physics, however, quantum randomness offers a definitive answer to the question of predestination vs. free will—for subatomic Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Molecular and microstructural analysis of a Stenopterygius ichthyosaur from the Jurassic (180 million years ago) reveals that these animals were most likely warm-blooded, had insulating blubber and used their coloration as camouflage from predators. “Ichthyosaurs are interesting because they have many traits in common with dolphins, but are not at all closely related to those sea-dwelling mammals,” says research co-author Mary Schweitzer, professor of biological sciences at NC State with a joint appointment at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and visiting professor at Lund University. “We aren’t exactly sure of their biology either. They have many features in common with living marine reptiles like sea turtles, but we know from the fossil record that they gave Read More ›

This is in regard to: Is Darwinist Jerry Coyne starting to get it about SJW “science”? To Jerry: Your biggest problem is whether either you or your colleagues believe strongly enough that there is such a thing as truth, as opposed to an evolved illusion of your consciousness, that you would band together to fight off the aggrieved tentacles and suckers? It would be dreadful to see you and a few others all alone out there, but that’s what it’s coming down to. Anyway, we didn’t send the guy in the vid, so don’t try sending him back to us. We’re just passing on the info. Back to our regular coverage soon. – News

And anyway, does it even matter, if no one will join him?  At least, that’s the word on the street, they’re scared.* Meanwhile, here is Coyne, the author of Why Evolution Is True, concerned about a Woke science studies course that tells us: In the course of this survey, we shall engage a number of key questions such as: is science gendered, racialized, ableist or classist? Does the presence or absence of women (and another marginalized individuals) lead to the production of different kinds of scientific knowledge? – Science After Feminism (Catherine Taylor) Jerry says the obvious about the course: Do any of you doubt for a moment that the answer to both questions is “yes”? (My answers to both would be Read More ›

Karsten Pultz reports from Denmark on efforts to suppress the idea of design in nature that are coming from the Danish church. Mr. Pultz is also the author of “Why I have a problem with theistic evolution,”: Intelligent design being suppressed in academia is old news. But in Denmark even a Christian newspaper participates in biased coverage in favour of evolution. Recently, Mads Jakobsen, a priest and theologian in the Danish state church, was reprimanded by his bishop, Marianne Christiansen because he had written critically about Darwin’s theory in his parish magazine. The theologian had mainly identified the moral problems which arise when trying to combine survival of the fittest with Christian beliefs, but he seems also to have admitted Read More ›

They thought the mob was coming for someone else. Amid the dead silence in the combox following “The perfect storm: Darwinists meet the progressive “evolution deniers” — and cringe…, , EDTA pipes up 1, Well, how does it feel now that the universal acid shoe is on the other foot? And who on the evolutionist side will have the guts to stand up for what they believe at the risk of their job now? We are in the odd position of being able to supply an answer in which we are,. unfortunately, confident. No, they won’t. They will continue to pretend nothing is happening and abandon those who speak up, maybe at one of those new, “edgy” mags where you are Read More ›

According to the media release from Seals Unlimited, that is. No, but seriously: Dog lovers may be surprised (and displeased!) by a recent study of animal intelligence that dismisses the intelligence of dogs, compared to that of marine mammals: … systematically reviewing the animal cognition literature, British psychologists Stephen Lea and Britta Osthaus found dogs to be unremarkable in their cognitive capabilities compared to wolves, cats, dolphins, chimpanzees, pigeons, and several other species. For example, dogs seem no better at learning associations—such as between a behavior and a reward—than other species. Similarly, dogs can spatially navigate within small spaces, but other species can, too. And while dogs have an excellent sense of smell, the “pig’s olfactory abilities are outstanding and might Read More ›

Stephen Hawking was hardly the only one: Along with Sir Martin Rees, Elon Musk, and Henry Kissinger, among many lesser knowns, the late Stephen Hawking worried about an AI apocalypse (the “worst event in the history of our civilization”). Otherwise very bright people don’t seem to have a grasp of the underlying situation. Let’s take just two examples: 1. What would we need to make machines “intelligent”? We don’t even understand animal intelligence clearly. Are seals really smarter than dogs? Plants can communicate to adjust to their circumstances without a mind or brain. Where does that place plants with respect to intelligence? And what about the importance of the brain? Humans with seriously compromised brains can have consciousness. News, “Stephen Read More ›

An evolutionary biologist chronicles the onslaught: At first, left-wing pushback to evolution appeared largely in response to the field of human evolutionary psychology. Since Darwin, scientists have successfully applied evolutionary principles to understand the behavior of animals, often with regard to sex differences. However, when scientists began applying their knowledge of the evolutionary underpinnings of animal behavior to humans, the advancing universal acid began to threaten beliefs held sacrosanct by the Left. The group that most fervently opposed, and still opposes, evolutionary explanations for behavioral sex differences in humans were/are social justice activists. Evolutionary explanations for human behavior challenge their a priori commitment to “Blank Slate” psychology—the belief that male and female brains in humans start out identical and that Read More ›

He wonders: If I kill you but upload your mind into an android, did I murder you or just modify you? Is it even possible to upload your consciousness to a computer and, if so, is it still really you? The sci-fi TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013– ) tackled this question in an episode titled “Self Control”.  Scientist Holden Radcliffe has an android assistant appropriately named Aida (Artificial Intelligence Digital Assistant). Together, they build a virtual world that people could be plugged into and uploaded into, called The Framework. “More.” at Mind Matters See also: McDonald’s, meet McPathogen Robert J. Marks: What happens when the drive to automate everything meets the Law of Unintended Consequences?: I have a wager with a Read More ›

It was hardly heard of before and hardly widely predicted; now the Darwinian question is, why isn’t it more common? Why? Because there are two conflicting evolutionary forces at work. In the short-term, mixing mitochondria can be beneficial to individuals because the father’s mitochondria, say, can compensate for a harmful mutation in the mother’s mitochondria. But in the long-term, this can impair evolution’s ability to eliminate bad mutations as they are hidden from view. Lane thinks this is why organisms have an astonishingly wide variety of mechanisms for ensuring mitochondria are only inherited from the mother. During the course of evolution, species have repeatedly evolved such mechanisms, lost them and then evolved similar mechanisms again, his team has proposed.Michael Le Read More ›