From ScienceDaily: A small group of fishes — possibly the world’s cleverest carnivorous grazers — feeds on the scales of other fish in the tropics. The different species’ approach differs: some ram their blunt noses into the sides of other fish to prey upon sloughed-off scales, while others open their jaws to gargantuan widths to pry scales off with their teeth. A team led by biologists at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories is trying to understand these scale-feeding fish and how this odd diet influences their body evolution and behavior. The researchers published their results Jan. 17 in the journal Royal Society Open Science. “We were expecting that with this specialized scale-eating niche, you would get specialized morphology. Read More ›

Devolution means that a life form jettisons valuable qualities just to survive, often by becoming  parasite or “freeloader” (see below). From Nancy Pearcey at CNS: King’s vision of equal rights is no longer “self-evident” to many of America’s opinion makers in media, politics, and academia. Why not? Because they have embraced secular ideologies that sabotage King’s ideal. Listen in on some of the thinkers who are busy destroying King’s vision of inalienable rights. In a UNESCO lecture, the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty observed that throughout history, societies have excluded certain groups from the human family—those belonging to a different tribe, class, race, or religion. Historically, Rorty noted, it was Christianity that gave rise to the concept of universal rights, derived from Read More ›

By evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland, who seems to have adopted that role: Evolution unleashed: Is evolutionary science due for a major overhaul – or is talk of ‘revolution’ misguided? If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by the natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, Read More ›

Let’s follow up our earlier Sci-Tech Newswatch on the Meltdown-Spectre MPU architecture flaw issue. (We see here just how hard it is to create a robust, complex design that can readily be adapted to changes in the environment. Besides, a heads up on a big but under-reported story is helpful.) In a new Jan 15, 2018 report on Meltdown in The UK’s The Register, we may read: >>Patches for the Meltdown vulnerability are causing stability issues in industrial control systems. SCADA vendor Wonderware admitted that Redmond’s Meltdown patch made its Historian product wobble. “Microsoft update KB4056896 (or parallel patches for other Operating System) causes instability for Wonderware Historian and the inability to access DA/OI Servers through the SMC,” an advisory Read More ›

Over at ENV Michael Egnor explains how Descartes blew it and why that has consequences. The foundation of epistemology is not self-awareness. This can be understood by considering Descartes’s maxim, “Cogito ergo sum.” Notice that we cannot conclude that we exist unless we can conclude. That is, we must first know the principle of non-contradiction — that being is not non-being — before we can conclude that “I think therefore I am.” “Therefore,” not “I think” nor “I am,” is the crux of the most important thing we know. The principle of non-contradiction is prior to self-awareness. Failure to give the LNC its due leads to A-Mat absurdity (as we have seen in these pages many times): It’s worth noting that modern atheists Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Considered for two decades to be the oldest human fossil found in France, the mandible has formed part of different comparative studies, and the description published by G. Billy and Henri V. Vallois in 1977 stands out. That work was undertaken more than 40 years ago, in the context of what was then known and of the theories then current on the colonization of the European continent. However, human evolution in Europe was undoubtedly more complex than was thought only a couple of decades ago, as is explained in this paper entitled A reassessment of the Montmaurin-La Niche mandible (Haute Garonne, France) in the context of European Pleistocene human evolution, in which Mario Modesto, María Martinón-Torres and Marina Read More ›

Last time we saw, in a new paper, evolutionists Warren Allmon and Robert Ross reformulate the argument for evolution from homologous structures. The paper makes several mistakes, but is important because it is a rare case of evolutionists (i) recognizing the religion in evolutionary thinking, and (ii) trying to do something about it. In this case the religion is in the claim that God would nothave created non optimal homologies (such as vestigial structures). Allmon and Ross attempt to remove the religion by restating the claim as: God did not have to create such homologies. It is good that evolutionists are finally recognizing the religion, after having been in denial for so many years. But Allmon and Ross’ solution fails on several counts. The Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: Reunited following their collaborative funding of a $3 million investigation to determine how the religious community would respond to the discovery of life in outer space—-NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) and John Templeton Foundation, directly and through Templeton-funded entities: Templeton World Charity Foundation and ELSI Origins Network, are principal supporters of a Royal Society year-end publication that seems to want to redefine “life” in order to justify further adventures (space as well as lab). Titled: “Re-conceptualizing the origins of life,” theme issue 2109 of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A is really all about re-conceptualizing the living state. Manipulating the definition for what “life” is is the easiest way to ensure that you find “life” Read More ›

From tech reporter Brian Bergstein at Technology Review: Is it possible to give machines the power to think, as John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and other originators of AI intended 60 years ago? Doing that, Levesque explains, would require imbuing computers with common sense and the ability to flexibly make use of background knowledge about the world. Maybe it’s possible. But there’s no clear path to making it happen. That kind of work is separate enough from the machine-learning breakthroughs of recent years to go by a different name: GOFAI, short for “good old-fashioned artificial intelligence.” If you’re worried about omniscient computers, you should read Levesque on the subject of GOFAI. Computer scientists have still not answered fundamental questions that occupied Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Dodder, a parasitic plant that causes major damage to crops in the US and worldwide every year, can silence the expression of genes in the host plants from which it obtains water and nutrients. This cross-species gene regulation, which includes genes that contribute to the host plant’s defense against parasites, has never before been seen from a parasitic plant. … “Dodder is an obligate parasite, meaning that it can’t live on its own,” said Michael J. Axtell, professor of biology at Penn State and an author of the paper. “Unlike most plants that get energy through photosynthesis, dodder siphons off water and nutrients from other plants by connecting itself to the host vascular system using structures called haustoria. Read More ›

The exchanges over ethics have continued to brew up in UD’s comment threads. Accordingly, it is appropriate to note an excerpt from a chapter summary for what seems to be a very level-headed — and so quite unfashionable — textbook: >>Excerpted chapter summary, on Subjectivism, Relativism, and Emotivism, in Doing Ethics 3rd Edn, by Lewis Vaughn, W W Norton, 2012. [Also see here and here.] Clipping: . . . Subjective relativism is the view that an action is morally right if one approves of it. A person’s approval makes the action right. This doctrine (as well as cultural relativism) is in stark contrast to moral objectivism, the view that some moral principles are valid for everyone.. Subjective relativism, though, has Read More ›

From Emily Conover at ScienceNews: Observations of a trio of dead stars have confirmed that a foundation of Einstein’s gravitational theory holds even for ultradense objects with strong gravitational fields. The complex orbital dance of the three former stars conforms to a rule known as the strong equivalence principle, researchers reported January 10 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. That agreement limits theories that predict Einstein’s theory, general relativity, should fail at some level. … Many physicists expect the strong equivalence principle to be violated on some level. General relativity doesn’t mesh well with quantum mechanics, the theory that reigns on very small scales. Adjustments to general relativity that attempt to combine these theories tend to result in Read More ›

If one watches the TED talk by Astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, one will notice that she begins with Sagan’s aphorism on “extraordinary” claims. This inadvertently reveals just how significant epistemological concerns are in scientific undertakings. Accordingly, for follow up, I post a corrective: The issue in knowledge is not extraordinary evidence (an assertion that invites selective hyperskepticism) but instead adequate warrant so that claimed knowledge is indeed warranted, credibly true (and so also reliable). END PS:  It seems I need to add a clip I just made and annotated from a UKG paper on envisioning future scenarios for RW purposes, to illustrate a point on risk vs uncertainty i/l/o planning horizons — though, frankly, a U-UBSE (unknown unknown, black swan event) Read More ›

I once debated two evolutionists on the campus of Cornell University. In that debate I raised several fundamental problems with evolutionary theory. The problems that I pointed out fell into two broad categories: process and pattern. In the latter category, I pointed out that the keystone argument for evolution from homology had badly failed. Unfortunately, that failure was waved off and went unaddressed by the evolution professors. That may not have been the case had Warren Allmon been able to participate. Allmon, Director of the Cornell University-affiliated Paleontological Research Institution (PRI), has thought more deeply about the homology argument than most evolutionists. Now in 2018, he has published, along with adjunct professor Robert Ross, a new paper containing a very important concession.  Read more Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists have found an explanation for how flowering plants became dominant so rapidly in ecosystems across the world — a problem that Charles Darwin called an ‘abominable mystery’. In a study publishing on January 11 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, Kevin Simonin and Adam Roddy, from San Francisco State University and Yale University respectively, found that flowering plants have small cells relative to other major plant groups and that this small cell size is made possible by a greatly reduced genome size. … This new research provides a mechanism. By scouring the literature for data, the authors argue that these anatomical innovations are directly linked to the size of their genome. Because each cell has to Read More ›