2018

From ScienceDaily: Roughly 30 percent of the cauliflower coral’s (Pocillopora damicornis) genome was unique compared to several other reef-building corals. In this 30%, many of these genes were related to immune function. This diversity of genes related to immune function, the researchers say, may be important for the long-term survival of coral reefs as climate change and ocean acidification continue to alter the environment to which corals are adapted. “This coral is traditionally thought of as a weed, and yet it may be one of the last corals to survive environmental changes such as climate change,” said senior author of the study Nikki Traylor-Knowles, an assistant professor of marine biology and ecology at the UM Rosenstiel School. An animal like Read More ›

Look how smart he got in the last few decades: This from a discussion of whether Neanderthals had language: Based on these results, most researchers agree Neanderthals were capable of emitting and hearing complex vocalizations. However, they disagree over the implications. While some consider the findings indicative of speech-based language in Neanderthals, others propose these features could have evolved for other reasons, like singing. Neanderthals may have lacked the cognitive abilities for language, but possessed the physical anatomy for musical calls to attract mates or sooth infants. To assess if Neanderthals had the brains for language, researchers usually rely on proxies from the archaeological record — artifacts that required the same cognitive prerequisites as language, such as hierarchical organization or Read More ›

There may be an additional, more sinister explanation for the ongoing reproducibility crisis, he suggests: A stunning report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that researchers often make “inappropriate requests” to statisticians. And by “inappropriate,” the authors aren’t referring to accidental requests for incorrect statistical analyses; instead, they’re referring to requests for unscrupulous data manipulation or even fraud. The authors surveyed 522 consulting biostatisticians and received sufficient responses from 390. Then, they constructed a table (shown below) that ranks requests by level of inappropriateness. For instance, at the very top is “falsify the statistical significance to support a desired result,” which is outright fraud. At the bottom is “do not show plot because it did not show as Read More ›

JDK wrote in a comment to my last post:  “I just believe it is true that there is no Truth that we can know.” I replied by stating that the fact that it is evil to torture a baby for pleasure is certainly true.  And I challenged JDK:  “Deny that. I dare you.” JDK refused my dare and ran for cover. JDK’s statement and my statement are mutually exclusive.  They cannot be both be true.  So it should be easy for JDK to deny my claim if he truly believes his claim.  Yet he refuses to do so. Why?  Because at bottom he is a coward.  He comes into these pages and makes bold claims about the unknowability of truth.  Read More ›

It’s great to see concern for primate apes taking a rational turn that can actually be in their interests: In recent years, wildlife sanctuaries, conservation organizations, and animal rights groups have told the public to stop touching chimpanzees and other wild animals. National Geographic, PETA, and even Instagram draw explicit links between human touch and harm. They discourage wildlife enthusiasts from visiting “fake sanctuaries” that let tourists play with wild animals. Sanctuary accreditation organizations, such as the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA), can refuse to accredit facilities that allow visitors to touch primates. They say that visitor illness, easily communicated through touch, can kill a young chimpanzee. Moreover, this touch—even if it is playful—can harm chimps and other wild animals Read More ›

Based on an analysis of their teeth: Two 250,000-year-old teeth from two Neanderthal children revealed that both of them were exposed to lead twice during their short lifetimes, the first known case of lead exposure in Neanderthals… “Teeth record environmental variation based on the climate, even where you’re growing up,” said Tanya Smith, lead author of the study and associate professor at Griffith University. “That’s possible because when you’re growing, your teeth you actually lock in a record of the chemistry of the water and the food that you’re eating and drinking. Because teeth have these tiny timelines, we can relate the chemistry to the growth to calculate ancient climate records. We can’t do that with any other element of Read More ›

We are starting to get so much more information now: Andrew had a short narrow snout, whereas his parents had wide, square snouts. His snout was suited to forests, but his parents would be grazing the ground in open areas. But if adults fed their babies, why would they need to have different teeth and snouts? The researchers believe that the babies fended for themselves and were separated from the adults. The babies most likely lived in forests in age-segregated herds, which could protect them both from predators and from being trampled by their own gigantic parents. “I’ve been thinking of these roving bands of young Diplodocus in the forests akin to Peter Pan’s Lost Boys,” Woodruff said. “These age-segregated herds Read More ›

Much information is offered here: Astronomer Jill Tarter discusses the search for intelligent life (Phys.org). Jill Tarter, one of the queens of SETI, was given royal treatment in a Harvard interview. The interviewer could have asked some hard questions, but one never treats royalty that way. “For me, after millennia of asking priests and philosophers what we should believe, I just thought it was very exciting that right then in the middle of the 20th century we were beginning to have some tools—telescopes and computers—that allowed scientists and engineers to try to figure out what is, and not have to take somebody’s belief system. I thought that was really important and I got hooked.” Without realizing, she was being treated Read More ›

Some scientists hope to influence society by running for office: On the verge of Election Day in the U.S. a political movement focused on getting scientists into public office is hoping that results at the polls will lead to more scenes like this one at state houses, city councils and school boards across the country, not just at a federal level. At least 70 scientist–candidates launched bids for office at the state and local level this election cycle, most of them first-time campaigners and part of a record wave of scientists bucking a long-established penchant to avoid the political arena. Organizers hope this will become a deep bench of up-and-coming policy makers with science and technology backgrounds who might contest Read More ›

Michael Denton, author of Children of Light: The astonishing properties of sunlight that made us possible, explains, We should feel very lucky. The sun is a giant fusion bomb, converting hydrogen to helium in an ongoing chain reaction in its dense, ultra-hot core. But fortunately for us, the electromagnetic radiation emitted by this runaway fusion bomb (and that of most other stars) is almost entirely light and heat (or infrared). These have precisely the characteristics needed for advanced life to thrive on the Earth’s surface. No matter how unfashionable the notion may be in some intellectual circles, the evidence is unequivocal: Ours is a cosmos whose laws appear finely tuned for our type of life. The crucial visual band, which Read More ›

Kinda like this: In a comment to my last post A-Mat subjectivist Mimus demonstrates how he would argue to a Saudi that executing homosexuals is wrong. I would argue that moral codes should balance the freedom of individuals to pursue happiness and thrive in their own lives with the detrimental effects of selfish or antisocial behavior. That leaves no grounds for discrimination against gay people at all, let alone their murder. The problem with Mimus’ argument is that it is based on an equivocation.  Let’s see how. Mimus’ argument boils down to this: Major premise:  Killing someone for no reason other than that they are pursuing happiness and thriving in their own lives is evil. Minor premise:  Homosexuals are pursuing Read More ›

Researchers tried modeling intergroup anxiety but look what the public heard about the results, instead of the facts: In fact, nearly every claim about the paper seems to misunderstand how computer models work generally and how they worked in this paper in particular. First, there is nothing particularly “religious” about the criteria used in the model. In computer models, you can name the pieces of the model however you wish. The authors of the software simply happened to assign religious names to the components of the model. There was hardly anything religious about it apart from that. According to the BBC article, the study shows that “The most risky situations are when the difference in the size of two different Read More ›

Not Paul Nelson, if you go by his account of the discussion between Weinstein, the biology prof driven by “woke” students from Evergreen State University and iconic Darwinist Richard Dawkins: I witnessed something last week that I never thought I’d see. Richard Dawkins, pressed to affirm the explanatory power of Darwinian reasoning for human life, backed off, expressing great caution. In fact, he said that talking about human behavior in Darwinian terms was “not helpful” and “not Darwinian.” Pressing Dawkins was evolutionary biologist (and atheist) Bret Weinstein, who, as the evening progressed, out-Darwined Dawkins — if I may coin a neologism — on several fronts. Dawkins, come to discover, turns out to be a rather reluctant Darwinian, at least where Read More ›

Last Sunday we noted a new book by psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, and writer Ken Francis, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd. They tackle the same topics in twin essays, as a Christian and an agnostic. Francis kindly sends us an excerpt from one of his essays featuring Jeffrey Dahmer (1960-1994), murderer and cannibal: One of the worst terrors of existence is the fear of being murdered or badly tortured. We read endless stories of homicide, both fact and fictional, and the ones that spook us most are those carried out by the psychopath. The Moors Murders in the UK during the 1960s were perhaps the most disturbing story of the slaying of innocent children by Read More ›

It’s not a new story. We’ve covered it here, here, and here within the last year or so. People don’t seem to be ditching traditional religion for science as much as for witchcraft: Interest in spirituality has been booming in recent years while interest in religion plummets, especially among millennials. The majority of Americans now believe it is not necessary to believe in God to have good morals, a study from Pew Research Center found. The percentage of people between the ages of 18 and 29 who “never doubt existence of God” fell from 81% in 2007 to 67% in 2012. Meanwhile, more than half of young adults in the U.S. believe astrology is a science. compared to less than Read More ›