2018

Readers will remember celebrity atheist physicist Larry Krauss. We first heard the story about the sexual harassment charges at Buzzfeed in February. Krauss announced his retirement last week but has also offered a lengthy rebuttal to the accusations. Among other things, he says the physics of some of the allegations doesn’t hold up: One piece of evidence against Krauss was a photo he took with a fan, who is leaning back toward him to take a selfie. She claimed the photo showed his hand moving toward her breast just before he grabbed it. Krauss says a closer examination of the photo clearly shows his hand is actually moving away from the woman’s breast. He said he should have caught this earlier, Read More ›

Our philosopher-photographer friend Laszlo Bencze sends us some thoughts on J. P. Moreland’s recent book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology: – (O’Leary for News) I just finished my reading of this book and I think it’s an excellent analysis of the issues which undergird evolution, namely that science and only science can provide knowledge about the world. This view, known as “scientism” relegates both philosophy and theology to the realm of personal opinion where both may be safely ignored. Of course, as Moreland points out, this position is self-refuting because all statements about the power and purpose of science are necessarily philosophical statements: The irony is that strong scientism is a philosophical statement, expressing an Read More ›

Especially when it comes to a Darwinian approach to human beings? Man, the universal, does not really exist. According to the late Stanley Jaki, Chesterton* detested Darwinism because “it abolishes forms and all that goes with them, including that deepest kind of ontological form which is the immortal human soul.” And if one does not believe in universals, there can be, by extension, no human nature—only a collection of somewhat similar individuals. Classical notions of ethics were radically dependent upon this notion of a real, knowable human nature. Aristotle and others often argued for what is ethical in terms of what leads to human flourishing and fulfillment. Yet if there is no human nature, how can we know what human Read More ›

On the other side of a vast chasm… The code needed to detect and handle the flow between the situations increases polynomially with the number of driving situations we must address. That is, if we have 2 driving situations, there are 2 possible transitions to account for. If we have 3 driving situations, there are 6 possible transitions. If we have 4 driving situations, there are 12 possible transitions. Expressing it mathematically, for n driving situations, there are “n2 – n” transition possibilities. These types of numbers can mount up quickly. Therefore, every newly-identified driving scenario doesn’t just add one more scenario to code for in a linear fashion; it makes the project an order of magnitude more difficult. Many cheerleaders Read More ›

In his book, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, (2017), MIT physics prof Tegmark offers a science fiction scenario for how AI colossus Prometheus, produced by a group of idealistic programmers, the Omegas, could take over the world. And not only take over the world but make it a bureaucrat’s idea of a vastly better place. To top it off,  Prometheus produces an astonishing array of popular entertainment along the way: The Omegas noticed that after Prometheus had binge-watched a few hundred films, it started to get quite good at predicting what sort of reviews a movie would get and how it would appeal to different audiences. Indeed, it learned to write its own movie reviews in a Read More ›

A computer programmer looks at DNA … and finds it to be “amazing” code. From 2006 through 2017, Dutch entrepreneur and software developer Bert Hubert contributed from time to time to a web page where he listed many of the ways the workings of DNA can be likened to coding decisions by programmers. Some of his thoughts: The human genome is about 3 gigabases long, which boils down to 750 megabytes. Depressingly enough, this is only 2.8 Mozilla browsers. DNA is not like C source but more like byte-compiled code for a virtual machine called ‘the nucleus’. It is very doubtful that there is a source to this byte compilation – what you see is all you get. It is Read More ›

An “expert voice” astrophysicist explains that the Big Bang is now the “vanilla Big Bang,” which is unpopular because it doesn’t explain all observations: The Big Bang model is our most successful explanation for the history of the universe that we live in, and it’s ridiculously easy to encapsulate its core framework in a single, T-shirtable sentence… But But there’s no reason for our universe to be flat. At large scales it could’ve had any old curvature it wanted. Our cosmos could’ve been shaped like a giant, multidimensional beach ball, or a horse-riding saddle. But, no, it picked flat. And not just a little bit flat. For us to measure no curvature to a precision of a few percent in Read More ›

Steve Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt, is thought to be vindicated by a paper published in 2017, “Experimental test and refutation of a classic case of molecular adaptation in Drosophila melanogaster” (Nature Ecology and Evolution). The paper “begins with a perceptive statement about what ought to be required when establishing some genetic evolutionary pathway: Identifying the genetic basis for adaptive differences between species requires explicit tests of historical hypotheses concerning the effects of past changes in gene sequence on molecular function, organismal phenotype and fitness.” It proceeded to apply that approach to whether fruit flies became able to digest alcohol via natural selection acting on random mutation. Apparently, it didn’t: “Our experiments strongly refute the predictions of the adaptive ADH Read More ›

The neutral theory of evolution holds that “most variation at the molecular level does not affect fitness and, therefore, the evolutionary fate of genetic variation is best explained by stochastic [random] processes.” From ScienceDaily: However, what scientist Fanny Pouyet and colleagues from the Group of Laurent Excoffier at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and University of Bern recently discovered, is that 95% of our genome actually seems to be affected by selection and other genetic biases and that markers previously thought to be neutral appear to provide skewed estimates. Their study, published in eLife, calls for the re-examination of a plethora of results and provides the tools and recommendations to correct such issues in the future. Models used to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: More than 1200 types of colourful cichlid can be found in the large African lakes Malawi, Victoria and Tanganjika. Not only are they very diverse in colours, they also have numerous colour patterns such as horizontal or vertical stripes. “But that’s not all” explains Axel Meyer, “cichlids are prime examples of evolution. They are extremely diverse in terms of social behaviour, body shape, colour pattern and many other biological aspects, but at the same time certain features repeatedly evolved independently in the different lakes.” This principle of repeated evolution — biologists term it convergent evolution — makes cichlids the perfect target to study the genetic basis of this phenomenon. If similar colours and body shapes have emerged in Read More ›

Turns out we didn’t need Jurassic Park: The lungs and feathers of a bird that lived 120 million years ago had some of the same characteristics found in today’s birds, researchers reported yesterday (October 18) in PNAS… They examined a sample with scanning electron microscopy and found an extremely subdivided structure much like that enabling modern birds to take in enough oxygen to fuel flight. They also identified similarities between the specimen’s preserved feathers and its modern counterparts.Shawna Williams, “A fossil from the Cretaceous Period shows similarities to modern avian species.” at The Scientist Significance: Archaeorhynchus spathula is a basal member of the Ornithuromorpha, the lineage that includes neornithines. Although this is the fifth reported specimen, unlike the others it Read More ›

Yes, that ether that thinkers assumed to pervade otherwise empty space right into the modern era: In the 18th and 19th centuries, as physicists grappled with light, there was some debate over whether it was a wave or a particle. (Trick question—we now know it has properties of both.) Scientists thought that if light were a wave, then it needed a medium to travel through. Waves, after all, aren’t objects themselves, but the effects of movement on a substance like air or water. And so, once again minds turned toward aether. Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens first proposed the “luminiferous” or light-bearing aether as a medium for the propagation of light. It was a popular theory. Nikola Tesla held onto it Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The fact that all living giant tortoises are insular may suggest that their evolution followed the so-called island rule: a trend toward dwarfism of large animals and gigantism of small animals on islands… In a recent study in the journal “Cladistics,” Dr Evangelos Vlachos from the Paleontological Museum of Trelew, Argentina, and Dr Márton Rabi from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), funded by the German VolkswagenStiftung, assembled the most comprehensive family tree of extinct and extant tortoises so far. The researchers analysed genetic data from living species together with osteological data from fossil and living tortoises. This is the first study of such global scale to allow for investigating body size evolution in tortoises. The fossils reveal Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The cells in a tissue are surrounded by a net-like structure called the extracellular matrix. To attach itself to the matrix the cells have receptor molecules on their surfaces, which control the assembly of large protein complexes inside them. These so-called adhesion complexes connect the outside to the cell interior and also signal to the cell about its immediate environment, which affects its properties and behaviour. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now discovered a new type of adhesion complex with a unique molecular composition that sets it apart from those already known about. The discovery has been made in collaboration with researchers in the UK. “It’s incredibly surprising that there’s a new cell structure left to discover in Read More ›

The responses from subjectivists to my latest post have been drearily predictable.  I invite readers to go back and review the post, but in summary I posited a conversation between a subjectivist named Bob and a Saudi over whether is it good to execute homosexuals.  The obvious point was that Bob has literally no logical argument he can make, because his own premises lead to the conclusion that for the Saudi executing homosexuals is in fact morally good. Bob has no logical ground to assert that his personal subjective preference for vanilla ice cream is superior to the Saudi’s personal subjective preference for chocolate ice cream.  In exactly the same way, Bob has no logical ground to assert that his Read More ›