2018

The world-class symposium features several controversies long the lines of 1) Should we build a synthetic cell and 2) Aren’t we really doing that under another name anyway? Suzan Mazur reports at her blog, Oscillations: The late Carl Woese, who was awarded the Leeuwenhoek Medal by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992), opposed the idea of making a synthetic cell, telling me in a 2012 interview weeks before he died that he thought the push for a synthetic cell was all about “Power” and scientists “thinking they’re God.” … The Dutch conference promo never actually defines life. It does, however, address why the country has decided to build a synthetic cell. It repeats the mantra that the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Animals that have either migrated to or been introduced in Central Europe — such as the Asian bush mosquito or the Asian ladybeetle — feel extremely comfortable in their new homes due to changing climatic conditions. If these newcomers are genetically compatible with local species, they may crossbreed and produce hybrids, which can continue to evolve under local environmental conditions — a process that has been shown to have taken place during human evolution, between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals for example. New genes contributed by foreign species provide new genetic combinations that can be beneficial and are thus favoured by natural selection. According to hybrid swarm theory, interbreeding between hybrid species and parent species may then lead to Read More ›

“At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs – as long as no one is watching, anything goes.” Lawrence Kraus Given recent allegations against Kraus, this statement is deliciously ironic.

 From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: In June, I wrote a piece here at MercatorNet, “A shambolic atheist community faces some tough choices,” reflecting on the discontent of some members of that community. It attracted a good many comments and at least one riposte shortly afterward. The riposte garnered 114 comments too. Clearly, the piece struck a nerve. That said, fewer readers than I had expected took up the issue that seemed most significant to me: “‘Eiynah’ fears that the [atheist] movement is going ‘right wing.’” I don’t think the atheist movement is going right-wing so much as that some prominent atheists are re-evaluating their relationship with progressivism. It’s about time too. Considering how many atheists see science as a worthy Read More ›

As philosopher Michael Polanyi has noted, much that we know is hard to codify or automate. From Denyse O’Leary at Mind Matters Today We have all encountered that problem. It’s common in healthcare and personal counseling. Some knowledge simply cannot be conveyed—or understood or accepted—in a propositional form. For example, a nurse counselor may see clearly that her elderly post-operative patient would thrive better in a retirement home than in his rundown private home with several staircases. The analysis, as such, is straightforward. But that is not the challenge the nurse faces. Her challenge is to convey to the patient, not the information itself, but her tacit knowledge that the proposed move would liberate, rather than restrict him. More. Reality Read More ›

Ann Gauger, a senior scientist at the Biologic Institute, writes to defend homo erectus from charges that laziness led to his his extinction. She writes, This anthropologist is not looking at the broader picture. H erectus is estimated to have appeared somewhere in Africa 1.9 mya. By 1.8 mya H erectus is found in Dmanisi, Georgia. Not the US state. And in Europe and Asia not long after. They dispersed from Africa in 100 kya. Or about as long as it took H sapiens to do so. Who’s calling who lazy? They had a long run as a successful species. In fact, they co-existed with Neanderthals and depending on your point of view, even to the time of H sapiens, Read More ›

Abstract: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin loved the world, but, theologically and spiritually, he often tried to leave it behind. This essay shows that from the 1920s until his death in 1955, Teilhard de Chardin unequivocally supported racist eugenic practices, praised the possibilities of the Nazi experiments, and looked down upon those who he deemed “imperfect” humans. These ideas explicitly lay the groundwork for Teilhard’s famous cosmological theology, a link which has been largely ignored in Teilhardian research until now. This study concludes that such support requires a reconsideration of how Teilhard is used in twenty-first century theology. (paywall) – John P. Slattery, Dangerous Tendencies of Cosmic Theology, The Untold Legacy of Teilhard de Chardin, Philosophy and Theology, Volume 29, Issue Read More ›

From Mind Matters today: Recently, we looked at Moravec’s Paradox, the fact that it is hard to teach machines to do things that are easy for most humans (walking, for example) but comparatively easy to teach them things that are challenging for most humans (chess comes to mind). Another paradox worth noting is Polanyi’s Paradox, named in honor of philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), who developed the concept of “tacit knowledge” … … Here’s [Polanyi’s] Paradox, as formulated by law professor John Danaher, who studies emerging technologies, at his blog Philosophical Disquisitions: We can know more than we can tell, i.e. many of the tasks we perform rely on tacit, intuitive knowledge that is difficult to codify and automate. We have Read More ›

We don’t hear as much old-fashioned moralizing these days as we used to but this looks like the authentic product from ScienceDaily: Laziness helped lead to extinction of Homo erectus An archaeological excavation of ancient human populations in the Arabian Peninsula during the Early Stone Age, found that Homo erectus used ‘least-effort strategies’ for tool making and collecting resources. This ‘laziness’ paired with an inability to adapt to a changing climate likely played a role in the species going extinct, according to lead researcher Dr Ceri Shipton of the ANU School of Culture, History and Language. “They really don’t seem to have been pushing themselves,” Dr Shipton said. “I don’t get the sense they were explorers looking over the horizon. Read More ›

Paleontologist Gerta Keller attributes the extinction 66 million years ago of three-quarters of Earth’s species, including all dinosaurs, not to an asteroid hit but to a series of volcanic eruptions. A writer goes with her on a field trip: The prestige of science is solidly behind the asteroid: The impact theory provided an elegant solution to a prehistoric puzzle, and its steady march from hypothesis to fact offered a heartwarming story about the integrity of the scientific method. “This is nearly as close to a certainty as one can get in science,” a planetary-science professor told Time magazine in an article on the crater’s discovery. In the years since, impacters say they have come even closer to total certainty. “I Read More ›

 In a review of science writer Anil Ananthaswamy’s Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality, science writer Philip Ball captured the essence of the sheer oddity of quantum mechanics: What’s odd is that the interference pattern remains — accumulating over many particle impacts — even if particles go through the slits one at a time. The particles seem to interfere with themselves. Odder, the pattern vanishes if we use a detector to measure which slit the particle goes through: it’s truly particle-like, with no more waviness. Oddest of all, that remains true if we delay the measurement until after the particle has traversed the slits (but before it hits the screen). Read More ›

Researchers Iranzo and Koonin ask: Typically, natural selection results in deletions of harmful genes, so the main question is, why hasn’t natural selection wiped out genetic parasites? They mean “transposons, plasmids, viruses” etc., that offer no benefit to the hosts. They offer a hypothesis: In a new study published in EPL, researchers Jaime Iranzo and Eugene V. Koonin at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, have found that horizontal gene transfer may be one of the keys to understanding the persistence and spread of genetic parasites over evolutionary timescales. In horizontal gene transfer (HGT), genetic information is transferred to an organism by a variety of mechanisms other than the traditional parent-to-offspring process of transferring DNA. For example, an Read More ›

But how would we know? What is the reference population? “Similarly, rapid expansion of brain size and cognitive abilities in humans has been key to our evolutionary success,” says study senior author David Kingsley, a developmental geneticist at Stanford University. However, at the same time, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia impact more than 3 percent of the world population. Kingsley reasoned this vulnerability to mental disorders might also stem from recent evolutionary changes controlling human brain size and structure. – Charles Choi, “Could Human Evolutionary Changes Be Behind Mental Disorders?” at Discover Do we know that life forms with far more limited intelligence do not suffer in the same way? If a bear had bipolar disorder or a cat had schizophrenia, how Read More ›

Focusing on stopping progress, barring new power plants, dismantling chemical facilities, mobilizing against Israel, and other reactionary pursuits, Ivy institutions are pursuing the fancies of a declining intellectual and business elite, full of chemophobic nags and luddite lame-ducks quacking away on their miasmic pools of old money as the world whirls past them. George Gilder, Life After Google:  The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy Would that it were so.

New Scientist, where it is known that all things come of evolution and we make nothing ourselves, does not know whether we “evolved” domestic violence: Why is domestic violence so horrifyingly common around the world? According to a study out today, men who are violent towards their partners have more children in societies without birth control. This implies that evolution favours domestic violence – but can that really be true? Yes. No. Maybe. It is true that allowing Political Correctness to rule your thoughts and not believing that you have free will can lead to conniptions. The researchers studied the Tsimane people of Bolivia, who have a pre-industrial culture with no access to contraception. Shockingly, 85 per cent of women Read More ›