2018

From bioegineer and editor Nicolai Slavov at The Scientist: Have you read a paper and thought: “How could peer reviews support the publication of such a paper?” I have. More than once. Other times, I have read fascinating papers outside of my field and wondered what the concerns of the experts who peer reviewed the study were. What important caveats am I missing? Sometimes, I am lucky and find the answers to such questions: A few publications, including those from EMBO Press and eLife, publish the peer reviews alongside the papers. Reading such peer reviews has provided an additional dimension of appreciating and understanding the experiments and the findings, especially when I am not very familiar with the topic. But Read More ›

Suzan Mazur has republished her wide-ranging interview with the Renaissance man (in an age of specialization), first published in Omni in 1981, at Oscillations. The interview as a whole offers insights on how space exploration was viewed back then (for example, habitable planets were not top of mind): Suzan Mazur: Since every last mineral can be found in space fiftyfold, do you think a principal aim should be to recapture the vision of space exploration that we quickly abandoned after we landed on the moon? Malcolm Forbes: These high frontiers are surely exciting, but whether it’s economical to go there to support the Earth’s population, I’m not sure. I think it more immediately feasible to concentrate on the planet we Read More ›

Further to the claim that ecology, not social challenges drove the huge increase in human brain size, Ashley Yeager offers some alternative views at The Scientist: “González-Forero and Gardner are on the right track,” David Geary of the University of Missouri in Columbia tells New Scientist. But he questions whether the model accurately calculated just how challenging it is to live in groups. “Their conclusion that human brain evolution was largely driven by ecological pressures, and only minimally by social pressures, is surprising and likely premature.” Language is another missing link in the model, Dean Falk, a brain-evolution expert at Florida State University, tells The Washington Post. González-Forero admits that the model falls short in addressing the influence cultural factors, such Read More ›

“The Enlightenment undermined itself through hubris and hatred for tradition, and Nietzsche danced upon the ruins. ” Nathanael Blake   

From evolutionary biologist Mauricio Gonzalez Forero at The Conversation: Most animals have brains in proportion to their body size – species with larger bodies often have larger brains. But the human brain is almost six times bigger than expected for our bodies. This is puzzling, as the brain is very costly – burning 20% of the body’s energy while accounting for only 4% of its mass. As evolution tends to remove waste, how come we evolved such large, energy-consuming brains? There are many different ideas out there, with the dominant hypothesis suggesting that challenging social interactions were the driving force. But our new study, published today in Nature, finds evidence against this idea and shows that human brain expansion was Read More ›

It goes downhill from there. If I were a Darwinian, I would be embarrassed by this stuff. From Jeremy E Sherman at Psychology Today: I’m an atheist with a PhD. in evolutionary theory. I spend much of my time encouraging a new relationship with religion and spirituality modeled on our relationship with fiction. For example, I wish that Christians believed in Christ the way they believe in Santa Claus, as a fictional character based loosely on a historical one, reconfigured to embody a first-cut simplification of Christian values for kids that remains vivid and valued by nostalgic and conscientious adults. Most of the world, for whatever reason, continues to distinguish between apparent truth and admitted fiction. Now, as to Sherman’s main Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: With individuals weighing in at more than 140 pounds, the critically endangered Chinese giant salamander is well known as the world’s largest amphibian. But researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on May 21 now find that those giant salamanders aren’t one species, but five, and possibly as many as eight. The bad news as highlighted by another report appearing in the same issue is that all of the salamanders — once thought to occur widely across China — now face the imminent threat of extinction in the wild, due in no small part to demand for the amphibians as luxury food. … “We were not surprised to discover more than one species, as an earlier study suggested, Read More ›

In Adrian Cho’s interpretation at Science: When Stephen Hawking died on 14 March, the famed theoretical physicist had a few papers still in the works. Today, the Journal of High Energy Physics published his last work in cosmology—the science of how the universe sprang into being and evolved. (Other papers on black holes are still being prepared.) In the new paper, Hawking and Thomas Hertog, a theoretical physicist at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU) in Belgium, attempt to stick a pin in a bizarre concept called eternal inflation, which implies—unavoidably, according to some physicists—that our universe is just one of infinitely many in a multiverse. Borrowing a concept from string theory, Hawking and Hertog argue that there is no Read More ›

From Mollie Cahillane at the Daily Mail: Chimps have midwives too: Incredible footage shows female bonobos protecting mothers during labor and assisting in the delivery – Scientists saw three captive bonobos give birth in France and the Netherlands – The mother did not isolate herself from the group and other females helped her – Bonobos are humans’ closest living relative and the behavior shows that assistance during birth is not unique to people, as previously thought More. Photos here. The Daily Mail is right. The behavior is not unique to humans. Elephants do it too. So, doubtless, do some other mammal species. As we have noted earlier, there is no tree of intelligence and suddenly discovering a behavior trait among Read More ›

In response to our recent item on the mainstreaming of epigenetics, physicist Rob Sheldon writes to say, in connection with the recent studies of the generational epigenetic effects following mass starvation, — It is, of course, refreshing to see epigenetics now making the mainstream publications. What has me in stitches, however, is all the things that are not said: a) that Darwin hated Lamarck because it reintroduced teleology into evolution. Darwin’s whole purpose was to remove teleology and purpose from a discussion of life, thereby destroying theism. Now the reintroduction of epigenetics leaves the Darwinist program in tatters. b) that the Dutch hunger winter of 1944 wasn’t just Germany blockading Holland, it was the Nazi party. That acme of Darwinian Read More ›

From Nathan H. Lents at Skeptic: From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at ENST: Lents writes: One of the important drainage-collection pipes is installed near the top of the largest pair of cavities, the maxillary sinuses, located underneath the upper cheeks… Putting the drainage-collection point high within these sinuses is not a good idea because of this pesky thing called gravity. Egnor replies: Lents misunderstands the physiology of sinus drainage. The visible opening (ostium) in the maxillary sinus is not the only, or even the main, route of drainage. There is a complex system of interconnection, often at the microscopic level, between the paranasal sinuses, and Lents betrays an ignorance of sinus physiology in asserting that the large visible opening out of Read More ›

 Berlinski, an agnostic mathematician, is author of The Devil’s Delusion, a riposte to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. See also: Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne takes on skeptical mathematician David Berlinski

From Kevin Hartnett at the Atlantic, interviewing, for Quanta Magazine, Judea Pearl, author (along with Dana Mackenzie) of The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect In his new book, Pearl, now 81, elaborates a vision for how truly intelligent machines would think. The key, he argues, is to replace reasoning by association with causal reasoning. Instead of the mere ability to correlate fever and malaria, machines need the capacity to reason that malaria causes fever. Once this kind of causal framework is in place, it becomes possible for machines to ask counterfactual questions—to inquire how the causal relationships would change given some kind of intervention—which Pearl views as the cornerstone of scientific thought. Pearl also proposes Read More ›

From Bill Andrews at Discover: In particular, according to a study released Monday in Nature Chemistry, an international team of scientists showed that molecules involved in photosynthesis display quantum mechanical behavior. Even though we’d suspected as much before, this is the first time we’ve seen quantum effects in living systems. … With a technique called two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy, researchers saw molecules in simultaneous excited states — quantum weirdness akin to a cat being alive and dead at the same time. What’s more, the effect lasted exactly as long as theories predicted it, suggesting this evidence of quantum biology will last. As the authors succinctly put it, “Thus, our measurements provide an unambiguous experimental observation of excited-state vibronic coherence in the Read More ›

A philosophical question to wake you up. A reader directs our attention to a 2015 piece by cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin at Inference Review (2015): THE ANSWER to the question, “Did the universe have a beginning?” is, “It probably did.” We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV theorem gives us reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed. More. He offers the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem by way of evidence: Loosely speaking, our theorem states that if the universe is, on average, expanding, then its history cannot be indefinitely continued into the past. More precisely, if the average expansion rate is positive along a given world line, or geodesic, then this geodesic must terminate after a Read More ›