2018

From ScienceDaily: The recently-discovered species Homo naledi may have had a pint-sized brain, but that brain packed a big punch. New research by Ralph Holloway and colleagues — that include researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa — published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examines the imprints of the brain upon the skulls of this species, called endocasts. The research highlights the humanlike shape of naledi’s tiny brain, surprising scientists who studied the fossils. These findings draw further into question the long-held belief that human evolution was an inevitable march towards bigger, more complex brains. Naledi lived in southern Africa about southern Africa between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago, originating at the same Read More ›

If science were mostly disputes over trivia, replication would not matter. But when studies of the effectiveness of cancer treatment fail replication,  you might want to take an interest in this problem if you think you might ever need cancer treatment. After all the hoopla about replication studies as one plank in the reform of a broken peer review system, it’s interesting to see how the top science journal reacted. In the first installment by Mante Nieuwland over at Retraction Watch, we learned, Importantly, our multi-laboratory replication study tackled all the methodological and statistical issues with DUK05 that have come up in recent years. We tested a sample more than 10 times greater than that of DUK05, we employed both Read More ›

A long time ago, everyone thought that nature was just a big, easily tinkered machine, there was a fad for transporting awesomely successful life forms across the globe (which they would not usually do themselves*). From Daniel Martins at the Weather Network: If you’re wondering what in blazes Canadian beavers are doing so far away from the Frozen North, that is a excellent question whose implications the Argentine government should probably have thought a little harder about. Instead, it seems to have been with a mixture of pride and hopefulness that, in 1946, the government flew 20 beavers from Manitoba first to Rio de Janeiro, then to Buenos Aires, and then on by seaplane to Lake Fagnano, in the interior of Read More ›

From Katia Moskvitch at Quanta: The neutron-star collision was just the beginning. New data in the months since that discovery have made life increasingly difficult for the proponents of many of the modified-gravity theories that remain. Astronomers have analyzed extreme astronomical systems that contain spinning neutron stars, or pulsars, to look for discrepancies between their motion and the predictions of general relativity — discrepancies that some theories of alternative gravity anticipate. These pulsar systems let astronomers probe gravity on a new scale and with new precision. And with each new observation, these alternative theories of gravity are having an increasingly hard time solving the problems they were invented for. Researchers “have to sweat some more trying to get new physics,” Read More ›

From Lisa Grossman at ScienceNews: Seven of those exoplanets are in the TRAPPIST-1 system, one of the most exciting families of planets astronomers have discovered to date. At least three TRAPPIST-1 planets might host liquid water on their surface, making them top spots to look for signs of life (SN: 12/23/17, p. 25). Yet those planets shouldn’t exist. Astronomers calculated that the small star’s preplanet disk shouldn’t have contained enough rocky material to make even one Earth-sized orb, says astrophysicist Elisa Quintana of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Yet the disk whipped up seven. TRAPPIST-1 is just one of the latest in a long line of rule breakers. Other systems host odd characters not seen in our Read More ›

From science writer Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience, addressing a point raised in astrophysicist Brian Keating’s Losing the Nobel Prize: … anti-religious sentiments provided underlying motivation to debunk Lemaître’s theory. Many atheist scientists were repulsed by the Big Bang’s creationist overtones. According to Hoyle, it was cosmic chutzpah of the worst kind: “The reason why scientists like the ‘big bang’ is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis.” In contrast, the Steady State model was the rightful heir to the Copernican principle. It combined the banality of space with humanity’s mediocrity in time. Thanks to Hoyle, humanity had humility. Hoyle, however, did not. Over the decades, as more and more evidence lined up in favor of the Big Bang Read More ›

My review at MercatorNet: The death with dignity group that contacted me in 1972 and its many successors have achieved much but they are only just beginning. As Dunn puts it, “Almost every country in the world is discussing some form of legalization and America is “at a tipping point.” Now and then the euthanasia and assisted suicide campaigners face setbacks. Recently, the American Medical Association restated its objection to assisted suicide, rejecting the claim that it somehow isn’t “suicide,” a big talking point with the campaigners. Indeed, progress is stalling as Americans realize that the Netherlands is their future if the vote is yes. But medical acceptance of euthanasia is not what American opponents most fear. They fear a Read More ›

From David Nguyen at Think Tank Learning: See also: Did you know?: Don’t Let Stereotypes Block Your Smarts With David Nguyen.

From multiverse cosmologist Sean Carroll we learn that eighty videos are about to hit YouTube: Some of you might be familiar with the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop I organized way back in 2012. For two and a half days, an interdisciplinary group of naturalists (in the sense of “not believing in the supernatural”) sat around to hash out the following basic question: “So we don’t believe in God, what next?” How do we describe reality, how can we be moral, what are free will and consciousness, those kinds of things. Participants included Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Terrence Deacon, Simon DeDeo, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Janna Levin, Massimo Pigliucci, David Poeppel, Nicholas Pritzker, Alex Rosenberg, Don Ross, and Read More ›

Thank you News for directing us to this interview of Giulio Tononi (see video embedded at bottom of post).  Dr. Tononi has doctorates in both psychiatry and neurobiology and holds the David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine, as well as a Distinguished Chair in Consciousness Science, at the University of Wisconsin.  He explains that the so-called hard problem of consciousness is not really hard at all.  From a bottom up physicalist perspective, it is down right impossible: It is important to study the brain, but you will never squeeze the essence of consciousness out of gray matter.  You can squeeze it as a sponge as much as you want.  You will never get experience flowing out of it, because Read More ›

From complexity theorist Adam Barrett at The Conversation: Recently, “Integrated Information Theory” has been gaining attention – and the backing of some eminent neuroscientists. It says that absolutely every physical object has some (even if extremely low) level of consciousness. Some backers of the theory claim to have a mathematical formula that can measure the consciousness of anything – even your phone. These big claims are controversial and are (unfortunately) undermining the great potential for progress that could come from following some of the ideas behind the theory. Actually, these claims are making the entire field sound ridiculous Which is what the search for “little green men” did for exoplanet research. People who pay taxes for obvious public benefits like Read More ›

 Inspiring Philosophy Philip Cunningham kindly forwarded this, noting that “Quantum mechanics has repeatedly confirmed the startling conclusion that (material) reality cannot exist without consciousness.” True, but defenders of a rational approach to science tend to forget that many people today are educated to think that reason and evidence are tools of oppression, that only their feelings are valid. That won’t end well, no matter what their feelings are. See also: How naturalism rots science from the head down The illusion of consciousness sees through itself. and Question for multiverse theorists: To what can science appeal, if not evidence?

In the isolated islands of function thread, Origenes cited the exact value of one of a big number. GP asked, how did you do it, as Excel and R are overwhelmed at that sort of level. Origenes answered: Origenes, 104: >> . . . I found this website: https://defuse.ca/big-number-calculator.htm >> Now, I have routinely used logs and high-capacity hardware calculators [e.g. HP 50] or software ones [X-Calc and Emu-48], but obviously these give rounded answers. I popped over to the linked page (now on speed dial, of course), and so — for reference: KF, 106: >>2^500 = 3 273 390 607 896 141 870 013 189 696 827 599 152 216 642 046 043 064 789 483 291 368 096 Read More ›

From David Nguyen at Think Tank Learning: See also: Science news fact check: Was a new organ really discovered? and Science blunder: Hormone therapy and cancer

From Jonathan Wells at ENST: … Dr. Lents just published his own book titled Human Errors, in which he repeats on page 5 his claim that the human eye is badly designed because the photoreceptor cells “appear to be installed backward.” Over thirty years ago, Richard Dawkins had used this claim as an argument for Darwinian evolution in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker. Since then the argument has been repeated by evolutionary biologists George Williams, Kenneth R. Miller, Douglas Futuyma, and Jerry Coyne, among others. But even before Dawkins published his claim in 1986, scientists writing in standard textbooks on eye physiology had shown why the “backwards retina” is functionally better than its opposite. Those scientists and textbooks included Read More ›