2018

A handy guide from Tasnim Elmamoun at PLOS blogs: So… how do we identify spin? As Chiu and colleagues point out, spin can take a variety of forms, including: 1) “inappropriate study given study data;” 2) “inappropriate extrapolations or recommendations for clinical practice;” 3) “selective reporting;” 4) and “more robust or favorable data presentation.” Let’s unpack these a little bit. The first of these types, “inappropriate study given study data,” occurs when findings simply are interpreted incorrectly. Specifically, Chiu et al. found that this type of spin is commonly used in conjunction with casual (or colloquial) language, which in many cases has the potential to alter interpretation of the data. So how do researchers strike a balance between using scientific Read More ›

From Rachel Nuwer at PBS Nova Next: Humans and apes share nearly 99% of the same DNA, but language is one thing that seems to irreconcilably differentiate our species. Is that by necessity of nature, though, or simply a question of nurture? “It could be that there’s something biologically different in our genome, something that’s changed since we split from apes, and that’s language,” says Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “But another possibility is that they might have the cognitive capacity for language, but they’re not able to physically express it like we do.” … Scientists have been trying to teach chimps to speak for decades, with efforts ranging from misguided to tantalizingly Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Many of the “forensic science” methods commonly used in criminal cases and portrayed in popular police TV dramas have never been scientifically validated and may lead to unjust verdicts, according to an editorial in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. … “We wanted to alert people that this is a continuing and a major issue: that many of the forensic techniques used today to put people in jail have no scientific backing,” says senior author Arturo Casadevall, MD, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and the Alfred & Jill Sommer Professor and Chair of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. … The structure of the field of forensic science inhibits vital reforms. Read More ›

Podcast with Steve Minsky:  A transcript is to be made available. Science historian Michael Flannery is, we hear, not a fan of Brown University Darwinian biochemist Ken Miller’s new book, The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will. Re the accompanying podcast, he writes, More nonsense from Miller. Miller’s new book is largely science and theology “explained” by double talk. He argues for human uniqueness and then proceeds to argue against it. He argues for free willl and then proceeds to argue against it. He complains about the term “Darwinism” and then uses the term himself (repeatedly). He talks about design only to argue against it. He writes against what he calls the “scientific creationists” Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The theory of eternal inflation that Hawking and Hertog put forward is based on string theory: a branch of theoretical physics that attempts to reconcile gravity and general relativity with quantum physics, in part by describing the fundamental constituents of the universe as tiny vibrating strings. Their approach uses the string theory concept of holography, which postulates that the universe is a large and complex hologram: physical reality in certain 3D spaces can be mathematically reduced to 2D projections on a surface. … Hertog and Hawking used their new theory to derive more reliable predictions about the global structure of the universe. They predicted the universe that emerges from eternal inflation on the past boundary is finite and Read More ›

And maybe they are not all female. From ScienceDaily: A new study has cast doubt on leading theory for how tiny creatures have evolved for tens of millions of years — without ever having sex. … they are all female, and their offspring are clones of their mothers. Bdelloids are microscopic animals that live in freshwater and damp habitats across the world. Despite their apparent lack of sex, we know they have evolved for tens of millions of years into more than 500 species. By studying their genomes — the set of all the genes that define an animal’s characteristics — researchers thought they had identified an explanation for how bdelloids had ‘gotten away’ with no sex for millions of Read More ›

Okay, you say, enough about Neanderthals. Just one more thing for now: From Andrew Lawler at Science: A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans. The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates modern humans, says Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who gave an Read More ›

Yes, four eyes. From Gunter Bechly at ENST: Based on two fragmentary fossils, Smith et al. (2018) just described the new monitor lizard Saniwa ensidens from the 49 million year old Bridger Formation in Wyoming. Both known specimens surprisingly had four eyes! Additional to the normal pair of lateral lens eyes, and the usual parietal third eye of lizards, this new species actually had a forth pineal eye like a lamprey. Not a single other jawed vertebrate has something remotely like this, even though this fossil lizard is the closest relative of the modern monitor lizard genus Varanus and thus deeply nested within modern land vertebrates. What? This sounds almost too weird to be true. Yet since the article was Read More ›

From George Dvorsky at Gizmodo: New research published today in Scientific Reports suggests important differences in cognitive and neural function between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals led to differences in behavior that may have resulted in the conditions under which anatomically modern humans succeeded and Neanderthals failed some 45,000 years ago. To reach this conclusion—and in one of the first studies of its kind—scientists conducted a comparative analysis of Neanderthal and early modern human skulls to infer brain function. But because no other archaeological evidence was provided to bolster the case, and because the shape and size of brains cannot be definitively tied to cognitive capacity and behavior, the question of what caused Neanderthal extinction remains very much unsettled. However, many Read More ›

From Peter Dockrill at Science Alert: For the first time, scientists have identified the existence of a new DNA structure never before seen in living cells. The discovery of what’s described as a ‘twisted knot’ of DNA in living cells confirms our complex genetic code is crafted with more intricate symmetry than just the double helix structure everybody associates with DNA – and the forms these molecular variants take affect how our biology functions. “When most of us think of DNA, we think of the double helix,” says antibody therapeutics researcher Daniel Christ from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia. “This new research reminds us that totally different DNA structures exist – and could well be important for Read More ›

From Kirk Durston at P2C-Change: So what progress has science made over the past 60 years? I just counted the number of papers and articles on the origin of life I have filed on my computer—54, and that is only a small sampling of what is out there. Reviewing this collection, the news is not good … we are still working on a plausible, reproducible process for the first step. A recent review paper provides a current summary… “The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of complexity that Read More ›

Frank Turek, apologetics expert and cultural commentator, best known for I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist: Morality: Reason: God of the Gaps: Hat tip: Kenneth Francis.

From Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution is true, on mathematician and Darwin skeptic David Berlinski. I’m not sure how David Berlinski manages to make a living, but he does live in Paris, which ain’t cheap. Although he’s a Senior Fellow with the ID Creationist Discovery Institute, that can’t pay much, and his science books, including A Tour of the Calculus (1995), The Advent of the Algorithm (2000), Newton’s Gift (2000), and Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (2005), can’t bring in that much dosh. (As Wikipedia notes, “Berlinski’s books have received mixed reviews.”) However, his 2009 book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions remains at #41 on Amazon, a remarkable spot, but explained of course Read More ›

From Jonah Goldberg at Townhall: China made it official: By 2020, the government will fully implement a “social credit score” system that will use artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to monitor, reward and punish virtually every kind of activity based upon ideological criteria — chiefly, loyalty to the state. It doesn’t take a science-fiction writer to imagine where these trends can go. Right now, the decisions made about the rebellious driver and little Alfie are being made by humans. But will that always be the case? AI systems can send people to jail and make decisions about withholding care quite easily. Just ask the Chinese. Indeed, the humans making these decisions are just following the legal and bureaucratic equivalent Read More ›

From Tom Woodward at Themelios, in a review of Richard Weikart’s Death of Humanity: there is throughout the book a proper sense of what I call “deep-shock” to see what these secular thinkers have actually said in writing. Many of the vignettes and quotes from secular crusaders moved me, stopping me in my mental tracks. These shocks were hammer blows of reality—wake up calls that prompted me to jot my reaction and resolve on the margins of many pages. One shock, from US Supreme Court jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was especially stunning. Holmes, in commenting on a recently published book he had read, said, “[I] think morality a sort of higher politeness, that stands between us and the ultimate Read More ›