2018

Pos-Darwinista writes to draw our attention to the following Abstract: Universal biology and the statistical mechanics of early life Nigel Goldenfeld, Tommaso Biancalani, Farshid Jafarpour Published 13 November 2017.DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2016.0341 All known life on the Earth exhibits at least two non-trivial common features: the canonical genetic code and biological homochirality, both of which emerged prior to the Last Universal Common Ancestor state. This article describes recent efforts to provide a narrative of this epoch using tools from statistical mechanics. During the emergence of self-replicating life far from equilibrium in a period of chemical evolution, minimal models of autocatalysis show that homochirality would have necessarily co-evolved along with the efficiency of early-life self-replicators. Dynamical system models of the evolution of the genetic Read More ›

From Peter Wood and David Randall at the Wall Street Journal: Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. … The biggest newsmakers in the crisis have involved psychology. Consider three findings: Striking a “power pose” can improve a person’s hormone balance and increase tolerance for risk. Invoking a negative stereotype, such as by telling black test-takers that an exam measures intelligence, can measurably degrade performance. Playing a sorting game that involves quickly pairing faces (black or white) with bad and good words (“happy” or “death”) can reveal “implicit bias” and predict discrimination. All three of these results received massive media attention, but independent researchers haven’t been able to reproduce any of them properly. It seems as Read More ›

From Lisa Grossman at Science News: TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is headed to an orbit between the Earth and the moon, a journey that will take about two months. In its first two years, the telescope will seek planets orbiting 200,000 nearby, bright stars, and identify the best planets for further study. TESS’ cameras will survey 85 percent of the sky by splitting it up into 26 zones and focusing on each zone for 27 days apiece. More. Here’s her story on a previous, scrubbed launch. It is nice to see exoplanet research situated more clearly in the realm of science. The “millions of habitable planets” claims we so often hear are mere assertions in search of funding. Read More ›

I’ve talked to a number of biologists, and it seems like there are a number of important facts that are left out of a standard biological education.

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From ScienceDaily: The ‘bad apples’ of the immune system are also its secret weapon, according to major Australian research published today in the world-leading journal Science. In a world first, scientists from Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research have revealed how a population of ‘bad’ antibodies in the immune system — which are usually ‘silenced’ because they can harm the body — can provide crucial protection against invading microbes. The research was carried out in mice. The ‘bad’ antibodies are known to react against the body’s own tissues and can cause autoimmune disease. For this reason, it was once thought that they were discarded by the immune system or that they were made inactive in the long term. However, the Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder reflects on British science writer Jim Baggott’s 2013 book Farewell to Reality at her blog, Back(re)action: I largely agree with Baggott’s assessment, though I am less critical of research on the foundations of quantum mechanics and I could quibble with his take on black hole evaporation, but it seems somewhat besides the point. I share Baggott’s worry that presenting unfounded speculations, like that we live in a multiverse, as newsworthy research undermines public trust in science. … Baggott is a gifted science writer whose explanations seem as effortless as I’m sure they’re not. He knows his stuff and isn’t afraid of clear words. And having noted this, it is not irrelevant to mention that Baggott is no longer Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Lead author Dr Massimo Bernardi, Curator at MUSE and Research associate at Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, said: “We were excited to see that the footprints and skeletons told the same story. We had been studying the footprints in the Dolomites for some time, and it’s amazing how clear cut the change from ‘no dinosaurs’ to ‘all dinosaurs’ was.” The point of explosion of dinosaurs matches the end of the Carnian Pluvial Episode, a time when climates shuttled from dry to humid and back to dry again. It was long suspected that this event had caused upheavals among life on land and in the sea, but the details were not clear. Then, in 2015, dating of rock sections Read More ›

From Cornelius Hunter at ENST: Who is the author of the following statement? In contrast [to trait loss], the gain of genetically complex traits appears harder, in that it requires the deployment of multiple gene products in a coordinated spatial and temporal manner. Obviously, this is unlikely to happen in a single step, because it requires potentially numerous changes at multiple loci. If you guessed this was written by an advocate of intelligent design, such as Michael Behe describing irreducibly complex structures, you were wrong. It was evolutionist Sean Carroll and co-workers in a 2007 PNAS paper. When a design person says it, it is heresy. When an evolutionist says it, it is the stuff of good solid scientific research. Read More ›

From Dan Garisto at Science News: New genetic evidence instead suggests that wild precursors to sweet potatoes reached Polynesia at least 100,000 years ago — long before humans inhabited the South Pacific islands, researchers report April 12 in Current Biology. If true, it could also challenge the idea that Polynesian seafarers reached the Americas around the 12th century. … The researchers calculated the average rate of genetic change for the plant, determining that the Polynesian sweet potato diverged from its South American cousin at least 100,000 years ago. That suggests the plants, or their seeds, somehow migrated across the ocean on their own, possibly via wind, water or birds. Precedent exists, the authors note. Two other Ipomoea species crossed the Read More ›

From Bruce Bower at ScienceNews: A trio of dogs buried at two ancient human sites in Illinois lived around 10,000 years ago, making them the oldest known domesticated canines in the Americas. Radiocarbon dating of the dogs’ bones shows they were 1,500 years older than thought, zooarchaeologist Angela Perri said April 13 at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. … An absence of stone tool incisions on the three ancient dogs’ skeletons indicates that they were not killed by people, but died of natural causes before being buried, Perri said. More. Burial of dogs who died from natural causes implies, of course, a level of affection and esteem. See also: A top anthropology finding of year show Read More ›

One thing to be said for granting personhood to intelligent machines is that we could then blame them for things that go wrong. From Sarah Jeong at The Verge: Over the course of an accumulated 10 hours spread out over two days of hearings, Mark Zuckerberg dodged question after question by citing the power of artificial intelligence. Moderating hate speech? AI will fix it. Terrorist content and recruitment? AI again. Fake accounts? AI. Russian misinformation? AI. Racially discriminatory ads? AI. Security? AI. It’s not even entirely clear what Zuckerberg means by “AI” here. He repeatedly brought up how Facebook’s detection systems automatically take down 99 percent of “terrorist content” before any kind of flagging. In 2017, Facebook announced that it Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: One of the oldest and biggest experiments hunting for dark matter particles, DAMA is alone in claiming to see them. It purports to pick up on rare interactions between the hypothesized particles and ordinary atoms. But if these dalliances between the visible and invisible worlds really do produce DAMA’s data, several other experiments would probably also have detected dark matter by now. They have not. Late last month, Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, DAMA’s longtime leader, presented the results of an additional six years of measurements. She reported that DAMA’s signal looks as strong as ever. But researchers not involved with the experiment have since raised serious arguments against dark matter Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In a study published this week in Science Advances, an international team of researchers from Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins and School of Human Evolution and Social Change, New York University, University of Kent, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology found that a simple, straightforward developmental rule — the “patterning cascade” — is powerful enough to explain the massive variability in molar crown configuration over the past 15 million years of ape and human evolution. “Instead of invoking large, complicated scenarios to explain the majors shifts in molar evolution during the course of hominin origins, we found that simple adjustments and alterations to this one developmental rule can account for most of those changes,” Read More ›

John Horgan asks at Scientific American if science is hitting a wall: Economists show increased research efforts are yielding decreasing returns The economists are concerned primarily with what I would call applied science, the kind that fuels economic growth and increases wealth, health and living standards. Advances in medicine, transportation, agriculture, communication, manufacturing and so on. But their findings resonate with my claim in The End of Science that “pure” science—the effort simply to understand rather than manipulate nature–is bumping into limits. And in fact I was invited to The Session because an organizer had read my gloomy tract, which was recently republished. I had lots of reactions to The Session. Here are a few: … In the realm of Read More ›

From George Dvorsky at Gizmodo: Over 150 experts in AI, robotics, commerce, law, and ethics from 14 countries have signed an open letter denouncing the European Parliament’s proposal to grant personhood status to intelligent machines. The EU says the measure will make it easier to figure out who’s liable when robots screw up or go rogue, but critics say it’s too early to consider robots as persons—and that the law will let manufacturers off the liability hook. This all started last year when the European Parliament proposed the creation of a specific legal status for robots … More. See also: Should chimpanzees be considered legal persons or things? Chimpanzees being considered legal persons is a step on the road to Read More ›