2018

From David Reznick and Joseph Travis at Science: Questionable predictability is not specific to stick insects. Nosil et al. analyzed data sets for other long-term studies of evolution in various species, including Galapagos finches and the peppered moth, and show that they also offer low temporal predictability. In these cases, the likely cause is also multiple forms of selection the strength of which varies over time. These results show that an iconic example of a simple trait subjected to a single agent of strong selection is actually much more complicated. Similar lessons have been taught by other seemingly simple phenomena. For example, the complex ways in which known agents of selection on the color polymorphism of Cepaea snails meant that Read More ›

First, condolences and prayers for victims and families. Daily Mail has a useful header that seems to capture key themes to ponder as we head into the weekend: These was of course — within minutes — the usual talking point exchange on firearms, gun-free [= target-rich] zones, mental illness and effects of certain antidepressants, affiliations (Antifa and Islamism have also been suggested and there is a picture of him in a MAGA hat) and the like, etc. U/D: My email inbox has a link to Townhall that points to a claim that “Leon County law enforcement sources told the Tallahassee Democrat that they could not find information linking Cruz, 19, to the Republic of Florida Militia, as first reported by Read More ›

By 2012, the longstanding Encyclopedia Britannica had published its last print edition. Microsoft’s Encarta has long since bitten the dust, and so has Collier’s notable effort. Wikipedia, like it or lump it — mostly the latter — seems to have taken over that go-to first source slot. Indeed, for a great many subjects a Wikipedia article will dominate a Google search (or the like), to the point where one gets the impression that if it is not in the top three or so references, that was programmed in by the search engine’s programmers. And yet, as PJ Media reports, co-founder and original author of Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view [NPOV]” policy, Larry Sanger has gone on record, regarding Wiki’s entrenched Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “It’s exciting and significant to find a living family of giant viruses with eukaryote-specific genes in a form that predates the latest common ancestor of all eukaryotes,” says Albert Erives, associate professor in the Department of Biology. “These viruses are like time machines that tell us more about how life on our planet came to be.” In the study, Erives analyzed the genome of a virus family called Marseilleviridae and found it shares a similar set of genes, called core histones, with eukaryotes. That places Marseilleviridae, and perhaps its viral relatives, somewhere along eukaryotes’ evolutionary journey. “We now know that eukaryotes are more closely related to viruses,” says Erives, “and the reason is because they share core histones, Read More ›

From Ahmed Alkhateeb at Nautilus: Widespread irreproducibility is often misconceived as intentional fraud—which does occur, and is documented by websites like Retraction Watch. But the majority of irreproducible research stems from a complex matrix of statistical, technical, and psychological biases that are rampant within the scientific community. The institutionalization of science in the early decades of the 20th century created a scientific sub-culture, with its own reward systems, behaviors, and social norms. But what to do? To make the desire for recognition compatible with prioritizing good science, we need quality metrics that are independent of sociological norms. Above all, objective quality should be based on the concept of independent replication: A finding would not be accepted as true unless it Read More ›

That is, if RNA world is correct. From ScienceDaily: Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have now found evidence that the amino acid arginine (or its prebiotic world equivalent) may have been a more important ingredient in this soup than previously thought. “People tend to think of arginine as not being prebiotic,” said Irene Chen, a biophysicist whose research focuses on the chemical origins of life. “They tend to think of the simpler amino acids as being plausible, such as glycine and alanine.” Arginine, by contrast, is relatively more complex, and was therefore thought to have entered the game at a later stage. … The researchers are careful to point out that although the amino acid we call arginine was found Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at ACSH, who treats the journalism war as one of three fronts: Of the three, this one may be the most insidious, since the war is conducted in high-profile media outlets by practitioners who don’t understand science or hide behind a false pretense of “transparency” and “balance.” Indeed, the journalistic war on science is complex because there are two different wars: an accidental war and an ideological war. The “accidental” war Berezow describes is the endless stream of dubious stuff from approved sources flourished by pom poms for science. They’re for science, a sausage whose components they don’t know very much about and don’t need to. And they are against people who are “against” science. That group includes many Read More ›

From theoretical physicist Paul Davies at Cosmos: It turns out that the set of all points on a continuous line is a bigger infinity than the natural numbers; mathematicians say there is an uncountably infinite number of points on the line (and in three-dimensional space). You simply can’t match up each point on the line with the natural numbers in a one-to-one correspondence. … If it is continuous (and some physicists think it may not be) then it will contain an uncountably infinite number of points. But that doesn’t mean it has to go on forever. As Einstein discovered, it may be curved in on itself to form a finite volume. More. One would have thought that once we get Read More ›

From Ewen Callaway at Nature: When researchers made the astonishing suggestion last year that early humans settled the Americas 100,000 years earlier than thought, they asked doubters to keep an open mind and consider the evidence backing their claim. But their study1, which proposed that mastodon bones from California were broken by an as-yet-unidentified group of early humans 130,000 years ago, was instantly questioned by archaeologists. Most researchers agree that humans settled the Americas around 15,000 years ago. Nearly a year later, the sceptics are still not convinced. In a rebuttal to the work, published on 7 February in Nature2, archaeologists say that modern construction equipment better explains the mastodon bone damage than does the handiwork of ancient hominins. They Read More ›

From Philip Ball at Chemistry World: Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The selfish gene, which topped a poll last year for the most inspiring science books of all time, has set the agenda for how we think about genes and DNA. ‘We are,’ he famously said, ‘all survival machines for the same kind of replicator – molecules called DNA.’ Battles have been fought over whether this is a good use of metaphor (and as with the ‘selfish gene’ itself, metaphor was all it was ever meant to be). But the fundamental premise on which it is built – DNA as replicator – seemed always to be sound. Not from what we know today. However, once you accept that genes are not Read More ›

Math prof Peter Zoeller-Greer writes in response to “Rob Sheldon: Why human beings cannot design a conscious machine”: — I became a theist years ago because of my works in quantum physics (by the way: I did my Dissertation in Math on a quantum-mechanical problem). I came to a similar rejection myself when I read Roger Penrose’s book “The large, the small and the human mind” years ago. He proposed that quantum mechanical effects in our brain have to do with free will and mind. What he wrote is similar to Rob Sheldon’s comments: QM may have very unpredictable and incalculable effects that can never be reproduced simply by exchanging e.g. a neuron through a chip. The chip may mimic Read More ›

Because those people agree to use it at all. Referencing Tyler O’Neil’s article above, At ENST, David Klinghoffer writes, All the same, Klinghoffer did not say Wikipedia was worthless. “You can rely on Wikipedia for things that nobody cares about. If you want to know the population of Peoria, you can absolutely trust Wikipedia, but for anything that people are invested in and care about, you can’t trust it,” he said. Whenever you look up a controversial issue on Wikipedia, take the results with a grain of salt. Not to pat myself on the back, but that gets to the heart of the problem. As soon as it’s a subject that gets people riled — specifically, the sociological slice with Read More ›

With metal-like superionic water already on the table, why not look at the seemingly evasive metallic hydrogen? A year ago, there was a happy announcement (and an article in Science), but doubts have since been entertained; indeed Science issued a correction to the original paper. Science: >>Producing metallic hydrogen has been a great challenge in condensed matter physics. Metallic hydrogen may be a room-temperature superconductor and metastable when the pressure is released and could have an important impact on energy and rocketry. We have studied solid molecular hydrogen under pressure at low temperatures. At a pressure of 495 gigapascals, hydrogen becomes metallic, with reflectivity as high as 0.91. We fit the reflectance using a Drude free-electron model to determine the Read More ›

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts: — Some have suggested that we could replace the neurons in a human brain one at a time with, say, electronic circuits. Size shouldn’t be an issue, but even if it is, we can imagine thin silver wires connecting the electronics cabinet with the brain under vivisection. As I interpret it, the question is “How many wires will it take before we have transferred the consciousness to the electronics cabinet?” Now a single neuron has 10,000 or so synapses where it connects to other neurons. Each of these synapses uses some complicated chemistry to enhance or inhibit neighboring cells. Each of those chemical reactions involves tens or hundreds of membrane-spanning active Read More ›

From Oxford University Press, Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, edited by Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupre, – A radical new conception of biology and the metaphysics of the living world – Offers a new kind of process philosophy with a naturalistic grounding – The Introduction provides a state-of-the-art survey to orient readers new to the topic Here’s the abstract from a chapter by Daniel J. Nicholson, “Reconceptualizing the Organism: From Complex Machine to Flowing Stream,” This chapter draws on insights from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to demonstrate the ontological inadequacy of the machine conception of the organism. The thermodynamic character of living systems underlies the importance of metabolism and calls for the adoption of a processual view, exemplified Read More ›