Frank is an expert on the final stages of evolution of stars like the sun. His computational research group has developed advanced supercomputer tools in order to study how stars form and die. So he would incline to a materialist view, surely? But no, he says, quantum physics blew all that away. And some neuroscientists just haven’t caught up.
Month: October 2019
Sabine Hossenfelder: There is a crisis in physics and it may spread to other sciences
Many science writers probably like the current state of affairs because nonsense about the multiverse and space aliens is easy to write. Artists might like it because it is easy to illustrate. Only if you cared about physics would you want to spoil the party.
Peering into the origin of time
Via a curious universal pattern of correlated pairs of objects.
Ola Hössjer and Ann Gauger sketch genetic scenarios for Adam and Eve
Wow. The Darwin trolls’ll miss Halloween to go after this one.
Controversial claim: First humans originated in what is now Botswana
One is tempted to wonder, how would “storytelling” differentiate the Garvan team from many other human evolution researchers?
Videos from the ID conference in Austria
Just think, it’s becoming increasingly possible to hold a civilized discussion of evolution. Maybe the trolls got sent semi-accidentally to the wrong address?
Red algae thrives despite losing 1/4 of genes, a billion years ago
This is a classic story of devolution, where an organism thrives by losing information, as Michael Behe explains in Darwin Devolves. Devolution is a form of evolution; it just isn’t glitzy.
The mammals who crawled out after the dinosaurs died, 66 mya
Now, will those remains bolster textbook Darwinism or help sink it? Or in-between? We shall see.
Rob Sheldon dumps cold water on the “planetary autopsy” that says ET life is common
Sheldon: I would argue that this is a very weak argument, mostly trying to jazz up a very boring data set or at least distract the audience from remembering the “standard candle” Nobel Prize assumed that all white dwarfs were identical. Either way, its a preposterous story attempting to distract from its most distressing results.
Historian Michael Flannery: There is much more Darwin doubt now than fifty years ago
Flannery: “Most interesting of all is the last essay by a noted historian and philosopher of biology, the late Jean Gayon, “What Future for Darwinism?” Against the centennial celebration, the question itself stands out as one that certainly wasn’t to be seriously asked in Chicago [in 1959].”
At Psychology Today: There are TWO hard problems of consciousness, not one
Psychology prof Gregg Henriques argues, consciousness “plays by a different set of rules than the language game of science.”
Eric Holloway’s latest short story: Mindtrap
Also, Adam Nieri’s review of Sprites – an AI replacement for actors?
A Simple Tutorial on the Hyperreals
Earlier I posted a video on hyperreal numbers. Here is a short tutorial on their usage.
“Moths’ ‘ears’ developed millions of years before bats” study is open access
Researchers: “We’ve thought for a long time that flowering plants must have contributed to the extraordinary number of moth and butterfly species we see today, but we haven’t been able to test that. This study helps us see if prior hypotheses line up, and what we find is that the plant hypothesis does, but the bat hypothesis does not.”
Factors for fine-tuning for life, intelligent life, listed
Life, 140 factors; intelligent life: 402 factors