At Nature: “In a project that could unlock the world’s research papers for easier computerized analysis, an American technologist has released online a gigantic index of the words and short phrases contained in more than 100 million journal articles — including many paywalled papers.”
Month: October 2021
At Mind Matters News: Why just anything can’t happen given an infinite sum of universes
Marks: It can be shown mathematically that the infinite does not exist in reality, only in our minds. Thus an infinite number of universes cannot exist.
It begins at last… T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, about to be Cancelled – other early Darwinists to get the chop soon?
W. D. Hamilton, Ronald Fisher, and J. B. S. Haldane are also threatened. We never thought it would happen but it is happening… so fast.
Flim flam? Flash in the pan? Paleontologists find “possible” dinosaur DNA from 125 million years ago
The Scientist: “But other experts have voiced caution or outright skepticism about the findings… ” The oldest extant DNA is from a 1 million-year-old woolly mammoth.
Wokeness isn’t new: Apparently there was such a thing as Marxist astronomy
Pannekoek would have been a stalwart, had he lived, in the war on math.
New animated short on the origin of life is a lot of fun
At ENST: Stadler and Anderson explore how origin-of-life papers and popular media reports have misled the public, evidenced by a survey underscored by Rice University synthetic organic chemist James Tour.
The Big Bang of flowers, 50–100 million years ago
Researchers: “It is not just that angiosperms are species-rich, but many individual angiosperm families show more morphological variety than all other seed plants combined, a distinction that reflects the dynamics of their genomes.” An episode we never heard before from the history of life. Is this the new Cambrian Explosion?
Useful reflections on the Cancel Culture everyone faces now
Nick Gillespie asks, “What kind of simulation are we living in where Mein Kampf is easier to purchase than McElligot’s Pool?” Oh, that’s easy to answer. It will be as fully an authoritarian culture as the Third Reich but with different authoritarians in charge. And that’s the way Cancel Culture supporters want it.
Insect parasite replaces fish’s tongue — and it all works
The tongue-eating louse is the only known life form to completely replace an organ in another animal. The takehome point is that devolution (shedding independent characteristics in order to survive, perhaps symbiotically) leads the history of life forms down some strange paths.
At Evolution News and Science Today: Why C. S. Lewis doubted the creative power of natural selection
West: “according to Lewis, Darwin’s theory explains how a species can change over time by losing functional features it already has. Suffice to say, this is not the key thing the modern biological theory of evolution purports to explain.”
Science writer asks: Why are medical journals full of fashionable nonsense?
Alex Berezow: The point is that hopping aboard a political bandwagon is good for grabbing attention — and subsequently, funding. We are witnessing a similar phenomenon with respect to climate change. No matter how extraneous a topic, researchers try to tie it to climate change.
Some at-your-fingertips stats on human–chimp similarity
Casey Luskin: “many non-coding sequences are highly dissimilar, and there are sequences of the human and chimp genomes that are so different that they can’t be aligned for comparison. For example, there are some parts of our genome, such as the human y chromosome, that are radically different from the chimp genome.”
At Mind Matters News, some fun: Would ET intelligences understand the 1974 Arecibo Message?
In early, easily-mocked sci fi, a little green man points his raygun at an unsuspecting passerby and barks “Take me to your leader.” Fast forward: If the little green man didn’t have the technology to figure out who the leader was before landing, he certainly wouldn’t have the technology to get here.
Rob Sheldon on the current trend to non-theist intelligent design (ID) theory
When some people wrote privately to protest that this ET>Big Bang stuff is all just one space bunny too far down the cosmic path, I (O’Leary for News) pointed out in response that Neil deGrasse Tyson (here), Martin Rees (here), and Elon Musk (here) have also suggested that very thing. Well, now theoretical physicist Rob Sheldon writes to offer some thoughts on the new-found popularity.
Jonathan Witt: Why is common descent a better explanation for the history of life than common design?
It’s one of those questions that many never ask because they are so used to hearing the Correct Answer that no other answers surface. And they would not, of course, know objections to the Correct Answer.