The eruption: Waves have hit Tonga (in about 20 minutes) and other parts including Hawaii and the California coast. Satellite imagery: UPDATE: Developing. END

That is the question they are asking over at Science Friday. Now, scientists are questioning whether that’s actually true—or if mutation is more likely to occur in some parts of the genome than others. New research published in the journal Nature this week looks at just that question, in a common weed called Arabidopsis thaliana. After following 24 generations of plants for several years and then sequencing the offspring, the team found that some genes are far less likely to mutate than others. And those genes are some of the most essential to the function of DNA itself, where a mutation could be fatal. Conversely, the genes most likely to mutate were those associated with the plant’s ability to respond to its environment—potentially a handy trick Read More ›

WARNING! The video linked here is extremely disturbing. Four days ago Alexis Avila, a woman in New Mexico, had a baby. She put the baby in a garbage bag and threw him in a dumpster. She is being charged with attempted murder. The good news is that a passerby found the baby (umbilical cord still attached) still alive and called 911. The medics were able to save his life. Ms. Avila could have gone to an abortionist a couple of hours earlier and had her baby chopped into pieces in utero. The abortionist could have then removed the pieces, put them in the same garbage bag and thrown it in the same dumpster. In that case, Ms. Avila would have Read More ›

The natural, built in law framework in 48g culminates: . . . in civil society with government, justice is a principal task of legitimate government. In short, nihilistic will to power untempered by the primacy of justice is its own refutation in any type of state. Where, justice is the due balance of rights, freedoms and responsibilities. (In Aristotle’s terms as cited by Hooker: “because we would take no harm, we must therefore do none; That since we would not be in any thing extremely dealt with, we must ourselves avoid all extremity in our dealings; That from all violence and wrong we are utterly to abstain, with such-like .”) Thus also, 11] Eleventh, that as the US DoI, 1776 Read More ›

Here, we follow up from the yardstick case of a child kidnapped, sexually tortured and murdered. No 60 in L&FP48a: >>Compare to such, a fish, that we lure to bite on a hook, then land, kill and eat for lunch without compunction. (And even for those who object to so treating a fish, they will do so by extension of the protective sense we have about say the young child — not the other way around.) But, unless there is a material difference between a young child and a fish, that sense of wrong is frankly delusional, it is just a disguised preference, one that we are simply willing to back up with force. So, already, once we let radical Read More ›

When we have to resort to Orwell, it is a sad sign of how far the rot has gone. LF&P 48, no 146: >>it seems language itself (so, dictionaries and other reference resources by extension . . .) is under the gun of the elephant game. Orwell wrote about Newspeak replacing Oldspeak in the interests of IngSoc . . . English Socialism (the National Socialist English Worker’s Party we suppose), and how part of the dumbing down was to make it impossible to conceptualise heresy against the partyline. There was also Doublethink: To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to Read More ›

Now that the six blind men and the elephant paradigm is broken, we may look at Plato with fresh eyes. Here, 92 in LF&P 48a: >>Plato . . . is highly relevant to our own mutiny on the good ship civilisation. For, the lessons of sound history were bought with blood and tears; those who neglect, forget, dismiss or disdain those lessons doom themselves to pay in the same coin over and over again. Let’s therefore listen to Plato, as he lays out how ancient evolutionary materialism on the part of the sophists and others of the avant garde of c 430 BC led to radical relativism, amorality, nihilistic factionalism and chaos — and we will also trace the like Read More ›

Again, let’s go out of chronological order in 48a (Plato comes later as there is a dismissive attitude) and speak to a paradigm story used to radically relativise our thinking from elementary school days on. Here, 143: >>In a world in which abstract processes such as logical inference and explicit argument are increasingly “other” and subject to hyperskeptical side-stepping . . . a world where logic is fast joining morality in the zone of disappeared seemingly discredited “fake” knowledge (oh, the folly of neglecting and dismissing things that were so hard-bought) . . . we have to take up a narrative fight. Take, then, certain blind men B1 to B6 in India — irony — and a narrator N1, with Read More ›

In the course of speaking to disappearance/restoration of moral knowledge, I realised that there was need to stop the rot on core right reason also. Accordingly, I commented at 153 in LF&P 48a, and as it is obviously logically prior, I now headline out of rough chronological order: The issue of self-referential incoherence, regrettably, does not seem to move objectors anymore. That is strongly suggesting to me that we are seeing a SECOND “loss” of knowledge: logic in the historic sense, of first principles and practices of right reason. In short, relativism spreads. First, it attacks morality thus justice: [ NB: Plato, The Laws, Bk X, c 360 BC, in the voice of Athenian Stranger: “[Thus, the Sophists and other Read More ›

Knowledge, of course, is best understood as warranted, credibly true [and so, reliable] belief. Where truth is, similarly, accurate description of actual entities, states of affairs etc. Willard, in the closing decades of his life, spoke to the disappearance of moral knowledge (and was writing a book which was completed posthumously in 2018, five years after his passing), as was picked up at 43 in the discussion thread for LF&P 48a: [DW, in “Where Is Moral Knowledge?,” 2007:] when I speak of the disappearance of moral knowledge, I am not saying that it does not exist, or that it is unattainable. Those are views sometimes maintained in academic circles and by cultural icons who presume to be “in the know” Read More ›

It’s an impossible exercise if you leave out design: The same shortcomings and omissions that plague current OOL research can also be found in the paper under review. Indeed, these issues are so routinely ignored by researchers that the field appears to have become numbed to their absence from the literature. OOL researchers are prepared to assume that an ever-increasing list of obstacles were overcome on the prebiotic earth, but do not consider these hurdles as problems to be solved in their own work. The following five shortcomings in the research presented by Krishnamurthy et al., are emblematic of broader issues that need to be addressed. James Tour, “Much Ado About Nothing” at Inference Review (January 2022)

Ethan Siegel offers an opinion at Forbes: No matter how tempting it may be to think that the Universe arose from a singular point of infinite temperature and density, and that all of space and time emerged from that starting point, we cannot responsibly make that extrapolation and still be consistent with the observations that we’ve made. We can only run the clock back a certain, finite amount until the story changes, with today’s observable Universe — and all the matter and energy within it — allowed to be no smaller than the wingspan of a typical human teenager. Any smaller than that, and we’d see fluctuations in the Big Bang’s leftover glow that simply aren’t there. Ethan Siegel, “How Read More ›