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Instead of meaningless? How exactly did we get from “Alone” to “Meaningless” via eloquence from tenured pundits? Where do we buy return tickets? A blogging neurologist asks this obvious question. From Steven Novella at The Ness: Until, however, we detect actual aliens or their signals, the rest of the factors in the equation are likely to remain a mystery. Put simply – we have a sample size of one. We don’t know how likely life is to develop intelligence, and intelligence technology, and how long such civilizations tend to last. We won’t know until we encounter evidence of aliens. And, if there are few or no other aliens out there, we will never know the full answer. We would only Read More ›

From Ryan Whitwam at Extreme Tech: Scientists have known for years that our Neanderthal cousins made use of fire to cook and make tar from birch bark, but we didn’t know much about where they got the fire. Were they simply at the mercy of mother nature, collecting fire from lightning strikes, or could they start their own fires whenever they needed it? Archaeologist Andrew Sorensen and his colleagues now say Neanderthals knew how to make fire, and they came to that decision after making fire themselves. Sorensen and his team at Leiden University suspected that flint tools often found at Neanderthal dig sites held the answer to early humanoid mastery of fire. Any place Neanderthals lived, archaeologists are likely Read More ›

From science writer Suzan Mazur, at Oscillations, interviewing Bogdan Dragnea, who studies the physical structure of viruses via spectrosopy: Suzan Mazur: Do you consider viruses live organisms since viruses can recognize their targets, attach, and infect their hosts—most viruses using a tail spike and needle [see following Parent lab image]—and as you’ve noted, they can “drive large-scale phenomena across the entire biosphere”? Bogdan Dragnea: No, I don’t. I will stick with the definition that requires for a living organism to reproduce and produce mechanical work in a thermodynamic cycle. If it could do that, then I would say it’s alive. But the virus cannot do mechanical work as part of a cyclic transformation. That is because they do not have Read More ›

From Josh Bloom at American Council for Science and Health: I recently wrote about three of the deadly neurotoxins being produced by cyanobacteria (aka blue-green algae) during an ongoing algae bloom in South Florida (See Florida’s Deadly Algae Bloom – Why Is It So Dangerous?). The toxins range from structurally simple and easy for organic chemists to synthesize in the lab to moderately complex and not simple at all. But there are numerous examples of plants, marine organisms, and bacteria that easily biosynthesize molecules that are so complex and difficult to make synthetically that chemistry grad students and post-docs who were given the unenviable task of doing so are probably still waking up in cold sweats thinking about what they Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: So why do so many theoretical physicists write papers about the multiverse? About parallel Universes and their connection to our own through this multiverse? Why do they claim that the multiverse is connected to the string landscape, the cosmological constant, and even to the fact that our Universe is finely-tuned for life? Because even though it’s obviously a bad idea, they don’t have any better ones. … As I’ve explained before, the Multiverse is not a scientific theory on its own. Rather, it’s a theoretical consequence of the laws of physics as they’re best understood today. It’s perhaps even an inevitable consequence of those laws: if you have an inflationary Universe governed by quantum physics, Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Salvo, a look at Matti Leisola’s book, Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design Matti Leisola, a gifted Finnish bioengineer, started out as a good Darwinist. But he could not avoid the massive pushback from the evidence of design he found in nature. A specialist in enzymes and rare sugars, he noticed that high-school students in his own country were being taught hoary Darwinian legends rather than a more nuanced view of biology that sees each individual cell as a complex city of life. Over a long career, which included serving as dean (now emeritus) of Chemistry and Material Sciences at Helsinki University of Technology and as research director for Cultor, a global biotech company, Read More ›

They were microbial mats. From Anna Azvolinsky at The Scientist: According to the study authors, the previously oldest visible fossilized remains of microbes on land were about 2.7 billion years old, found in a different location from the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa and also in Australia … For the current study, Homann and his colleagues focused on ancient sedimentary rocks, known as the Moodies Group, in the Barberton Greenstone Belt that were shown by geologists earlier to be approximately 3.22 billion years old. There, the team uncovered what are known as fossilized microbial mats—composed mainly of the imprints of bacteria and archaea and are among the earliest preserved forms of life. While living on the early Earth, these Read More ›

  … in a science and technology culture in which it is otherwise axiomatic that humans are merely evolved animals. So, can we cheat death by uploading ourselves as virtual AI entities? Cheating death is a serious goal of some transhumanists. Futurist Ray Kurzweil(now a Google innovator) calls such a digital fate the Singularity, as in his book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Published in 2006, it is still in the top ten in artificial intelligence and biotechnology. In 2017, he announced, 2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Wnt is ancient pathway, whose evolutionary appearance dates back to the emergence of multicellular animals. It plays pivotal roles in cell to cell communication and governs several aspects of embryonic development and tissue homeostasis. When dysfunctional, Wnt signaling can be at the origin of many diseases, in particular several cancers. With 10 receptors and 19 ligands, recognizing each other, the complexity of the pathway seemed dizzying. How do vertebrate cells manage to interpret the many Wnt signals they encounter and trigger an adequate response? It is such an interpretation mechanism that ULB researchers have just discovered. Previous findings had shown that two proteins expressed by cerebral endothelial cells, Gpr124 and Reck, are required for cerebrovascular development in response Read More ›

Closing out our religion coverage for the week, there is an interesting series of cartoons from Jordan Collver at Nautilus, on why people do or don’t “believe in” evolution. Here’s one panel: Some notes: The girl at middle left seems to be a fan of Berra’s Blunder (describing the outcome of alleged unintelligent natural processes by citing as examples the known product of explicit design). But the blunder is accepted in science literature today. The guy at middle right seems to believe that he can put his faith in “Jesus” and just accept the fully naturalist atheism on which “evolution,” as understood in most media today, is grounded. Most science journals would make short work of his “Jesus” as a Read More ›

And some objections. Via Mark Tapscott at HillFaith, from Hugh Ross at Reason to Believe: 1. origin of space, time, matter, and energy 2. origin of life 3. human exceptionalism 4. fine-tuning of the universe, Earth, and Earth’s life to make possible the existence and redemption of billions of humans 5. Genesis 1’s predictive power to accurately describe, in chronological order, key events in Earth’s history leading to humans More. Ross defends each one, for example, Origin of the universe: All our observations of the present and past state of the universe are consistent with a cosmic creation event that occurred 13.8 billion years ago. Some examples include (1) maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation; (2) past cosmic temperature Read More ›

That’s the claim by Paul Thagard at Psychology Today: In a recent New York Times column, Stephen T. Asma claims that religion can help people to deal with grief much better than science can. His case for religion over science has four flaws. It depends on a view of how emotion works in the brain that has been rendered obsolete by advances in neuroscience. It underestimates how much science can help to understand the nature of grief and to point to ways of overcoming it. It overestimates the consoling power of religion. Finally, it neglects how science can collaborate with philosophy to suggest ways of dealing with grief. … Science does not directly address normative questions concerning right, wrong, and Read More ›

From Clay Routledge at National Review: As I discuss in my new book, Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of Invisible World, the decline of any particular religion does not reflect a decline in people’s orientation toward supernatural questions, curiosities, and beliefs. Most people still believe in God or a universal spirit. The majority of religious “nones” believe in God, a higher power, or a spiritual force. Even those who reject supernatural ideas can be influenced by them. For instance, researchers in Finland found that theists and atheists exhibited similar levels of physiological stress when reading aloud statements daring God to cause harm. Other studies indicate that even atheists have a tendency to believe in fate at least somewhat and Read More ›

From tipster Ken Francis again, who is currently sitting in for Richard Dawkins’s social secretary and wants us to know that at RT: Question More, ‘Tedious old racist’: Richard Dawkins under fire for dismissing ‘aggressive’ Muslim prayer Best-selling atheist author Richard Dawkins has once again been branded “racist” after he tweeted that the sound of cathedral bells is much more pleasant than the “aggressive-sounding Muslim Allahu Akbar.” More. Come to think of it, we hadn’t heard much from or about Dawkins lately; well, he has certainly fixed that. Francis adds, “Richard gives praise to the Lord (stop laughing, Denyse).” Okay, not laughing. He notes that Dawkins also wants more secular chaplains, Humanists UK has been advertising – including in the Read More ›

Ken Francis, hat tipped below, writes to inform us of this vid featuring Frank Turek, of I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist fame, debating non-theist anthropologist Dennis Nørmark last year: Nørmark: In his role as a critic of literature, and formerly also of television, for both the newspaper, ‘Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten’, and from 2015 also, ‘Politiken’, he has to this day been an incisive critic of societal and political issues in a direct and unapologetic fashion. Turek remarks: Denis Normark fails to give a good argument as to why in his worldview if Stalin decided that the meaning of his life is to kill whoever gets in his way it would not be wrong. What do you think? Read More ›