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From some thoughts on by Peter Woit at : Part of the problem with this good vs. evil story is that, as the book itself explains, it’s not at all clear what the “Copenhagen interpretation” actually is, other than a generic name for the point of view the generation of theorists such as Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Wigner and von Neumann developed as they struggled to reconcile quantum and classical mechanics. They weren’t solipsists with poor reasoning skills, but trying to come to terms with the extremely non-trivial and difficult problem of how the classical physics formalism we use to describe observations emerges out of the more fundamental quantum mechanical formalism. They found a workable set of rules to describe what Read More ›

Here. Paper. See also: Film night with Philip Cunningham: Atheists’ reasons for not believing in God are not scientific, and more…

From Natalie Wolchover, reviewing Philip Ball’s Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics Is Different at Nature: Along with the historic discoveries, Ball brings readers up to speed on today’s “quantum renaissance”. This active intellectual period is fuelled by quantum-computing research and the rise of quantum information theory, pioneered by researchers including David Deutsch, Peter Shor and Charles Bennett. Quantum mechanics is now seen as, more than anything, a set of rules about how information can be shared and processed. That, Ball says, is why quantum computing has proved so stimulating: what’s possible and impossible to compute “follow from the same rules that govern what is knowable and what is not”. Additionally, physicists, starting with Dieter Read More ›

From David Reich at New York Times: One hopes so. In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it? Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published Read More ›

From Salk News: “We are taught that our DNA is something stable and unchanging which makes us who we are, but in reality it’s much more dynamic,” says Rusty Gage, a professor in Salk’s Laboratory of Genetics. “It turns out there are genes in your cells that are capable of copying themselves and moving around, which means that, in some ways, your DNA does change.” For at least a decade, scientists have known that most cells in the mammalian brain undergo changes to their DNA that make each neuron, for example, slightly different from its neighbor. Some of these changes are caused by “jumping” genes—officially known as long interspersed nuclear elements (LINEs)—that move from one spot in the genome to Read More ›

Well, they do not quite say it. But get this: From Charles Q. Choi at Astrobiology: Assuming that early life adapted to survive in a checkerboard of many different kinds of environments, “the complex ecological relationships between different species may have been a part of life on Earth since very near its beginning, and LUCA is only one example of the life that may have been extant at that time,” says Fournier. “Perhaps a rapid establishment of complex environmental and ecological relationships was even necessary for early life to persist,” adds Cantine. The picture painted by Cantine and Fournier of the early evolution of life on Earth is just one plausible scenario. “Our interpretation, like others, relies on a limited Read More ›

From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: For decades, researchers have commonly assumed that higher oxygen levels led to the sudden diversification of animal life 540 million years ago. But one iconoclast argues the opposite: that new animal behaviors raised oxygen levels and remade the environment. … n a paper published in the January issue of Geobiology, Butterfield braided fluid dynamics and ecology to present his case for animals driving oxygenation instead of the other way around. First, he argued, if there was enough oxygen to power unicellular eukaryotes 1.6 billion years ago — which was indeed the case — then there would have been enough to run a whole assortment of animals. He believes early multicellular organisms would have consisted of Read More ›

From Adam Becker at Scientific American: Quantum physics, Everett pointed out, didn’t really reduce to classical physics for large numbers of particles. According to quantum physics, even normal-sized objects like chairs could be located in two totally separate places at once—a Schrödinger’s-cat–like situation known as a “quantum superposition.” And, Everett continued, it wasn’t right to appeal to classical physics to save the day, because quantum physics was supposed to be a more fundamental theory, one that underpinned classical physics. … Everett’s work fell into deep obscurity. It wasn’t revived until the 1970s, and even then, it was slow to catch on. Everett did make one last foray into the academic debate over his work; Wheeler and his colleague Bryce DeWitt Read More ›

From Walter Myers III at ENST: While much of the DNA code may be the same, the parts that are not the same have significant differences. The programs I described above, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, have different purposes, yet they all depend on the same OS that consists of tens of millions of lines of code. To be specific, let’s say you are using an iPhone with iOS 11 (the Apple mobile OS) installed. iOS is estimated to take up about 4 GB of space on your iPhone. Facebook takes up about 297 MB. Snapchat is about 137 MB. Instagram is about 85 MB. Respectively, that’s 7.4 percent, 3.4 percent, and 2.1 percent of the size of iOS. Read More ›

Pos-Darwinista writes to say that Stephen Hawking’s ashes are to be interred beside those of Isaac Newton at Westminster Abby, as reported at BBC: The Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, said: “It is entirely fitting that the remains of Professor Stephen Hawking are to be buried in the Abbey, near those of distinguished fellow scientists. “Sir Isaac Newton was buried in the Abbey in 1727. Charles Darwin was buried beside Isaac Newton in 1882.” He added: “We believe it to be vital that science and religion work together to seek to answer the great questions of the mystery of life and of the universe. More. Okay, yes, they’re all Brits. And Hawking did courageously fight off Read More ›

From Phoebe Weston at the Daily Mail, who offers a convenient bullet point format: Revealed: The worrying state of Earth’s species in numbers as scientists warn the sixth mass extinction is here and wildlife is in a ‘global crisis’ Two species of vertebrate, animals with a backbone, have gone extinct each year Currently more than a quarter of mammals are threatened with extinction There are an estimated 8.7 million plant and animal species on our planet About 86% of land species and 91% of sea species remain undiscovered Starting Saturday, a comprehensive, global appraisal of the damage, and what can be done to reverse it, will be conducted in Colombia More. The problem is, if we takes ecology seriously, how Read More ›

From Harriet Hall, in a review of Daniel Dennett’s book, Bacteria to Bach and Back, at CSICOP: Consciousness is not a nonphysical phenomenon. It is an evolved user-illusion, “a system of virtual machines that evolved, genetically and memetically, to play very special roles in the ‘cognitive niche’ our ancestors have constructed over the millennia.” There can be competence without comprehension, and comprehension is expensive, so nature uses the “need to know” principle. Most animals don’t need to know. Are there degrees of consciousness? Where might we draw a line? We draw a line for moral reasons and try to prevent animals from suffering, but what is suffering? We euthanize dogs when we think they are conscious of suffering, but do Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The team also compared these Neandertal genomes to the genomes of people living today, and showed that all of the late Neandertals were more similar to the Neandertals that contributed DNA to present-day people living outside Africa than an older Neandertal from Siberia. Intriguingly, even though four of the Neandertals lived at a time when modern humans had already arrived in Europe they do not carry detectable amounts of modern human DNA. “It may be that gene flow was mostly unidirectional, from Neandertals into modern humans,” says Svante Pääbo, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Our work demonstrates that the generation of genome sequences from a large number of archaic human individuals is now technically Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Modern humans co-existed and interbred not only with Neanderthals, but also with another species of archaic humans, the mysterious Denisovans. Research now describes how, while developing a new genome-analysis method for comparing whole genomes between modern human and Denisovan populations, researchers unexpectedly discovered two distinct episodes of Denisovan genetic intermixing, or admixing, between the two. This suggests a more diverse genetic history than previously thought between the Denisovans and modern humans. … What is known about Denisovan ancestry comes from a single set of archaic human fossils found in the Altai mountains in Siberia. That individual’s genome was published in 2010, and other researchers quickly identified segments of Denisovan ancestry in several modern-day populations, most significantly with individuals Read More ›

From Erica Klarreich at Quanta: In January, Ziegler traveled to San Diego for the Joint Mathematics Meetings, where he received (on his and Aigner’s behalf) the 2018 Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. “The density of elegant ideas per page [in the book] is extraordinarily high,” the prize citation reads. The 2014 book is Proofs from the Book (that is, a book of God’s alleged proofs, the most beautiful ones). Here’s the interview with Günter Ziegler (his co-author of Martin Aigner) at Quanta, with a sort of assist from Paul Erdős (1913-1996) Quanta: You’ve said that you and Martin Aigner have a similar sense of which proofs are worthy of inclusion in THE BOOK. What goes into your aesthetic? Ziegler: We’ve Read More ›