News

From Peter Kwasniewski at Lifesite News: Modernity expects people to hand over their intellects to a mysterious oracle called “Science,” a source of dogmas more unquestioned and blindly trusted than ever the papacy was in the Dark Ages. Christianity, in contrast, requires believers to submit their minds to an infinite God of truth who created all things—a worthy object of worship and obedience. The “new atheists” assert that Christians, by profession as it were, have a contempt for hard facts. In reality, it would be impossible to find a religion more friendly to truths of nature and history and more encouraging of those who devote their time and effort to studying them. Consider the five proofs for the existence of Read More ›

From Peggy Fletcher Stack at Salt Lake City Tribune: Mormons should be as friendly to evolution as any people on Earth, a Brigham Young University biologist unequivocally declared this week. They believe in “eternal progression,” for example, and that the universe was organized from pre-existing matter, Steven L. Peck told a packed audience Thursday on the Utah Valley University campus. Those are ideas embraced by evolutionary biologists, too. Hmmm. Typical Mormons probably don’t believe what 78% of evolutionary biologists believe: No God and no free will. Could that matter? There certainly are surprises in the development of complex structures, he said. “Things that occur on one level — like DNA mutations — are truly random. And they can bubble up Read More ›

The cat may or may not attend.

Since reinstated. That’s what comes of hiring toxic snowflakes to make decisions. No, really: From Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason: A pudgy little figure with wide hips and ample breasts, the Venus of Willendorf was discovered in 1908 but originally dates to the Stone Age. One of the oldest surviving art works in the world, the limestone sculpture now resides in Vienna’s Natural History Museum, where a woman named Laura Ghianda snapped a pic last December and then posted the image to Facebook. It was promptly removed. A notice from Facebook explained that the naked figure was inappropriate for the social site. According to the company’s official policy, “photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures” are Read More ›

From Sarah Chaffee at ENST: Professor Peter Ridd heads up the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia. He has over a hundred scientific papers to his name and has spent thirty years studying the Great Barrier Reef. But he wrote a chapter in the volume Climate Change: The Facts 2017 for a think tank, critiquing claims that the Great Barrier Reef is nearly dead due to global warming and other factors. When he talked about the article on television last August, his university went ballistic. Ridd took his situation to the public, writing an op-ed for Fox News, “Science or silence? My battle to question doomsayers about the Great Barrier Reef.” More. From that job-endangering op-ed: Around Read More ›

From Catherine Offord at the at The Scientist: In one recent project, for example, Schroeter and her advisor Mary Schweitzer extracted and analyzed collagen peptides from just 200 mg of an 80-million-year-old fossil of a Cretaceous-era herbivore, Brachylophosaurus canadensis, excavated in Montana. The amino acid sequences of those peptides, published last year, placed the dinosaur on a branch of the phylogenetic tree between crocodiles and basal birds such as ostriches.1 What’s more, the team’s collection of analyzable peptides from the ancient specimen suggests that there might be other fossils out there with similar molecular information hidden in them. Although the findings were controversial—some researchers still doubt that proteins can resist degradation for tens of millions of years—Schroeter is one of a Read More ›

New paper: Abstract Background and objectives Evolutionary medicine is a rapidly growing field that uses the principles of evolutionary biology to better understand, prevent and treat disease, and that uses studies of disease to advance basic knowledge in evolutionary biology. Over-arching principles of evolutionary medicine have been described in publications, but our study is the first to systematically elicit core principles from a diverse panel of experts in evolutionary medicine. These principles should be useful to advance recent recommendations made by The Association of American Medical Colleges and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to make evolutionary thinking a core competency for pre-medical education. Methodology The Delphi method was used to elicit and validate a list of core principles for evolutionary Read More ›

  From Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity, on Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism, and Progress, at ENST: In his zeal to defend science from the onslaught of those allegedly waging a “war on science” Steven Pinker (in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education taken from his recent book, Enlightenment Now) cries foul against anyone who dares suggest that science (including Darwinian science) has anything to do with racism. Racism, Pinker informs us — as if anyone needed to be informed — is much older than the dastardly scientific racism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pinker admits that scientific racists deserve our opprobrium, but he rescues science from any Read More ›

From linguist Daniel Everett at Aeon: What is the greatest human technological innovation? Fire? The wheel? Penicillin? Clothes? Google? None of these come close. As you read this, you are using the winning technology. The greatest tool in the world is language. Without it there would be no culture, no literature, no science, no history, no commercial enterprise or industry. The genus Homo rules the Earth because it possesses language. But how and when did we build this kingdom of speech? And who is ‘we’? After all, Homo sapiens is just one of several species of humans that have walked the Earth. Does ‘we’ refer to our genus, Homo, or to our species, sapiens? To discover the answers to these Read More ›

As Peter Dockill explain at Science Alert, Scientists have discovered two new kinds of virus in Brazil that display such size and genetic complexity we may need to rethink exactly what viruses are, scientists say. The two new strains – dubbed Tupanvirus, after the Brazilian thunder god Tupã in Guaraní mythology – are as prodigious as their namesake, and while they’re not a threat to humans, their existence further challenges the scientific boundaries that define what a virus is. Tupanvirus soda lake and Tupanvirus deep ocean, both named in relation to the extreme aquatic habitats in which they were discovered, aren’t just among the largest viruses ever found – they also contain the most protein-making machinery of any virus discovered Read More ›

From Douglas Murray at the UK Spectator: Of course the intellectual dark web partly thrives because it does not have the limitations of the traditional media. For any public intellectual or thinker the experience of a Newsnight or Channel 4 News studio is always the same. The evening is wrecked by having to travel to a studio where you will be given a maximum of three minutes’ airtime to correct a set of false presumptions which the presenter has already gathered against you. ‘So what you’re saying’ could be the epitaph for this form of journalism. There is no opportunity for nuance, not much opportunity for correction and very little to recommend it to anyone but the producers. Certainly not Read More ›

From Tom Siegfried at ScienceNews:: Maybe, string/brane/M theory would explain the amount of that mysterious “dark” energy in space and all would be well. But no. Working with physicist Raphael Bousso, Polchinski found that string theory did not specify how much energy the vacuum of space contained. Instead the theory predicted a virtually countless number of vacuum states, with nearly any amount of repulsive energy you could imagine. In other words, string theory described a giga-gaggle of different universes — a multiverse. Polchinski’s modesty manifested itself in his reaction to this situation. He hated the idea of a multiverse, because it implied that some questions had no answers that physicists could calculate. No equation could specify the amount of dark Read More ›

But the giraffe turned out to be four species. From ScienceDaily: Evolutionary biologists have now discovered that the Pygmy Marmoset — the world’s smallest monkey — is not one species but two. Weighing in at just 100 grams — roughly the size of a large tomato — the insect-eating primate was first described scientifically in 1823 by German naturalist Johann Spix as Cebuella pygmaea, with a sub-species subsequently found. Now a team led by the University of Salford, using the latest techniques in genomics and phylogenetics, have established proof of two clades or branches of pygmy marmosets, that have diverged from one another around 2 — 3 million years ago. The study was restricted to monkeys in the Brazilian Amazon, Read More ›

Remember Heather Heying, wife and co-belligerent of Bret Weinstein in the science vs. snowflakes wars? Guess what happened when she tried saying in public what everyone knows? Daily Wire: On February 17, Portland State University held an event to discuss viewpoint diversity moderated by PSU philosophy professor Peter Boghossian, with a panel including former Evergreen State biologist Heather E. Heying, writer Helen Pluckrose, and former Google engineer James DaMore, who was fired in 2017 after writing a memo about the biological differences between men and women. When Heying spoke of the simple biological differences between men and women, some leftist activists hilariously threw a fit, rising up in protest and sabotaging the sound system as they exited. … Heying answered, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In recent years, researchers have searched for ways to make computers more neuromorphic, or brain-like, in order to perform increasingly complicated tasks with high efficiency. Now Hersam, a Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, and his team are bringing the world closer to realizing this goal. The research team has developed a novel device called a “memtransistor,” which operates much like a neuron by performing both memory and information processing. With combined characteristics of a memristor and transistor, the memtransistor also encompasses multiple terminals that operate more similarly to a neural network. … Typical transistors and Hersam’s previously developed memristor each have three terminals. In their new paper, however, Read More ›