News

From ScienceDaily: How do fish end up in isolated bodies of water when they can’t swim there themselves? For centuries, researchers have assumed that water birds transfer fish eggs into these waters — however, a systematic literature review by researchers at the University of Basel has shown that there is no evidence of this to date. … To objectively measure the lack of evidence, the Basel research team conducted a systematic literature review. The result shows that no in-depth scientific studies exist to prove that water birds disperse fish eggs. To rule out the possibility that the unsuccessful search was due to their method, the researchers also used the same approach to look for evidence of the dispersal of aquatic Read More ›

We’ve heard plenty from the transhumanists and the pillpushers who think we can medicate our way to eternity. But now this, from Peter Hoffmann at Nautilus: Nanoscale thermal physics guarantees our decline, no matter how many diseases we cure. There is a vigorous discussion inside the aging research community about whether to classify aging as a disease. Many researchers studying specific diseases, cellular systems, or molecular components would like to see their favorite research subject take the mantle of “the cause” of aging. But the sheer number of possibilities being put forward refutes the very possibility. They can’t all be the cause of aging. Leonard Hayflick, the original discoverer of cellular aging, pointed out in his provocatively titled article “Biological Read More ›

Science journalists are actually fun— provided they are not just a flock of page boys for science boffins: This, for example, from Alex Berezow at ACSH: 314 Action’s stated mission is laudable. It includes, among other things, a desire to “elect more leaders… from STEM backgrounds” and to “strengthen communication among the STEM community, the public and our elected officials.” One would be left with the impression that the mission is bipartisan, which would be outstanding. Unfortunately, it is not. The leadership are all Democrats. All the candidates 314 Action has endorsed are Democrats. The site’s news page refers to Republicans as “anti-science denialists,” and one of the endorsed candidates refers to a GOP politician as “science’s public enemy number Read More ›

Read this and then ask yourself, why is historic journal Nature freaked out over American public school science classrooms – again? From Richard Harris at NPR: Another concern is that today scientists are judged primarily by which journal publishes their work. The greatest rewards tend to go to scientists who can get their papers into major journals such as Science, Nature and Cell. It matters less what the actual findings are. “To me that is one of the very biggest problems in the system today,” says Erin O’Shea, president of HHMI, “and it drives a lot of behavior — behavior that we don’t want.” And if a top journal reviews a paper and decides not to publish it, the scientist Read More ›

It’s not like the United States put a man on the moon and then brought him back or supervised mapping the human genome or anything useful like that. So it stands to reason that anyone at all, including people who live in countries where witchcraft is a capital offense, are free to fret about Florida classrooms. The beauty of pomo (post-modernism) is that it never needs to make sense, just make complaints. From Giorgia Guglielmi at Nature: Education bills would allow people who live in the state to review and recommend instructional materials to be used in schools. That’s shocking, especially when you consider that the people who live in the state are forced to pay for the schools and Read More ›

From anthropologist Alexandra Rosati at Scientific American: The shift to a cooked-food diet was a decisive point in human history. The main topic of debate is when, exactly, this change occurred. … But at what point in our evolutionary history was this strange new practice adopted? Some researchers think cooking is a relatively recent innovation—at most 500,000 years old. Cooking requires control of fire, and there is not much archaeological evidence for hearths and purposefully built fires before this time. The archaeological record becomes increasingly fragile farther back in time, however, so others think fire may have been controlled much earlier. Anthropologist Richard Wrangham has proposed cooking arose before 1.8 million years ago, an invention of our evolutionary ancestors. If Read More ›

Readers will recall Steven Pinker, a Darwinian cognitive scientist, one of whose key concepts is “A…reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.” He has a new book out, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism, and Progress. From professor of globalisation Ian Goldin at Nature: Pinker looks in some depth at the rise in scepticism about science, in society and in parts of academia such as the humanities. He gives shorter shrift to the erosion of faith in expertise elsewhere, even though this is justified in some notable instances. The financial sector, for example, is home to the biggest and most Read More ›

Ah, start the day with fond memories. Most people who were kids in the mid-twentieth century grew up with the icons of horse evolution, starting with grubby little Eohippus and ending with Black Beauty. Of course, the story didn’t need to be true and as Jonathan Wells pointed out in Icons of Evolution, it wasn’t really true, at least not in a factual way. It was more the idea of evolution that was supposed to sink in for us. As CS Lewis has pointed out, Darwinian evolution was a great story, not necessarily to be confused with facts of nature. Meanwhile, at ScienceDaily: There are no such things as “wild” horses anymore. Research published in Science today overturns a long-held Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Human ‘self-domestication’ is a hypothesis that states that among the driving forces of human evolution, humans selected their companions depending on who had a more pro-social behavior. Researchers have found new genetic evidence for this evolutionary process. Human ‘self-domestication’ is a hypothesis that states that among the driving forces of human evolution, humans selected their companions depending on who had a more pro-social behavior. Researchers from a team of the UB led by Cedric Boeckx, ICREA professor at the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics and member of the Institute of Complex Systems of the University of Barcelona (UBICS), found out new genetic evidence for this evolutionary process. The study, published in the science journal PLOS ONE, Read More ›

From Mike Kugler in Northwestern Review: Long before Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings and Lewis converted to “mere Christianity,” their suspicions of modern science, the heart of the modern worldview, and anxiety about Europe’s future were latent. The Great War illustrated terribly how well-grounded were their concerns. Later, in the 1930s, Europeans watched creeping authoritarian and fascist movements, further illustrating the danger from the Europe-wide threat of totalitarianism. Through the 1940s Lewis’ association of Darwinian evolution and science augmenting human power and arrogance deepened. His greatest concern was not evolution alone; I don’t know of evidence that Lewis dismissed Darwin’s argument or conclusions. Lewis’ concern, I think, was that the Darwinian account afforded rational permission to “Progressives” Read More ›

From Maria Temming at Science News: If alien microbes crash-land on Earth, they may get a warm welcome. When people were asked how they would react to the discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life, they give generally positive responses, researchers reported at a news conference February 16 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This suggests that if microbial life is found on Mars, Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus (SN: 5/13/17, p. 6) or elsewhere in the solar system, “we’ll take the news rather well,” said Michael Varnum, a social psychologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. What’s more, the tone of news reports announcing potential evidence for intelligent aliens suggests people would welcome that news, Read More ›

From theologian Norman Geisler at Jonh Ankerberg Show: Persons have mind, will, and feelings. Androids have only mind and will, but no feelings. Open theists and others sometimes object to the classical view of God by claiming that if God is impassible then He cannot experience feelings like love and joy. In short, it makes God into an android, or more properly, a theandroid. However, classical theists, including Thomas Aquinas, do not believe that God is without feeling but only that He has no changing passions (feelings). God is a simple and unchanging Being and, as such, He experiences no changing passions. Hence, in his comments on Ephesians 4:30 (”Grieve not the Holy Spirit…”) Aquinas says, this phrase could be Read More ›

From the Max Planck Institute: At least 70,000 years ago Homo sapiens used perforated marine shells and colour pigments. From around 40,000 years ago he created decorative items, jewellery and cave art in Europe. Using Uranium-Thorium dating an international team of researchers co-directed by Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, now demonstrates that more than 115,000 years ago Neanderthals produced symbolic objects, and that they created cave art more than 20,000 years before modern humans first arrived in Europe. The researchers conclude that our cousins’ cognitive abilities were equivalent to our own. … “Neanderthals created meaningful symbols in meaningful places”, says Paul Pettitt from University of Durham, also a team member and cave Read More ›

Theology can lead us to some weird places. From Evolution News and Science Today, in a continuing series on Adam and the Genome, As if on cue, science news today reports a remarkable discovery: cave art in Spain from upwards of 64,000 years ago, apparently by Neanderthals. The Wall Street Journal aptly summarizes the takeaway: Neanderthals, once considered the low-brows of human evolution, may have been among the world’s first artists, creating cave paintings long before modern humanity arrived on the scene… “Once considered”? This is timely because in the book Adam and the Genome, which we’ve been reviewing here, theistic evolutionist and biologist Dennis Venema discusses DNA that has been extracted from fossils of extinct members of the genus Read More ›

From Robert Wright and Galen Strawson at Meaning of Life TV: 0:30 Why scientific materialism is harder to define than you think 14:42 Galen explains panpsychism 27:36 What does “mind is all there is to reality” mean? 32:48 Is human consciousness epiphenomenal? 40:35 Do physical laws come from somewhere? 44:35 Is it like something to be a rock? (And is Galen saying it is?) 50:57 Galen: Discussion of the mind-body problem was better 100 years ago The reader who sent this link suggests that panpsychism may be “better than pure materialism.” But one wants to ask, better in what sense? If everything is conscious, nothing is. So the primary materialist (naturalist) assertion, that your consciousness (and his) is an illusion, Read More ›