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Comments from Kirk Durston and Rob Sheldon added. From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: But in the past few years, a growing number of cosmologists have cautiously revisited the alternative. They say the Big Bang might instead have been a Big Bounce. Some cosmologists favor a picture in which the universe expands and contracts cyclically like a lung, bouncing each time it shrinks to a certain size, while others propose that the cosmos only bounced once — that it had been contracting, before the bounce, since the infinite past, and that it will expand forever after. In either model, time continues into the past and future without end. With modern science, there’s hope of settling this ancient debate. In the years Read More ›

Not your high school teacher’s human evolution, it seems. From Bruce Bower at ScienceNews: Excavated stone artifacts document a gradual shift from larger, handheld cutting implements to smaller pieces of sharpened stone, known as Middle Paleolithic tools, by around 385,000 years ago, researchers say. That shift mirrors a similar change seen in tools from a variety of hominid populations in Africa, Asia and Europe between about 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, including African Homo sapiens and European Neanderthals. … The new finding suggests, however, that some humanlike populations reached South Asia shortly before H. sapiens even appeared in Africa, which possibly occurred around 300,000 years ago. … Still, “we cannot be sure who made the Attirampakkam tools, because we lack Read More ›

From Serif Tekin at Aeon: I call my proposed model the ‘multitudinous self’. ‘Do I contradict myself?’ asks the poet Walt Whitman in ‘Song of Myself’ (1891-92), ‘Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)’ The multitudinous self is empirically tractable and responsive to the experiences of ‘real people’ who do or do not have mental disorders. According to this model, the self is a dynamic, complex, relational and multi-aspectual mechanism of capacities, processes, states and traits that support a degree of agency. The multitudinous self has five distinct but functionally complementary dimensions: ecological, intersubjective, conceptual, private, and temporally extended. These dimensions work together to connect the individual to her body, her social world, her Read More ›

From Sal Cordova at Creation-Evolution Headlines: Chris Rupe co-authored the book Contested Bones with John Sanford to tell about the inadequate evidence for human evolution. The book is almost entirely about bones and the fossil record, but there are 3 pages in that book that refute claims by evolutionary biologists that the human genome is badly designed because of repetitive DNA elements known as Alus. Some 10-11% of the human genome is composed of repeats of specific 300-base pattern called an Alu. Evolutionists claim this is bad design. Their reasoning goes something like this: ‘You only need one copy of a phone book in a house, maybe a few at most, certainly not millions of copies. Therefore the 1 million Read More ›

From Lisa Zyga at Phys.org: Adam and others have been investigating a leading candidate for a water alternative called formamide, a clear liquid that consists of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. Not only does formamide favor polymer bond formation more than water does, it also reacts with other molecules to form nucleobases, amino acids, and some of the other basic compounds needed to make nucleic acids. But there is a glaring problem with this proposal: formamide does not occur naturally in any significant quantity anywhere on Earth. Although formamide is widely used in industry as a solvent for making pharmaceuticals and pesticides, all of this formamide is synthetically produced. Formamide does exist in space, however, which has previously motivated researchers Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Archaeologists say they may have discovered one of the earliest examples of a ‘crayon’ — possibly used by our ancestors 10,000 years ago for applying colour to their animal skins or for artwork. The ochre crayon was discovered near an ancient lake, now blanketed in peat, near Scarborough, North Yorkshire. An ochre pebble was found at another site on the opposite side of the lake. The pebble had a heavily striated surface that is likely to have been scraped to produce a red pigment powder. The crayon measures 22mm long and 7mm wide. … A pendant was discovered at Star Carr in 2015 and is the earliest known Mesolithic art in Britain. Here, more than 30 red deer Read More ›

The way activists eat their own. From 500 Women Scientists at Scientific American: Tonight, Bill Nye “The Science Guy” will accompany Republican Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), Trump’s nominee for NASA Administrator, to the State of the Union address. Nye has said that he’s accompanying the Congressman to help promote space exploration, since, he asserts, “NASA is the best brand the United States has” and that his attendance “should not be … seen as an acceptance of the recent attacks on science and the scientific community.” But by attending the SOTU as Rep. Bridenstine’s guest, Nye has tacitly endorsed those very policies, and put his own personal brand over the interests of the scientific community at large. Rep. Bridenstine is a Read More ›

Responding to animal behaviorist Kevin Laland’s recent piece at Aeon, Evolution unleashed: Is evolutionary science due for a major overhaul – or is talk of ‘revolution’ misguided? At Oscillations, Mazur writes, In the unconvincing Aeon article, “Evolution unleashed,” Laland asks the question: “If the extended evolutionary synthesis is not a call for a revolution in evolution, then what is it, and why do we need it? Good point. To answer Laland’s question—We don’t need it. We don’t need a graft onto Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. What we do need is a coherent evolutionary theory, untainted by mystical influences and non-transparent funding. An evolutionary theory that reflects the world of microbes and viruses that all animals, plants and fungi live in and Read More ›

The microbes are archaea, not bacteria. From ScienceDaily: The first-ever analysis of DNA of a contemporary heat-loving, ammonia-oxidizing organism, published in open-access journal Frontiers in Microbiology, reveals that evolution of the necessary adaptations may have been helped by highly mobile genetic elements and DNA exchange with a variety of other organisms. Most extremophiles are microorganisms — and many of the most extreme are archaea, an ancient group of single-celled organisms intermediate between the other two domains of life, bacteria and eukaryotes. Different archaea lineages are specialized to different extreme environments, including scalding hot springs, incredibly salty lakes, sunless deep-sea trenches and frigid Antarctic deserts. Only one branch, Thaumarchaeota, has managed to colonize very successfully the Earth’s more hospitable places — Read More ›

Sahelanthropus is supposed to be the oldest bipedal hominin. From Gunter Bechly at Evolution News & Science Today: When John Hawks inquired with the original describer of Sahelanthropus, Professor Michel Brunet, he received the following remarkable reply: In Chad, we have uncovered thousands of bones, which are in the process of study. Perhaps among them are hominid bones, but I only comment on those that have been published in a scientific review. This is plainly false, because in fact only a few dozen fossils were uncovered together with the cranium of Sahelanthropus. This is clearly visible in the photos from the discovery site (Hawks 2009b). Hawks comments that the femur bone lay unrecognized for three years in the Toros-Menalla faunal Read More ›

From John Horgan: In The End of Science I asserted that scientists are running into cognitive and physical limits and will never solve the deepest mysteries of nature, notably why there is something rather than nothing. I predicted that if we create super-intelligent machines, they too will be baffled by the enigma of their own existence. In Switzerland I suggested that the riddle of consciousness is a synecdoche for the riddle of humanity. What are we, really? For most of our history, religion has given us the answer. We are immortal souls, children of a loving god, striving to reach heaven or nirvana. Most modern scientists reject these religious explanations, but they cannot agree on an alternative. They have proposed Read More ›

Everything is conscious, many now say. From Olivia Goldhill at Quartz: The materialist viewpoint states that consciousness is derived entirely from physical matter. It’s unclear, though, exactly how this could work. “It’s very hard to get consciousness out of non-consciousness,” says Chalmers. “Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there’s a gap: Consciousness.” Dualism holds that consciousness is separate and distinct from physical matter—but that then raises the question of how consciousness interacts and has an effect on the physical world. Panpsychism offers an attractive alternative solution: Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an “unimaginably simple” form of consciousness, says Goff. These particles then come together to form more complex Read More ›

Oh? From Graham Readfearn at the Guardian: Deniers have found a platform in emerging publications that publish without rigorous review Journals that are “open access” make their money by charging academics or institutions a fee for peer reviewing and checking submitted academic manuscripts, and then publishing them. There are many reputable publishers working this way. But this murky world has a predator of its own – climate science deniers looking to take advantage of the questionable quality controls in return for getting their work published in what the publishers claim are “peer-reviewed journals” but that, in reality, are not. It might make very little difference if they were “peer-reviewed” according to Readfearn’s standards, given how things are going with peer Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: While it is largely believed that horses simply evolved with fewer digits, researchers pose a new theory that suggests remnants of all five toes are still present within the hooves of the horse. For the first time, as published in the January 24 issue of Royal Society Open Science, NYITCOM researcher, Nikos Solounias, Ph.D., paleontologist and anatomy professor, and a team of researchers propose that the reduction in the number of digits is not a matter of simple attrition; instead, they believe that all five digits have merged to form the compacted forelimbs with hooves that we know today. Currently, scientists accept that splints, small bones found along the outer sides of the metacarpal in modern horses, are Read More ›

From Mike Wall at LiveScience: Alien-life hunters should keep an open mind when scanning the atmospheres of exoplanets, a new study stresses. The time-honored strategy of looking for oxygen is indeed a good one, study team members said; after all, it’s tough for this gas to build up in a planet’s atmosphere if life isn’t there churning it out. “But we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket,” study lead author Joshua Krissansen-Totton, a doctoral student in Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a statement. More. But there are no eggs. There is no basket. At this point, now that SETI itself is uncertain about even looking for intelligence as Read More ›