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Using “cutting edge DNA technology.” From ScienceDaily: Meladema coriacea is among Europe’s largest water beetles and has been considered common across the south of the continent and in North Africa since the early 19th century. But academics from the University of Plymouth and the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona have now shown what was long thought to be one common species is actually two. Using DNA sequence data and detailed analysis of morphology, they have described a new species — Meladema lepidoptera — which appears virtually identical to Meladema coriacea at first glance, but is very divergent genetically. Meladema lepidoptera is restricted to Corsica, Sardinia, adjacent small islands and some areas of the Italian mainland, where it apparently occurs Read More ›

From Jake Buehler at Gizmodo: Imagine an animal with the body of a chameleon, the feet and claws of an anteater, the humped back of a camel, and a tail that is both flattened like a beaver’s, but also like that of a scorpion. If you’re thinking this sounds like someone just threw your local zoo into a blender—or that it’s not far off from mythical creatures like the chimera or manticore—this would be understandable. But this bonkers description fits a real, long-extinct group of tree-dwelling reptiles that lived more than 200 million years ago. Now, a new species of these freaky little critters has been identified, and its fossilized remains pile onto the anatomical strangeness, showing that this ancient Read More ›

  From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: Naturalists (who say nature is all there is) have recently sought to jimmy the rules around evidence to accommodate their strong belief that a multiverse really exists. Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel offers a glimpse of the future they propose, in a piece at Forbes titled “The multiverse is inevitable and we’re living in it”: “What is the Multiverse, then? It may go well beyond physics, and be the first physically motivated “metaphysics” we’ve ever encountered. For the first time, we’re understanding the limits of what our Universe can teach us. There is information we need, but that we’ll never obtain, in order to elevate this into the realm of testable science. Until Read More ›

Jeremy England. From John Ellis at PJ Media: In his new novel Origin, Brown includes a character named Jeremy England who is a physics professor. This fictional character based on the real-life Jeremy England has “identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life.” Furthermore, according to the book, Professor England has disproven all other theories of creation, including the Biblical account recorded in Genesis. The real Jeremy England scoffs at Dan Brown’s fictional creation that hijacks England’s actual research. England takes umbrage at Brown’s use of his name and research to suggest that the Book of Genesis has been refuted. England points out that his namesake in Dan Brown’s book offers no real science to interact Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Early humans seem to have recognised the dangers of inbreeding at least 34,000 years ago, and developed surprisingly sophisticated social and mating networks to avoid it, new research has found. The study, reported in the journal Science, examined genetic information from the remains of anatomically modern humans who lived during the Upper Palaeolithic, a period when modern humans from Africa first colonised western Eurasia. The results suggest that people deliberately sought partners beyond their immediate family, and that they were probably connected to a wider network of groups from within which mates were chosen, in order to avoid becoming inbred. This suggests that our distant ancestors are likely to have been aware of the dangers of inbreeding, and Read More ›

  From Stephen Sawchuk at Education Week: A standard dealing with the process of evolution deletes that word entirely, replacing it with a standard that asks students to construct an explanation based on evidence that biological diversity is “influenced by” things like competition for limited resources, the proliferation of organisms that are better equipped to survive, and genetic variations in species. … The proposed changes have brought a groundswell of criticism, both locally and throughout the country. Over 60 scientists associated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory took out a full-page ad in the Santa Fe paper of record, the New Mexican. “There is absolutely no scientific rationale for weakening the treatment of these subjects in New Mexico K-12 education,” Read More ›

In response to Jumpin’ Genes!: A quarter of cow DNA came from reptiles, our physics color commentator writes, This whole business of parasites transmitting retrotransposons from reptiles to cows is just so zoo-centric. What about plants? What about viruses? Don’t they get to originate DNA too? When are they going to admit that this whole business of descent-with-modification really disrespects half the tree of life? Zoo-racist, that’s what they are. Most human beings must confess to a lack of genuine empathy with bugs, worms, and germs. Seriously, although no one talks about it much, these types of finds can’t be good news for the End of Science rent-a-riot (Darwin-in-the-schools lobby). See also: Jumpin’ Genes!: A quarter of cow DNA came from Read More ›

From Ed Yong at The Atlantic: This jumping gene seems to have entered the cow genome from the unlikeliest of sources: snakes and lizards. Retrotransposons typically jump around within a single genome, but sometimes they can travel further afield. Through means that scientists still don’t fully understand, they can leave the DNA of one species and enter that of another. And so it is with BovB. No one knows the animal in which it originated. But from that mystery source, it has jumped into the DNA of snakes and cows, elephants and butterflies, ants and rhinos. … No one knows how BovB travels between species, but Ivancevic and Adelson suspect that it might spread via blood-sucking parasites. They have found Read More ›

From Ari N. Shulman at Big Questions Online: Is human perception a controlled hallucination? That was the claim advanced in a pair of talks at the Human Mind Conference in Cambridge, England in June, one by Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, the other by Andy Clark, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh. They were not advancing the radical thesis, made by some overeager neuro-philosophers, that all experience is an illusion. Rather, Seth and Clark made the case that there is no bright dividing line between hallucination and ordinary perception. … The terms “controlled hallucination,” and related ones like “inferred fantasy” and “virtual reality,” are useful rhetorical devices for illustrating what is distinctive about the theory Read More ›

From Matteo Rini at Physics: Life is hectic inside a living cell. To keep a cell functioning, myriad processes such as protein synthesis, power generation, waste disposal, and DNA replication are constantly and simultaneously running. These processes all rely on the precise and coordinated transport of organelles, proteins, and other biomolecules to the places where the cell needs them. George Shubeita, a professor of physics at New York University Abu Dhabi, studies the mechanisms by which tiny molecular motors move these cargoes. He observes the motors with superresolution microscopes and uses optical traps, commonly known as optical tweezers, to engage the motors in a “tug-of-war” game that allows him to measure their strength. In a conversation with Physics, Shubeita explains Read More ›

From Becky Feirrera at Motherboard: All stories about robots are, on some level, reflections of human behavior, and Thom’s efforts to flirt like a human—borrowing overheard phrases from others to compensate for his lack of self—is familiar enough in the human dating scene. But by the end of “The Flirtbot’s Condition,” a friendly chat with some barflies seems to temporarily ground Thom in an otherwise flighty world. In exchange, the human characters are reminded that even a malfunctioning robot can stumble across poetry. More. Isn’t the main problem that the robot doesn’t really want or need a relationship anyway? Reminds one of something J. Scott Turner said in Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed Read More ›

Here. Years ago, we pioneered the term noviewer, to describe people who review books without reading them. Now a friend has written to ask for a contest to come up with term to describe the reviewer who is the author’s public relations specialist. For example, the book is called Darwin was right and the reviewer is shouting Amen! fifty times. Or anyway, that is what it sounds like. Sounds like fun. Judged October 15. Free shipping [of a copy of J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It,] to postal address provided by winner. Here are the entries we received: At 1 full bore reviewer At 3 cheer-reader At 6 Read More ›

From Shivali Best at Daily Mail: Professor Cox said that he found ‘no reason at all’ why human intelligence couldn’t be simulated by computers – although he did not express a timeline for this to happen. Classic. Last we heard, the mind doesn’t really exist and our perceptions are hallucinations. funny, all that stuff disappears when these immortality-through-AI ideas hold the floor instead. In a recent article for The Conversation, Professor Richard Jones, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Sheffield outlined some ‘serious problems’ with the idea. He said: ‘To replicate the mind digitally we would have to map each of these connections, something that is far beyond our current capabilities. Even if we could create such a Read More ›

Yes, that Dan Brown, of da Vinci code fame, on the book tour circuit. From Reuters via Daily Mail: Brown said technological change and the development of artificial intelligence would transform the concept of the divine. ‘We will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other,’ he said, forecasting the emergence of ‘some form of global consciousness that we perceive and that becomes our divine’. … ‘Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us … will diminish and eventually disappear,’ he added. More. The perceived “need” for moral judgement disappeared a long time ago, actually. Governments today prefer secular systems where they can make and impose the rules themselves without reference Read More ›

From Sam Kriss at Atlantic: Among philosophers, biologists, and cognitive scientists, this nightmare is an exciting new field of study, known as embodied or extended cognition: broadly, the theory that what we think of as brain processes can take place outside of the brain. In some cases, this isn’t a particularly radical idea. The octopus, for instance, has a bizarre and miraculous mind, sometimes inside its brain, sometimes extending beyond it in sucker-tipped trails. Neurons are spread throughout its body; the creature has more of them in its arms than in its brain itself. It’s possible that each arm might be, to some extent, an independently thinking creature, all of which are collapsed into an octopean superconsciousness in times of Read More ›