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From Nathan Cofnas at Weekly Standard: What is really disturbing, though, is that Hawking has flagrantly given up on even the pretense of engaging with actual science. He speaks entirely from authority: I am a scientist. Adopt this political policy that I favor or suffer fire and sulfuric acid. The threatened punishment for noncompliance substitutes sulfuric acid for the regular sulfur (brimstone) that features in old-fashioned religion. As far as the justification for the claim, there is no important difference between this and a religious statement that is supposed to be believed simply because it issues forth from a high priest. That can lead to awkward problems when the promoters of scientism turn out to be less than virtuous. Consider Read More ›

From Ian O’Neill at Space.com, we learn: Is our sun fundamentally different from other “sun-like” stars? This question highlights an ongoing controversy about whether our nearest star is unique or, in fact, an “ordinary star.” Now, an international collaboration of solar physicists thinks it has an answer. Although the sun is very special to Earth and all of the planets in the solar system, it isn’t unique; indeed, it is driven by the same internal mechanisms as other stars, the researchers said in a statement highlighting the findings of a new study. lMore. Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon writes to say, This presser made me laugh. Here’s the punch line: “Although the sun is very special to Earth and all Read More ›

From Abby Olena at the Scientist: For more than 50 years, scientists have taken for granted that all snakes share a ZW sex determination system, in which males have two Z chromosomes and females have one Z and one W. But a study, published today (July 6) in Current Biology, reveals that the Central American boa (Boa imperator) and the Burmese python (Python bivittatus) use an XY sex determination system, which evolved independently in the two species. If a f fundamental change like that could evolve independently, something other than Darwin’s nature “hourly adding up” must be at work. But what? An internalized library of possible solutions, as Lee Spetner suggests? Gamble agrees that the next step is exploring other Read More ›

From Chase Nelson at Inference Review: The typical human gestation times of 38 weeks is, in fact, longer than one would expect for a primate of similar body mass. Instead of arguing for an enlarged brain, then, one might as easily argue for a diminished body mass. Thus, it is in spite of similar periods of gestation that humans are more helpless than other great apes at birth; humans are not born early. Moreover, we wean infants earlier than expected for a primate of our body size, not later. The opposite should be the case if weaning time is a proxy for altriciality, and if the obstetrical hypothesis is correct that altriciality requires more intelligent parents. Fetal development provides additional Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: “Because of the animal’s decomposition, it is difficult to be certain what this animal may have been,” John Hyde, a program leader of fisheries genetics at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California, told Live Science in an email. “However, it does resemble a black sea hare (Aplysia vaccaria) that are fairly common in this area.” Sea hares, a group of sea slug species,fall within the class of gastropoda. If the strange animal were a black sea hare, that could explain its large size: A. vaccaria is the largest gastropod in the world — it can weigh as much as 30 lbs. (13.6 kg) and grow as long Read More ›

Don Johnson is the author of Programming of Life and Programming of Life 2: the Earth These vids introduce the ideas.   See also: Don Johnson’s lecture on “Bioinformatics: The Information in Life”

From Carie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’” at Journal Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography: Abstract: An increasing amount of scholarship in critical, feminist, and anti-racist geographies has recently focused self-reflexively on the topics of exclusion and discrimination within the discipline itself. In this article we contribute to this literature by considering citation as a problematic technology that contributes to the reproduction of the white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship, despite advances toward more inclusivity in the discipline in recent decades. Yet we also suggest, against citation counting and other related neoliberal technologies that imprecisely approximate measures of impact, influence, and academic excellence, citation Read More ›

You know, string theory leads to a multiverse. As described by Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: There’s an interview with Nima Arkani-Hamed here. His talk at the recent PASCOS 2017 conference (real title is second slide “What the Hell is Going On?”) gives his take on the current state of HEP, post failure of the LHC to find SUSY. He’s sticking with his 2004 “Split SUSY” as his “Best Bet”. I’d like to think his inspirational ending claiming that the negative LHC results are forcing people to rethink the foundations of the subject, asking again the question “What is QFT?” reflects reality, but not sure I see much of that. More. It has become a cult. It does not need to be Read More ›

Re J. Scott Turner’s forthcoming Purpose and Desire: From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views, His book, Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, underlines that Turner is not an “anti-Darwinist.” On the contrary, he explains that “I want deeply for it” – meaning the modern theory of Darwinian evolution – “to make sense.” The reasons for his disillusion, which he outlines in this fascinating contribution to the evolution debate, turn upon long-ignored problems with the theory, and counterevidence from the mysterious nature of life itself. It is still a couple of months too early for reviews of Purpose and Desire, but Kirkus welcomes it with a pre-publication starred review Read More ›

Rob Sheldon is our physics color commentator, and he offers some thoughts on the claims made in A SETI hypothesis: We are Them: a) The paper is a sequel to this one: “The WoW! signal of the terrestrial genetic code” In that original paper, the same authors argue that the mapping between nucleotides and amino acids shows peculiar arrangements of high Shannon information, and is therefore a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence. As you might guess, the authors took a lot of flak for saying this. This paper is the response. b) This paper tries to argue the opposite direction, that if you were a supremely intelligent person designing the mapping from DNA–>amino acids, how would you go about putting information Read More ›

From Marcelo Gleiser at NPR: To me, what’s fascinating is that consciousness is what makes the universe exist. Just think that before humans came to be, and discounting other potentially smart creatures out there, the universe was just doing its thing, expanding, stars being born and dying, entropy increasing overall. But as matter organized itself into living things in our planet, it eventually reached a level of complexity that allowed for self-awareness, the ability to know that thyself is a self. This emergent picture of animal consciousness is the one that is meaningful to us, as it places humans back in the driver’s seat of existence. We will never know all things about the universe, but we have the amazing Read More ›

A friend sends this from the International Journal of Astrobiology (Cambridge): Maxim A. Makukov (a1) and Vladimir I. shCherbak (a2) Published online: 10 July 2017 After it was proposed that life on Earth might descend from seeding by an earlier extraterrestrial civilization motivated to secure and spread life, some authors noted that this alternative offers a testable implication: microbial seeds could be intentionally supplied with a durable signature that might be found in extant organisms. In particular, it was suggested that the optimal location for such an artefact is the genetic code, as the least evolving part of cells. However, as the mainstream view goes, this scenario is too speculative and cannot be meaningfully tested because encoding/decoding a signature within Read More ›

From Michelle Malkin at Townhall: As I’ve been chronicling in my newspaper columns and CRTV.com investigative reports, many state crime labs and police departments are particularly ill-equipped and inadequately trained to interpret DNA evidence, especially “touch” or “trace” DNA — minute amounts of DNA of unknown origin often transferred through incidental contact — which has resulted in monstrous miscarriages of justice against innocent people. The aura of infallibility conferred on crime lab analysts by “CSI”-style TV shows exacerbates the problem when juries place undue weight on indeterminate DNA evidence of little to no probative value. Just last week, North Carolina’s Mark Carver, who was convicted of murdering a college student based on dubious touch DNA that was likely the result Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: They call their theory the “poorly sleeping grandparent hypothesis.” The basic idea is that, for much of human history, living and sleeping in mixed-age groups of people with different sleep habits helped our ancestors keep a watchful eye and make it through the night. “Any time you have a mixed-age group population, some go to bed early, some later,” Nunn said. “If you’re older you’re more of a morning lark. If you’re younger you’re more of a night owl.” The researchers hope the findings will shift our understanding of age-related sleep disorders. “A lot of older people go to doctors complaining that they wake up early and can’t get back to sleep,” Nunn said. “But maybe there’s nothing Read More ›

From Joel Shurkin at InsideScience: It’s hard to think of dinosaurs as being loving, caring parents, but scientists have found some of them may have been just that. Take the oviraptorosaurs, a group of feathered creatures that look as if they were constructed by a malignant committee from spare bird parts. By studying fossilized oviraptorosaur eggs, researchers from France and China have found that oviraptorosaurs lay across those eggs in nests and warmed them with body heat just as modern birds do. Paleontologists had previously theorized that oviraptorosaurs incubated their eggs, but the French-Chinese team came up with the numbers. They also added to the theory that at least some dinosaurs were warm-blooded reptiles. More. With dinosaurs, as with Neanderthal Read More ›