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Summer vacation pricing for a leading book: US$7.56 From Amazon: Many volumes have addressed the question of whether or not naturalism is a required part of scientific methodology. However, few, if any, go any further into the many concerns that arise from a rejection of naturalism. If methodological naturalism is rejected, what replaces it? If science is not naturalistic, what defines science? If naturalism is rejected, what is gained and what is lost? How does the practice of science change? What new avenues would be available, and how would they be investigated? This volume is divided into three parts. The first part considers the question of methodological naturalism and its role in the demarcation problem – deciding what is science Read More ›

From Hannah Osborne at Newsweek: Scientists studying the brain have discovered that the organ operates on up to 11 different dimensions, creating multiverse-like structures that are “a world we had never imagined.” … Henry Markram, director of Blue Brain Project, said the findings could help explain why the brain is so hard to understand. “The mathematics usually applied to study networks cannot detect the high-dimensional structures and spaces that we now see clearly,” he said. “We found a world that we had never imagined. There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.” More. The structures are Read More ›

Crossway is publishing a mammoth (over 600-page) anthology critiquing theistic evolution , with a wide range of contributors from science to theology. From the publisher: The debate about biological origins continues to be hotly contested within the Christian church. Prominent organizations such as Biologos (USA) and Faraday Institute (UK) insist that Christians must yield to an unassailable scientific consensus in favor of contemporary evolutionary theory and modify traditional biblical ideas about the creation of life accordingly. They promote a view known as “theistic evolution” or “evolutionary creation.” They argue that God used—albeit in an undetectable way—evolutionary mechanisms to produce all forms of life. This book contests this proposal. Featuring two dozen highly credentialed scientists, philosophers, and theologians from Europe and Read More ›

But will it really lead to a hack-free internet? From Lee Billings at Scientific American: In a landmark study, a team of Chinese scientists using an experimental satellite has tested quantum entanglement over unprecedented distances, beaming entangled pairs of photons to three ground stations across China—each separated by more than 1,200 kilometers. The test verifies a mysterious and long-held tenet of quantum theory, and firmly establishes China as the front-runner in a burgeoning “quantum space race” to create a secure, quantum-based global communications network—that is, a potentially unhackable “quantum internet” that would be of immense geopolitical importance. The findings were published Thursday in Science. More. We do not live in the world we think we do. That said, probably, any Read More ›

From the Daily Galaxy: According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the curvature of spacetime was infinite at the big bang. In fact, at this point all mathematical tools fail, and the theory breaks down. However, there remained the notion that perhaps the beginning of the universe could be treated in a simpler manner, and that the infinities of the big bang might be avoided. This has indeed been the hope expressed since the 1980s by the well-known cosmologists James Hartle and Stephen Hawking with their “no-boundary proposal”, and by Alexander Vilenkin with his “tunnelling proposal”. Now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Potsdam and at the Perimeter Institute in Canada have been able Read More ›

Again. In his new book Zombie Science, biologist Jonathan Wells asks a simple question: If the icons of evolution were just innocent textbook errors, why do so many of them still persist? Wells gave a presentation about Zombie Science at the book’s national launch party recently in Seattle. Watch as Wells explores a new wave of icons walking the halls of science while putting some familiar corpses back in the grave. New topics include DNA, the human eye, vestigial organs, antibiotic resistance, and cancer. Looking past the current zombie outbreak, Wells offers a hopeful vision of science free from the clutches of materialist dogma. Wells himself is something of an iconoclast, railing against the tyranny of science’s Darwin-only advocates. His Read More ›

From neurologist Robert J. Burton at Nautilus: As a fledgling neurologist, I’d already seen a wide variety of strange mental states arising out of physical diseases. But on this particular day, I couldn’t wrap my mind around a gene mutation generating an isolated feeling of being spied on by the FBI. How could a localized excess of amino acids in a segment of DNA be transformed into paranoia? Though I didn’t know it at the time, I had run headlong into the “hard problem of consciousness,” the enigma of how physical brain mechanisms create purely subjective mental states. In the subsequent 50 years, what was once fodder for neurologists’ late night speculations has mushroomed into the pre-eminent question in the Read More ›

Here. Biological Theory, June 2017, Volume 12, Issue 2, pp 67–71 Three Modes of Evolution by Natural Selection and Drift: A New or an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis? Marion Blute First Online: 07 April 2017 DOI: 10.1007/s13752-017-0264-8 Cite this article as: Blute, M. Biol Theory (2017) 12: 67. doi:10.1007/s13752-017-0264-8 Abstract According to sources both in print and at a recent meeting, evolutionary theory is currently undergoing change which some would characterize as a New Synthesis, and others as an Extended Synthesis. This article argues that the important changes involve recognizing that there are three means by which evolutionary change can be initiated (genetically, ecologically, and developmentally) and three corresponding modes of evolutionary drift. It compares the three and goes on to discuss Read More ›

From Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: The organizing committee for the Munich conference was chaired by Richard Dawid, a string theorist turned philosopher who has written a 2013 book, String Theory and the Scientific Method. For a fuller discussion of that book, see the linked blog post. To oversimplify, it makes the case that the proper way to react to string theory unification’s failure according to the conventional understanding of the scientific method is to change our understanding of the scientific method. Much of the Munich conference was devoted to discussing that as an issue in philosophy of science. … Silverstein begins her article explaining how physics at a very high energy scale can in principle Read More ›

From Charles Q. Choi at Inside Science: However, much remains unknown about when and how cyanobacteria evolved oxygenic photosynthesis. “The whole question of the origin of cyanobacteria has long been a mystery because they kind of just appeared out of the tree of life with this very advanced capability to do oxygenic photosynthesis without any apparent forebears,” said biochemist Robert Blankenship at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Until recently, all known cyanobacteria were photosynthetic members of class Oxyphotobacteria. But in 2013, researchers discovered a nonphotosynthetic class of cyanobacteria known as Melainabacteria. Now Fischer and his colleagues have discovered a second class of nonphotosynthetic cyanobacteria, the Sericytochromatia. The researchers suggest that both groups are clearly closely related to photosynthetic cyanobacteria, Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The existence of agents — beings with intentions and goal-oriented behavior — has long seemed profoundly at odds with the reductionist assumption that all behavior arises from mechanistic interactions between particles. Agency doesn’t exist among the atoms, and so reductionism suggests agents don’t exist at all: that Romeo’s desires and psychological states are not the real causes of his actions, but merely approximate the unknowably complicated causes and effects between the atoms in his brain and surroundings. Hoel’s theory, called “causal emergence,” roundly rejects this reductionist assumption. “Causal emergence is a way of claiming that your agent description is really real,” said Hoel, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University who first proposed the idea with Read More ›

But by now, so what? Apart from political issues (gaining power by manipulating fake science claims), all this stuff would be so long discredited that it would only survive as a branch of the “Cultural Studies Department.”  Anyway,t his stuff: Over 30 years ago, Leonard Martin, Sabine Stepper, and I (Strack et al., 1988) conducted two studies to test the “facial feedback” hypothesis (Darwin, 1872). At the time, the hypothesis itself, namely that facial expressions may affect emotional experiences, was well established and frequently tested (e.g., Leventhal and Mace, 1970; Laird, 1974). However, the underlying mechanism remained largely unexplored. … The resulting “pen study” was meant neither to demonstrate a cute phenomenon nor to identify a powerful intervention to improve Read More ›

From Chase Nelson at Inference Review: ORIGINALLY PROPOSED by Motoo Kimura, Jack King, and Thomas Jukes, the neutral theory of molecular evolution is inherently non-Darwinian.2 Darwinism asserts that natural selection is the driving force of evolutionary change. It is the claim of the neutral theory, on the other hand, that the majority of evolutionary change is due to chance. Each individual in a typical mammal population has two copies of its genome in almost every cell. The exact DNA sequences they contain may differ as the result of mutations, random copying errors in which one nucleotide letter is replaced by another. Other changes can also occur, such as the deletion or duplication of larger DNA segments. The result is genetic Read More ›

A friend writes to raise the question of Basener’s ceiling: From Robert Marks II at ENV: We show that no meaningful information can arise from an evolutionary process unless that process is guided. Even when guided, the degree of evolution’s accomplishment is limited by the expertise of the guiding information source — a limit we call Basener’s ceiling. An evolutionary program whose goal is to master chess will never evolve further and offer investment advice. More. William Basener is an artificial intelligence expert. Our friend writes “Complexity in evolutionary algorithms always stops at a certain point and never gets any better, which is predicted by Basener’s ceiling. He also notes that biological evolution seems to have no problem continuously generating Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: Fine-tuning of the universe is so unpleasant a subject for materialists that it cannot really become a controversy. The desired evidence favors a random universe, accidentally spilled. Differing points of view on the findings would, of course, be funded by the government. But the randomness would be agreed upon up front. On the other hand, if evidence matters, our universe appears fine-tuned. In the end it is not really an issue about the evidence. Help! we are drowning in evidence! The universe’s expansion speed is said to be just right for life, the Higgs boson seems to be fine-tuned, and Earth has a “unique” iron signature, just as a few examples. This Read More ›