News

From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: The political campaign for the multiverse continues today with a piece by Amanda Gefter at Nautilus. It’s a full-throated salvo from the Linde-Guth side of the multiverse propaganda war they are now waging, with Linde dismissing Steinhardt’s criticism as based on “a total ignorance of what is going on”. All of the quotes for the article are on the pro-multiverse side. There is a new argument from them I’d never heard before: Guth comes up with this one: You can create a universe from nothing—you can create infinite universes from nothing—as long as they all add up to nothing. … The article is subtitled “Why the majority of physicists are on one side Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Now scientists around Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich paleontologist Professor Bettina Reichenbacher have described a new fossil cichlid discovered in Upper Miocene strata in East Africa, which provides new insights into the evolutionary history of the group. Moreover, the results are consistent with molecular genetic data relating to the ongoing diversification of the family in the Great Lakes region of East Africa, which have indicated that hybridization between members of related species or even genera has played a major role in cichlid speciation. The work also sheds light on the environmental conditions that prevailed in the Rift Valley of East Africa in the Upper Miocene period, 9-10 million years ago. The new findings appear in the Journal of Vertebrate Read More ›

From William Hicks on Evergreen at Heat Street: The campus erupted in protest a two weeks ago when biology professor Bret Weinstein emailed a student criticizing their plans for the “Day of Absence.” Usually the event is conducted by students of color leaving the campus for the day, but this year they wanted to coerce all white students and faculty to leave instead. Weinstein called this an act of oppression of its own, and was pilloried by hundreds of students who in effect took over the campus in Olympia, Washington. Since then the school’s administration and faculty have capitulated to almost all the protesters demands and are completely humiliated on a regular basis. It’s all filmed and uploaded to YouTube. Read More ›

From Sarah Chaffee at ENV: Two Days After Warning Against “Anti-Science” Label, Nature Calls Academic Freedom “Anti-Science” From the headline of the piece you might think you were reading some online tabloid. But guess again. Published in Nature on May 12 and republished by Scientific American, Erin Ross’s article declares, “Revamped ‘anti-science’ education bills in United States find success.” The headline is describing legislation in Florida and academic freedom resolutions in Alabama and Indiana. The term “anti-science” is ironic. As we noted at Evolution News the other day, Nature itself published a May 10 editorial, “Beware the anti-science label.” It warned against using the term lightly and urged that “Presenting science as a battle for truth against ignorance is an Read More ›

From William Doino, Jr. at First Things: To appreciate his achievement, one should start by noting what Plantinga had to overcome. As Heather Templeton Dill said, announcing this year’s prize: When Dr. Plantinga began his career in the late 1950’s, most academic philosophers deliberately rejected religiously informed philosophy. But early on, Dr. Plantinga defended a variety of arguments for the existence of God, marking the beginning of his efforts to put theistic belief back on the philosophical agenda. Plantinga’s first important work, God and Other Minds, re-examined the classic arguments for and against God. It concluded that belief in the existence of God was rational, just as belief in other minds is. Arguments for the existence of other minds cannot Read More ›

From Charles Q. Choi at LiveScience: We know little about Earth’s surface temperatures for the first 4 billion years or so of its history. This presents a limitation into research of life’s origins on Earth and how it might arise on distant worlds. Now researchers suggest that by resurrecting ancient enzymes they could estimate the temperatures in which these organisms likely evolved billions of years ago. The scientists recently published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. More. The big challenge will likely be to keep implicit assumptions from skewing the findings: Scientists estimate when ancient enzymes might have existed by looking at their closest living relatives of their host organism. The greater the number Read More ›

Readers may recall that NASA wonders how world religions would react if alien life were found. But Kirk Durston wonders at ENV whether atheism would survive. The probability of life spontaneously self-assembling anywhere in this universe is mind-staggeringly unlikely; essentially zero. If you are so unquestioningly naïve as to believe we just got incredibly lucky, then bless your soul. If we were to discover extraterrestrial life, however, then we would have had to get mind-staggeringly lucky two times! Like the forensic detectives at the lotteries commission, a thinking person would have to start operating on the well-founded suspicion that “something is going on.” On the other hand, the existence of life and beauty elsewhere in the universe is not at Read More ›

A friend writes to mention an online open access journal, Cosmos and History: Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of natural and social philosophy. It serves those who see philosophy’s vocation in questioning and challenging prevailing assumptions about ourselves and our place in the world, developing new ways of thinking about physical existence, life, humanity and society, so helping to create the future insofar as thought affects the issue. Philosophy so conceived is not exclusively identified with the work of professional philosophers, and the journal welcomes contributions from philosophically oriented thinkers from all disciplines. More. The article list looks interesting. For example: Now On-line Foundations of Mind IV: Quantum Mechanics Meets Read More ›

From Jeanna Bryner at LiveScience: Bigelow noted during the interview May 28 that his grandparents spotted a UFO on a canyon road outside Las Vegas: “It really sped up and came right into their face and filled up the entire windshield of the car. And it took off at a right angle and shot off into the distance,” he told “60 Minutes” reporter Lara Logan. “Do you believe in aliens?” Logan asked. “I’m absolutely convinced and that’s all there is to it,” said Bigelow, founder and CEO of the commercial space company Bigelow Aerospace. “There has been and there is an existing presence, an E.T. presence.” When asked if he expects to see forms of intelligent life as humans explore Read More ›

From Garry Kasparov at TED: Advanced Chess found its home on the internet, and in 2005, a so-called freestyle chess tournament produced a revelation. A team of grandmasters and top machines participated, but the winners were not grandmasters, not a supercomputer. The winners were a pair of amateur American chess players operating three ordinary PCs at the same time. Their skill of coaching their machines effectively counteracted the superior chess knowledge of their grandmaster opponents and much greater computational power of others. And I reached this formulation. A weak human player plus a machine plus a better process is superior to a very powerful machine alone, but more remarkably, is superior to a strong human player plus machine and an inferior Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: University of Queensland scientists discovered a new type of lymphatic brain “scavenger” cell by studying tropical freshwater zebrafish — which share many of the same cell types and organs as humans. Lead researcher Associate Professor Ben Hogan from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience said the fundamental discovery would help scientists understand how the brain forms and functions. “It is rare to discover a cell type in the brain that we didn’t know about previously, and particularly a cell type that we didn’t expect to be there,” he said. “The brain is the only organ without a known lymphatic system, so the fact that these cells are lymphatic in nature and surround the brain makes this finding quite a Read More ›

A friend draws attention to an interesting 2013 article by Boaz Miller in Synthese: Scientific consensus is widely deferred to in public debates as a social indicator of the existence of knowledge. However, it is far from clear that such deference to consensus is always justified. The existence of agreement in a community of researchers is a contingent fact, and researchers may reach a consensus for all kinds of reasons, such as fighting a common foe or sharing a common bias. Scientific consensus, by itself, does not necessarily indicate the existence of shared knowledge among the members of the consensus community. I address the question of under what conditions it is likely that a consensus is in fact knowledge based. Read More ›

Gotten mixed reviews. See what you think. From Pillbug Zone: In a universe driven by targets, a faceless corporation employs you to create an evolving ecosystem you can never hope to control…

Researchers: This system is exceptional in terms of the rates of evolutionary change and adaptive divergence, and it is likely that this may be due to the uncommon circumstances posed by the isolated and fragmented Galápagos landscape. At Molecular Ecology: Abstract: Beak shape in Darwin’s ground finches (Geospiza) is emblematic of natural selection and adaptive radiation, yet our understanding of the genetic basis of beak shape variation, and thus the genetic target of natural selection, is still evolving. Here we reveal the genomic architecture of beak shape variation using genomewide comparisons of four closely related and hybridizing species across 13 islands subject to parallel natural selection. Pairwise contrasts among species were used to identify a large number of genomic loci Read More ›

From Rachel Cernansky at Nature: Biodiversity moves beyond counting species Ecologists are increasingly looking at how richness of traits — rather than number of species — helps set the health of ecosystems. From the article: Biodiversity, it states, doesn’t have to be just about the number of a species in an ecosystem. Equally important to keeping an ecosystem healthy and resilient are the species’ different characteristics and the things they can do — measured in terms of specific traits such as body size or branch length. … “Just going for species numbers basically doesn’t allow us to harness all this incredibly rich information we have of how the real world operates,” says Sandra Díaz, an ecologist with Argentina’s National Scientific Read More ›