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From ScienceDaily: The Garden of the Ediacaran was a period in the ancient past when Earth’s shallow seas were populated with a bewildering variety of enigmatic, soft-bodied creatures. Scientists have pictured it as a tranquil, almost idyllic interlude that lasted from 635 to 540 million years ago. But a new interdisciplinary study suggests that the organisms living at the time may have been much more dynamic than experts have thought. Scientists have found It extremely difficult to fit these Precambrian species into the tree of life. That is because they lived in a time before organisms developed the ability to make shells or bones. As a result, they didn’t leave much fossil evidence of their existence behind, and even less Read More ›

From Daniel Engber, reviewing Richard Harris’s Rigor Mortis at Slate: Rigor may not always serve the public good. In biomedicine, everyone is looking for positive results—meaningful, affirmative experiments that could one day help support a novel treatment for disease. (That’s true both for scientists who study biomedicine at universities and those employed by giant pharmaceutical companies.) In that context, rigor serves to check scientists’ ambition and enthusiasm: It reins in their wild oversteps and helps to keep experiments on track. But not every field of research enjoys the same harmony of goals. In the sciences most relevant to policy and regulation—such as climatology, toxicology, and nutrition—academics’ focus on making new discoveries is counterbalanced by another group of researchers, funded by Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: This is true for all types of probabilities! So the next time something unlikely happens, or you realize that something very unlikely must have already occurred, remember that no matter how unlikely it is, the odds of it happening weren’t infinitely small. Its existence, just like our existence, already disproves that possibility! More. Siegel attempt to marshall Bayesianism to make his case that vanishingly small odds make no difference. But, of course, it isn’t the odds of single events that we must consider, but the odds of complex patterns, not always dependent on each other. Nice try, of the kind that traditional media robotically sponsor. Can readers imagine the uproar if someone argued for the Read More ›

From Mindy Weinberger, interviewing SETIs Seth Shostak at LiveScience: “The search should continue, simply because it’s a very interesting question,” he said. “Is Earth special? Is it the only place around with intelligent life? That would be remarkable — but it’s just as remarkable to find you’re not the only kid on the block. That’s something that would change our view of ourselves forever,” he said. More. But how or why would their discovery “change our view of ourselves forever”? Wouldn’t we still be the same? See also: But surely we can’t conjure an entire advanced civilization? and How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: Human teeth evolved from the same genes that make the bizarre beaked teeth of the pufferfish, according to new research by an international team of scientists. The study, led by Dr Gareth Fraser from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, has revealed that the pufferfish has a remarkably similar tooth-making programme to other vertebrates, including humans. Published in the journal PNAS, the research has found that all vertebrates have some form of dental regeneration potential. However the pufferfish use the same stem cells for tooth regeneration as humans do but only replace some teeth with elongated bands that form their characteristic beak. … “Our study suggests the same genes are instrumental in the early Read More ›

From Stuart Clark at the Guardian: To many these past 12 months seem as if we have already slipped into a parallel universe but Brexit and Trump are nothing compared to the alternate universes some astronomers are contemplating Brexit? Trump? Keep your political obsessions to yourself, Stuart. Say more about the evidence for parallel universes. It sounds bonkers but the latest piece of evidence that could favour a multiverse comes from the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society. They recently published a study on the so-called ‘cold spot’. This is a particularly cool patch of space seen in the radiation produced by the formation of the Universe more than 13 billion years ago. The cold spot was first glimpsed by NASA’s WMAP Read More ›

From Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God: at his book blog: It’s an odd pattern. It was this problem that came to mind as I recently revisited Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design and the Future of Faith, by Philip Kitcher. Kitcher is a philosopher at Columbia University, and he specializes on biology. His book was published by Oxford University Press, and was the recipient of the 2008 Lannan Notable Book Award. We should take his views seriously. His book begins with a forceful assertion: “From the perspective of almost the entire community of natural scientists world-wide, this continued resistance to Darwin is absurd. Biologists confidently proclaim that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection Read More ›

From George Musser at Nautilus: It has a built-in arrow. It is fundamental rather than derived from some deeper reality. Change is real, as opposed to an illusion or an artifact of perspective. The laws of physics act within time to generate each moment. Mixing mathematics, physics and philosophy, Maudlin bats away the reasons that scientists and philosophers commonly give for denying this folk wisdom. The mathematical arguments are the target of his current project, the second volume of New Foundations for Physical Geometry (the first appeared in 2014). Modern physics, he argues, conceptualizes time in essentially the same way as space. Space, as we commonly understand it, has no innate direction — it is isotropic. When we apply spatial Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Paper. (paywall) PhD student Qingdi Wang has tackled this question in a new study that tries to resolve a major incompatibility issue between two of the most successful theories that explain how our universe works: quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The study suggests that if we zoomed in-way in-on the universe, we would realize it’s made up of constantly fluctuating space and time. “Space-time is not as static as it appears, it’s constantly moving,” said Wang. … Unlike other scientists who have tried to modify the theories of quantum mechanics or general relativity to resolve the issue, Wang and his colleagues Unruh and Zhen Zhu, also a UBC PhD student, suggest a different approach. They Read More ›

From Jeffrey Marlow at Discover blog: “CHNOPS” is one of science’s most revered acronyms, an amalgamation of letters that rolls of the tongues of high school biology students and practicing researchers alike. It accounts for the six elements that comprise most biological molecules: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur. Biologists have traditionally assumed that all six elements were prerequisites, as each one is found in several of life’s most essential molecules. But what if earlier life forms weren’t quite so demanding? Could a sustainable metabolism actually exist without one of these seemingly essential elements? To explore this revolutionary possibility, Joshua Goldford, a graduate student in Boston University’s Bioinformatics Program, led a theoretical study taking aim at phosphorous and its Read More ›

Readers may not have heard the explosion when the New York Times’ remaining subscribers discovered that their Tree Deathstar had published a columnist who questions global warming hysteria. Publisher Sulzberger has been begging the enraged elitists to quit cancelling their subscriptions ever since. Possibly, the enraged ex-Times readers are too young to recall the era when newspapers routinely published non-editorial board opinions on the op-ed page. That is why it was called the op-ed page (“opposite” the “editorial”). That oppressive ancient custom predates the war on free speech. Formerly, Times readers would have felt somewhat foolish if they explained in polite company that an opposing opinion was a “trigger” for their latest emotional meltdown and/or lifelong freakout. In the 1990s, Read More ›

I (News) usually run this kind of question on Sunday but at a recent post, “Intelligent design: The materialist double standard” there was an exchange: Bob O’H: Seriously, what is the IDers’ answer to the “who designed the designer” question? (failure to answer this will – of course – immediately condemn all IDers as poopyheads, despite any efforts by the Federation of Creationist Scientists, International/Overseas to suppress this categorisation) and it was replied to: Barry Arrington: Bob, have you ever heard the old saw “there’s no such thing as a stupid question?” It is false. Stupid questions abound. The one you just asked is one of them. As has been pointed out on these pages 1,303,261 times (all of which Read More ›

Does anyone remember the Altenberg 16, a group of dissenting evolution theorists who met so nervously at the Konrad Lorenz institute in Austria that they locked a journalist out of the meeting?* They seem to be continuing to write papers, according to Massimo Pigliucci, I have just spent three delightful days at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for theoretical biology in Vienna, participating to a workshop of philosophers and biologists on the question of how to think about causality, especially within the context of the so-called Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the currently unfolding update to the standard model in evolutionary theory. Here’s one: Susan Foster, Incorporating the environmentally sensitive phenotype into evolutionary thinking: phenotypic plasticity mediates the relationship between selection and genotype Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: Here are four reasons why the war against freedom will not just somehow lose itself, without our taking any action: 2. Progressive academics are training “child soldiers” to carry out their revolution against intellectual freedom. Put simply, they are teaching their rioting students attitudes, values, and beliefs that guarantee failure in work and healthy relationships. Reader, would you want, as a colleague, someone who put a middle-aged woman professor at Middlebury College in the hospital ? No? Then think what your answer means. In an age when most graduates face job shortages, students who have been encouraged in transgressive behaviour must simply continue their “revolution” off campus. That may be all they know how to Read More ›

From Jesse Emspak at LiveScience: What Is Intelligence? 20 Years After Deep Blue, AI Still Can’t Think Like Humans “Good as they are, [computers] are quite poor at other kinds of decision making,” said Murray Campbell, a research scientist at IBM Research. “Some doubted that a computer would ever play as well as a top human. “The more interesting thing we showed was that there’s more than one way to look at a complex problem,” Campbell told Live Science. “You can look at it the human way, using experience and intuition, or in a more computer-like way.” Those methods complement each other, he said. Although Deep Blue’s win proved that humans could build a machine that’s a great chess player, Read More ›