News

But why stop? On the cocktail circuit, where hors d’oeuvres are served in iron rice bowls, it is piffle that pays. From Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at The Week: Why do humans have consciousness? The arguments surrounding this question make it one of the most animated debates in contemporary philosophy. One reason why consciousness so vexes academic philosophers is that a great many of them are atheists, and the reality of subjective consciousness frustrates an extremist but widely held version of atheistic metaphysics called eliminative materialism. This form of metaphysics takes the position that the only things that exist are matter and mindless physical processes. But in a world of pure matter, how could you have subjective, conscious beings like us? To someone Read More ›

From Jef Akst at the Scientist: Researchers uncover thousands of genes whose activity varies between men and women. Drawing on data on organ-, tissue-, and individual-specific gene expression from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTex) Portal, Shmuel Pietrokovski and Moran Gershoni of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel developed a comprehensive map of genes that are differentially expressed in men and women. … To explore whether other genes expressed differentially between the sexes might be similarly subject to mutation accumulation, Pietrokovski and Gershoni examined some 20,000 protein-coding genes, of which around 6,500 were expressed more in one sex than the other somewhere in the body. And sure enough, selection was effectively weaker in these genes, leading to the pile up of Read More ›

From an editorial in Nature: There has been much gnashing of teeth in the science-journalism community this week, with the release of an infographic that claims to rate the best and worst sites for scientific news. According to the American Council on Science and Health, which helped to prepare the ranking, the field is in a shoddy state. “If journalism as a whole is bad (and it is),” says the council, “science journalism is even worse. Not only is it susceptible to the same sorts of biases that afflict regular journalism, but it is uniquely vulnerable to outrageous sensationalism”. News aggregator RealClearScience, which also worked on the analysis, goes further: “Much of science reporting is a morass of ideologically driven Read More ›

From Steve Paulson of Wisconsin public broadcasting at Nautilus: Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious—and quite possibly crackpot—theory about the quantum origins of consciousness. He believes we must go beyond neuroscience and into the mysterious world of quantum mechanics to explain our rich mental life. No one quite knows what to make of this theory, developed with the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, but conventional wisdom goes something like this: Their theory is almost certainly wrong, but since Penrose is so brilliant (“One of the very few people I’ve met in my life who, without reservation, I call a Read More ›

From Brian Miller at Evolution News & Views: In the evolution debate, a key issue is the ability of natural selection to produce complex innovations. In a previous article, I explained based on engineering theories of innovation why the small-scale changes that drive microevolution should not be able to accumulate to generate the large-scale changes required for macroevolution. This observation perfectly corresponds to research in developmental biology and to the pattern of the fossil record. However, the limitations of Darwinian evolution have been demonstrated even more rigorously from the fields of evolutionary computation and mathematics. These theoretical challenges are detailed in a new book out this week, Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. Authors Robert Marks, William Dembski, and Winston Ewert bring Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur, author of Origin of Life Circus at Huffington Post, an interview with George Urtel: Georg Urtel: The hairpins are just being replicated. They are being replicated very inefficiently. Again, this has to do with the nature of the secondary structures. The hairpin structure is inhibiting because what the hairpin structure does is it forms a double helix with itself. When you have such a structure, the primer can’t bind. Suzan Mazur: What would you say is the significance of this experiment? Hasn’t it been known for many years that hairpins have a role in replication and recombination? Georg Urtel: Yes. The hairpin structure you find in all kinds of RNA enzymes, but the point here is that Read More ›

From Religious Beliefs, Evolutionary Psychiatry, and Mental Health in America, Volume 1 of the series Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach pp 49-54 at Springer: Reactions to Darwin’s Origin of Species by Kevin J. Flannelly, Abstract: The chapter describes the initial reaction of the British general public to the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, the immediate and later reactions of the scientific community, and the 20th Century response of Conservative Christians in the U.S. The British public had a generally favorable reaction to Origin of Species when it was first published, and it has been said that the British public widely accepted that the theory of evolution was true within a decade of the book’s publication. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A study recently published in PLOS Biology provides information that substantially changes the prevailing idea about the brain formation process in vertebrates and sheds some light on how it might have evolved. The findings show that the interpretation maintained hitherto regarding the principal regions formed at the beginning of vertebrate brain development is not correct. … Amphioxus, considered close to vertebrates, was used in the research. This work shows that the brain of vertebrates must have formed initially from two regions (anterior and posterior), and not three (forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain), as proposed by the current prosomeric model. … The idea that these regions were formed independently and that each one of them has given rise to other Read More ›

Abstract for 2015 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Lecture: Who Cares about the History of Science? by Cambridge science philosopher Hasok Chang: The history of science has many functions. Historians should consider how their work contributes to various functions, going beyond a simple desire to understand the past correctly. There are both internal and external functions of the history of science in relation to science itself; I focus here on the internal, as they tend to be neglected these days. The internal functions can be divided into orthodox and complementary. The orthodox function is to assist with the understanding of the content and methods of science as it is now practised. The complementary function is to generate and improve scientific knowledge where current science itself Read More ›

Well, the file is open. From Colin Barras at New Scientist: An extraordinary chapter has just been added to the story of the First Americans. Finds at a site in California suggest that the New World might have first been reached at least 130,000 years ago – more than 100,000 years earlier than conventionally thought. If the evidence stacks up, the earliest people to reach the Americas may have been Neanderthals or Denisovans rather than modern humans. Researchers may have to come to terms with the fact that they have barely scratched the surface of the North American archaeological record. More. Barely scratched the surface? Now, that part we should have realized a long time ago. We didn’t find what Read More ›

From Kirk Durston at Contemplations: The first mistake is the failure to distinguish between classical forms of information vs. functional information, and is described in a short 2003 Nature article by Jack Szostak.(2) In the words of Szostak, classical information theory “does not consider the meaning of a message.” Furthermore, classical approaches, such as Kolmogorov complexity,(3) “fail to account for the redundancy inherent in the fact that many related sequences are structurally and functionally equivalent.” It matters a great deal to biological life whether an amino acid sequence is functional or not. Life also depends upon the fact that numerous sequences can code for the same function, in order to increase functional survivability in the face of the inevitable steady Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists have looked at all 14,500 participants in Children of the 90s and found that if a girl’s maternal grandmother smoked during pregnancy, the girl is 67 percent more likely to display certain traits linked to autism, such as poor social communication skills and repetitive behaviors. … The discovery, published today in Scientific Reports, is part of an ongoing, long-term study of the effects of maternal and paternal grandmother’s smoking in pregnancy on the development of their grandchildren, who are all part of Children of the 90s. By using detailed information collected over many years on multiple factors that may affect children’s health and development, the researchers were able to rule out other potential explanations for their results. Read More ›

From Bob Holmes at New Scientist: How can we search for life on other planets when we don’t know what it might look like? One chemist thinks he has found an easy answer: just look for sophisticated molecular structures, no matter what they’re made of. The strategy could provide a simple way for upcoming space missions to broaden the hunt. Until now, the search for traces of life, or biosignatures, on other planets has tended to focus mostly on molecules like those used by earthly life. Thus, Mars missions look for organic molecules, and future missions to Europa may look for amino acids, unequal proportions of mirror-image molecules, and unusual ratios of carbon isotopes, all of which are signatures of Read More ›

In an interview with science writer John Horgan, who starts out by saying, At its best, physics is the most potent and precise of all scientific fields, and yet it surpasses even psychology in its capacity for bullshit. To keep physics honest, we need watchdogs like Peter Woit. He is renowned for asserting that string theory, which for decades has been the leading candidate for a unified theory of physics, is so flawed that it is “not even wrong.” That phrase (credited to Wolfgang Pauli) is the title of Woit’s widely discussed 2006 book (see my review here) and of his popular blog, which he launched in 2004. Woit, who has degrees in physics from Harvard and Princeton and has Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: In 2015, Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, announced that “universities are right—and within their rights—to crack down on speech and behavior. Students today are more like children than adults and need protection.” Why today in particular? Is it possible that decades of proselytism for left fascism by their teachers have left their mark? The rioting students are not dissidents but conformists. So many people don’t want to face how marchin’, marchin’ affects the sciences: The sciences are especially hard hit. In a post-fact science world, objectivity comes to be seen as sexist if not racist, and engineering is suspect. Does it feel odd to you, reader, that young Read More ›