News

From Sarah Knapton at Telegraph: Scientists have discovered a link between the amount of fruit eaten by primates and the size of their brains. … The researchers suggest that the bigger brains probably evolved to recall fruit locations, and work out new ways to extract flesh from tough skins. Fruits also contain for more energy than plants, giving brains a boost. “Fruit is patchier in space and time in the environment, and the consumption of it often involves extraction from difficult-to-reach-places or protective skins,” said doctoral student Alex DeCasien, the lead author. “Together, these factors may lead to the need for relatively greater cognitive complexity and flexibility in fruit eating species. “Complex foraging strategies, social structures, and cognitive abilities, are Read More ›

Poetic. From Joshua Rothman at New Yorker: Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly, that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. Life had begun. The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and Read More ›

From William Nardi at The College Fix: The latest “privilege” identified within the hallowed halls of higher education appears to be human privilege. This year, the Modern Language Association of America has put out a call for papers on “critical plant studies,” seeking papers addressing the “vitality, agency, sentience, and/or emotional life of plants.” Critical plant studies “aims to do for plants what human animal studies began to do for animal life over 20 years ago — attributing greater agency and autonomy to the non-human world strengthens the ethical standing of beings historically relegated to the lower rungs of the chain of life,” said John Ryan, honorary research fellow at the University of Western Australia, in a 2016 lecture hosted Read More ›

…but not for the reasons we might think. Let’s start with consciousness in general to see why. From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at The City (Houston Baptist U): Science writer Margaret Wertheim, reflecting on why consciousness is such a hot topic now, notes that Giulio Tononi has described the idea that mere matter could generate mind as a mystery “stranger than immaculate conception… an impossibility that defie[s] belief.” (Phi, 2012) Nonetheless, he and many others appear resolved to believe and act on that admitted impossibility. Given their commitments, they have no choice. And given current research directions, there may never be a good theory of consciousness. More. See also: Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of Read More ›

We get mail. A friend writes to explain why Richard Dawkins, even though he is a metaphysical naturalist (nature is all there is), trusts his own reason. The argument goes something like this: I trust my own reason because it proves itself useful time and time again, and until someone can demonstrate that reason isn’t to be trusted, there’s no reason to think otherwise. We thought that sounded odd because it is his reason that tells him that it is useful. But then it would, right? And what if it didn’t? What then? Other naturalist atheists say that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth, so Dawkins’s conclusion is part of a fitness function—but how would he know Read More ›

We are talking about events of over 600 million years ago. Could be blurry. From Amy Maxmen at Nature: For the better part of the past century, zoologists arranged these branches according to their judgements of what was simple and what was complex. Sponges fell to the bottom branch, and bilaterally symmetrical animals resided higher up. But in 2008, a genetic analysis published in Nature put comb jellies, rather than sponges, near the root of the evolutionary tree. This arrangement rattled evolutionary biologists because it upended the idea that animal complexity increased over time. It implied that nerves and other characteristics evolved independently in different lineages, and were subsequently lost in sponges. Since then, studies have supported or contradicted the Read More ›

In place of “research misconduct.” From Helen Briggs at BBC News: The scale of “fake research” in the UK appears to have been underestimated, a BBC investigation suggests. Official data points to about 30 allegations of research misconduct between 2012 and 2015. However, figures obtained by the BBC under Freedom of Information rules identified hundreds of allegations over a similar time period at 23 universities alone. … Co-founder of Retraction Watch, Dr Ivan Oransky, told BBC News: “We do not have a good handle on how much research misconduct takes place, but it’s become quite clear that universities and funding agencies and oversight bodies are not reporting even a reasonable fraction of the number of cases that they see.” More. Read More ›

According to Sharon Woodhill, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Mount Saint Vincent University (Nova Scotia, Canada) at Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Summer 2016) The Sexual Politics of Intelligent Design Abstract: Intelligent design is creationism for the twenty-first century. It is the view that the natural world is best explained as the product of an intentional intelligent agent rather than undirected natural forces. Although there has been much ado about its scientific status, beyond the scientific face of intelligent design is a dense discourse that brings a compelling aspect into full relief. Intelligent design is a political movement that embodies aggressive and regressive sexual politics. This article suggests that, motivated by the belief that evolutionary thought has Read More ›

From Jennifer Frazer at Scientific American: Gemmata obscuriglobis excels at breaking rules. Like the platypus, to whom these bacteria have been compared, they possess a baffling arsenal of oddities. Although it has been controversial, they seem to contain membrane-bound compartments. One of those compartments surrounds their DNA. That would make it, apparently, a nucleus. But bacteria are thought to be devoid of nuclei – hence the terms prokaryote (“pre-kernel”) for bacteria and archaea, and eukaryote (“true kernel”) for all nucleated life (which includes all multicellular organisms). The eye-popping apparent commonalities don’t end there. … If that is the case, it means one of two equally astounding things must be true: either this humble bacterium, isolated from freshwater near the Maroon Read More ›

Read and decide. Recently, Paul Ratner asked at BigThink if Albert Einstein was a pantheist or deist? A friend kindly forwards information from a 2009 web page that no longer exists, apparently originally composed in German, dated in 2009, http://nobelist.tripod.com/id1.html The author appears to have done homework. If anyone finds out whose vanished page this is, please let us know in the combox. 1. ALBERT EINSTEIN – NOBEL LAUREATE IN PHYSICS Nobel Prize: Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to Quantum Theory and for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is one of the founders of modern physics; he is the author of the Theory of Relativity. According Read More ›

In response to: Math prof: Be careful what we do with infinity. Weird things can happen: “Some weird things are like 1 = 0, not just weird, but undesirable. So we try to build our mathematical ideas to avoid those. But other weird things don’t contradict logic, they just contradict normal life,” a reader writes, Indeed, when you introduce ‘infinity’ into your equation, one of the (far worse than “weird” or “undesirable”) results you get is that 1=0 , which is a logical contradiction/impossibility (which is to say, utterly impossible). Or, to put this another way, you can “prove” anything with a false premise. And, this “result” that 1=0 is one more way we can know that the age of Read More ›

From Eugenia Cheng at ScienceFriday: What has gone wrong? The problem is that we have manipulated equations as if infinity were an ordinary number, without knowing if it is or not. One of the first things we’re going to see in this book is what infinity isn’t, and it definitely isn’t an ordinary number. We are gradually going to work our way toward finding what type of “thing” it makes sense for infinity to be. This is a journey that took mathematicians thousands of years, involving some of the most important developments of mathematics: set theory and calculus, just for starters. The moral of that story is that although the idea of infinity is quite easy to come up with, Read More ›

A literary essay from David Randall at First Things: Yet three notable works of science fiction do address themselves to the power of that old promise against the secular infinitudes of time and space: Cordwainer Smith’s “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” (1964), John Morressy’s The Mansions of Space (1983), and R. A. Lafferty’s Past Master (1968). These novels share a Christian preoccupation—a theological preoccupation—with the survival of faith threatened sometimes by oblivion, sometimes by annihilation, and sometimes indeed by the gates of hell. The three fables vary on an important particular. The survival of faith may or may not be identical with the survival of the Church—and the difference between broadly Christian and specifically Catholic science fiction may be Read More ›

No, we hadn’t heard of it either. At Cerebral Faith, Christian apologist Evan Minton explains, Recently, William Lane Craig debated atheist Michael Nugent in Ireland on the existence of God. One of the arguments that Dr. Craig employed was The Fine Tuning Argument for design. I’m going to assume that readers of this article already have some familiarity with the fine tuning, so in case you’re new to the God debate, or this website, or apologetics in general, I discuss The Fine Tuning Argument in this blog post here. In response to the Fine Tuning Argument, Nugent said the following: “Theists believe that this God fine tuned the physical constants of the universe to allow life. But while these constants Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Former NBA player Shaquille O’Neal can likely see that a basketball is round, but the newly proclaimed “flat-Earther” can’t seem to say the same for the planet. In a podcast that aired Feb. 27, the basketball legend announced that the Earth is flat, saying that when he drives from Florida to California, “it’s flat to me.” But there are countless ways that show the Earth isn’t flat, but round. (To be specific, it’s an “irregularly shaped ellipsoid,” according to the National Ocean Service.) Before we dive into the science, here is what O’Neal said, as sports reporter Ben Rohrbach first reported. … More. Box office? Okay, now we see: It feels flat to him. But Read More ›