News

Well, depending on your religious convictions, they did it once … From Zaria Gorvett at BBC: The last man on Earth is a common trope in fiction – but what if it actually happened? How many people would it take to save our species? … So how much variety do you need? It’s a debate that goes right back to the 80s, says Stephens, when an Australian scientist proposed a universal rule of thumb. “Basically you need 50 breeding individuals to avoid inbreeding depression and 500 in order to adapt,” he says. It’s a rule still used today – though it’s been upped to 500-5,000 to account for random losses when genes are passed from one generation to the next – Read More ›

From Financial Express: Evolution is a touchy subject. Unveil a new discovery pointing towards what triggered life on Earth and a whole contingent of evolutionists, the proponents of Intelligent design (ID) and SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), spiritualists and those who believe in one “Supreme Being” will rush to reinforce that what they say is true. Yes, and hundreds of them will die, trampled by naturalists, converging on a single straw that supports them… But one thing becomes clear if examined from a purely scientific point of view: we are close yet still far from knowing when a single-cell organism stopped behaving like a single-cell entity and decided to explode into a multi-cellular being and – millions and millions of Read More ›

  April 16, 2016 online From Blyth Institute: We are pleased to announce the 2016 Conference on Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism, which aims to explore new methodologies that can be employed in a variety of disciplines that are not based on methodological naturalism. E-mail proposed abstracts to info@blythinstitute.org (200-500 words) More. E-conference is available. Blyth previously hosted the Engineering and Metaphysics conference, with proceedings. From News: Methodological naturalism is Darwin’s sucker punch: Science is coterminous with naturalism. The purpose of science, therefore, is to come up with theories that are in line with and support naturalist (nature is all there is) explanations. If those explanations seem weak (cf crackpot cosmology and evolutionary psychology) , we must wait for better naturalist explanations. No other Read More ›

From scientist and novelist Michael Grazziano at the Atlantic: It’s just the brain describing itself—to itself. but … Wait … Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct. Well, that one’s been tried before. As here, it involves speculations about human evolution based on one or two slender skeins of evidence. The human brain insists it has consciousness, with all the phenomenological mystery, because it constructs information to that effect. The brain is captive to the information it contains. It knows nothing else. This is why a delusional person can say with such confidence, “I’m a kangaroo rat. I know it’s true because, well, it’s true.” The consciousness we describe is non-physical, confusing, irreducible, Read More ›

Let the door hit both of you on the way out? Well, how else to understand this, from a review of new book, The Society of Genes (Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher, Harvard U Press)? From New Scientist: FORTY years ago, Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene popularised the notion that the gene, rather than the individual, was the true unit of evolution. That view has dominated evolutionary genetics ever since. But in The Society of Genes, biologists Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher say that it’s time to replace the selfish-gene metaphor with a new one that focuses on relationships. “We are not the simple sum of our genes,” they write. “The members of the society of genes do not Read More ›

Darn right. The simpler emotions, anyway. And what would we make of a study that claimed they didn’t? Well, anyway, … from ScienceDaily: Dogs can recognize emotions in humans by combining information from different senses — an ability that has never previously been observed outside of humans, a new study published today reveals. … The researchers advance a claim that the dogs are forming abstract representations of mental states in order to do that. It’s not clear why they would need to. “Our study shows that dogs have the ability to integrate two different sources of sensory information into a coherent perception of emotion in both humans and dogs. To do so requires a system of internal categorisation of emotional Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at HuffPo, offering the “unofficial list” for the the meeting scheduled for the public November 7-9 meet, co-sponsored by the British Academy for the humanities and social sciences: Prime movers of the event are: Oxford physiologist and Royal Society Fellow, Denis Noble — who has already made his case on this page for replacing the modern synthesis; Sir Patrick Bateson, FRS, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2003 for his service to biology and currently serves as president of the Zoological Society of London; Nancy Cartwright, Lady Hampshire, a University of Durham/University of California-San Diego philosopher of science and Fellow of the British Academy; John Dupré, a philosopher of biology at the University of Exeter whose Read More ›

What our dogs and cats feel like when we don’t understand them. From Evolution News & Views: … Continuities can be merely apparent, not actual. Consider, for example, the laptop computer vs. the typewriter. Both feature the QWERTYUIOP keyboard. That might suggest a physical continuity between the two machines. The story would run thus: Computer developers added more and more parts to the typewriter, and subtracted some, until they had transformed the typewrter into a laptop. But of course, they didn’t. They adapted a widely recognized keyboard layout to an entirely new type of machine. Continuities are created by history, not laws. If we don’t know the history, we don’t know whether a similarity reflects continuity or not. Bolhuis and Read More ›

Has recently retired from being “vestige of evolution” … From Jordan Rosenfeld at Mental Floss: While the appendix is not required for digestive functions in humans, Belz tells mental_floss, “It does house symbiotic bacteria proposed by Randal Bollinger and Bill Parker at Duke University to be important for overall gut health, but particularly when we get a gut infection resulting in diarrhea.” Infections of this kind clear the gut not only of fluids and nutrients but also good bacteria. Their research suggests that those ILCs [innate lymphoid cells] housed in the appendix may be there as a reserve to repopulate the gut with good bacteria after a gut infection. ILCs are hardier than other immune cells, and thus vital to Read More ›

Wouldn’t that make information reality? From Rachel Thomas’ evaluation of the work of physicist John Archibald Wheeler at PlusMaths: Wheeler categorised his long and productive life in physics into three periods: “Everything is Particles”, “Everything is Fields”, and “Everything is Information”. (You can read more about his life and work in his autobiography, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam.) The driving idea behind the third period was spurred by his contemplation of the age-old question: “How come existence?” And his answer, first published in a brilliantly written (and very entertaining) paper in 1989, was it from bit: “It from bit symbolises the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in Read More ›

From Science News: New calculations suggest roughly equal populations, not 10-to-1 ratio A “standard man” weighing 70 kilograms has roughly the same number of bacteria and human cells in his body, researchers report online January 6 at bioRxiv.org. This average guy would be composed of about 40 trillion bacteria and 30 trillion human cells, calculate researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. That’s a ratio of 1.3 bacteria to every one human cell. More. In case anyone wondered why they didn’t just take over… See also: Evolution: Cells “hiring” functions they can’t do (endosymbiosis) Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Nature: Dogic’s team created a new kind of liquid crystal. Unlike the molecules in standard liquid-crystal displays, which passively form patterns in response to electric fields, Dogic’s components were active. They propelled themselves, taking energy from their environment — in this case, from ATP. And they formed patterns spontaneously, thanks to the collective behaviour of thousands of units moving independently. These are the hallmarks of systems that physicists call active matter, which have become a major subject of research in the past few years. Examples abound in the natural world — among them the leaderless but coherent flocking of birds and the flowing, structure-forming cytoskeletons of cells. Based on laboratory work, Experimentalists are only beginning to gain control of Read More ›

Yes, in certain ways, says mathematician at the University of Adelaide. From Science Daily: The old adage that says ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is’ has finally been put to the test — mathematically. A team of researchers has found that overwhelming evidence without a dissenting opinion can in fact weaken the credibility of a case, or point to a failure of the system. … The team put three different scenarios to the test based on mathematical probability: the use of witnesses to confirm the identity of a criminal suspect; the accurate identification of an archaeological find; and the reliability of a cryptographic system. They found in each case that there was a point at Read More ›

From Lee Spetner at Evolution News & Views: Reviewing The Evolution Revolution, the NCSE Offers Uninformed Criticism that Misses the Point No surprise, the Darwin-in-the-schools lobby (NCSE) did a hit job on physicist Spetner’s book, and did not acknowledge his request for an opportunity to reply in their publication (last we heard). No matter, here’s his response: Unfortunately, the points Levin raises are the results of his misunderstandings or distortions of what I wrote, or his failure to read the relevant portion of the text he was commenting on. Indeed, he missed the most important point of the book. I show that current evolutionary theory, and any derivative of it that relies on random mutations, is invalid. A scientific theory Read More ›

Bad news for scuba shops: To adapt to a ‘water world’, Dr Skinner expects humans would develop webbed hands and eyes like those of cats to help us see in the poor lighting conditions underwater. We would also retain a layer of baby fat into adulthood as an insulator for spending long periods submerged. Regular foraging in shallow waters could lead us to develop artificial ‘gills’ to help us breathe, extracting oxygen from the water and delivering it to the bloodstream. This would also lead to our lung capacity becoming greatly reduced, and our rib cages shrinking. An additional layer in the retina – like cat’s eyes – could develop to help us see in poor light under water. We Read More ›