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… In an historic edict, Pope Francis warned that failing to act would have “grave consequences”, the brunt of which would fall on the world’s poorest people. His words came as a stark reminder that global climate change is among the most pressing moral dilemmas of the 21st century. It joins a long list. He could have added spiralling inequality, persistent poverty, death from preventable diseases and nuclear proliferation to the ethical challenges that define our times. Some are newer than others, but all could plausibly be fixed. The fact we’re struggling with all of them raises a troubling question: does our moral compass equip us to deal with the threats we face … One must apparently pay for more Read More ›

Further to the current blaze of nonsense re the multiverse and the unfortunate news that naturalism is dead, at Not Even Wrong, mathematician Peter Woit notes, re Arkani-Harmed, here, A couple years ago I was struck by a talk of his in which he showed a lot of self-knowledge, describing himself as an “ideolog” (see here). There’s more about this in the Quanta profile: “It’s important for me while I’m working on something to be very ideological about it. And then, of course, it’s also important after you are done to forget the ideology and move on to another one.” The ideologies on display this time include a very speculative picture of a future union of mathematics and theoretical physics:More. ‘Nuff Read More ›

We can’t help you. Sign noted in a computer guy’s office somewhere in North America: If after ten minutes at the poker table you do not know who the patsy is—you are the patsy. First, what exactly is Darwin’s theory anyway, other than an invite to the approved parties? Here it is: Information can be created without intelligence. That is, natural selection acting on random mutation explains the order of life we see all around us. What can’t survive won’t, and that explains how very complex life forms and structures — including the human mind — get built up. True: Things that can’t survive don’t. But why would that fact alone drive nature to produce anything as simple as a Read More ›

We didn’t think anyone would be so honest about it, but get this from Quanta Magazine: As things stand, the known elementary particles, codified in a 40-year-old set of equations called the “Standard Model,” lack a sensible pattern and seem astonishingly fine-tuned for life. Arkani-Hamed and other particle physicists, guided by their belief in naturalness, have spent decades devising clever ways to fit the Standard Model into a larger, natural pattern. But time and again, ever-more-powerful particle colliders have failed to turn up proof of their proposals in the form of new particles and phenomena, increasingly pointing toward the bleak and radical prospect that naturalness is dead. … Arkani-Hamed considers his tendency to speculate a personal weakness. “This is not Read More ›

Ah yes ,the time of year in many parts of North America when, everywhere you look, there is a Monarch (an orange butterfly) flap gliding around. They migrate in vast masses from mid-north Canada to Mexico. Now, from New Scientist: Wasps first turned bracoviruses into biological weapons around 100 million years ago. There are now thousands of species of braconid wasp, each of which parasitises a specific butterfly or moth and produces a unique bracovirus carrying a set of genes that is different to those of other wasp species. But sometimes things go awry. Wasps occasionally lay an egg in the wrong host, for instance, in which case the wasp larva may not survive. In such cases, if genes from Read More ›

From the National Association of Scholars: The Pressure of Group Thought Academic “consensus” is in the news. Stetson University professor of psychology Christopher Ferguson, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, recently gave a run-down on how the American Psychological Association supposedly compromised itself by manipulating a task force into endorsing harsh interrogations of prisoners. Ferguson says the APA “crafted a corrupted ‘consensus’ by excluding those who might disagree.” Ahem. Never mind “disagree.” What if most of the evidence fails to support a politically crafted “consensus,” often enforced from the bench? Cf Darwin in the schools. The left today is infatuated with “consensus” as a tool that can be used to ostracize views it would rather not have to debate. Read More ›

Someone else has noticed: Benedict Carey describes a University of Virginia-led effort to reproduce the findings of 100 key psychological studies published in top journals. Over 250 researchers chose some of the most often cited findings in their field and tried to replicate the results with their own experiments. The outcomes, published in the journal, “Science,” weren’t pretty. Of the 100 studies tested, 60 did not yield the results their authors reported. In other words, the findings couldn’t live up to a basic requirement of science—repeatability. It’s a revelation Carey says confirms many scientists’ worst fears. Why should that be those scientists’ worst fears. Can’t they compel us all to fund them anyway? “The vetted studies,” he explained, “were considered Read More ›

Further to Roll dice twice, see what turns up (One game changer, however, is this: As more is discovered about the past of life on Earth, evolution becomes less a grand theory (cf Darwinism) and more a history (cf World War II)): Evolution and dispersal of the genus Homo: A landscape approach Here’s the abstract: The notion of the physical landscape as an arena of ecological interaction and human evolution is a powerful one, but its implementation at larger geographical and temporal scales is hampered by the challenges of reconstructing physical landscape settings in the geologically active regions where the earliest evidence is concentrated. We argue that the inherently dynamic nature of these unstable landscapes has made them important agents Read More ›

Interesting new approach to evolution studies: Rolling the Dice Twice: Evolving Reconstructed Ancient Proteins in Extant Organisms (Betul Kacar) Scientists have access to artifacts of evolutionary history (namely, the fossil record and genomic sequences of living organisms) but they have limited means with which to infer the exact evolutionary events that occurred to produce today s living world. An intriguing question to arise from this historical limitation is whether the evolutionary paths of organisms are dominated by internal or external controlled processes (i.e., Life as a factory) or whether they are inherently random and subject to completely different outcomes if repeated under identical conditions (i.e., Life as a casino parlor). Two experimental approaches, ancestral sequence reconstruction and experimental evolution with microorganisms, Read More ›

From Real Clear Science: Not only are bonobos liberal in their lovemaking, they also aren’t shy about requesting it. Researchers report in the journal Scientific Reports that wild female bonobos will make blatant gestures asking for genital-on-genital rubbing. Subtlety is not their specialty. The two moves the scientists observed were foot-pointing, in which the female used her foot to point at her genitals, and the “hip shimmy,” in which she wiggled her genitals to mimic rubbing. Some 83% of the time, another female responded, giving the signaller exactly what she wanted. More. Everything would be simpler if we were bonobos. But try suing a bonobo for chimp support. No wonder they are an endangered species. See also: Why the human Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: The technical paper, “Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa,” appeared in a lesser-known journal, eLife. It’s a great find due to the sheer number of bones that were find, but to my mind its publication in eLife is immediate hint that this fossil isn’t an earthshattering “transitional form,” because if it were, we almost unquestionably would have seen the fossil published in Science or Nature. The question has been raised before, why it wasn’t published in Nature. In principal, it is up their alley, no? The specimens found in this cave are very diverse, suggesting they might belong to multiple species. But if that’s the case, Read More ›

… by viewing Wikipedia edits via this handy new tool: Friend says, “Enter any controversial topic and enjoy.” Possible last-ditch therapy for any who take Wikipedia seriously. See also: How Wikipedia can turn fiction into fact Follow UD News at Twitter!

Further to “Water’s unique sense of time” (amazing, these accidental freaks of nature,) we also learn, this time from Aeon, about the conundrum of universal constants, like the speed of light: Light travels at around 300,000 km per second. Why not faster? Why not slower? A new theory inches us closer to an answer Electromagnetic theory gave a first crucial insight 150 years ago. The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell showed that when electric and magnetic fields change in time, they interact to produce a travelling electromagnetic wave. Maxwell calculated the speed of the wave from his equations and found it to be exactly the known speed of light. This strongly suggested that light was an electromagnetic wave – as was Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Using innovative ultrafast vibrational spectroscopies, the researchers show why liquid water is unique when compared to most other molecular liquids. (Actually, usage note: To be unique, water must survive comparison with all other molecular liquids. But let’s get on with the story.) Water is a very special liquid with extremely fast dynamics. Water molecules wiggle and jiggle on sub-picosecond timescales, which make them undistinguishable on this timescale. While the existence of very short-lived local structures — e.g. two water molecules that are very close to one another, or are very far apart from each other — is known to occur, it was commonly believed that they lose the memory of their local structure within less than 0.1 picoseconds. Read More ›

  From ScienceDaily: ‘Tree of life’ for 2.3 million species released Presumably, “tree of life” is placed in quotation marks because it so little resembles a tree. Didn’t it used to be capped, as Tree of Life? 😉 The new style is probably a good sign. The first draft of the tree of life for all 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes has been released. Thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches, but this is the first time those results have been combined into a single tree. The end result is a digital resource that is available online for anyone to use or edit, much like a ‘Wikipedia’ for evolutionary Read More ›