News

Like Dracula it can’t really die, as it is culturally needed.* So it just keeps rising from the grave. Evidence is irrelevant. In the context of giving apes human rights instead of protection, we read: We share about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees and it has been argued this makes ape experimenters 99% as bad as the Nazis. It has also been argued that the medical benefits obtained from experiments on chimpanzees have been minimal. The chances are that the advancement of medical research would suffer little if the apes were given new rights that protected them from these experimental procedures. Most funding for chimp lab research in the United States was to end immediately in 2011, and the Read More ›

Digital afterlife: how the Internet has changed mourning and bereavement Users can post computer-composed messages after death. (This is one of the differences between material entities and informational entities. When Grandma dies, who is to get the Royal Doulton china? Her lacework? If she left no instructions, this must be decided between daughters and granddaughters. Only one of them can get each thing. But a theoretically infinite number of copies of her digitized photos and journal entries could be on line for everyone to see and use – for better or worse.) Canadian Christian writers’ conference big success after the bookstore closes (because obsolescent systems underrepresent demand). But writers may face more serious attempts at censorship now. New media: Information Read More ›

In breaking news, Climate Audit has obtained exclusive information on output from the first runs of Weaver’s “next generation” climate model. These are the first known climate model predictions of the future of human evolution. The results are worrying: Take a look. Serves us all right, presumably. 😉 If you are interested in climate change issues, you might want to note this new book. Note: No more news posting till later this evening. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Skulls used as bowls, the rest discarded. From ScienceDaily: Dr Silvia Bello, from the Natural History Museum’s Department of Earth Sciences, lead researcher of the work said, “The human remains have been the subject of several studies. In a previous analysis, we could determine that the cranial remains had been carefully modified to make skull-cups. During this research, however, we’ve identified a far greater degree of human modification than recorded in earlier. We’ve found undoubting evidence for defleshing, disarticulation, human chewing, crushing of spongy bone, and the cracking of bones to extract marrow.” The presence of human tooth marks on many of the bones provides incontrovertible evidence for cannibalism, the team found. In a wider context, the treatment of the Read More ›

Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, interviews Adrian Bejan, orignator of the constructal law at Huffington Post: I’ve quoted Adrian Bejan numerous times in books and articles about evolution, about academic mafias and peer review, but somehow we never got around to having a full conversation. So I called him recently at Duke University, where he is now J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, to chat about both his constructal law of design in nature — which he considers one of the few laws of physics — as well as his formative years in the 50s and 60s in communist Romania. … Suzan Mazur: There continues to be some debate about which came first in origin Read More ›

Died out as a distinct ethnic group, that is. We are also told that current humans and Neanderthals definitely interbred. From LiveScience: Neanderthals may have died off because they failed to harness the power of fire to the extent their human cousins did, a new data analysis suggests. Using fire for cooking would have allowed these other groups of ancient human relatives to get more calories from the same amount of food, thereby edging out the Neanderthal population. Over time, the anatomically modern human population would have risen, while the Neanderthal population plummeted toward extinction, according to the model. Last month, a speculation walloped through the pop science media that wolves helped current humans kill off Neanderthals. That thesis is vulnerable Read More ›

Formamide detected in Nebulosa NGC1333/NASA-Spitzer From ScienceDaily: One of science’s greatest challenges is learning about the origin of life and its precursor molecules. Formamide (NH2CHO) is an excellent candidate for helping to search for answers as it contains four essential elements (nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen), and can synthesise amino acids, carbohydrates, nucleic acids and other key compounds for living organisms. However, this molecule is also abundant in space, mainly in molecular clouds or the concentrations of gas and dust where stars are born. This has been confirmed by an international team of researchers, including Spanish investigators, after searching for formamide in ten star-forming regions. “We have detected formamide in five protosuns, which proves that this molecule (in all probability Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The new research, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that structures once thought to be Earth’s oldest microfossils do not compare with younger fossil candidates but have, instead, the character of peculiarly shaped minerals. In 1993, US scientist Bill Schopf described tiny carbon-rich filaments within the 3.46 billion-year-old Apex chert (fine-grained sedimentary rock) from the Pilbara region of Western Australia, which he likened to certain forms of bacteria, including cyanobacteria. The apparent find was controversial but the ensuing debate was hard to resolve until more advanced equipment became available, at which point: Now Dr David Wacey, a Marie Curie Fellow in Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, in collaboration with the late Professor Read More ›

At Braindecoder: “Spiders are very smart, that’s why we’re studying them,” says Ronald Hoy, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University. “They use visual cues to steer by, and the kind of mazes that they can solve is considered to be pretty impressive for an invertebrate.” There is a limit to how small neurons can get, so Perhaps as a solution to space limits, some small spiders have brains that spill out all the way into their legs. Scientists have discovered that the central nervous systems of the smallest spiders fill up almost 80 percent of their total body cavity, including about a quarter of the space inside their legs. More. It was easier to believe in Darwinism Read More ›

Interesting piece on John Searle by Frank Free man at Weekly Standard: Mistake Number One is the idea “that there is some special problem about the relation of the mind to the body, consciousness to the brain, and in their fixation on the illusion that there is a problem, philosophers have fastened onto different solutions to the problem.” Mistake Number Two “is the mistake of supposing that we never directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world, but directly perceive only our subjective experiences.” So that’s all right then. All the people who perceive a problem can just take a well-deserved break. A proponent of Direct Realism, Searle argues, Like Wittgenstein, but with less openness, he seems to Read More ›

In response to Science writer boilerplate Jonathan Wells writes to say, Based on my reading of thousands of Peer-Reviewed Articles in the professional literature, I’ve distilled a template for writing scientific articles that deal with evolution: 1. Darwinian evolution is a fact. 2. We used [technique(s)] to study [feature(s)] in [name of species], and we unexpectedly found [results inconsistent with Darwinian evolution]. 3. We propose [clever speculations], which might explain why the results appear to conflict with evolutionary theory. 4. We conclude that Darwinian evolution is a fact. Yes, it’s a fact, all right. About the mindset of the people who do that. Wells is the author of The Myth of Junk DNA, which is not short of examples on Read More ›

So claims writer Mark Strauss at Slate: Ridiculing astrobiologists is a favorite sport at the Discovery Institute, which complains on its news site that “hardly a month goes by lately when the science media fail to breathlessly report the discovery of a new planet, in some star’s ‘habitable zone,’ that might hypothetically be capable of supporting life.” The institute attributes the coverage in part to hype purposefully generated by “organized science” to shake down the government for grant money. But the creationists also see a more sinister agenda than naked greed. They place astrobiologists among the ranks of the “Darwin Brigades” who have always been “eager to undermine human exceptionalism,” since “the alleged ordinariness of the human race was vital Read More ›

Recently, StephenB wrote, RDFish is wrong; Barry Arrington is right: Materialism cannot be reconciled with objective morality: In several previous posts, RDFish stumbled into a serious philosophical error that needs to be addressed. Barry Arrington had made the unassailable point that materialism (understood as physicalism) is incompatible with such concepts as good, evil, and objective morality. The reason is clear: Materialism reduces all choices to electro-chemical processes in the brain. With that model, all apparent moral decisions are really nothing more than chemcial-physical operations or functions. Though RDF failed to refute the argument, confront the argument, or even define his own terms, he sought, nevertheless, to attack it through the back door, claiming that past atheist philosophers embraced both metaphysical Read More ›

Astrophysicist Mario Livio shares some thoughts: Math: Discovered, Invented, or Both? The puzzle of the power of mathematics is in fact even more complex than the above examples from electromagnetism might suggest. There are actually two facets to the “unreasonable effectiveness,” one that I call active and another that I dub passive. The active facet refers to the fact that when scientists attempt to light their way through the labyrinth of natural phenomena, they use mathematics as their torch. In other words, at least some of the laws of nature are formulated in directly applicable mathematical terms. The mathematical entities, relations, and equations used in those laws were developed for a specific application. Newton, for instance, formulated the branch of Read More ›

Sir James Gray stated in a 1954 issue of *Nature *(v. 173; 227) that No amount of argument, or clever epigram, can disguise the inherent improbability of orthodox [Darwinian] theory; but most biologists feel it is better to think in terms of improbable events than not to think at all; there will always be a few who feel in their bones a sneaking sympathy with Samuel Butler’s skepticism. And why are those the only options? Essentially, Darwinian evolution is a cultural mood. Evidence isn’t really needed because it functions as a kind of religion for everyone from the biologists to the airheads on TV. From Dawkins: “My argument will be that Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining Read More ›