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Further to Oldest human fossil found, 400k years “earlier than previously thought,” neuroscientist David A. DeWitt writes to say, That is a real problem since it means that humans overlapped with australopithcines including especially sediba which is a mere 2 million years old. Humans dated 2.8 million years ago? Sophisticated tools used by H. erectus? Neanderthal genes in modern humans? Range of variation in Dmanisi overlapping H. erectus to modern humans? A. sediba is a mixture of Homo and Australopithecine remains in South Africa? What we essentially have is a Cambrian explosion type phenomenon for human origins. Readers? See also: The ridiculous level of uncertainty in the field of human evolution DeWitt: “Look at how messed up this field is. Read More ›

From Darwin Day in America (with Afterword): The very issue Holdren was testifying about—climate change—provides a disturbing example of the growing effort to treat scientific dissent as heresy. One of America’s leading daily newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, announced in 2013 it would no longer publish letters to the editor that expressed skepticism about the human role in climate change. Since one of the original purposes of printing letters to the editor was to air community viewpoints that might differ from a newspaper’s official position, the Times’s decision represented a dramatic departure from historic journalistic standards. Others go much further, calling for the criminal prosecution of global warming skeptics. In 2014 Professor Lawrence Torcello at the Rochester Institute of Technology Read More ›

Here. Sheldon, an eight year-old sulfate tortoise, and Dolly, a three year-old American Pit Bull Terrier, were both rescued from HSNT and are now best friends! Their owner says they love to play chase like in this video and that Dolly even tries to get Sheldon to play with her favorite ball, though so far he’s had no interest. Look how speedy Sheldon is! These two are great examples of just how amazing rescued animals are and how friendship doesn’t see species! From the News desk’s perspective, the tortoise does seem to be playing (hostility seems absent), but we doubt he’ll “get” the idea of whacking a ball around soon. At one time, it was generally assumed that reptiles were Read More ›

Readers may vaguely recall: If anyone cares, Biologos (Christians for Darwin) will now actually review Darwin’s Doubt, which shows why the Cambrian explosion can’t be explained by the theory that guides their lives and work. Author Steve Meyer responds to their attempts to defend Darwinian naturalism here: In any case, it is not at all clear that BioLogos has declined to take an official position on methodological naturalism. In their description of the theory of intelligent design on their website, BioLogos affirms its commitment to explaining all natural phenomena (including presumably the origin of life and novel forms of life) by reference to strictly natural causes. As the website explains: [Intelligent Design] claims that the existence of an intelligent cause Read More ›

2.8 million-year-old specimen is 400,000 years older than previous ones. From LiveScience: An ancient jawbone fragment is the oldest human fossil discovered yet, a bone potentially from a new species that reveals the human family may have arose a half million years earlier than previously thought, researchers say. And Michael Cremo is still wrong, right? NatGeo’s take here. See also: The search for our earliest ancestors: signals in the noise Follow UD News at Twitter!

Doubtless a new experience for you. From International Business Times: Women affiliated with members of terror group Islamic State (Isis) have published a manifesto and guide to living as a militant Muslim female. Education for women is okay as long as they stay at home, but “It is considered legitimate for a girl to be married at the age of nine. Most pure girls will be married by 16 or 17, while they are still young and active. Young men will not be more than 20 years old in those glorious generations.” The authors of the document also urged people to refrain from “exploring science”, aimed at “trying to uncover the secrets of nature”. The focus, rather, should be on Read More ›

Here at Science Friday: are excerpts from Brockman’s latest, This Idea Must Die : Seth Lloyd: Suppose that everything that could exist does exist. The multiverse is not a bug but a feature. We have to be careful: The set of everything that could exist belongs to the realm of metaphysics rather than physics. Tegmark and I have shown that with a minor restriction, however, we can pull back from the metaphysical edge. Suppose that the physical multiverse contains all things that are locally finite, in the sense that any finite piece of the thing can be described by a finite amount of information. The set of locally finite things is mathematically well defined: It consists of things whose behavior Read More ›

From The Netherlands: The professor of media studies, José van Dijck, has been appointed president of the Royal Academy of Sciences, the Academy. Van Dijck follows Hans Clevers on. Van Dyck is a representative of the humanities again headed the association of outstanding scientists. The appointment of the Academy Clevers had previously broken with the tradition that the presidency rotates between social sciences, humanities and natural sciences. Clevers well as its predecessor Robbert Dijkgraaf are scientists. (Google Translate) … It is the first time that a woman in charge is at the Academy.  O’Leary for News, an arts grad and double X, is going to sit this one out. But the rest of you, please, readers, your thoughts! Follow UD Read More ›

It is cheerleading for a worldview, one that permits, even encourages, fiction to stand in for fact. In Scientists Create Methane-Based Life: Science Reporting Stoops to a New Low, Eric Anderson recounts a claim for life on Saturnian moon Titan: Researchers have finally developed a new “life form.” And a methane-based one at that. Now at this point, a few red flags should have been raised in the mind of anyone who is passingly familiar with origin of life research. Indeed, there should be a whole field of red flags waving and snapping smartly in the wind like the Hammer and Sickle on a frigid Moscow (or Titan) morning. Our pulse racing at the news, we scarcely get to the Read More ›

Readers may remember science writer Philip Ball, who described the many worlds multiverse as a fantasy, verging on nihilism. At Prospect Magazine, he narrates the string theory showdown: One of the key predictions specific to string theory is that the three dimensions of space (up-down, left-right and front-back, say) and the one dimension of space (past-future) are not all there is to the fabric of reality. String theory insisted that there are in fact not four but ten dimensions of spacetime—and Witten’s M-theory added one more. We don’t see these dimensions because they are “compactified:” in effect rolled up and hidden away, much as the three-dimensional form of a hosepipe looks like a one-dimensional strand from far enough away. Proposing Read More ›

A friend wrote to ask because he came across a 2001 paper, Entropy and Self-Organization in Multi-Agent Systems by H. Van Dyke Parunak and Sven Brueckner Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2001), 124-130: Emergent self-organization in multi-agent systems appears to contradict the second law of thermodynamics. This paradox has been explained in terms of a coupling between the macro level that hosts self-organization (and an apparent reduction in entropy), and the micro level (where random processes greatly increase entropy). Metaphorically, the micro level serves as an entropy “sink,” permitting overall system entropy to increase while sequestering this increase from the interactions where selforganization is desired. We make this metaphor precise by constructing a simple example of Read More ›

From The Guardian: How hunting with wolves helped humans outsmart the Neanderthals Forty thousand years ago in Europe our ancestors formed a crucial and lasting alliance that enabled us to finish off our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals Modern humans formed an alliance with wolves soon after we entered Europe, argues Shipman. We tamed some and the dogs we bred from them were then used to chase prey and to drive off rival carnivores, including lions and leopards, that tried to steal the meat. … “Even if you brought down a bison, within minutes other carnivores would have been lining up to attack you and steal your prey,” said Shipman. The answer, she argues, was the creation of the human-wolf alliance. Read More ›

Attkisson is a genuine investigative journalist, harassed by authoritarian government in an age of cosseted government media hacks, poseurs, and vapid cheerleaders for “science.” Further to kairosfocus’ Sharyl Attkisson (in a TEDx) cautions on Astroturfing and pseudo-consensus: This also seemed worth calling out as astroturf: A close third is an array of blogs that use words such as “science” and “skeptic” in their titles or propaganda in an attempt to portray an image of neutrality and logic when they are often fighting established science and serving pro-pharmaceutical industry agendas. Or, we would add, attempting to strangle sciences that seek to move beyond the dead ends in which they themselves comfortably burrow. For an antidote to that last, see, for example, Read More ›

Really small: The snapshots may not look like much, but they’re revealing a lot about lifeforms at this extremely miniscule size. For one thing, their metabolisms are so minimal that they likely depend on resources from other bacteria to stay alive. While there’s still a lot that remains a mystery (it’s not certain what half of the genes do), this up-close imagery could eventually fill in a lot of blanks in biology — it’s clear that there’s a world of unusual organisms that have gone largely unnoticed. Engadget Note: If they depend on other bacteria for resources, they probably aren’t going to help much with origin of life studies. They might well be devolved from more metabolically endowed free-living organisms. Read More ›

As in But what IS a gene? (At one time we knew. We were wrong. Honestly and stubbornly so). Philosopher (and photographer) Laszlo Bencze here: The notion of a gene seems to be becoming less and less useful with every discovery in genetics. Of course all (or practically all) of these discoveries are being made by strict evolutionists. They still palm off the increasing complexity of reproduction as the result of a long evolutionary process no matter how much their own work does not support that notion. The way I see it, the main purpose of the gene concept is to support a comprehensible evolutionary scenario. If one gene equals one protein and one protein equals one trait, it is Read More ›