“Human’s ability to talk may depend, in part, on our having lost a part of the larynx that dozens of other primate species have, new research suggests.”
Intelligent Design
At Evolution News: From Intelligent Cause to Intelligent Design: My Debt to Charles Thaxton
Stephen C. Meyer shares, from the Foreword to the new memoir by Charles Thaxton, A Leg to Stand On:
At Phys.org: ‘Eternal engine’ inspires the next generation of ultraprecise atomic clocks
“UK scientists have created an “eternal engine” to keep the next generation of atomic clock ticking.”
At Reasons.org: Benefits of Viruses
“Why would an all-powerful, all-loving God create a world with viruses?”
At Mind Matters News: Epitaph for transhumanism: But it’s far from dead!, advocate says
The waning of interest in transhumanism may be related to a growing awareness of the fundamental limits of artificial intelligence.
Eric Holloway: How AI neural networks show that the mind is not the brain
Holloway: Neural networks get stymied by complex decisions due to the very processes that enable them to make any decisions at all. That’s a fundamental limitation.
At Mind Matters News: If DNA is a language, who is the speaker?
So, the pivotal question that the information content of DNA and other biomolecules raises is, can the relevant forces of nature, namely gravity and the electromagnetic forces, produce the complex, information-rich, functional biomolecules found within even unicellular organisms?
At Mind Matters News: Could we really increase human IQ via genetic engineering?
It’s not clear what, explicitly, human intelligence is or even how it originates. Ethics aside, there’s no way to decide who to save and who to throw away.
Eric Holloway: Can computer neural networks learn better than human neurons?
Takehome: Humans can do things that AI cannot do, as we saw earlier, but those abilities are not due to the superior learning ability of a human neuron.
At Mind Matters News: Panpsychism: If computers can have minds, why can’t the Sun?
If the Hard AI people are right, animism — the belief that inanimate objects (whether the Sun or a computer) can have minds — has been unjustly dismissed.
At Evolution News: Recognizing Providence in the History of Life Is a Hint About Our Own Lives
“An arena of fine-tuning we can all appreciate, not quantitatively but qualitatively, is how in most events of our lives, things go right, when there are so many more ways that they could go wrong.”
The Intelligent Design Audiopaper Project
I was thinking recently, about how many audiobooks are consumed by people these days. I would guess that the main reason behind this consumption is convenience. Many people just don’t have the time, or don’t create the time, to really sit down and get their head in a book. But I understand that for many, Read More…
At Evolution News: An Evolutionary Mathematician Flunks Biology
Arguments and counter-arguments serve a purpose in arriving at a truthful conclusion. But what if one side jumps ship when the waves of counter-argument are unassailable?
At Live Science: Solar storm from hole in the sun will hit Earth on Wednesday (Aug. 3)
Ben Turner writes: Thankfully, the storm is classified as weak. High-speed solar winds from a “hole” in the sun’s atmosphere are set to hit Earth’s magnetic field on Wednesday (Aug 3.), triggering a minor G-1 geomagnetic storm. Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) made the prediction after observing Read More…
At Science Daily: Fiddler crab eye view inspires researchers to develop novel artificial vision
“The researchers develop an amphibious artificial vision system with a panoramic field-of-view based on the Fiddler crab’s eye structure.”