Intelligent Design

And, it turns out, they must: Zebrafish aren’t just surrounded by liquid, but turn liquid – in part – during their development. As the zebrafish embryo develops from a ball of cells to a fully-formed fish, a region of the embryo switches its phase from viscous to liquid in a process known as fluidity transition. Such fluidity transition has long been speculated to exist in living matter, but is described for the first time to occur in a living organism in a study published today in Nature Cell Biology. The study was carried out by the group of Carl-Philipp Heisenberg at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, with first author and Postdoc Nicoletta Petridou, and together with the group Read More ›

In an ongoing discussion with hazel and others in another thread, some agreement has been reached that conceptual elements of mathematics (and in a related relationship, geometry) are things we discover rather than invent, such as circles and their mathematical properties. That discussion, IMO, could benefit by discussing what is meant by the term “Platonic Realm”. It seems to me that this issue turns on a very simple question; do we live in a universe that is matter-centric or consciousness-centric? What is the primary, driving force of the physical universe – mind or matter? IMO, quantum experimentation over the past 150 or so years makes the case that consciousness/mind is at least one of the fundamental aspects of even material Read More ›

The Blyth Institute’s new journal will offer a focus on artificial intelligence and philosophy as well as philosophical questions in mathematics and engineering The Blyth Institute, a think tank that explores the relationships between biology, cognitive science, and engineering, has launched a new journal, Communications of the Blyth Institute with Eric Holloway as Managing Editor and Jonathan Bartlett as Associate Editor. Communications is intended as a discussion forum for fresh ideas in a variety of areas, including philosophy of mind as seen from a computer science perspective. It is open to ID-friendly ideas. The inaugural issue covers such topics as Eric Holloway, Creativity and Machines, 13 Jonathan Bartlett, Simplifying and Refactoring Introductory Calculus, 17 T. M. Koch, Recategorizing the Human Read More ›

is Think!: The worst trap that people who are pursuing automation fall into is the desire to automate everything. That’s usually a road to disaster. Automation is supposed to save time and money, but it can wind up costing you both if you don’t carefully consider what you automate. How Automation Goes Wrong Elon Musk found this out the hard way. His original dream called for the Model 3 to be built almost entirely by robots. He believed that automation would increase the speed and decrease the costs of his production line. However, as GM found out in the 1980s, when an automated line goes wrong, you wind up automating failure instead of success. Apart from the fact that the Read More ›

Researchers have found that the presence of oxygen in a planet’s atmosphere may not be a strong indicator of life: Simulating in the lab the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system, researchers successfully created both organic compounds and oxygen, absent of life. The findings, published Dec. 11 by the journal ACS Earth and Space Chemistry, serve as a cautionary tale for researchers who suggest the presence of oxygen and organics on distant worlds is evidence of life there. “Our experiments produced oxygen and organic molecules that could serve as the building blocks of life in the lab, proving that the presence of both doesn’t definitively indicate life,” says Chao He, assistant research scientist in the Johns Hopkins University Department Read More ›

Remember the recent study in which Adam and Eve practically reappeared and extant species turned out to be only about 100,000 years old? The researchers, who found their own conclusion “very surprising” and “fought against it” are anxious that the world know that none of it disproves Darwin: Shortly after the Daily Mail published its article under the headline “All humans may be descended from just TWO people and a catastrophic event almost wiped out ALL species 100,000 years ago, study suggests,” Thaler and Stoeckle sent out this clarification: “Our study is grounded in and strongly supports Darwinian evolution, including the understanding all life has evolved from a common biological origin over several billion years. Our study follows mainstream views Read More ›

We knew about the “rape culture in dogs” paper that got taken seriously but did you know about this one?: Hoaxers Reveal That Some Social Science Journals Will Publish Nonsense. This year, three academics, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, revealed their efforts to publish blatantly ridiculous hoax papers in a variety of social science journals. … Accepted at Affilia was “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism,” which essentially reworded a chapter from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Revised and resubmitted to Women’s Studies International Forum was “Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework for a Feminist Astronomy,” which argues “that feminist and queer astrology should be considered part of the science Read More ›