Intelligent Design

Focusing on stopping progress, barring new power plants, dismantling chemical facilities, mobilizing against Israel, and other reactionary pursuits, Ivy institutions are pursuing the fancies of a declining intellectual and business elite, full of chemophobic nags and luddite lame-ducks quacking away on their miasmic pools of old money as the world whirls past them. George Gilder, Life After Google:  The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy Would that it were so.

New Scientist, where it is known that all things come of evolution and we make nothing ourselves, does not know whether we “evolved” domestic violence: Why is domestic violence so horrifyingly common around the world? According to a study out today, men who are violent towards their partners have more children in societies without birth control. This implies that evolution favours domestic violence – but can that really be true? Yes. No. Maybe. It is true that allowing Political Correctness to rule your thoughts and not believing that you have free will can lead to conniptions. The researchers studied the Tsimane people of Bolivia, who have a pre-industrial culture with no access to contraception. Shockingly, 85 per cent of women Read More ›

From a review of The Equations of Life: The Hidden Rules Shaping Evolution by astrobiologist Chares Cockell, The book uses many examples of living things on our own planet, most convincingly the ladybug, to explain eloquently why everything from microbes to large animals are the way they are. For example, why does the ladybug not fall off a leaf? How does it manage to breathe without lungs? How does it survive winter or fly—considering its aerodynamics are very different from an airplane’s? Having shown that physical factors limit the solutions for life on this planet, Cockell extends the argument to extraterrestrial life. He expects us to find only carbon-based life elsewhere in the universe, which, he contends, is likely to Read More ›

News from the Ediacaran era (600 – 542 million years ago), when many animals were genuinely hard to distinguish at first from plants, sharpens the question: So-called Ediacaran organisms have puzzled biologists for decades. To the untrained eye they look like fossilized plants, in tube or frond shapes up to 2 meters long. These strange life forms dominated Earth’s seas half a billion years ago, and scientists have long struggled to figure out whether they’re algae, fungi, or even an entirely different kingdom of life that failed to survive. Now, two paleontologists think they have finally established the identity of the mysterious creatures: They were animals, some of which could move around, but they were unlike any living on Earth Read More ›

As opposed to a denier: I propose a basic test to determine who has earned the benefit of the doubt on whether to be labelled a denier or not. Does the person have an academic or professional background in atmospheric science or climatology? If the answer is yes, then they earn the benefit of the doubt and should not be called a denier. Does the person have an academic or professional background in another discipline and not a climate-related field? If the answer is yes, then they have not earned the right to be called anything other than a denier. Brian Brettschneider, “Climate Change Skeptic Or Denier?” at Forbes Reader Otto Pellinen writes to say, This article has an interesting take Read More ›

  From Mind Matters Today: Many tweaks later, is Zo correct enough? Is everyone pleased? Well, maybe the digital teen is too Correct now. From Quartz, where Chloe Rose Stuart-Ulin has been checking in with Zo for over a year and finds her “sort of convincing,”speaking “fluent meme”: But there’s a catch. In typical sibling style, Zo won’t be caught dead making the same mistakes as her sister. No politics, no Jews, no red-pill paranoia. Zo is politically correct to the worst possible extreme; mention any of her triggers, and she transforms into a judgmental little brat. One wonders, what is the market potential for judgmental little brats? More. See also: GIGO alert: AI can be racist and sexist, researchers Read More ›

For one thing, advanced dinosaurs existed much earlier than thought. From ScienceDaily: “We were surprised to find a close relative of Diplodocus in East Asia 174 million years ago. It’s commonly thought that sauropods did not disperse there until 200 million years ago and many of their giant descendants, reached this region much later, if at all,” explained study co-author Professor Paul Upchurch (UCL Earth Sciences). “Our discovery of Lingwulong demonstrates that several different types of advanced sauropod must have existed at least 15 million years earlier and spread across the world while the supercontinent Pangaea was still a coherent landmass. This forces a complete re-evaluation of the origins and evolution of these animals.” The new evidence also reinforces the Read More ›

What? Doug Axe draws attention to a new paper at Evolution News and Science Today which suggests that “the genetic program for limb development predates limbs.” Abstract: Cephalopod mollusks evolved numerous anatomical innovations, including specialized arms and tentacles, but little is known about the developmental mechanisms underlying the evolution of cephalopod limbs. Here we report that all three axes of cuttlefish limbs are patterned by the same signaling networks that act in vertebrates and arthropods, although they evolved limbs independently. In cuttlefish limb buds, Hedgehog is expressed anteriorly. Posterior transplantation of Hedgehog-expressing cells induced mirror-image limb duplications. Bmp and Wnt signaling, which establishes dorsoventral polarity in vertebrate and arthropod limbs, is similarly polarized in cuttlefish. Inhibition of the dorsal Bmp signal Read More ›

Plants are thought to have started moving to land 500 million years ago. The algae are presumed to have been carrying the redundant genes since then. So did they then pre-exist the move to land? From ScienceDaily: 500 million years ago, the first plants living in water took to land. The genetic adaptations associated with this transition can already be recognized in the genome of Chara braunii, a species of freshwater algae. An international research team headed by Marburg biologist Stefan Rensing reports on this in the journal Cell. Rainer Hedrich and Dirk Becker from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany, are also members of this team. “The genes of the Chara braunii alga comprises numerous evolutionary innovations that have Read More ›

There are pygmies on Flores Island in Indonesia today but they are not related to the diminutive Flores humans discovered in 2004. A fossil skeleton found in a cave on Flores Island, Indonesia, in 2004 turned out to be a previously unknown, very small species of human. Nicknamed the “hobbit” (officially Homo floresiensis), it remains a mysterious species with an unknown relationship to modern humans. Intriguingly, the current inhabitants of Flores include a pygmy population living in a village near the Liang Bua cave where the fossils were found. An international team of scientists has now sequenced and analyzed the genomes of 32 people in this population. The analysis revealed evolutionary changes associated with diet and short stature in the Read More ›

At Mind Matters Today: Early in my neurosurgical career, I was called to the emergency room to see a four-year-old boy who had had a stroke. He was playing on a sofa and fell on his head, twisting his neck. He told his mom that his head hurt—then lapsed into a coma. The CT scan showed that he had torn his vertebral artery, which is a vital artery that traverses the bones of the neck and provides blood flow to critical parts of the brain (see the illustration at right below). His damaged brain was swelling dangerously; quite simply, he was dying. We rushed him to the operating room, where I removed the permanently damaged part of his brain—most of Read More ›

Plus, a friend offers a reply. From ScienceDaily: There may be more habitable planets in the universe than we previously thought, according to Penn State geoscientists, who suggest that plate tectonics — long assumed to be a requirement for suitable conditions for life — are in fact not necessary. When searching for habitable planets or life on other planets, scientists look for biosignatures of atmospheric carbon dioxide. On Earth, atmospheric carbon dioxide increases surface heat through the greenhouse effect. Carbon also cycles to the subsurface and back to the atmosphere through natural processes. “Volcanism releases gases into the atmosphere, and then through weathering, carbon dioxide is pulled from the atmosphere and sequestered into surface rocks and sediment,” said Bradford Foley, Read More ›

We are told that modern humans are survivors and most other human “species” died out. From Sarah Sloat at Sapiens: Roberts and Stewart contend that the fossil record, as it stands now, demonstrates that anatomically modern humans had expanded to higher-elevation niches than their hominin predecessors and contemporaries by 80,000 to 50,000 years ago. At least 45,000 years ago, Homo sapiens were colonizing a range of intensely challenging settings, including deserts, tropical rainforests, and Palearctic regions. That’s not to say that other members of the genus, like Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis, didn’t migrate far beyond Africa. But these ancient hominins stayed within an environmental comfort zone comprising a mixture of woodland and grassland. So far, says Roberts, we’ve only Read More ›

Why do computers mean we never have to be humble again? We asked our physics color commentator, Rob Sheldon, about the recent deflation of the “expanding blueberry muffin” picture of the universe. That is, as one astrophysicist puts it “Just as cosmological measurements have became so precise that the value of the Hubble constant was expected to be known once and for all, it has been found instead that things don’t make sense.” Sheldon offers a little background: — — — Hubble’s constant is a calculation of the expansion rate of the universe by: a) measuring how far away something is (e.g., parsecs) b) measuring how fast it is moving away from us (e.g., kilometers/second) c) divide speed by distance Read More ›

And cosmologists race to win a “great cosmic bake-off” to produce a new one, says astrophysicist: Just as cosmological measurements have became so precise that the value of the Hubble constant was expected to be known once and for all, it has been found instead that things don’t make sense. Instead of one we now have two showstopping results. On the one side we have the new very precise measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background – the afterglow of the Big Bang – from the Planck mission, that has measured the Hubble Constant to be about 46,200 miles per hour per million light years (or using cosmologists’ units 67.4 km/s/Mpc). On the other side we have new measurements of pulsating Read More ›