Intelligent Design

From Marcelo Gleiser at NPR: To me, what’s fascinating is that consciousness is what makes the universe exist. Just think that before humans came to be, and discounting other potentially smart creatures out there, the universe was just doing its thing, expanding, stars being born and dying, entropy increasing overall. But as matter organized itself into living things in our planet, it eventually reached a level of complexity that allowed for self-awareness, the ability to know that thyself is a self. This emergent picture of animal consciousness is the one that is meaningful to us, as it places humans back in the driver’s seat of existence. We will never know all things about the universe, but we have the amazing Read More ›

A friend sends this from the International Journal of Astrobiology (Cambridge): Maxim A. Makukov (a1) and Vladimir I. shCherbak (a2) Published online: 10 July 2017 After it was proposed that life on Earth might descend from seeding by an earlier extraterrestrial civilization motivated to secure and spread life, some authors noted that this alternative offers a testable implication: microbial seeds could be intentionally supplied with a durable signature that might be found in extant organisms. In particular, it was suggested that the optimal location for such an artefact is the genetic code, as the least evolving part of cells. However, as the mainstream view goes, this scenario is too speculative and cannot be meaningfully tested because encoding/decoding a signature within Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: They call their theory the “poorly sleeping grandparent hypothesis.” The basic idea is that, for much of human history, living and sleeping in mixed-age groups of people with different sleep habits helped our ancestors keep a watchful eye and make it through the night. “Any time you have a mixed-age group population, some go to bed early, some later,” Nunn said. “If you’re older you’re more of a morning lark. If you’re younger you’re more of a night owl.” The researchers hope the findings will shift our understanding of age-related sleep disorders. “A lot of older people go to doctors complaining that they wake up early and can’t get back to sleep,” Nunn said. “But maybe there’s nothing Read More ›

From Joel Shurkin at InsideScience: It’s hard to think of dinosaurs as being loving, caring parents, but scientists have found some of them may have been just that. Take the oviraptorosaurs, a group of feathered creatures that look as if they were constructed by a malignant committee from spare bird parts. By studying fossilized oviraptorosaur eggs, researchers from France and China have found that oviraptorosaurs lay across those eggs in nests and warmed them with body heat just as modern birds do. Paleontologists had previously theorized that oviraptorosaurs incubated their eggs, but the French-Chinese team came up with the numbers. They also added to the theory that at least some dinosaurs were warm-blooded reptiles. More. With dinosaurs, as with Neanderthal Read More ›

From Brian Gallagher, Nautilus blog editor, at Nautilus:  In 2008 in Louisiana, and then in 2012 in Tennessee, laws passed allowing teachers to discuss the supposed “weaknesses” of evolutionary theory—a loophole, some science-education advocates said, through which creationism would creep in. And there’s good reason to think that it is: A 2008 nationally representative survey of U.S. high school biology teachers found that nearly half of the responders agreed or strongly agreed that creationism or intelligent design was “a valid, scientific alternative” to evolution, just over 15 percent reported adhering to young-Earth creationism, and 18 percent said they either explicitly advocated creationism in class or endorsed it in passing. … How to fix this? They argue the U.S. needs its prospective Read More ›

From Phys.org: The transition from an egg to a developing embryo is one of life’s most remarkable transformations. Yet little is known about it. Now Whitehead Institute researchers have deciphered how one aspect—control of the all-important translation of messenger RNAs (mRNAs) into proteins—switches as the egg becomes an embryo. That shift is controlled by a beautiful mechanism, which is triggered at a precise moment in development and automatically shuts itself off after a narrow window of 20 to 90 minutes. As an egg develops, it stockpiles mRNAs from the mother because it will not have time to create new mRNAs during the rapid development of a very early embryo. When fertilized the egg becomes an embryo, the stashed maternal mRNAs Read More ›

Missed this earlier: From Phys.org: Humanity may soon generate more data than hard drives or magnetic tape can handle, a problem that has scientists turning to nature’s age-old solution for information-storage—DNA. In a new study in Science, a pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) show that an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone can unlock DNA’s nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its four base nucleotides. They demonstrate that this technology is also extremely reliable. DNA is an ideal storage medium because it’s ultra-compact and can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place, as demonstrated by the recent recovery of DNA from Read More ›

From Jonny Anomaly and Brian Boutwell at Quillette: “Actually Studies Show…” Chances are you’ve found yourself in a heated conversation among a group of friends, family, or colleagues when someone throws down the gauntlet: “Actually, studies show…” Some nod in silent agreement, others check their text messages, and finally someone changes the subject. It’s hard to know what to say when people cite scientific studies to prove their point. Sometimes we know the study and its relative merits. But most of the time we just don’t know enough to confirm or refute the statement that the study is supposed to support. We are floating in a sea of information, and all we can do is flounder around for the nearest Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Mind-body interventions (MBIs) such as meditation, yoga and Tai Chi don’t simply relax us; they can ‘reverse’ the molecular reactions in our DNA which cause ill-health and depression, according to a study by the universities of Coventry and Radboud. The research, published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology, reviews over a decade of studies analysing how the behaviour of our genes is affected by different MBIs including mindfulness and yoga. Experts from the universities conclude that, when examined together, the 18 studies — featuring 846 participants over 11 years — reveal a pattern in the molecular changes which happen to the body as a result of MBIs, and how those changes benefit our mental and physical health. Paper. Read More ›

From David Sloan Wilson at This View of Life: Anything and Everything from an Evolutionary Perspective: ERS [Evolutionary Religious Studies] has made rapid progress during the last 20 years, in part by organizing the vast amount of empirical information on religion that has accumulated, much as Darwin was able to organize the vast amount of information on plants and animals during his day. More. It has made rapid progress if churning out a vast amount of idle naturalist speculation is progress. But remember, many of these people, deep down in their hearts, really do believe in that stuff. It would be easier to feel sympathy for them if it were not so ridiculous. See also: “The evolutionary psychologist knows why Read More ›

Rob Sheldon’s book is The Long Ascent: Genesis 1–11 in Science & Myth, Volume 1 (Wipf & Stock). The book tries to probe the minds of early biblical characters struggling to understand nature in the absence of any formal body of science knowledge. Order here. As “Part I” suggests, he is working on another installment in the series.

Various foolish explanations are on offer: the adaptationist hypothesis, the byproduct hypothesis, and the sexual selection hypothesis. From Bill Dembski and Jonathan Wells at Evolution News & Views: Leaving aside whether mathematical ability really is a form of sexual display (most mathematicians would be surprised to learn as much), there is a fundamental problem with these hypotheses. To be sure, they presuppose that the traits in question evolved, which in itself is problematic. The main problem, however, is that none of them provides a detailed, testable model for assessing its validity. If spectacular mathematical ability is adaptive, as the adaptationist hypothesis claims, how do we determine that? What precise evolutionary steps would be needed to achieve that ability? If it Read More ›

From Mark Buchanan at Nature Physics: The origin of life is among the deepest unexplained mysteries. How did the first self-replicating entities emerge, providing the material on which the selective mechanism of evolution could then operate? The most primitive known self-replicating forms of life are far too complex to have sprung from the pre-evolutionary environment through… More. You’d have to pay to read more. Not recommended. If they had any workable naturalist idea, the world would deafen at the sound. If they thought it required intelligence, their careers would be ruined. See also: What we know and don’t know about the origin of life

From Will Sullivan at PBS Nova Next: While the single-celled organisms that dominated early Earth’s oceans didn’t have much need for teeth, they did find some evolutionary advantage in making their own minerals. According to research published last week, life has been making its own hard parts for at least 810 million years, about 200 million years longer than previously thought. It’s the first occurrence of what scientists call biomineralization, and it could give us deeper insight into both the evolution of living things and Earth’s early climate. More. It also reduces the time for purely Darwinian evolution to work. See also: Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen

From Uri Harris at Quillette: What is particularly striking about this shift is that the number of moderates has dropped sharply among professors. … From Bankston’s description, it seems clear that any non-leftist would find working in sociology almost unbearable. The research in the original paper suggests that the leftward shift in social science is likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. More. We all knew this but why persist with the pretense that these disciplines are any kind of sciences at all? And why should they be publicly funded? See also: All sides agree: progressive politics is strangling social sciences