Mind

From Ruth Williams at The Scientist: Two studies in Science today (December 7)—one that focuses on prenatal development in humans, the other on infancy to old age—provide insights into the extent of DNA sequence errors that the average human brain cell accumulates over a lifetime. Together, they reveal that mutations become more common as fetuses develop, and over a lifetime a person may rack up more than 2,000 mutations per cell. … Within the now burgeoning field of somatic mutation analyses, the brain is a particular area of interest. That’s because unlike organs such as the skin and gut where cells are replaced daily, the brain’s neurons, once established in the fetus, for the most part stick around for life. Read More ›

From at Christie Anschwanden FiveThirtyEight: These are the arguments underlying an “open science” reform movement that was created, in part, as a response to a “reproducibility crisis” that has struck some fields of science.1 But they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it. What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries Read More ›

From Alice Klein at NewScientist: An Australian boy missing the visual processing centre of his brain has baffled doctors by seeming to have near-normal sight. … However, BI has remarkably well-preserved vision, says Iñaki-Carril Mundiñano at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “You wouldn’t think he is blind,” he says. “He navigates his way around without any problems and plays soccer and video games,” (paywall) More. But then, as per David Robson at BBC, there’s also blindsight, Clearly, despite his blindness, Daniel’s healthy eyes were still watching the world and passing the information to his unconscious, which was guiding his behaviour. Publishing a report in 1974, Weiskrantz coined the term “blindsight” to describe this fractured conscious state. “Some were sceptical, of Read More ›

From philosopher Tim Mulgan at Aeon: In academic philosophy today, an interest in extraterrestrial life is regarded with some suspicion. This is a historical anomaly. In Ancient Greece, Epicureans argued that every possible form of life must recur infinitely many times in an infinite universe. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, as modern astronomy demonstrated that our Earth is just another planet and our Sun just another star, the default hypothesis among informed observers was that the Universe is filled with habitable planets and intelligent life. One principal argument for this ‘pluralism’ was philosophical or theological: God (or Nature) does nothing in vain, and therefore such a vast cosmos could not be home to only one small race of Read More ›

From Andy Coghlan at New Scientist: We may owe some of our unique intelligence to a generous supply of a signalling chemical called dopamine in brain regions that help us think and plan. Our brains produce far more dopamine in these regions than the brains of other primates like apes.More. Naturalist ideology requires something like extra dopamine production to be seen as a cause, not an effect.  Of course, what we are really talking about is human consciousness, whose origin no one understands. And whatta feast of just-so science! See also: Human/primate evolution: Eating fruit led to bigger brains? Climate change made us smart Retroviruses play a role in development of human brain? Tooth size not linked to brain size in early humans Read More ›

Here: Artificial Intelligence has leapt to the forefront of global discourse, garnering increased attention from practitioners, industry leaders, policymakers, and the general public. The diversity of opinions and debates gathered from news articles this year illustrates just how broadly AI is being investigated, studied, and applied. However, the field of AI is still evolving rapidly and even experts have a hard time understanding and tracking progress across the field. More. But they are keeping track and it is free. See also: How are those AI spiritual machines coming?

According to Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health: “How do we know what we claim to know?” is quite easily the most important question in science. In fact, the scientific method is designed precisely to answer that question. Through a process of careful observation, hypothesizing, and tightly controlled experimentation, scientists have been able to explain why they know what they claim to know for hundreds of years. Rigorously following this procedure is what separates science from all other disciplines. We’re fine with that but naturalism entails a different approach: Consciousness is an illusion and evidence is an outdated concept where cosmology is concerned. Now here is where the wheels came off: Most aspects of our lives cannot Read More ›

Jerry Fodor was one of the Altenberg 16* and author of What Darwin Got Wrong (2010). Correction: Jerry Fodor was interviewed in the book “The Altenberg 16” by Suzan Mazur  (Chapter 3)  but is not one of the 16 scientists that met at Altenberg in 2008. Pos-Darwinista writes to say that Fodor’s page at Rutgers University doesn’t mention What Darwin Got Wrong, co-authored with Massimo Piattelli Palmarini. There is, however, a link to the pdf of a paper, “Against Darwinism,” identified as forthcoming: This started out to be a paper about why I am so down on Evolutionary Psychology (EP), a topic I’ve addressed in print before.  But, as I went along, it began to seem that really the paper was Read More ›

Maybe the arms are an illusion too… From ScienceDaily: Neuroscientists have shown how amputees can learn to control a robotic arm through electrodes implanted in the brain. The research details changes that take place in both sides of the brain used to control the amputated limb and the remaining, intact limb. The results show both areas can create new connections to learn how to control the device, even several years after an amputation. … The researchers worked with three rhesus monkeys who suffered injuries at a young age and had to have an arm amputated to rescue them four, nine and 10 years ago, respectively. Their limbs were not amputated for the purposes of the study. In two of the Read More ›

Recently, a claim whistled through the pop science media: Bonobos help strangers without being asked, therefore human are not special. The claim is noteworthy only for the authors’ apparent assumption that most readers don’t realize that many animals help without being asked, provided they have any idea what to do. Usually, they don’t. The animals-are-just-fuzzy-people stuff caters to the growing conviction that humans are not special, — a conviction for which the best excuse would have to be “I never read or think much, I don’t care what happens politically. My big issue is, my dealer has gone to rehab.” Meanwhile, from Penny Spikins at Sapiens: There are, perhaps surprisingly, only two known cases of likely interpersonal violence in the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Duplications of large segments of noncoding [junk] DNA in the human genome may have contributed to the emergence of differences between humans and nonhuman primates, according to results presented at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) 2017 Annual Meeting in Orlando, Fla. Identifying these duplications, which include regulatory sequences, and their effect on traits and behavior may help scientists explain genetic contributions to human disease. Paulina Carmona-Mora, PhD, who presented the work; Megan Dennis, PhD; and their colleagues at the University of California, Davis, study the history of human-specific duplications (HSDs), segments of DNA longer than 1,000 base pairs that are repeated in humans but not in primates or other animals. In this study, they focused on Read More ›

The 21st century is not turning out at all the way pundits thought. From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at Evolution News & Views: It is important to understand the aspects of mind that they do share. They share some motor control, some common sensations, and probably share some aspects of imagination — that is, the ability to reconstruct sensory images (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.). This sharing of some aspects of the mind, but not others, is remarkably consistent with classical Thomistic dualism. In Thomistic dualism, the human soul is the composite of three powers: vegetative, sensory, and rational. Vegetative powers are what we today call autonomic physiological control — control of heart rate, control of blood pressure, control of growth, reproduction, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Professor Robin Allaby, in Warwick’s School of Life Sciences, has discovered that human crop gathering was so extensive, as long ago as the last Ice Age, that it started to have an effect on the evolution of rice, wheat and barley — triggering the process which turned these plants from wild to domesticated. In Tell Qaramel, an area of modern day northern Syria, the research demonstrates evidence of einkorn being affected up to thirty thousand years ago, and rice has been shown to be affected more than thirteen thousand years ago in South, East and South-East Asia. Furthermore, emmer wheat is proved to have been affected twenty-five thousand years ago in the Southern Levant — and barley in Read More ›

From David Oakley and Peter Halligan at The Conversation: If the experience of consciousness does not confer any particular advantage, it’s not clear what its purpose is. But as a passive accompaniment to non-conscious processes, we don’t think that the phenomenon of personal awareness has a purpose, in much the same way that rainbows do not. Rainbows simply result from the reflection, refraction and dispersion of sunlight through water droplets – none of which serves any particular purpose. Our conclusions also raise questions about the notions of free will and personal responsibility. If our personal awareness does not control the contents of the personal narrative which reflects our thoughts, feelings, emotions, actions and decisions, then perhaps we should not be Read More ›

Which, in the context, can only mean naturalist efforts to identify free will as an illusion, like consciousness, that evolved to help spread our selfish genes. From Ari N. Schulman at Big Questions Online: For example, let’s say I decide not to commit murder. My decision is rational not only because I have deliberated about the reasons not to do it, but also because my decision flows from a character that has been formed in a rational way. When faced with the choice to murder, my dispositions have already been shaped, e.g., by membership in a society that professes to value human life, by individual reflection, or by both. And if this is the case, then when confronted with the Read More ›