News

We don’t think the World Wildlife Fund would welcome the news, put that way. Anyway, from ScienceDaily: Periods of high extinction on Earth, rather than evolutionary adaptations, may have been a key driver in the diversification of amniotes (today’s dominant land vertebrates, including reptiles, birds, and mammals), according to new research. … The new study examined the issue of adaptive radiations among early amniotes, from 315 to 200 million years ago. This time period witnessed some of the most profound climate changes on a global scale, including the dramatic shrinking of the southern polar icecap, the disappearance of equatorial rainforests, a substantial increase in temperature, and prolonged drought conditions. The time period under study also included the largest mass extinction Read More ›

At Salvo, Casey Luskin writes, Hominid Hype, Take 2015 This Time It’s “Homo Naledi” The discoverers of Homo naledi are calling it an “anatomical mosaic.” That terminology raises a red flag. In the parlance of evolutionary biology, that usually means the fossil is a unique organism that doesn’t fit easily into the standard evolutionary tree. As one technical paper concluded, “the H. naledi skeleton is a unique mosaic previously unknown in the human fossil record.” Indeed, just four years ago, the hominin Australopithecus sediba—also discovered and promoted by Berger—was the transitional form du jure between the australopithecines and our own genus, Homo. Yet sediba is very different from naledi in some important ways, including the pelvis. If the same researchers Read More ›

So says some new research. First, remember “vestigial organs”? We learned in high school that  vestigial organs, including the appendix, show that there is no design in nature. Being teens, we never considered the implications of the fact that the proposition is never supposed to work the other way. That is, now that almost all such organs have been found to be functional (so far), the no-design PR lobby just moved to other claims. For example, junk DNA! Oh wait, let’s check our notes here on junk DNA… whoops… Okay, and now the humble appendix has the floor: Immune cells make appendix ‘silent hero’ of digestive health “Popular belief tells us the appendix is a liability,” she said. “Its removal is one Read More ›

Here (video unlikely to embed at UD). Live TV: http://livestream.com/accounts/9262780/events/3189705 Live radio: http://player.radio.com/listen/station/knx-1070-newsradio U/D Dec 4, looks like we have pics of recovered weapons, looks like Semi-auto AR15s with stabilising front hand grips, low mag optical sights and two 9mm parabellum semiauto pistols: Confirmation of explosive devices on live TV just now, that is not normal. END PS: Links (Drudge?): 14 DEAD; 17 INJURED… Dressed in ski masks and military gear… KNBC-TV LIVE… KCAL-TV LIVE… KFI-AM LIVE… KNX-AM LIVE… AP LATEST… Active-shooter drills every month at Inland Regional Center… ISIS Extremists Celebrate Shootings With America Burning Hashtag… PPS: The following was first observed on Sept 11 2001 on an Islamic Dawah site (subsequently vanished save in the web archives): Notice Read More ›

Because the bill is due for cosmology’s free, non-falsifiable lunch. At least, that is the impression one gets from Columbia mathematician Peter Woit’s comments Here: Next week there will be a workshop in Munich with the title Why Trust a Theory? Reconsidering Scientific Methodology in Light of Modern Physics. It’s organized by Richard Dawid, to discuss his ideas about “non-empirical theory confirmation”, developed to defend string theory research against accusations that its failure to make any testable predictions about anything make it a failure as a research program. I guess the idea of such a workshop is to bring together string theory proponents and critics to sort things out, but looking at the program and talk abstracts, this doesn’t look Read More ›

Further to astronomer Hugh Ross on degrees of certainty in science, from Christie Aschwanden, Five Thirty-Eight’s lead science writer: P-values have taken quite a beating lately. These widely used and commonly misapplied statistics have been blamed for giving a veneer of legitimacy to dodgy study results, encouraging bad research practices and promoting false-positive study results. But after writing about p-values again and again, and recently issuing a correction on a nearly year-old story over some erroneous information regarding a study’s p-value (which I’d taken from the scientists themselves and their report), I’ve come to think that the most fundamental problem with p-values is that no one can really say what they are. More. Here’s the theory, from Dummies, but apparently Read More ›

This guy argues so. Drink yer brew and decide. Note: For a serious look at devolution in nature, see “Getting back to the simple life …” Hat tip: ’s blog, Signs of the Times

Wake up. From ScienceDaily: Scientists have found eight well-preserved fossilized peach endocarps, or pits, in southwest China dating back more than two and a half million years. Despite their age, the fossils appear nearly identical to modern peach pits. … “We found these peach endocarp fossils just exposed in the strata,” Su said. “It’s really a fantastic finding.” Su said the discovery provides important new evidence for the origins and evolution of the modern fruit. Peaches are widely thought to have originated in China, but the oldest evidence had been archeological records dating back roughly 8,000 years. No wild population has ever been found, and its long trade history makes tracing its beginnings difficult. More. Of course, humans have done Read More ›

Whiggish? That is, a history that simply decides who is right. Readers may recall Steven Weinberg, Nobelist (1979) and multiverse theorist. From his recent piece in the New York Review of Books: Nevertheless, in teaching courses on the history of physics and astronomy, and then working up my lectures into a book, I have come to think that whatever one thinks of whiggery in other sorts of history, it has a rightful place in the history of science. It is clearly not possible to speak of right and wrong in the history of art or fashion, nor I think is it possible in the history of religion, and one can argue about whether it is possible in political history, but Read More ›

Further to A biologist explains epigenetics: Picture an orchestra (DNA is only the violin section), … From The Scientist : Antidepressant Exerts Epigenetic Changes … “Depression is considered a stress-related disease and it has been known for a while that stress can change long-term behavior, probably by reprogramming gene activity,” said study coauthor Theo Rein of Max Planck. Several groups previously demonstrated that environmental factors could influence epigenetic changes associated with psychiatric disorders, including depression. Different classes of antidepressant drugs have also been found to induce epigenetic changes in both animal brain cells and in clinical studies. “In depression, we’ve seen alterations in gene expression that coincide with DNA methylation and other epigenetic changes,” explained Rein. The present study builds Read More ›

Here (make sure to watch the embedded Fox26 video which I doubt I can embed at UD). Is it reasonable to be putting such a question to 12 year old students in class? (And if you think this was just one teacher, note how it came up the next day in other classes and in multiple classes on the day in question; somebody with responsibility wrote this into a curriculum with intent to create the view that per critical thinking, belief in God is little more than a widely believed, religiously backed [itself a loaded issue] questionable opinion with little warrant.) Is the view that God is real merely a religious belief with no serious weight of evidence or argument? Read More ›

Hard on the heels of the Atlantic noting the resistance to valid new ideas in science, we hear from Inside Science that : Scientific Consensus Is Almost Never Wrong – Almost The man who shifted the geology paradigm was Alfred Wegener and he was never mentioned in my Geology 101 class. How this happened was discussed at a meeting of the Geology Society of America in Baltimore earlier this month. … No one knows how it happened, but likely one day Wegener simply looked at a globe and noted that you could slide South America right up against Africa. The bulge in Brazil near the city of Natal, would fit snugly into the bight of Africa near Cameroon. There are Read More ›

From The Atlantic: The strangeness of the geology and fossil evidence behind the theory of continental drift helped drive a half-century of resistance to the idea. Siddhartha Mukherjee documented in his book The Emperor of All Maladies how a fixation on the cure for a misconceived disease inhibited recognition of the complexity of cancer for a generation. It took decades before physicists came to grips with experiments that showed that the speed of light was constant for every observer—and even then, only the very young Einstein took that observation seriously enough to produce his first relativity theory. In the long run, it’s true: Reality imposes a final and authoritative judgment on the rights and wrongs of any idea. In the Read More ›

Readers recall Brit physicist/TV presenter Brian Cox? You know, ”multiverse/“many worlds” makes sense“ and all that? Rumour has it that he became something of a target this year. A reader sends: Laughably, Prof. Brian Cox – a household name in Britain in science-communication – was attacked for having the ‘wrong’ wife. Not so laughable at all though was the large-scale harassment directed against him by flamers. They also mounted a major campaign of harassment against another person who is also a household name in Britain for science-communication, Prof. Mary Beard. The personal attacks upon Cox about his wife were in the course of Cox’ having tweeted in mild, polite support of an open letter in favour of free-speech. Though Brian Read More ›

Thoughts spurred by ISIS, apparently. From New Scientist: What turns an ordinary person into a killer? The idea that a civilised human being might be capable of barbaric acts is so alien that we often blame our animal instincts – the older, “primitive” areas of the brain taking over and subverting their more rational counterparts. But fresh thinking turns this long-standing explanation on its head. It suggests that people perform brutal acts because the “higher”, more evolved, brain overreaches. The set of brain changes involved has been dubbed Syndrome E – with E standing for evil. Yes, evil is an intelligent choice. Not a “natural” one. As Aesop’s fable tells it, the scorpion doesn’t sting because he is evil, but Read More ›