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At the Evolution Institute, UNC Charlotte biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks, who blogs on the cultural significance of Darwinism at Anthropomics, writes, ”Evolutionary Psychology Is Neither”: … It’s presumably better than creationist psychology, but nobody practices creationist psychology – so presumably the word “evolutionary” is doing a bit more work here than it may seem at first blush. Indeed, the word seems to encode, in this context, a series of propositions that most people actually working in human evolution believe to be false, if not ridiculous. Foundationally, where students of human evolution have generally emphasized the adaptability of the human mind, evolutionary psychologists have rather attempted to call attention to the adaptedness of the human mind. From these opposed starting points, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “We now know what the plumage looked like on the tail, and that from the mid-femur down, it had bare skin,” says Aaron van der Reest. This is the first report of such preserved skin forming a web from the femoral shaft to the abdomen, never before seen in non-avian dinosaurs. “Ostriches use bare skin to thermoregulate. Because the plumage on this specimen is virtually identical to that of an ostrich, we can infer that Ornithomimus was likely doing the same thing, using feathered regions on their body to maintain body temperature. It would’ve looked a lot like an ostrich.” In fact, this group of animals–referred to as ornithomimids–is commonly referred to as “ostrich mimics.” The find is Read More ›

But isn’t that precisely what naturalism teaches about everything? Further to When organized crime got ID? (There always needs to be someone whose knowledge is in fact an intelligent commentary for a naturalist theory of mind to be valid, which means by definition that it isn’t), cheating supposedly random lotteries is once again in the news. From WUSA9, we hear, WASHINGTON (WUSA9) – A man who sold himself a $1,000,000 winning D.C. Lottery ticket is just one of many retailers a WUSA9 investigation found winning the lottery at rates statisticians say border on impossible. At least three retailers won the lottery around 100 times according to an analysis of D.C. Lottery records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. … Read More ›

About time. Readers may recall that the first billion years of life when, we are told, simple microbes dominated, have been considered boring. Well, books where we have only .01 percent of the text preserved are boring too. But things may be changing. From Science News: 1.8 billion years ago, low oxygen may not have hindered life after all After this wild youth of rapid change, things slowed down. About 1.8 billion years ago, the climate stabilized. Oxygen levels steadied. Evolution seemingly stalled. For around a billion years, not a lot changed on planet Earth. Scientists called this interval the dullest time in Earth’s history. It came to be known as the “boring billion.” But scientists are taking a fresh Read More ›

Animal mind is a fascinating topic, and I’ll be starting a five-part series on it at Evolution News & Views later this month. Meanwhile, from the world of grumpy cat vids, we learn: A study carried out between the University of Edinburgh and Bronx Zoo compared our beloved domestic cat with its wilder relatives. Compared with the snow leopard, the Scottish wildcat and the African lion, researchers found these larger predators shared similar characteristics of aggression and neurotic behaviour to domestic cats. They needed to do a study to find that out? Dominance, impulsiveness and neurotic behaviour are the most common trait shared between the domestic cat and the wild cat. More. Well, a problem arises when we characterize cats’ Read More ›

Here, according to a friend: Abstract. This paper describes the forensic analysis of what the authors believe to be the most sophisticated smart card fraud encountered to date. In 2010, Murdoch et al. [7] described a man-in-the-middle attack against EMV cards. [7] demonstrated the attack using a general purpose FPGA board, noting that “miniaturization is mostly a mechanical challenge, and well within the expertise of criminal gangs”. This indeed happened in 2011, when about 40 sophisticated card forgeries surfaced in the field. These forgeries are remarkable in that they embed two chips wired top-to-tail. The first chip is clipped from a genuine stolen card. The second chip plays the role of the man-in-the-middle and communicates directly with the point of Read More ›

How many lives did Dawkins save, you say?  Carson doesn’t believe in Dawkins’ religion, Darwinian evolution. All doctors should be as ignorant as Carson. As so often, we close our religion coverage for the week with a new atheist: Richard Dawkins on US prez contender Ben Carson: On Dr. Ben Carson specifically Richard Dawkins said, “You just told me all the Republican candidates except one doesn’t believe in evolution, I mean that’s a disgrace. For a senor a very eminent, distinguished doctor, as he is, to say that is even worse. Because of course evolution is the bedrock of biology and biology is the bedrock of medicine. For a distinguished doctor to not understand, I have to use the word Read More ›

Here. Highly religious Americans are less likely than others to see conflict between faith and science. People’s sense that there generally is a conflict between religion and science seems to have less to do with their own religious beliefs than it does with their perceptions of other people’s beliefs. Less than one-third of Americans polled in the new survey (30%) say their personal religious beliefs conflict with science, while fully two-thirds (68%) say there is no conflict between their own beliefs and science. People’s sense that there generally is a conflict between religion and science seems to have less to do with their own religious beliefs than it does with their perceptions of other people’s beliefs. Less than one-third of Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Belief in God and prejudice reduced by directing magnetic energy into the brain The findings, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, reveal that people in whom the targeted brain region was temporarily shut down reported 32.8% less belief in God, angels, or heaven. They were also 28.5% more positive in their feelings toward an immigrant who criticised their country. Dr Izuma, from the University’s Department of Psychology, said: “People often turn to ideology when they are confronted by problems. We wanted to find out whether a brain region that is linked with solving concrete problems, like deciding how to move one’s body to overcome an obstacle, is also involved in solving abstract problems addressed by Read More ›

Beginning our religion coverage this week (a bit late), from Christian Post: Ten years after publication of Who Was Adam? by Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, 13 new chapters detail the new scientific evidence on the origins of humankind in a second edition. Rana and Ross are scholars affiliated with Reasons to Believe, which also published the new edition of Who Was Adam? RTB works to spread the Gospel by showing how science supports the truths found in Scripture. Rana and Ross both have doctorate degrees in the physical sciences, biochemistry and astronomy, respectively. Reasons to Believe. Astronomer/apologist Hugh Ross. Biochemist/apologist Fazale Rana. They describe their position as Old Earth Creationism: We think that the days in Genesis 1 are Read More ›

‘Twas ever thus: A nasty little 66-million-year-old family secret has been leaked by a recently unearthed tyrannosaur bone. The bone has peculiar teeth marks that strongly suggest it was gnawed by another tyrannosaur. The find could be some of the best evidence yet that tyrannosaurs were not shy about eating their own kind. … Serrated teeth rule out crocodiles and point directly to a theropod dinosaur like T. rex. The fact that the only large theropods found in the Lance Formation are two tyrannosaurs –Tyrannosaurus rex or Nanotyrannus lancensis — eliminates all interpretations but cannibalism, explained McLain, who will be presenting the discovery on 1 Nov. at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Baltimore. … Even Read More ›

Microbiome = the microbes that mostly run things on our planet and in our bodies. (Or so they say. We’re just the back office.) From Carl Zimmer at New York Times: In two papers published simultaneously in the journals Science and Nature, the scientists called for a government-led effort akin to the Brain Initiative, a monumental multiyear project intended to develop new technologies to understand the human brain. … In recent decades, microbiologists have begun to map their astonishing diversity. The animal kingdom contains about 40 major groups, or phyla. Microbiologists now recognize upward of 1,000 phyla of microbes. “Plants and animals are a patina on the microbial world,” said Margaret J. McFall-Ngai of the University of Hawaii, a co-author Read More ›

From How We Get to Next: If, many decades from now, some form of rogue artificial intelligence does manage to follow the playbook of a thousand science-fiction narratives and enslave the human race, I suspect the last remaining historians will look back to an obscure computer science experiment conducted at the turn of this century as an augur of the revolution to come. The experiment was the brainchild of two researchers at the University of Sussex named Jon Bird and Paul Layzell, and it involved a programming technique known as “evolutionary” software that uses a kind of simulated version of natural selection to engineer and optimize solutions to a design problem. If Darwinism produces intelligence, why aren’t Boltzmann brains floating Read More ›

Some people offer the 15 best reasons to think aliens are real. Others say, no. But it’s not even clear how we would recognize alien life. From Cosmos, Alan Finkel questions whether the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos is worth the effort. Let’s say there is an intelligent civilisation on Kepler-452b and that they have built a powerful transmitter to send signals to us. If we picked up such a signal today and responded, our signal would take 1,400 years to reach them. Their response would take just as long, so it would be our descendants 2,800 years from now who would receive the reply. That would make for a rather drawn-out conversation. Even if they did Read More ›

Please tell us it’s not true. From the Atlantic: In 2006, Daniel Oppenheimer, then a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, published research arguing that the use of clear, simple words over needlessly complex ones can actually make authors appear more intelligent. The research garnered him the Ig Nobel Prize in literature—a parody of the Nobel Prize that, according to a Slate article by the awards’ creator, Marc Abrahams, and several academics I consulted, is always given to improbable research and sometimes serves as a de facto criticism or satire in the academic world. (Oppenheimer for his part believes he got the award because of the paper’s title: “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems Read More ›