News

“ … reportage that is mostly aimed at insulting Republicans and Christians.” But isn’t that what a pop science page would typically understand science reporting to be?  Oh yes, there are also a-crock-alypses to cover. Sorry, forgot. Here: Now, for some reason, Slate’s science page has partially abandoned its strong tradition of in-depth analysis to promote an angry, opinion-driven reportage that is mostly aimed at insulting Republicans and Christians. … This is counterproductive. Science journalism that forsakes its primary mission of science communication to engage in partisan culture wars does a grotesque disservice to the scientific endeavor and is doomed to fail. Just ask ScienceBlogs, which has become a shell of its former self … Yuh. I often send ScienceBlogs Read More ›

If they’re honest. Following on Darwin’s Predictions: A New Website Surveys Evolution’s Main Predictions Here: The predictions examined in this paper were selected according to several criteria. They cover a wide spectrum of evolutionary theory and are fundamental to the theory, reflecting major tenets of evolutionary thought. They were widely held by the consensus rather than reflecting one viewpoint of several competing viewpoints. Each prediction was a natural and fundamental expectation of the theory of evolution, and constituted mainstream evolutionary science. Furthermore, the selected predictions are not vague but rather are specific and can be objectively evaluated. They have been tested and evaluated and the outcome is not controversial or in question. And finally the predictions have implications for evolution’s capacity Read More ›

What’s needed to drive this increase? Just three things: selection, replication, and mutation.” – Kenneth Miller, Only a Theory, p. 77 Thoughts? See also: Wow. Catholic Darwinism goes nuts. A mass for Darwin. Or is this a joke? Open a window, someone, please. Follow UD News at Twitter!

It can be the greatest game on Earth. And it can be vastly more useful. But: Further to A growing serious interest in the science journal retraction problem?, this also landed in the In Bin yesterday: In the language of science, calling results “incredibly nice” is not a compliment—it’s tantamount to accusing a researcher of being cavalier, or even of fabricating findings. But rather than heed the warning, the journal, Anesthesia & Analgesia, punted. It published the letter to the editor, together with an explanation from Fujii, which asked, among other things, “how much evidence is required to provide adequate proof?” In other words, “Don’t believe me? Tough.” Anesthesia & Analgesia went on to publish 11 more of Fujii’s papers. Read More ›

Maybe. It even penetrated as far as the New York Times: Retractions can be good things, since even scientists often fail to acknowledge their mistakes, preferring instead to allow erroneous findings simply to wither away in the back alleys of unreproducible literature. But they don’t surprise those of us who are familiar with how science works; we’re surprised only that retractions aren’t even more frequent. … Every day, on average, a scientific paper is retracted because of misconduct. Two percent of scientists admit to tinkering with their data in some kind of improper way. That number might appear small, but remember: Researchers publish some 2 million articles a year, often with taxpayer funding. In each of the last few years, Read More ›

Drat, just when I (O’Leary for News) complained that the new atheists had given up threatening each other with legal action, raising cain about genome mapper Francis Collins, or starting hoo-haws in elevators, this item turned up in the In Bin: Jerry Coyne in The Scientist : But while science and religion both claim to discern what’s true, only science has a system for weeding out what’s false. In the end, that is the irreconcilable conflict between them. Science is not just a profession or a body of facts, but, more important, a set of cognitive and practical tools designed to understand brute reality while overcoming the human desire to believe what we like or what we find emotionally satisfying. Read More ›

We ran a bit late on our religion coverage yesterday. The new atheists have not produced as many interesting scandals and uproars recently. Besides it is gardening season in many places anyway. That said, catching up, here is something O’Leary for News certainly didn’t know: A few years ago, a Mass was composed titled “Missa Charles Darwin” (Missa means Mass). The piece is based on the five-movement structure of the traditional Mass. It sounds very much like Renaissance church music, but the texts from Scripture have been replaced by excerpts from Darwin’s writings, including On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.” Or is this a joke we didn’t get? No wonder News’s pastor can hardly stand to hear the Read More ›

Here. In this way, the researchers looked back at selection events that occurred up to 500,000 years ago, revealing the evolutionary forces that shaped the dawn of modern humans, thought to be around 200,000 years ago. Most previous methods for uncovering such changes reach back only about 30,000 years, says Stephen Schaffner, a computational biologist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The analytical approach that Tang’s team used is promising, he adds. “It’s treating all kinds of selection in a uniform framework, and it’s also treating different eras of selection in a more or less uniform way.” But Schaffner says that further research is needed to confirm that the method is broadly applicable. Still, even the most powerful genomic-analysis Read More ›

In a comparatively nonsense-free book review, we read, Schrödinger and Einstein both spent far longer on the hunt for a unification of quantum physics and relativity than they had on the breakthroughs for which they are known. This quixotic quest forms the major part of Halpern’s book, and it makes for a tragic tale. instein revised and rejigged his work, to the increasing ennui of his peers and the increasing adulation of the world. Schrödinger, never as famous, overstepped the mark, trying so hard to be taken seriously that he offended Einstein with public pronouncements about the superiority of his own work. For three years, Einstein didn’t return Schrödinger’s letters. Their fellow physicists became more bewildered and irritated by the Read More ›

From Huffington Post Mind Controlled Robot Arm Lets Paralyzed Man Drink a Beer on His Own … doesn’t that mean mind over matter? A man paralyzed for 13 years can finally have a drink on his own again, thanks to a robotic arm he’s able to control using his brain. More. See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism but then the brain got away Follow UD News at Twitter!

Here, based on this post on a remarkably pungent academic disgrace: Peter Thiel’s comments on the American university system say it all. A variety of academics, scientists and particularly Ivy League professors and alumni inherit a priestly-caste status. They are the truth holders. They are the diviners of the universe. And we must pour an endless stream of funds, and an increasingly greater amount of resources into their steadily decreasing return of investment. The education bubble is ready to burst; and it will be far more glorious than the housing or tech bubbles. But does anyone know how to short sell or buy put options on Harvard? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Noted by Barry Arrington here. Whitewash duly reported in the New Yorker is In retrospect, Green wishes he had asked for the raw data earlier. And yet, in collaborations in which data is collected at only one institution, it’s not uncommon for the collecting site to anonymize and code it before sharing it. The anonymized data Green did see looked plausible and convincing. “He analyzed it, I analyzed it—I have the most ornate set of graphs and charts and every possible detail analyzed five different ways,” Green said. Ultimately, though, the system takes for granted that no one would be so brazen as to create the actual raw data themselves. The author burbles on, as expected, about the nature of Read More ›

From Nature: The tests being used to work that out are extremely subtle, and have yet to produce a definitive answer. But researchers are optimistic that a resolution is close. If so, they will finally be able to answer questions that have lingered for decades. Can a particle really be in many places at the same time? Is the Universe continually dividing itself into parallel worlds, each with an alternative version of ourselves? Is there such a thing as an objective reality at all? “These are the kinds of questions that everybody has asked at some point,” says Alessandro Fedrizzi, a physicist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. “What is it that is really real?” More. But why Read More ›

Readers may remember Suzan Mazur’s interview with a senior NASA scientist: senior NASA origin of life scientist: In a couple of e-mails to me in January 2013, Andrew Pohorille, the senior-most scientist at NASA working in the origin of life field, objected to my story, “The RNA World’s Last Hurrah?”, “The RNA World’s Last Hurrah?”, in which I interviewed Paul Davies’ collaborator at Arizona State University, physicist Sara Walker. … Hey, we got you hooked? Then how be this, a followup: Pohorille is now even less enthused about the RNA world since Princeton and said there were also fewer scientists currently pursuing that line of research. He also thinks the answer to origin of life is not about a thermodynamic Read More ›

Well, here is one: Crap about “Intentional change” = stuff government will probably try to make us do, if it gets votes:  The Evolution Institute says it uses evolutionary science to solve real-world problems. Currently, there is no mechanism for applying current theory and research to public policy formulation. We aim to provide the mechanism. Working with our large network of advisors, we can: Identify and assemble the evolutionary expertise for virtually any topic relevant to human welfare. Organize workshops, coordinate the writing of position papers, and provide advisors. Assist in the implementation of the policies that we formulate. Does that include SWAT teams? Curiously, it took a Canadian to publicize how many semi-useless bureaucrats in the United States have SWAT Read More ›