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From Slate: Why more rigor in science might do more harm than good

From Daniel Engber, reviewing Richard Harris’s Rigor Mortis at Slate: Rigor may not always serve the public good. In biomedicine, everyone is looking for positive results—meaningful, affirmative experiments that could one day help support a novel treatment for disease. (That’s true both for scientists who study biomedicine at universities and those employed by giant pharmaceutical companies.) In that context, rigor serves to check scientists’ ambition and enthusiasm: It reins in their wild oversteps and helps to keep experiments on track. But not every field of research enjoys the same harmony of goals. In the sciences most relevant to policy and regulation—such as climatology, toxicology, and nutrition—academics’ focus on making new discoveries is counterbalanced by another group of researchers, funded by Read More ›

We are informed: Odds of our existence not infinitely small after all

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: This is true for all types of probabilities! So the next time something unlikely happens, or you realize that something very unlikely must have already occurred, remember that no matter how unlikely it is, the odds of it happening weren’t infinitely small. Its existence, just like our existence, already disproves that possibility! More. Siegel attempt to marshall Bayesianism to make his case that vanishingly small odds make no difference. But, of course, it isn’t the odds of single events that we must consider, but the odds of complex patterns, not always dependent on each other. Nice try, of the kind that traditional media robotically sponsor. Can readers imagine the uproar if someone argued for the Read More ›

Why should we look for alien civilizations?

From Mindy Weinberger, interviewing SETIs Seth Shostak at LiveScience: “The search should continue, simply because it’s a very interesting question,” he said. “Is Earth special? Is it the only place around with intelligent life? That would be remarkable — but it’s just as remarkable to find you’re not the only kid on the block. That’s something that would change our view of ourselves forever,” he said. More. But how or why would their discovery “change our view of ourselves forever”? Wouldn’t we still be the same? See also: But surely we can’t conjure an entire advanced civilization? and How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Great news for fabled Tree of Life: Human and pufferfish have same tooth-making gene program. Except …

From ScienceDaily: Human teeth evolved from the same genes that make the bizarre beaked teeth of the pufferfish, according to new research by an international team of scientists. The study, led by Dr Gareth Fraser from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, has revealed that the pufferfish has a remarkably similar tooth-making programme to other vertebrates, including humans. Published in the journal PNAS, the research has found that all vertebrates have some form of dental regeneration potential. However the pufferfish use the same stem cells for tooth regeneration as humans do but only replace some teeth with elongated bands that form their characteristic beak. … “Our study suggests the same genes are instrumental in the early Read More ›

Tim Maudlin: Defending a “homey and unfashionable ” view of time

From George Musser at Nautilus: It has a built-in arrow. It is fundamental rather than derived from some deeper reality. Change is real, as opposed to an illusion or an artifact of perspective. The laws of physics act within time to generate each moment. Mixing mathematics, physics and philosophy, Maudlin bats away the reasons that scientists and philosophers commonly give for denying this folk wisdom. The mathematical arguments are the target of his current project, the second volume of New Foundations for Physical Geometry (the first appeared in 2014). Modern physics, he argues, conceptualizes time in essentially the same way as space. Space, as we commonly understand it, has no innate direction — it is isotropic. When we apply spatial Read More ›

Accelerating expansion of the universe solved?

From ScienceDaily: Paper. (paywall) PhD student Qingdi Wang has tackled this question in a new study that tries to resolve a major incompatibility issue between two of the most successful theories that explain how our universe works: quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The study suggests that if we zoomed in-way in-on the universe, we would realize it’s made up of constantly fluctuating space and time. “Space-time is not as static as it appears, it’s constantly moving,” said Wang. … Unlike other scientists who have tried to modify the theories of quantum mechanics or general relativity to resolve the issue, Wang and his colleagues Unruh and Zhen Zhu, also a UBC PhD student, suggest a different approach. They Read More ›

Could early life survive without phosphorus?

From Jeffrey Marlow at Discover blog: “CHNOPS” is one of science’s most revered acronyms, an amalgamation of letters that rolls of the tongues of high school biology students and practicing researchers alike. It accounts for the six elements that comprise most biological molecules: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur. Biologists have traditionally assumed that all six elements were prerequisites, as each one is found in several of life’s most essential molecules. But what if earlier life forms weren’t quite so demanding? Could a sustainable metabolism actually exist without one of these seemingly essential elements? To explore this revolutionary possibility, Joshua Goldford, a graduate student in Boston University’s Bioinformatics Program, led a theoretical study taking aim at phosphorous and its Read More ›

Is Bret Stephens right about progressives and science?

Readers may not have heard the explosion when the New York Times’ remaining subscribers discovered that their Tree Deathstar had published a columnist who questions global warming hysteria. Publisher Sulzberger has been begging the enraged elitists to quit cancelling their subscriptions ever since. Possibly, the enraged ex-Times readers are too young to recall the era when newspapers routinely published non-editorial board opinions on the op-ed page. That is why it was called the op-ed page (“opposite” the “editorial”). That oppressive ancient custom predates the war on free speech. Formerly, Times readers would have felt somewhat foolish if they explained in polite company that an opposing opinion was a “trigger” for their latest emotional meltdown and/or lifelong freakout. In the 1990s, Read More ›

Konrad Lorenz Institute: Following through on non-Darwinian biology

Does anyone remember the Altenberg 16, a group of dissenting evolution theorists who met so nervously at the Konrad Lorenz institute in Austria that they locked a journalist out of the meeting?* They seem to be continuing to write papers, according to Massimo Pigliucci, I have just spent three delightful days at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for theoretical biology in Vienna, participating to a workshop of philosophers and biologists on the question of how to think about causality, especially within the context of the so-called Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the currently unfolding update to the standard model in evolutionary theory. Here’s one: Susan Foster, Incorporating the environmentally sensitive phenotype into evolutionary thinking: phenotypic plasticity mediates the relationship between selection and genotype Read More ›

From LiveScience: “IBM scientists spent years constructing Deep Blue, and all it could do was play chess”

From Jesse Emspak at LiveScience: What Is Intelligence? 20 Years After Deep Blue, AI Still Can’t Think Like Humans “Good as they are, [computers] are quite poor at other kinds of decision making,” said Murray Campbell, a research scientist at IBM Research. “Some doubted that a computer would ever play as well as a top human. “The more interesting thing we showed was that there’s more than one way to look at a complex problem,” Campbell told Live Science. “You can look at it the human way, using experience and intuition, or in a more computer-like way.” Those methods complement each other, he said. Although Deep Blue’s win proved that humans could build a machine that’s a great chess player, Read More ›

Does convergent evolution point to libraries of patterns in life forms?

From Anurag A. Agrawal and Editor: Judith L. Bronstein at The American Naturalist: Abstract: A charm of biology as a scientific discipline is the diversity of life. Although this diversity can make laws of biology challenging to discover, several repeated patterns and general principles govern evolutionary diversification. Convergent evolution, the independent evolution of similar phenotypes, has been at the heart of one approach to understand generality in the evolutionary process. Yet understanding when and why organismal traits and strategies repeatedly evolve has been a central challenge. These issues were the focus of the American Society of Naturalists Vice Presidential Symposium in 2016 and are the subject of this collection of articles. Although naturalists have long made inferences about convergent evolution Read More ›

U Maryland’s Robert Nelson has noticed that the Darwin-in-the-schools lobby is no longer policing Evolution Street

From Robert H. Nelson at the Conversation: The question of whether a god exists is heating up in the 21st century. According to a Pew survey, the percent of Americans having no religious affiliation reached 23 percent in 2014. Among such “nones,” 33 percent said that they do not believe in God – an 11 percent increase since only 2007. Such trends have ironically been taking place even as, I would argue, the probability for the existence of a supernatural god have been rising. He offers five reasons God probably exists, but that’s not new. This is: As I say in my book, I should emphasize that I am not questioning the reality of natural biological evolution. What is interesting Read More ›

Is time travel a science-based idea?

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: This might seem like out-and-out science fiction, but not all of it belongs to the “fiction” category: traveling through time is the one thing in science that you can’t help yourself from doing no matter what you do! The question is how much you can manipulate it for your own ends, and control your motion through time. Physicist Siegel offers theories that enable forward or backward motion through tme but says But that’s a mathematical solution; does that mathematics describe our physical Universe, though? It appears not to be the case. The curvatures and/or discontinuities we’d need our Universe to have are wildly incompatible with what we observe, even near neutron stars and black holes: Read More ›

Deep learning is easy to fool?

From Nguyen A, Yosinski J, and Clune J (2015) at Evolving Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently been achieving state-of-the-art performance on a variety of pattern-recognition tasks, most notably visual classification problems. Given that DNNs are now able to classify objects in images with near-human-level performance, questions naturally arise as to what differences remain between computer and human vision. A recent study revealed that changing an image (e.g. of a lion) in a way imperceptible to humans can cause a DNN to label the image as something else entirely (e.g. mislabeling a lion a library). Here we show a related result: it is easy to produce images that are completely unrecognizable to humans, but that state-of-the-art DNNs believe Read More ›

Three-atom fridge? So everything IS information…

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. … “Many exciting things Read More ›