News

Animals we thought were extinct sometimes aren’t. From Julia Brown at New Scientist: Will Bill Laurance and his team find Tasmanian tigers lurking in Australia’s remote Cape York peninsula? Numerous animals that were thought to be extinct have recently been rediscovered. Here are our top five species that came back from the dead – and two more that might also have been written off too soon. More. This subject has heated up recently on account of possible sightings of the Tasmanian wolf (tiger), a marsupial that was believed to have gone extinct in the last century. Possibly, current technology would help us determine the chances that an actual species has actually gone extinct. The fact that one hasn’t seen any Read More ›

Well, in the age of just shout louder against the marchin’, marchin’ hordes, aw, maybe academic freedom is just a frill anyway. From Erin Ross at Nature: Revamped ‘anti-science’ education bills in United States find success: Legislation urges educators to ‘teach the controversy’ and allows citizens to challenge curricula. State and local legislatures in the United States are experimenting with new ways to target the topics taught in science classes, and it seems to be paying dividends. Florida’s legislature approved a bill on 5 May that would enable residents to challenge what educators teach students. And two other states have already approved non-binding legislation this year urging teachers to embrace ‘academic freedom’ and present the full spectrum of views on Read More ›

Most complete remains: Also in the series of papers released Tuesday in the journal eLife is the announcement of a new chamber within the Rising Star cave where the hominin species was first found. It too contains a collection of H. naledi bones, including at least three individuals and one “remarkably complete” specimen with a nearly intact skull. … While the dating is robust, the presence of such a primitive-looking hominin species so late in our history is perplexing. In addition to an upper body more suited for tree-dwelling, H. naledi had tiny brains, smaller even than a chimpanzee, which would have left them at a disadvantage when competing with the more intelligent hominin species in the same area around Read More ›

Over half a billion years earlier than dates usually given. From ScienceDaily: The researchers studied exceptionally well-preserved deposits which are approximately 3.5 billion years old in the ancient Dresser Formation in the Pilbara Craton of Western Australia. They interpreted the deposits were formed on land, not in the ocean, by identifying the presence of geyserite – a mineral deposit formed from near boiling-temperature, silica-rich, fluids that is only found in a terrestrial hot spring environment. Previously, the oldest known geyserite had been identified from rocks about 400 million years old. Within the Pilbara hotspring deposits, the researchers also discovered stromatolites – layered rock structures created by communities of ancient microbes. And there were other signs of early life in the Read More ›

A reader offers an interesting quote from Denis Noble´s recent book on Karl Popper´s view of Darwinism ( Dance to the Tune of Life – Biological Relativity, page 199): It is not widely known that Popper gave an important lecture to the Royal Society in 1986 entitled “A new interpretation of Darwinism”. It was given on the presence of Nobel laureates Sir Peter Medawar, Max Perutz and other figures, and it must have shocked his audience. He proposed a completely radical interpretation of Neo-Darwinism, essentially rejecting the Modern Synthesis by proposing that organisms themselves are the source of the creative processes of evolution, not random mutations in DNA. He said that Darwinism (but I am sure he meant Neo-Darwinism) was Read More ›

From psychology prof Tania Lombrozo at NPR: Skepticism is supposed to reflect a willingness to question and doubt — a key characteristic of scientific thinking. Skepticism encourages us to look at the evidence critically; it allows for the possibility that we are wrong. It seems like a win, then, to learn that courses in skepticism can decrease belief in the paranormal or — as reported in an article forthcoming in Science & Education — that teaching students to think critically about history can decrease belief in pseudoscience and other unwarranted claims. But taken too far, skepticism misses its mark. It’s important to avoid the error of believing something we ought not to believe, but it’s also important to avoid the Read More ›

Responding to Walter Myers III at ENV, Barry Arrington brings up a name that rings a bell: Over at ENV Walter Myers III takes a sledgehammer to the argument that the success of science compels acceptance of metaphysical naturalism, this time as argued by Barbara Forrest More. There are over 18,000 posts here but I remember Forrest from the curious case of her wholly unjustified attack on fellow philosopher Frank Beckwith in a philosophy quarterly a few years back. The story, so far as we knew it, is this: Beckwith used to hang out with ID theorists. Forrest published a savage attempt at a takedown in Synthese, without apparently having paid much attention to what Beckwith actually said. He, naturally, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Now scientists have reviewed all the evidence pointing towards an animal identity of the Weng’an fossils. Their findings have revealed that none of the characteristics previously used to define the fossils as animals are actually unique to animals alone, opening up the possibility for alternative identifications. Professor Philip Donoghue, another Bristol co-author, added: “Many proponents of animal affinity have argued that the Y-shaped junctions between the cells in the fossils are an important animal character, but this a feature common to many multicellular groups, including algae, that are very distant relatives of animals.” Dr Cunningham added: “It could be that the fossils belong to other groups, such as algae, and these possibilities need to be investigated carefully.” Despite Read More ›

But why stop? On the cocktail circuit, where hors d’oeuvres are served in iron rice bowls, it is piffle that pays. From Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at The Week: Why do humans have consciousness? The arguments surrounding this question make it one of the most animated debates in contemporary philosophy. One reason why consciousness so vexes academic philosophers is that a great many of them are atheists, and the reality of subjective consciousness frustrates an extremist but widely held version of atheistic metaphysics called eliminative materialism. This form of metaphysics takes the position that the only things that exist are matter and mindless physical processes. But in a world of pure matter, how could you have subjective, conscious beings like us? To someone Read More ›

From Jef Akst at the Scientist: Researchers uncover thousands of genes whose activity varies between men and women. Drawing on data on organ-, tissue-, and individual-specific gene expression from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTex) Portal, Shmuel Pietrokovski and Moran Gershoni of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel developed a comprehensive map of genes that are differentially expressed in men and women. … To explore whether other genes expressed differentially between the sexes might be similarly subject to mutation accumulation, Pietrokovski and Gershoni examined some 20,000 protein-coding genes, of which around 6,500 were expressed more in one sex than the other somewhere in the body. And sure enough, selection was effectively weaker in these genes, leading to the pile up of Read More ›

From an editorial in Nature: There has been much gnashing of teeth in the science-journalism community this week, with the release of an infographic that claims to rate the best and worst sites for scientific news. According to the American Council on Science and Health, which helped to prepare the ranking, the field is in a shoddy state. “If journalism as a whole is bad (and it is),” says the council, “science journalism is even worse. Not only is it susceptible to the same sorts of biases that afflict regular journalism, but it is uniquely vulnerable to outrageous sensationalism”. News aggregator RealClearScience, which also worked on the analysis, goes further: “Much of science reporting is a morass of ideologically driven Read More ›

From Religious Beliefs, Evolutionary Psychiatry, and Mental Health in America, Volume 1 of the series Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach pp 49-54 at Springer: Reactions to Darwin’s Origin of Species by Kevin J. Flannelly, Abstract: The chapter describes the initial reaction of the British general public to the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, the immediate and later reactions of the scientific community, and the 20th Century response of Conservative Christians in the U.S. The British public had a generally favorable reaction to Origin of Species when it was first published, and it has been said that the British public widely accepted that the theory of evolution was true within a decade of the book’s publication. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A study recently published in PLOS Biology provides information that substantially changes the prevailing idea about the brain formation process in vertebrates and sheds some light on how it might have evolved. The findings show that the interpretation maintained hitherto regarding the principal regions formed at the beginning of vertebrate brain development is not correct. … Amphioxus, considered close to vertebrates, was used in the research. This work shows that the brain of vertebrates must have formed initially from two regions (anterior and posterior), and not three (forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain), as proposed by the current prosomeric model. … The idea that these regions were formed independently and that each one of them has given rise to other Read More ›

Abstract for 2015 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Lecture: Who Cares about the History of Science? by Cambridge science philosopher Hasok Chang: The history of science has many functions. Historians should consider how their work contributes to various functions, going beyond a simple desire to understand the past correctly. There are both internal and external functions of the history of science in relation to science itself; I focus here on the internal, as they tend to be neglected these days. The internal functions can be divided into orthodox and complementary. The orthodox function is to assist with the understanding of the content and methods of science as it is now practised. The complementary function is to generate and improve scientific knowledge where current science itself Read More ›

Well, the file is open. From Colin Barras at New Scientist: An extraordinary chapter has just been added to the story of the First Americans. Finds at a site in California suggest that the New World might have first been reached at least 130,000 years ago – more than 100,000 years earlier than conventionally thought. If the evidence stacks up, the earliest people to reach the Americas may have been Neanderthals or Denisovans rather than modern humans. Researchers may have to come to terms with the fact that they have barely scratched the surface of the North American archaeological record. More. Barely scratched the surface? Now, that part we should have realized a long time ago. We didn’t find what Read More ›