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From Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, on new atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris’s Spirituality without Religion: There’s no “I” in “Me” (and no sense in Sam Harris) … As with nearly all of Harris’s work, the book can safely be discarded before exiting the first chapter. In Saganesque fashion (remember Cosmos, “the universe is all that is or was or ever will be”?), Harris gives us, “Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had.”(p 2) His main thesis is that the mystics of antiquity were right in denying even this. There is no self, and so there is no mind (quotes to this affect forthcoming). How does Read More ›

From Neuroscience News: The researchers found that people with more varied heart rates were able to reason in a wiser, less biased fashion about societal problems when they were instructed to reflect on a social issue from a third-person perspective. But, when the study’s participants were instructed to reason about the issue from a first-person perspective, no relationship between heart rate and wiser judgment emerged. “We already knew that people with greater variation in their heart rate show superior performance in the brain’s executive functioning such as working memory,” says Prof. Grossmann. “However, that does not necessarily mean these people are wiser – in fact, some people may use their cognitive skills to make unwise decisions. To channel their cognitive Read More ›

From Washington Post: For 3 billion years, life on Earth was only home to water-dwelling, single-celled organisms like bacteria. But suddenly, multicellular life ballooned, knocking over the first domino in an evolutionary cascade that would one day allow you — yes, you — to exist and think and even read stuff on the Internet. Scientists think that until 500 million years ago, life on Earth fell victim to high-energy blasts from the sun, which at the time contained a lot more of the cell-killing gamma, ultraviolet and x-rays than it does today. The atmosphere then was too thin to fully protect our single-celled ancestors, whose DNA would have been damaged by such powerful rays. That kept them from becoming more Read More ›

From Science: Moths from high light pollution areas were significantly less attracted to the light than those from the darker zones, the scientists report in today’s issue of Biology Letters. Overall, moths from the light-polluted populations had a 30% reduction in the flight-to-light behavior, indicating that this species is evolving, as predicted, to stay away from artificial lights. That change should increase these city moths’ reproductive success. But their success comes at a cost: To avoid the lights, the moths are likely flying less, say the scientists, so they aren’t pollinating as many flowers or feeding as many spiders and bats. More. Paper (paywall) Of course, they may not need to fly as far. The food sources won’t usually be Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: There is considerable controversy over what structures in the brain restrict all human languages to the same deep structure. Some linguists reject an innate neurological organ devoted specifically to language. Conceiving that it is only the brain’s general abilities that are “pre-organized,” they envisage language as a learned skill based on a “functional language system” and design constraints, distributed across numerous cortical and subcortical structures. Yet however it is derived during development, there is no doubt that a unique deep structure underlies the languages of all members of our species. It is because of the same underlying deep structure that we can speak the language of the San Bushman or an Australian aborigine, and they Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Current prevailing hypotheses of how human ancestors became fire-dependent depict fire as an accident — a byproduct of another event rather than a standalone occurrence. One hypothesis, for example, explains fire as a result of rock pounding that created a spark and spread to a nearby bush. “The problem we’re trying to confront is that other hypotheses are unsatisfying. Fire use is so crucial to our biology, it seems unlikely that it wasn’t taken advantage of by our ancestors,” said Kristen Hawkes, distinguished professor of anthropology at the U and the paper’s senior author. “Everything is modified by fire; just take a look around at the books and furniture in this room. We’re surrounded by fire’s byproducts,” added Read More ›

From Nature News: Operators of Internet repositories that provide illicit free access to millions of research papers seem determined to keep up their services, despite being barred by an injunction. A New York district court ruled on 28 October that online services such as Sci-Hub and the Library Genesis Project (Libgen) violate US copyright law. The court ruled in favour of academic publisher Elsevier, which in June filed a complaint against the main operators of the sites for unlawfully accessing and distributing its copyrighted papers. Sci-Hub downloads articles by aping university IP addresses and stores them in a repository that now contains more than 46 million papers. More. One possible solution would be to make all serious public science research Read More ›

From Todd Wood: Beyond that, it was incredibly refreshing to hear the talks in this symposium. Hybridization has been a passing interest of mine for a long time (thanks to Frank Marsh), and long ago, I came to the conclusion that hybridization was not remotely rare (like I had been taught) and that the biological species concept didn’t really explain what we were seeing in the real world of hybridizing species. Sure enough, Rebecca Ackermann of the University of Cape Town said that the Biological Species Concept is basically dead. That was in the first talk of the day. In the second, Mike Arnold of the University of Georgia said that introgressive hybridization is the rule in eukaryotes, plants and Read More ›

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: “This is humbling,” says Jonathan Eisen from the University of California, Davis, “because holy **#$@#!, we know virtually nothing right now about the biology of most of the tree of life.”More. Which makes the dogmatism of the Darwinians all the more curious. And who would ever have thought of calling it a tree anyway, but for past beliefs? See also: Tree of life morphs into … leaf? and Kirk Durston on the new tree of life Classic Darwinian fundamentalism: Follow UD News at Twitter!

Readers will remember the “science guy”: From Reason: As a taxpayer and voter, the introduction of this extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizen… So I can see where people are very concerned about this, and they’re pursuing criminal investigations as well as engaging in discussions like this….That there is a chilling effect on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change, I think that is good. Via Washington Times More. That sort of thing is big in Big Government now. For example, Breitbart London notes the lawfare approach: Now the Attorney General of the US Virgin Islands — some utter nonentity called Claude Earl Walker — has gone a step Read More ›

Further to Scientists, data, and diet, from ScienceDaily: Butter might not be a health food, but researchers unearthed more evidence that replacing it with vegetable oils does not decrease risk of heart disease … A research team led by scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health has unearthed more evidence that casts doubt on the traditional “heart healthy” practice of replacing butter and other saturated fats with corn oil and other vegetable oils high in linoleic acid. The findings, reported today in the British Medical Journal, suggest that using vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter when it comes to preventing heart disease, though more research needs to be Read More ›

Erik Larson at the Atlantic (May 2015): Questioning the Hype About Artificial Intelligence … Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has openly speculated that humans could be reduced to “pets” by the coming superintelligent machines. Musk has donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, in a self-described bid to help stave off the development of “killer robots.” At Berkeley, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is dedicated to addressing what Bostrom and many others describe as an “existential threat” to humanity, eclipsing previous (and ongoing) concerns about the climate, a nuclear holocaust, and other major denizens of our modern life. Luminaries like Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates have also commented on the scariness of artificial intelligence. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: … dinosaurs and their close relatives had much more variation in growth patterns then ever expected, and this variation does not appear to be related to differences between males and females. Given how little we really know about dinosaurs and their ilk, it’s surprising we expect anything. Asilisaurus lived during the Triassic Period, roughly 240 million years ago in present-day Africa. With four legs and a long tail, the animal was about the size of a Labrador retriever, and likely maxed at 65 pounds, according to previous studies of the animal. Its exterior skin appearance remains unknown. Fossils of Asilisaurus kongwe — a combination of Swahili and Greek works meaning “ancient ancestor reptile” — are vital because a Read More ›

From Neuroskeptic at the Daily Dot: Why is there so much neurobullshit around today? I think the answer is that neuroscience really has made great advances in the past few decades, and these advances have been very visible. Methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), introduced in 1990, have made it possible to measure and picture brain activity in real time. FMRI really is an amazing technology that has revolutionized neuroscience; it has also made neuroscience more accessible to the public. The trouble is that the colorful images produced by fMRI and other neuroimaging techniques are immensely compelling but often misinterpreted. Such images have led to the impression that now, for the first time, we can understand the brain, Read More ›

Got that? You’re sure to graduate in evolutionary psychology: From a computer model from the University of Waterloo: The study, by Professor Bauch and Richard McElreath from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, found that when population sizes become large, the presence of STIs decreases fertility rates more among males with multiple partners, therefore changing which mating behaviour proves to be most beneficial to individuals and groups. Reality: The only consistent enforcer of monogamy has been the relatively equal number of boys and girls born. In early hunter-gatherer populations, it was common for a few males to monopolize mating with multiple females in order to increase their number of offspring. In these small societies where there is a maximum Read More ›