News

Last news cycle, skim milk was virtuous; now it’s just a fad. Meanwhile, from the Ian Leslie at the Guardian: If, as seems increasingly likely, the nutritional advice on which we have relied for 40 years was profoundly flawed, this is not a mistake that can be laid at the door of corporate ogres. Nor can it be passed off as innocuous scientific error. What happened to John Yudkin belies that interpretation. It suggests instead that this is something the scientists did to themselves – and, consequently, to us. We tend to think of heretics as contrarians, individuals with a compulsion to flout conventional wisdom. But sometimes a heretic is simply a mainstream thinker who stays facing the same way Read More ›

Recently, we noted a claim that nature prefers hexagons, but a reader has written in to say that nature prefers squares. He adduces in evidence: Science published an interesting paper last year about the fact that the square shape of the seahorse tail creates a robust, rigid, yet flexible tail, more so than the typical circular/cylindrical shape you see in animal tails. Explanation: Most animals and plants approximate a cylinder in shape, and where junctions occur (as with branches of trees or limbs on animals), those corners are “faired,” meaning smoothly curved so that one surface grades into the next (1). When living organisms deviate from the norm, there’s usually a good biomechanical reason: a clue to some specific problem Read More ›

Oops. One last religion news item just landed: A friend writes to say that these guys didn’t get the memo from theistic evolutionists that an explanation by natural selection doesn’t refute intelligent design: From Thiago Hutter, Carine Gimbert, Frédéric Bouchard and François-Joseph Lapointe, “Being human is a gut feeling,” Microbiome, (2015) 3:9: Before Darwin, intelligent design arguments (such as the ones found in Paley) explaining the organization found in biological individuals via divine creation were the norm. Since Darwin, the origin of organization of biological individuals is to be explained thanks to designer-free adaptive processes. Individuals were functional wholes whose parts-integration was the result of evolution by natural selection. (public access) More. Some people believe natural selection somehow naturally produces Read More ›

New Scientist advises us that “evolution” can help us understand the migration crisis in Europe. But of course. Provided we believes what they believe, “evolution” can by definition enable us to understand anything. Just find a peg on which to hang whatever is happening. Migration is, we are told, “a characteristic of our species,” “evolution made us xenophobes,” and “we’re a stay-at-home species.” Or that “rich countries need immigrants.” And “Only a new international body can cut through the bluster on the emotive but much misunderstood migration ‘crisis.’” Contradiction’s no problem; we haven’t evolved so as to understand how to deal with it properly. If you can stand all the enlightenment, sign up and pay. Note: It would be nice Read More ›

From Nathaniel Scharping here: The words and body language we use during social interactions belong to a set of mutually understood categories. When people deviate from this set of normative behaviors, we sense that something is off. And if something isn’t right, we don’t feel comfortable. More. That makes sense. Actual human interactions are much more complex than pop psychology. This is something to keep in mind: “I think that none of the behaviors described as creepy in our study were actually tied to danger,” McAndrew wrote. … McAndrew also asked participants whether they thought creepy people knew they were, well, creeps. The response was overwhelmingly “no,” indicating that no one thinks people are willingly trying to be creepy. Instead creepiness Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Although it’s widely known that modern humans carry traces of Neanderthal DNA, a new international study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine suggests that Neanderthal Y-chromosome genes disappeared from the human genome long ago. Apparently, 2.5 to 4 percent of DNA sequences are thought be from Neanderthals. Question: Has anyone tried doing that with any other discrete group? Why is not yet clear. The Neanderthal Y chromosome genes could have simply drifted out of the human gene pool by chance over the millennia. Another possibility, said Mendez, is that Neanderthal Y chromosomes include genes that are incompatible with other human genes, and he and his colleagues have found evidence supporting this idea. Indeed, one Read More ›

Says Philip Ball at Nautilus: The ancient Greek philosopher Pappus of Alexandria thought that the bees must be endowed with “a certain geometrical forethought.” And who could have given them this wisdom, but God? According to William Kirby in 1852, bees are “Heaven-instructed mathematicians.” Charles Darwin wasn’t so sure, and he conducted experiments to establish whether bees are able to build perfect honeycombs using nothing but evolved and inherited instincts, as his theory of evolution would imply. More. Note how in pop science culture, a simple question like Why hexagons? turns into a hymn of praise to Darwin vs. others. You know, the author of the single greatest idea anyone ever had. Incidentally, this kind of thing is what makes Read More ›

From a featurette on a New Zealand spider with really fast jaws at Mashable: The spiders are only found in New Zealand and southern parts of South America, with the quickest of the 14 species of trap-jaw spider closing their jaw more than 100 times faster than the slowest. … Not only are some of these trap-jaw spiders fast, four of the spiders boast a power output exceeding the known capacity of their muscles. It’s a finding which shows that a spider’s movements aren’t necessarily powered by their tiny muscles, according to the statement, but have perhaps developed structural mechanisms in their bodies which allow the storing of energy — thanks to evolution. More. Huh? What’s “thanks to evolution” doing in Read More ›

According to a Discovery Institute-sponsored poll: According to the survey, 43 percent of Americans now agree that “Evolution shows that no living thing is more important than any other,” and 45 percent of Americans believe that “Evolution shows that human beings are not fundamentally different from other animals.” The highest levels of support for the idea that evolution shows that humans aren’t fundamentally different from other animals are found among self-identified atheists (69 percent), agnostics (60 percent), and 18 to 29 year-olds (51 percent). The theory of evolution is also reshaping how people think about morality. A majority of Americans (55 percent) now contend that “Evolution shows that moral beliefs evolve over time based on their survival value in various Read More ›

From Retraction Watch: A philosophy journal that focuses on the teachings of philosopher Alain Badiou has apparently fallen victim to yet another Sokal hoax, and has retracted a fake article submitted by authors trying to expose the publication’s weaknesses. The paper, “Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non-)Being-Queer,” attributed to Benedetta Tripodi of the Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza in Romania, is apparently the work of two academics, who submitted the absurd article to Badiou Studies to expose its lack of rigor in accepting papers. More. But the question arises, in this case, why does anyone care? As long as they aren’t funded by taxpayers who do boring, maybe dangerous, jobs all day, whose business is it? That is, at what Read More ›

And that’s not a good thing for understanding numbers, says Priceonomics: Many analysts believe that the unthinking use of the average damages our understanding of quantitative information. This is because when people look at averages, they think it is “the norm”. But in reality, it might be highly impacted by just one huge outlier. Imagine an analyst who wanted to know the representative value for the cost of real estate on a block with five houses. Four of the houses are worth $100,000 and one is worth $900,000. Given these numbers, the average would be $200,000 and the median $100,000. In this case, and many others, the median gives you a better sense of what is “typical”. … The median Read More ›

From Jazz Shaw at Hot Air: Remember when eggs were bad for you? All the doctors were telling us that eggs have cholesterol so they’re evil. Fortunately, breakfast is my favorite meal of the day and I pretty much ignored them. Later we learned that the facts doctors were so sure of turned out to be not quite so factual and that we evolved to process eggs fairly efficiently. Now we have yet another element of the conventional wisdom which may be crumbling under the light of additional study. We’ve been forcing kids to drink low fat or skim milk for years because that was supposed to be bad for you too. Frankly, I can’t stand that watery skim milk Read More ›

As Robert Barron notes: In a rambling and largely incoherent response to an interlocutor who wondered whether philosophy is still relevant, Nye denigrated the discipline, stating that philosophy never deviates from common sense, that it doubts the reality of sense experience, and that it engages in speculation about whether we might be part of an intergalactic ping pong match! To tumultuous applause, doubtless. The physical sciences can reveal the chemical composition of ink and paper, but they cannot, even in principle, tell us anything about the meaning of Moby Dick or The Wasteland. Biology might inform us regarding the process by which nerves stimulate muscles in order to produce human action, but it could never tell us anything about whether Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Salamanders and fish possess genes that can enable healing of damaged tissue and even regrowth of missing limbs. The key to regeneration lies not only in the genes, but in the DNA sequences that regulate expression of those genes in response to an injury. Researchers have discovered regulatory sequences that they call ’tissue regeneration enhancer elements’ or TREEs, which can turn on genes in injury sites. … Over the last decade, researchers have identified dozens of regeneration genes in organisms like zebrafish, flies, and mice. For example, one molecule called neuregulin 1 can make heart muscle cells proliferate and others called fibroblast growth factors can promote the regeneration of a severed fin. Yet, Poss says, what has not Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers recently discovered that alligators and related crocodilian species have a previously unknown second jaw joint that helps to distribute the extreme force of their bite, which is the most powerful of any living animal. The finding raises new questions about the evolution of our own meager-by-comparison jaws and could potentially lead to a better understanding of common jaw disorders. When we discovered that crocs had built this new jaw joint, it made us re-evaluate how mammals actually evolved our jaw joint and reinterpret what we thought we knew about where parts of our jaw joint came from,” said Casey Holliday, Ph.D., assistant professor of anatomy at the University of Missouri, who led the research. “It’s one of Read More ›