News

From David Eagleman’s review of David Gelernter’s The Tides of Mind, The problem of consciousness sits at the heart of neuroscience, and it is into this question that Yale computer-science professor David Gelernter steps with his fascinating “The Tides of Mind.” At the heart of Mr. Gelernter’s book is a critical observation often overlooked by artificial-intelligence researchers and neuroscientists alike: Your conscious experience is not just one thing. Instead, it falls on a spectrum. At one end, you’re attuned to the outside world; as you move further down the spectrum, you’re increasingly inside your own head, recalling memories and daydreaming. Each day you journey back and forth along the spectrum; your conscious experience changes hour by hour. … Mr. Gelernter Read More ›

From Zach Risdon at The Rebel: We generally think that those who push politically correct agendas on campus congregate in the social sciences. These people are annoying, but surely they have little influence on society as a whole, or more specifically, within medicine and science — fields focused on creating, discovering and building technology for the betterment of human existence, right? Well, I hate to break it to you, but the answer is an emphatic “no!” For example, the University of Calgary Department of Anthropology offers a course entitled “Sex and Gender.” As a student in that same department and college, my experience there has been almost always positive. However, this course is an exception. Here is the course outline Read More ›

From the New York Times, we learn: Ancestors of Modern Humans Interbred With Extinct Hominins, Study Finds The ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and another extinct line of humans known as the Denisovans at least four times in the course of prehistory, according to an analysis of global genomes published Thursday in the journal Science. The interbreeding may have given modern humans genes that bolstered immunity to pathogens, the authors concluded. “This is yet another genetic nail in the coffin of our oversimplistic models of human evolution,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, a research scientist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in the study. The new study expands on a series of findings Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: According to a new study, our ancestors between 2 and 3 million years ago started to spend far less time and effort chewing by adding meat to their diet and by using stone tools to process their food. The researchers estimate that such a diet would have saved early humans as many as 2.5 million chews per year, and made possible further changes that helped make us human. One of the biggest puzzles in human evolution is how species such as Homo erectus evolved smaller teeth, smaller faces, and smaller guts, and yet managed to get more energy from food to pay for their bigger brains and bodies before cooking was invented. “What we showed is that…by processing Read More ›

A friend writes to note what philosopher of science, John Elof Boodin (1869-1950), had to say about natural selection: The principle of natural selection is indeed an important contribution to biology. But it is a negative, not an architectonic, principle. It does not explain why variations appear, why they cumulate, why they assume an organization in the way of more successful adaptation. Organisms must, of course, be able to maintain themselves in their life environment and in the physical environment, in order to leave descendants and determine the character of the race. But that is all natural selection tells us. It does not explain the traits and organization of organisms nor why they become well or badly adapted to their Read More ›

From Perry Marshall’s blog, Cosmic Fingerprints: Not only has Dawkins ruined science, he’s ruined atheism too. 20 years ago, an atheist was an intellectual with whom one could have a reasonable dialogue. Today, most people experience atheists as bellicose angry males who commonly suffer from depression, who post anonymous tirades all over the internet so they can share their misery with everyone else. We have the New Atheists to thank for this. And their four horsemen. Dawkins – Dennett – Harris – Hitchens. Wanna have an intelligent discussion about atheism? Read Voltaire, Nietzche or Bertrand Russell. Agree or disagree, they will force you to think. Wanna have a pointless shouting match with a bunch of mannerless name-callers who make up just-so Read More ›

Not to start up the infinity battle again (okay, maybe we are … ), from New Scientist: Explanimator: Does infinity exist in the real world? … Some mathematicians are trying to rebuild the foundations of mathematics without the infinite. But if there is a biggest number, what would happen when you add one to it? The solution could be thinking of numbers as a cycle rather than a linear series, some sort of loop where you revert back to the beginning. It’s a little strange, but then so is infinity. More. The reader who forwarded the tip comments, “Compared to William Lane Craig’s lectures, this article seems shallow and infantile.” Here’s Craig. Readers can decide: See also: Durston and Craig Read More ›

According to yet another experimental manipulation. From ScienceDaily: “Challenging a person’s belief in free will did not seem to provide them with a conscious justification for uncooperative behavior,” Protzko said. “If it did, we should have observed fewer contributions when people were given adequate time to think about their decision on the amount to contribute. “It’s very damaging to hear that we don’t have free will,” said Protzko. “Discounting free will changes the way we see things. Yet given time, we recover and go about our lives as though nothing were different.” More. Paper. (paywall) At least in their game simulation. See also: How can we believe in naturalism if we have no choice? and “I will ” means something Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Archaic Denisovan and Neanderthal DNA that persists in modern Pacific islanders of Melanesia, far from the Siberian cave where Denisovan fossils have been found, is a source of information about early human history. Equally informative are genome regions where DNA from extinct, human-like species has vanished and been replaced with sequences unique to people. These large regions have genes for brain development, language and brain cell signalling. Retained archaic DNA in human genomes may confer infection-fighting advantages. … Denisovans are related to, but distinct from, Neanderthals. This prehistoric species was discovered less than a decade ago through genetic analysis of a finger bone unearthed in northern Siberia. Named for the mountain cave where that fossil, and later, two Read More ›

From Winston Ewert of the Evolutionary Information Lab, writing at Evolution News & Views: Ev Ever Again — Eying an Evolutionary Simulation A writer at The Skeptical Zone, Patrick, recently contributed a post on the computer simulation ev. He takes aim at William Dembski, Robert Marks, and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab’s analysis of that simulation. However, the events he discusses actually show a history of Darwinists repeatedly misunderstanding or misrepresenting arguments for intelligent design. Patrick fundamentally mistakes the claim we are making about ev (and evolutionary simulations in general). Regarding a response to Schneider from the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, he says: He admits again that evolution does work in certain environments. Patrick treats this as an admission that undermines our Read More ›

From Matthew Davidson at The Conversation: Integrated Information Theory (IIT), and was proposed in 2008 by Guilio Tononi, a US-based neuroscientist. It also has one rather surprising implication: consciousness can, in principle, be found anywhere where there is the right kind of information processing going on, whether that’s in a brain or a computer. … The theory says that a physical system can give rise to consciousness if two physical postulates are met. The first is that the physical system must be very rich in information. … This brings us to the second postulate, which is that for consciousness to emerge, the physical system must also be highly integrated. … The authors report some success in testing a related idea, Read More ›

Well, almost. Maybe should be. From Digg: According to King, Echo was owned by a New Orleans crime boss and he’d been at the wrong place at the wrong time, seen something he wasn’t supposed to, and wouldn’t stop talking about it. All this chatter, King told Heck, meant he was making himself into a potential target. Because Echo isn’t a person, he couldn’t enter an actual witness protection program. At least not officially. At least not yet. … Occasionally parrots learn to mimic darker things. In South Carolina in 2010 a woman went to jail for abusing and neglecting her elderly mother. When local police entered the house they found a parrot that repeated “Help me, help me” — Read More ›

But Simon Oxenham did, at Prime Mind: Let’s begin by looking at the most widely-read news website—Mail Online, which provides a perfect demonstration of what we’ll call the seesaw effect. Almost every week, the Mail publishes news stories illustrating scientific findings that—apparently—turn our understanding of the world upside down. If you believed everything you read in the Mail about cancer, for example, you’d have to believe that everything from taking aspirin to drinking beer both causes and prevents cancer. That’s according to The Daily Mail Ontological Oncology project, a tongue-in-cheek attempt to track “the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it.” But it’s not just the Mail that’s Read More ›

Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, offers thoughts on Saturday’s debate in Toronto: Lamoureux’s role in the debate was largely to offer a robotic rolodex of tired cliché’s (e.g., “I find the evidence for evolution overwhelming, there is no debate on that,” and “biology only makes sense in light of evolution”). Among them was the classic, “show me one tooth in the Cambrian, and we’ll turn all the science upside-down.” Of course, we have good reason to doubt that he would be true to his ultimatum. After all, we didn’t think evolution could account for the massive diversification of animal life seen in a 5-8 million year sliver of the Cambrian period, Read More ›

But then we would need to replace a lot of science journalists. From Michael Schulson at Pacific Standard: Last May, when This American Life acknowledged that it had run a 23-minute-long segment premised on a fraudulent scientific study, America’s most respected radio journalists did something strange: They declined to apologize for the error. “Our original story was based on what was known at the time,” host Ira Glass explained in a blog post. “Obviously the facts have changed.” It was a funny admission. Journalists typically don’t say that “facts change”; it is a journalist’s job to define and publicize facts. When a reporter gets hoodwinked by a source, she does not imply that something in the fabric of reality has Read More ›