If there apparently isn’t and never has been life on Mars, why should we assume it exists elsewhere? If there is/has been life on Mars and it looks like it came from Earth, well, that’s a game-changer in itself. If it doesn’t look like it came from Earth, that opens up whole new, *non-speculative* vistas.
Apollo 11 Moon landing + 50 years today
A moment of triumph and a giant leap for mankind. Live stream: Let us remember and let us learn. Hopefully, back to the Moon then onward to Mars, the Asteroid belt and solar system colonisation across this century — our real hope. And, a positive focus going forward. END
Chemist James Tour calls time out on implausible origin of life theories
He writes, “It is time for a temporary time out. Why not admit what we cannot yet explain: the mass transfer of starting materials to the molecules needed for life; the origin of life’s code; the combinatorial complexities present in any living system; and the precise non-regular assembly of cellular components?”
Rob Sheldon on celeb physicists Sabine Hossenfelder, Ethan Siegel, and Chad Orzel
My own view is that we need to go back to 1950 and revisit the alternatives. Because solving today’s impasse doesn’t require any new physics, but old physics done differently.
Robert J. Marks: Reforming peer review faces serious numerical law problems
Laws concerning the way people behave around numbers mean that quantification itself invites certain types of corruption.
Steven Jacobs’ 5-year fight and when mammalian life begins
According to The College Fix: UChicago scholar proves biologists believe life begins at conception. It took five years and cost him a career. Daniel Payne – Assistant Editor •July 10, 2019 ‘I’m doing this for the sake of the research’ Steven Jacobs has described some of his time in the academy as “agony.” The University […]
Particle physics is a mess but Hossenfelder should chill, fellow physicist says
Hmmm. He’s not giving fellow physicists much of an incentive to sort out the mess. On the other hand, civilized theoretical physicists fight so politely that you can learn a lot just by listening.
Do viruses play a hidden role in evolution?
Viruses seem to be everywhere, doing a lot of things, with apparent “ingenuity.” Maybe a discovery down the road will be that they cause many changes currently interpreted according to some Darwinian theory (kin selection, costly fitness, what have you … )
In case you wondered why so much science journalism sounds like PR
Because science boffins often want it that way. The biggest temptation for science journalists is to be cheerleaders instead of thoughtful and constructive critics. Everybody loves the cheerleader; the critic, however kindly and well-meaning, well — is just not loved so much. So one must be willing to be unpopular at times.
New findings show that ancestral single-celled organisms were “amazingly complex”
Overturning traditional theories. But how did they just happen to get to be amazingly complex if there is no design in nature?
Why can’t we make apes behave like people?
Many researchers think that apes are just like us and that
we’re not doing the right things to make them start behaving that way…
Now Steve Pinker is getting #MeToo’d, at Inside Higher Ed over Jeffrey Epstein
The rap against cognitive psychologist Pinker, who always seemed ready with a Darwinian explanation for everything, is that he offered some interpretation of language to Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.
Ethan Siegel: Don’t trust experiments that claim there are parallel universes
This sounds so sensible, we thought theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder would say it. But astrophysicist Ethan Siegel said it. A sober position for him.
New measurement keeps the discrepancy around the Hubble constant alive
So if there is something fundamentally wrong with our picture of the universe, there still is, more or less, and we will have to live with it for now.
Paleoanthropologist: Climate change will cause us to grow webbed feet
What we need right now is an earnest, just-published study offering convoluted neuroscience theories as to why so many people don’t trust science.