The paper, which appeared in Entropy in 2020, is open access. The most significant element of this new theory is surely that it is explicitly a theory of “panconsciousness” and non-materialism.
At Quanta: “The molecular signaling systems of complex cells are nothing like simple electronic circuits.”
Actually, the best way to understand the systems would be that they are somewhat like a great novel. To someone with no understanding of the language, it might seem like a “riot” or “mess” of meaningless characters. To someone who does understand the language and has a mature appreciation of literature and life, it seems like “a sophisticated signal-processing system that can extract information reliably and efficiently from complicated cocktails of” life.
At least, the “science of obesity” is now a legitimate topic of discussion
Another well-known science writer, Ross Pomeroy, says Gary Taubes is wrong. It is a good thing we get to hear both sides of the argument. That is not happening often enough. People who complain about popular doubt or denial of science are too often among the first to demand that only their side of the argument be published — thus fueling the very thing they complain about.
Design inference: AI, ID, and detecting deceit
The next iterations of science fraud will employ machine learning trained on enough of the internet to avoid obvious goofs. We will need better, more sophisticated methods.
Evidence of clothing from 90 000 to 120 000 years ago
The researchers came across the bone tools unexpectedly. They were looking for animal bones in order to recreate the human diet.
Laszlo Bencze: Just another gratuitous use of the word “evolution” in the WSJ
Bencze: Did the arterial network sprout long before the giraffe’s long neck evolved? Sadly evolution can’t look ahead to provide things that will be useful in the future, so no go.
Weaponizing the term “creationism” in debates on racism
That includes, for example, dragging it into debates over repatriation of the remains of Indigenous peoples.
Researchers: Cichlids are causing a rethink of the “fundamentals of evolution”
Researcher: Remarkably, this constraint seems to be the key to cichlid’s success by promoting rapid shifts in jaw shapes and feeding ecology, all of which is likely to be an advantage in a dynamic and fluctuating environment, like the East African Rift Valley, where Lake Malawi is located. “The constraint is actually facilitating cichlid evolution, rather than impeding it,” says Conith.
Rats’ whiskers: Another code found
Evolution News and Views: Did you know that a rat’s tactile sense requires analyzing a 16-dimensional stimulus space? How does that computation fit into a rat’s brain? Trying to simplify in a model what goes on in rat whiskers quickly gets deep into mathematical weeds.
At Mind Matters News: Fine-tuning? How Bayesian statistics could help break a deadlock
Bayesian statistics are used, for example, in spam filter technology, identifying probable spam by examining vast masses of previous messages.
Another Truism Dies
A new paper can be found at Phys.Org undermining the idea that what drives evolution is the “decoupling” of DNA with phylogenic structures. This idea is implicit in the twin ideas of pseudogenes and gene duplication: both allow the DNA to become “uncoupled” from the structures they code for and so RM becomes permissible. Well, Read More…
Stanford: Plants evolved complexity in two rapid bursts — 250 million years apart
Researcher: “The most surprising thing is this kind of stasis, this plateau in complexity after the initial evolution of seeds and then the total change that happened when flowering plants started diversifying,” said lead study author Andrew Leslie, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). “The reproductive structures look different in all these plants, but they all have about the same number of parts during that stasis.”
Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne says they’ll never clone a herd of mammoths
Coyne: What they’d get would be a genetic chimera, an almost entirely Asian elephant but one that is hairier, chunkier, and more tolerant of cold. That is NOT a woolly mammoth, nor would it behave like a woolly mammoth, for they’re not inserting behavior genes.
Science Uprising: The Big Bang: Something from Nothing is here
Klinghoffer: In some ways, this is a quick take on the most novel arguments in Stephen Meyer’s recent book, The Return of the God Hypothesis , but presented in a very different way.
When people claim that “the science” says this or that…
Discussing the recent essay by medical statistician John Ioannidis on the was politicization and shoddy research around COVID-19 are corrupting science, philosopher Edward Feser focuses on a couple of his points, including this one, “the deleterious role that social media have played.”