Researcher: A “chemical brain” will solve the hard problem of consciousness
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Origin Of Life |
Because silicon can’t, says chemist: WHEN Lee Cronin was 9 he was given a Sinclair ZX81 computer and a chemistry set. Unlike most children, Cronin imagined how great it would be if the two things could be combined to make a programmable chemical computer. Now 45 and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of […]
Aging has always been with us, say researchers (to no one’s surprise)
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
This group somehow links it to natural selection: A new USC Dornsife study indicates that aging may have originated at the very beginning of the evolution of life, at the same time as the evolution of the first genes. … This could be a game changer for research on longevity and aging. It may also […]
Should atheism be included in religious education?
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Education, Intelligent Design, Religion |
That’s being suggested in Britain: Humanists UK welcomed the recommendation that humanist beliefs and values be taught. In general, the commission’s conclusions were a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to save the academically serious teaching of religious and non-religious worldviews in our schools”, said Andrew Copson. But the Catholic Education Service said the report was “not so much […]
Must Christians believe in the Big Bang theory?
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Creationism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, theistic evolution |
J. R. Miller offers a reasonable discussion of varieties of Biblical creationism: Maybe you have heard the accusation that biblical creationists are blinded by their ancient theology which forces them to reject the modern “scientific fact” of evolution. But what do people mean by this accusation? What is evolution? Is biblical creation a de facto […]
UChicago Researchers: Those extra dimensions ain’t out there
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Not if you go by results from the gravitational waves collision. While last year’s discovery of gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars was earth-shaking, it won’t add extra dimensions to our understanding of the universe—not literal ones, at least. University of Chicago astronomers found no evidence for extra spatial dimensions to the universe based on […]
Here’s the film about Mike Behe
| September 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Irreducible Complexity, Video |
Or here. Note: Behe has a new book coming out. See New book from Michael Behe on how today’s DNA findings “devolve” Darwin See also: The bombardier beetle, the toad, and – after all these years – Mike Behe
Gaia theory is now Gaia 2.0
| September 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Naturalism, Religion |
Yes, everything is going high tech now, it seems. Intro of topic For around half a century, the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis has provided a unique way of understanding how life has persisted on Earth. It champions the idea that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings evolved together as a single, self-regulating system that has kept the […]
Making intelligent machines persons hits a few snags
| September 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Earlier this year, over 150 experts in AI, robotics, ethics, and supporting disciplines signed an open letter denouncing the European Parliament’s proposal to make intelligent machines persons. According to Canadian futurist George Dvorsky, the Parliament’s purpose is to hold the machines liable for damages, as a corporation might be: “The EU is understandably worried that […]
Neutron scattering: A window into the development of living cells
| September 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design |
Neutrons can be used to probe living tissues without damaging them (neutron scattering). Suzan Mazur interviews biophysicist John Katsaras, whose specialty is cell membranes, at Oscillations on their implications for studying the origin and development of life forms. Among the fascinating details, Suzan Mazur: Your membranes research revealed that lipids gathered with others of their […]
It’s amazing how much the public believes about neuroscience that is just myth
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Education, Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience |
But maybe it doesn’t matter. For example, as British Psychological Society’s Research Digest’s editor, Christian Jarrett, tells it, Educational neuromyths include the idea that we learn more effectively when taught via our preferred “learning style”, such as auditory or visual or kinesthetic … the claim that we use only 10 per cent of our brains; […]
AI and pop music: Can simple probabilities outperform deep learning?
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind, Probability |
Haebichan Jung tells us that he built an original pop music-making machine “that could rival deep learning but with simpler solutions.” Deep learning “is a subfield of machine learning concerned with algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the brain called artificial neural networks.” (Jason Brownlee, Machine Learning Mastery) Jung tells us that he […]
“Perhaps physics has slipped into a post-empirical era…”
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Physics |
Science writer David Appell suggests this, in all seriousness, in his review of Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at Physics World: Hossenfelder confronts physicists to ask them why their ideas aren’t working. Michael Krämer, who heads the new-physics group at the LHC and works on supersymmetry, tells her that he is “honestly […]
If a conventional evolutionary psychology claim is true, masculinity is “in crisis”?
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design |
We just tried to pull a Darwinian out of the way of the southbound freight called Progress when here it is rumbling back into town again: This week’s peer-reviewed portrayal of fragile masculinity comes to you from the journal Science Advances, which recently published a depressing new study about online dating. Researchers looked at nearly […]
Quantum mechanics: Pushing the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Mind, Physics |
Philip Cunningham writes to tell us of an interesting experiment by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger and colleagues that pushed the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago, using quasars to determine measurement settings: Abstract: In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time […]
Food for thought: ScuzzaMan on Design Law Theory
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by kairosfocus under Philosophy, Religion, theism, UD Guest Posts |
Here at UD, we often find food for thought in the comment box. The following by ScuzzaMan, is worth pondering as a particular, from the horse’s mouth philosophical-theological perspective within the Christian frame (and yes, it is Creationist-Biblical in focus rather than empirical-inferential on reliable signs of design). Here is a Christian voice, in his […]
Nathan Lents is still wrong about sinuses but is still writing about them
| September 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Naturalism |
He is the author of a “bad design” book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes: Earlier this year writers for Evolution News posted responses to Dr. Lents, who teaches at John Jay College and wrote a recent book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to […]
Jumping genes drive changes in strawberries
| September 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants |
Does anyone else remember when “evolution” was just some guy going on about how survival of the fittest creates the world of life? Now, it’s much more like a history than a rant.
ET life: We should look for planets like Earth’s past, not it’s present
| September 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Exoplanets, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
Suggested at New Scientist: There may be life out there that was like life on Earth when Earth was a very different environment: In the 4.5 billion years our planet has existed, it has experienced dramatic transformations: ice ages and warming periods, times when the atmosphere was impossible to breathe, when large areas were desert, […]
Dispute over recent find of tools on Madagascar from 10,500 ya
| September 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
Earlier, we wrote about human habitation of Madagascar being pushed back 6000 years. Now that claim is disputed due to lack of evidence besides tools: “These finds of cut-marked bones seem to predate any evidence of humans. Not only is there an absence of human remains [from that time], but there is an absence of […]
