Gotta hand it to Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, he’s a brave one. He is taking on the Woke claim that sex isn’t really binary in animals.
At Evolution News: Evolution’s Tall Tale — The Giraffe Neck
Often portrayed as a simple Darwinian development, it was recently admitted at Nature to be a puzzle.
Junk DNA has yet another job – keeping mouse embryos alive
Depletion of MERVL transcripts [ retrotransposons] results in embryonic lethality with profound defects in development and is associated with dysregulation of MERVL including their adjacent transcripts, and retaining two-cell-like transcriptome and chromatin state.
Paranthropus: But, on the other hand, ARE those stones actually tools?
Elbein: “The monkeys — long-tailed macaques — seem to have made their artifacts by accident, not by design. But in many ways, that only makes the finding more disruptive.”
At VICE: Our view of intelligent [human] life upended by tools find?
So it’s sort of like your great-uncle and aunt made the tools, not your great-grandparents. And that’s supposed to make all the difference? Meanwhile, another “subhuman” candidate to scratch off the list.
Does the order of nature point to a divine mind?
Saleem Ali engages with Steve Meyer.
Science journalists are paid not to be skeptical?
The science writers’ behavior around the origin of COVID raises the question: About what other, less immediate but more profound topics, are these professional non-skeptics obfuscating things?
A classic in scientism: ‘In Science Lives Hope.’
When science becomes scientism, people who call out the bad stuff become heretics, not just critics. We saw plenty of that during the COVID crazy.
Astrophysicist: The Big Bang says nothing about how the cosmos came to be
Has Frank just given away the store to theists? The situation is exactly what we would expect if the cosmos is designed by a supernatural intelligence. We can learn how it works but the inventor exists and works at a higher level. We get only scattered, partial insights as to that.
Theoretical astrophysicist re dark energy: The zero-point energy of empty space is not zero.
And, as Ethan Seigel goes on to say at Big Think, “Even with all the physics we know, we have no idea how to calculate what it ought to be.”
As panpsychism takes hold in science, plant minds become a focus
Is the growing presence of panpsychism in science an effort to get away from naturalism or to rescue it?
“Murder” on the Serengeti?
“A new study of violent behavior in more than 1,000 mammal species found the meerkat is the mammal most likely to be murdered by one of its own kind.” Could someone please post the Meerkat Ten Commandments? Ten Suggestions even?
Stray dogs vs “new species” at Chernobyl
Those “new species” that radiation would produce have always existed and always will exist — in the human imagination at least. Meanwhile, it is just the dogs. “Evolution” led them back to your basic dog.
Vox offers three “unexplainable” mysteries of life on Earth
Science writer Carl Zimmer offers “The problem is, for each definition of life, scientists can think of a confounding exception.”
Origin of life as a chemical Eden?
Requarth: “Russell’s conception of our species, along with every other living thing, as mere energy patterns, ultimately born of rogue fluctuations in the Universe’s infancy, might make us feel a little less special.” Maybe that’s the point of many origin of life theories…