It’s basically a rehash of many wishful theories, united by a single drive: To somehow get an origin of life out of a mindless cosmos. The best thing about such theories is their inventiveness.
Eric Holloway: Why engineering can’t be reduced to the laws of physics
He argues that the problem how to account for innovation cannot be solved by anything built upon the laws of physics.
One of Boghossian’s hoaxers started the Woke on the 2 plus 2 equals five drive?
Meanwhile, Lindsay has a blog keeping track of Woke folk and other unfunny crazies, where he says he himself might have started off the 2 + 2 = 5 crazy, intending only to explain to someone how the Woke think.
Bacteria are smarter than we think
At Wired: As they cleared paths of food, the E.coli tended to move toward unexplored, broth-rich areas, which ultimately helped them evacuate the maze. It took about 10 hours for about 1 percent of the multiple generations of bacteria to collectively solve the puzzle. That may not sound fast, but it’s five times faster than if the organisms had just been swimming around randomly, says Phan.
Tuatara genome sequenced; some surprising findings
At Nature: The genome produced by Gemmell and co-workers is one of the largest vertebrate genomes published so far. At more than 5 gigabases, it is about 50% larger than the human genome… Tuatara have a close resemblance to their forebears from the early Mesozoic era, between 240 million and 230 million years ago…
There is no human counterpart to some types of dog intelligence
What dogs really excel at is understanding humans. It’s the key to their well-being. Naturally, when they succeed, we think they are very clever. Are wolves more clever because they survive on their own? Well, they are more clever in certain ways, such as group co-operation and problem-solving, but not in understanding human communications. It really depends on what type of intelligence we want to measure.
Rob Sheldon on recent claims of dramatic new Higgs boson findings
Sheldon: This required analysis of thousands of decays and Terabytes of data crunching. So it is a triumph of data analysis to be able to see this rare decay against the more common route to stability, but neither unexpected nor revealing of physics “beyond the standard model”.
Mike Egnor on what to do when the Woke come for you
It works well when dealing with Darwinists, too, he thinks.
Tales of the Woke: #MeTooSTEM leader faked up COVID-19 victim
At The Scientist:But after McLaughlin announced @Sciencing_Bi’s death from COVID-19 several days ago, people began trying to identify her, and her story began to fall apart. Scientists who had considered @Sciencing_Bi an online friend turned from mourning her death to accusing McLaughlin of inventing her outright …
Michael Egnor: How Noam Chomsky showed that humans are exceptional
Chomsky’s insight that language is an in-born “organ” unique to humans is of obvious relevance to our understanding of why humans are exceptional.
“Astounding”hybridization between species of angelfish
At Phys.org: Other hybrids were found between species with over 12 percent pairwise distance in mitochondrial DNA. Pairwise distance is a measurement of differences in pairs of DNA sequences. “This genetic separation is quite astounding, considering that hybrids are rarely reported between species that share more than 2 percent in genetic distance,” Mr Tea said. “Though coral reef fish hybrids are common; they are usually formed by closely-related species.”
Claim: A surprising number of exoplanets could host life
Oh for a single, solitary fossil bacterium on Mars, to make this discussion sound real…
Brain connectivity is equal in 130 mammals, including humans
Researcher:”Our study revealed a universal law: Conservation of Brain Connectivity. This law denotes that the efficiency of information transfer in the brain’s neural network is equal in all mammals, including humans.” So what makes humans unique isn’t brain connectivity.
Mental Reality Theory vs External Reality Theory: Checkmate
All experience is mental, regardless of whether or not anything extra-mental causes or informs it. We can only ever directly interact with and experience mental experience/phenomena. We have direct, empirical evidence mind exists and that is the only thing we can have such evidence exists, even in principle. What we actually experience as “reality” is Read More…
Researchers: Severe population decline looms in our future
You might think the new pundits are wrong but they can’t be more wrong than the science pundits of the recent past. The day is coming when, if someone accuses you of being “anti-science” because you are skeptical of trendy claims, you’ll be thinking, “Thank goodness! I was afraid that the lumpen certainty of the representatives of Science was catching. It appears not to be.”