What, the “single best idea anyone ever had” (philosopher Daniel Dennett on Darwin ) is now comparable to gravity? Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon would take issue with that. Yes, a psychologist seems to think Darwinian natural selection is indeed a force of nature like gravity: Natural selection, one of the fundamental processes of evolution, has something in common with gravity: A public relations problem. At one level of analysis, natural selection, like gravity, looks like a chump. When you’re looking up close at the tiny bits of stuff that go into making humans—the sequences of DNA that constitute the human genome—and how they came to be arranged in the manner that they are, natural selection doesn’t seem to have done Read More ›

When we deal with deeply polarised topics such as ID, we face the problem of well-grounded reasoning vs fallacies. A fallacy being a significantly persuasive but fundamentally misleading argument, often as an error of reasoning. (Cf. a classic collection here.) However, too often, fallacies are deliberately used by clever rhetors to mislead the unwary. Likewise we face the challenge of how much warrant is needed for an argument to be credible. All of these are logical challenges. Let us note IEP, as just linked: A fallacy is a kind of error in reasoning. The list of fallacies below contains 224 names of the most common fallacies, and it provides brief explanations and examples of each of them. Fallacies should not be Read More ›

Retired biologist Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, has begun to understand what it means to say that university campuses are no longer a home for ideas, but for grievances: Many universities, including public ones, have created “bias response teams,” in which speech considered hateful or offensive is reported to University authorities and dealt with promptly. The number of these teams is growing. While universities are perfectly free to recommend standards of civil discourse, public schools must adhere to the First Amendment and thus have no right to police speech unless it falls into the Amendment’s exceptions: speech that’s a clear and present danger, that is libelous, that creates a climate of harassment that impedes Read More ›

Like monarch butterflies. Apparently, the shimmering dragonfly migrates like the Monarch butterfly, taking three generations to loop across North America: At least three generations make up the annual migration of common green darner dragonflies. The first generation emerges in the southern United States, Mexico and the Caribbean starting around February and flies north. There, those insects lay eggs and die, giving rise to second generation that migrates south until late October. (Some in that second generation don’t fly south until the next year, after overwintering as nymphs.) A third generation, hatched in the south, overwinters there before laying eggs that will start the entire process over again. (from the chart) … An adult darner, regardless of where it was born, is Read More ›

You can’t ground a discussion in basic reality, says one commentator, “without somebody, sooner rather than later, confidently pronouncing something like “our universe is just one of many universes that are constantly evolving and forever changing.” He offers a response, courtesy Regis Nicoll: Everett imagined that each split created a parallel universe in which particles existed as mirror images of themselves. The result is that every possible state of a particle is realized somewhere. “Taking many-worlds to its logical conclusion, cosmology consultant Marcus Chown quipped, ‘Elvis didn’t die on that loo eating a burger but is still alive in an infinite number of places.’ “The problems with many-worlds are many, including where all of these parallel universes exist, how an Read More ›

Starting at the 38-minute mark: Steve Meyer is the author of Darwin’s Doubt See also: StTeve Meyer on the information enigma in evolution Follow UD News at Twitter! Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

That could impact our understanding of early Earth. Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe but finding it on Earth is tricky. So researchers resorted to a computer simulation and found a promising possible compound: Helium-bearing compounds have, until very recently, been considered unlikely to exist under the physical conditions on or inside the Earth, Chen says, but in his opinion, his team’s new predictions change that view. Chen suggests that primordial helium reacted with FeO2 back when the Earth was new, forming a solid material. The compound is sufficiently heavy that it would only rise to the surface through so-called mantle plumes, which are columns of hot, solid rock that move up to the crust. When Read More ›

Mistaking a teapot shape for a golf ball, due to surface features, is one striking example from a recent open-access paper: The networks did “a poor job of identifying such items as a butterfly, an airplane and a banana,” according to the researchers. The explanation they propose is that “Humans see the entire object, while the artificial intelligence networks identify fragments of the object.” News, “Researchers: Deep Learning vision is very different from human vision” at Mind Matters “To see life steadily and see it whole”* doesn’t seem to be popular among machines. *(Zen via Matthew Arnold) See also: Can an algorithm be racist?

From ScienceDaily: According to a new study led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin that looked at 10 species of vertebrates, evolution used a kind of universal formula for turning non-monogamous species into monogamous species — turning up the activity of some genes and turning down others in the brain. “Our study spans 450 million years of evolution, which is how long ago all these species shared a common ancestor,” said Rebecca Young, research associate in UT Austin’s Department of Integrative Biology and first author of the study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors define monogamy in animals as forming a pair bond with one mate for at least Read More ›