Earlier today, in A Man is a Woman, Winston, Barry Arrington asks us to imagine the reprogramming of people who think that words like “male” and “female” represent biological realities, which is somewhat like Winston’s mistake in imagining that 2 and 2 could make 4 even if the party needs them to make 5. In 1984 O’Brien tortured him out of that. Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne is refusing to follow Nature down the primrose path of political correctness and is doubling down on what people used to be allowed to accept as biological fact: The shameful part of all this is that the scientific journal Nature, as well as three evolutionary biology/ecology societies, who should Read More ›

Everyone has heard of a “shoestring budget.”  But did you know that UD gets by on an “aglet budget”?  What is an aglet? you ask.  An aglet is that little plastic sheath at the end of a shoestring.  That’s right.  Our budget is so small that we only wish we could get by on a shoestring.  All of which is prelude to our annual holiday fundraising drive.  If you have benefited from our News Desk’s tireless chasing of the latest ID-related happenings, or KF’s in-depth analysis of the fundamentals, or gpuccio’s scientific insights, or any of our other UD features, please consider a donation to help fund our efforts.  The Donate button is there on the right of the homepage Read More ›

If you read the science news, you’ve probably been hearing about Little Foot alot: The first of a raft of papers about ‘Little Foot’ suggests that the fossil is a female who showed some of the earliest signs of human-like bipedal walking around 3.67 million years ago. She may also belong to a distinct species that most researchers haven’t previously recognized.Colin Barras, “‘Little Foot’ hominin emerges from stone after millions of years” at Nature Ninety percent of the skeleton found in South Africa is complete, compared to (possibly) fellow Australopithecus Lucy’s 40%. The papers will be published in a special edition of the Journal of Human Evolution. An early announcement described Little Foot as an Australopithecus prometheus, but as Barras Read More ›

Leftists frequently bash ID proponents and climate change hysteria skeptics as science “deniers.”  This is ironic, because these same leftists insist that a man can be a woman by simply wanting to be badly enough.  This would be amusing if they did not often employ the levers of political power to force compliance with their anti-reality delusions, as a school board in Virginia recently did when it fired a teacher for refusing to join in the lie that one of his male students is a female.  See here.  We are rapidly arriving at a time when Orwell’s famous “2+2=5 if the party says so” passage is becoming a terrifying reality, except instead instead of “2+2=5 if the party says so,” it Read More ›

How is “To be or not to be?” different from Bow wow wow!? Both animals and humans use signs. A sign points to something other than itself. For example, when you point with your finger at a tree, you are making a sign. You want people to look at the tree, not at your finger. A lion’s roar (to scare off an intruder) is also a sign. It’s a warning sign for the intruder, not just noise the animal happens to be making. A bird’s song to attract a mate or establish territory is a sign in the same way. So is a written or spoken word. Both animals and humans use signs. There are (for our purposes) two kinds Read More ›

We live as beings in a world full of other concrete entities, and to do science we must routinely rely on mathematics and so on numbers and other abstract objects. We observe how — as just one example — a fire demonstrates causality (and see that across time causality has been the subject of hot dispute). We note that across science, there are many “effects.” Such puts the logic of being and causality on the table for discussion as part 4 of this series [ cf. 1, 2, 3] — and yes, again, the question arises: why are these themes not a routine part of our education? The logic of being (ontology) speaks to possible vs impossible entities, contingent ones Read More ›

Two independent teams of astronomers recently looked into the matter: Astronomers have detected and measured the mass and/or orbital features of 3,869 planets in 2,887 planetary systems beyond the solar system. This ranks as a staggering rate of discovery, given that the first confirmed detection of a planet orbiting another hydrogen-fusion-burning star was as recent as 1995. What do the characteristics of these systems reveal about potential habitability for advanced life? … The presumption back in 1995 was that astronomers would find many exoplanetary systems where the probability of advanced life possibly existing in that system would be greater than zero. More than twenty-three years later, with a database of 2,888 planetary systems and 3,877 planets, only one planetary system Read More ›

That’s the surprising conclusion of a recent study that required rats who had had their ovaries or their uterus removed or both and then had to negotiate a water maze six weeks later: As compared with the other rats, animals who had only their uterus removed struggled more as the test became increasingly difficult. The scientists also observed differences in the hormone levels of these rats. Overall, the study suggests that signals from the uterus—and not the ovaries, which are better known for their hormone production—influence brain function. Carolyn Wilke, “Rat Study Points to Role of Uterus in Memory” at The Scientist Memory may be more complex than we think. Follow UD News at Twitter! See also: Food, sex, and Read More ›

At her blog, Oscillations, Suzan Mazur reports on the lecture series Simons Center for Geometry and Physics has been hosting at Stony Brook University, on Nonequilibrium Physics in Biology: Among the more interesting presenters is Kim Sneppen, a professor of complex systems and biophysics at Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, who addresses the diversity of shapes in the biological world. Sneppen says, “We are basically all doughnuts” and describes how we go from a sphere to a torus in his talk titled: “Theoretical Tool Bridging Cell Polarities with Development of Morphologies.” Suzan Mazur, “Kim Sneppen, Simons Center Talk: “We are basically all doughnuts”” at Oscillations Mazur discusses his approach to embryology and along the way mentions Stuart Pivar, an early Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: University of Otago researchers have discovered information about a gene that sets primates — great apes and humans — apart from other mammals, through the study of a rare developmental brain disorder. … Dr O’Neill and research collaborators from Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Germany, then set forth to test the point that the gene drives aspects of brain development that are unique to primates. Some amazing data was found using a novel approach through studying human “mini-brains” in culture. It is now possible to take a skin cell and transform it using a set of genetic tricks, so that it can be triggered to form a tiny brain-like structure in culture in the lab. Their results showed Read More ›

It turns out that other solar systems are not shedding much light on how ours came to be: But as the menagerie of young planetary systems grows, researchers are struggling to square their observations with current theories on how our Solar System and others formed. Such ideas have been in turmoil ever since astronomers started discovering planets around distant stars — a list that now numbers in the thousands. The Solar System has rocky planets near the Sun and giant gas balls farther out, but the panoply of exoplanets obeys no tidy patterns. And the rule book for world-building is getting more complicated as researchers find evidence of planets in the process of being born. Still, astronomers hope that witnessing Read More ›

Probably not wanted either: The latest victim of an academic mobbing is 28-year-old social scientist Noah Carl who has been awarded a Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellowship at St Edmund’s College at the University of Cambridge. Rarely has the power asymmetry between the academic mob and its victim been so stark. Dr Carl is a young researcher, just starting out in his career, who is being mobbed for being awarded a prestigious research scholarship on the basis of his peer-reviewed research … Three hundred academics from around the world, many of them professors, have signed an open letter denouncing Dr Carl and demanding that the University of Cambridge “immediately conduct an investigation into the appointment process” on the grounds Read More ›

Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, talks about predictable claims from theistic evolution: To catch people up to speed, in a facebook conversation, [Jim] Stump made the statements, “Common ancestry [here he means Universal Common Ancestry] is a multiply confirmed theory that explains the observable data in detail. So asking what kind of evidence would contradict that is about like asking what kind of evidence would it take for you to accept geocentrism.” And, “The fossil record continues to be uncovered, and continues to show more and more what you expect to see if common descent is true. At all of the major transitions, there are intermediates found in just the right places.” Read More ›

No, we don’t sit around here, making stuff up: Tania Singer, 48 , had achieved prominence outside the scientific world in recent years. She caused a sensation with her interdisciplinary studies on the foundations of social emotions such as empathy, envy, fairness or revenge. Since 2013 , she has headed the ReSource project at the MPI in Leipzig, one of the largest research projects ever on the effects of meditation on the brain. At events such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, she regularly called for more compassion in business and society. This was missing but apparently in their own laboratory. The science journal Science and the online portal BuzzFeed reported in the summer of this year that Singer Read More ›