This is in regard to: Is Darwinist Jerry Coyne starting to get it about SJW “science”? To Jerry: Your biggest problem is whether either you or your colleagues believe strongly enough that there is such a thing as truth, as opposed to an evolved illusion of your consciousness, that you would band together to fight off the aggrieved tentacles and suckers? It would be dreadful to see you and a few others all alone out there, but that’s what it’s coming down to. Anyway, we didn’t send the guy in the vid, so don’t try sending him back to us. We’re just passing on the info. Back to our regular coverage soon. – News

And anyway, does it even matter, if no one will join him?  At least, that’s the word on the street, they’re scared.* Meanwhile, here is Coyne, the author of Why Evolution Is True, concerned about a Woke science studies course that tells us: In the course of this survey, we shall engage a number of key questions such as: is science gendered, racialized, ableist or classist? Does the presence or absence of women (and another marginalized individuals) lead to the production of different kinds of scientific knowledge? – Science After Feminism (Catherine Taylor) Jerry says the obvious about the course: Do any of you doubt for a moment that the answer to both questions is “yes”? (My answers to both would be Read More ›

Karsten Pultz reports from Denmark on efforts to suppress the idea of design in nature that are coming from the Danish church. Mr. Pultz is also the author of “Why I have a problem with theistic evolution,”: Intelligent design being suppressed in academia is old news. But in Denmark even a Christian newspaper participates in biased coverage in favour of evolution. Recently, Mads Jakobsen, a priest and theologian in the Danish state church, was reprimanded by his bishop, Marianne Christiansen because he had written critically about Darwin’s theory in his parish magazine. The theologian had mainly identified the moral problems which arise when trying to combine survival of the fittest with Christian beliefs, but he seems also to have admitted Read More ›

They thought the mob was coming for someone else. Amid the dead silence in the combox following “The perfect storm: Darwinists meet the progressive “evolution deniers” — and cringe…, , EDTA pipes up 1, Well, how does it feel now that the universal acid shoe is on the other foot? And who on the evolutionist side will have the guts to stand up for what they believe at the risk of their job now? We are in the odd position of being able to supply an answer in which we are,. unfortunately, confident. No, they won’t. They will continue to pretend nothing is happening and abandon those who speak up, maybe at one of those new, “edgy” mags where you are Read More ›

According to the media release from Seals Unlimited, that is. No, but seriously: Dog lovers may be surprised (and displeased!) by a recent study of animal intelligence that dismisses the intelligence of dogs, compared to that of marine mammals: … systematically reviewing the animal cognition literature, British psychologists Stephen Lea and Britta Osthaus found dogs to be unremarkable in their cognitive capabilities compared to wolves, cats, dolphins, chimpanzees, pigeons, and several other species. For example, dogs seem no better at learning associations—such as between a behavior and a reward—than other species. Similarly, dogs can spatially navigate within small spaces, but other species can, too. And while dogs have an excellent sense of smell, the “pig’s olfactory abilities are outstanding and might Read More ›

Stephen Hawking was hardly the only one: Along with Sir Martin Rees, Elon Musk, and Henry Kissinger, among many lesser knowns, the late Stephen Hawking worried about an AI apocalypse (the “worst event in the history of our civilization”). Otherwise very bright people don’t seem to have a grasp of the underlying situation. Let’s take just two examples: 1. What would we need to make machines “intelligent”? We don’t even understand animal intelligence clearly. Are seals really smarter than dogs? Plants can communicate to adjust to their circumstances without a mind or brain. Where does that place plants with respect to intelligence? And what about the importance of the brain? Humans with seriously compromised brains can have consciousness. News, “Stephen Read More ›

An evolutionary biologist chronicles the onslaught: At first, left-wing pushback to evolution appeared largely in response to the field of human evolutionary psychology. Since Darwin, scientists have successfully applied evolutionary principles to understand the behavior of animals, often with regard to sex differences. However, when scientists began applying their knowledge of the evolutionary underpinnings of animal behavior to humans, the advancing universal acid began to threaten beliefs held sacrosanct by the Left. The group that most fervently opposed, and still opposes, evolutionary explanations for behavioral sex differences in humans were/are social justice activists. Evolutionary explanations for human behavior challenge their a priori commitment to “Blank Slate” psychology—the belief that male and female brains in humans start out identical and that Read More ›

He wonders: If I kill you but upload your mind into an android, did I murder you or just modify you? Is it even possible to upload your consciousness to a computer and, if so, is it still really you? The sci-fi TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013– ) tackled this question in an episode titled “Self Control”.  Scientist Holden Radcliffe has an android assistant appropriately named Aida (Artificial Intelligence Digital Assistant). Together, they build a virtual world that people could be plugged into and uploaded into, called The Framework. “More.” at Mind Matters See also: McDonald’s, meet McPathogen Robert J. Marks: What happens when the drive to automate everything meets the Law of Unintended Consequences?: I have a wager with a Read More ›

It was hardly heard of before and hardly widely predicted; now the Darwinian question is, why isn’t it more common? Why? Because there are two conflicting evolutionary forces at work. In the short-term, mixing mitochondria can be beneficial to individuals because the father’s mitochondria, say, can compensate for a harmful mutation in the mother’s mitochondria. But in the long-term, this can impair evolution’s ability to eliminate bad mutations as they are hidden from view. Lane thinks this is why organisms have an astonishingly wide variety of mechanisms for ensuring mitochondria are only inherited from the mother. During the course of evolution, species have repeatedly evolved such mechanisms, lost them and then evolved similar mechanisms again, his team has proposed.Michael Le Read More ›

A  software developer friend brought this article in The Atlantic to my attention:  The CRISPR Baby Scandal Gets Worse by the Day And he writes: I find it amusing that they keep referring to this kind of thing as “editing”.  They’re going to need to figure out if they’re going to keep using “editing” as the concept they want to convey and as such provide an opening for ID proponents to make the connection to the semiotic nature of genetic code (and thereby creating testimony against interest) or begin utilizing a different concept to bulwark their materialist approach. Even the notion of DNA being “code” is going to require alteration.  Granted, DNA is an amazingly efficient data storage mechanism, but again Read More ›

According to a recent study dating the 23 available fragments of the bones of the giant, extinct rhinoceros, Elasmotherium sibericum (3.4 tonnes): The results were surprising: they were dated to a range of times after the animals were thought to be extinct, with the most recent being between 35,000 to 36,000 years ago. By this time, humans had started populating the steppe of Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Northern China. But the researchers don’t think humans wiped them out: “If we look at timing, it’s during a period of climate change, which wasn’t extreme, but it did cause a whole bunch of much colder winters that we think really altered the extent of the grassland in the area,” Alan Cooper of Read More ›

Could be unique to humans: It turns out we humans may have an extra type of thinky bit that isn’t found in other primates. A previously unknown brain structure was identified while scientists carefully imaged parts of the human brain for an upcoming atlas on brain anatomy. Neuroscientist George Paxinos and his team at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) have named their discovery the endorestiform nucleus – because it is located within (endo) the inferior cerebellar peduncle (also called the restiform body). It’s found at the base of the brain, near where the brain meets the spinal cord. This area is involved in receiving sensory and motor information from our bodies to refine our posture, balance and movements.Tessa Koumoundouros, “Neuroscientists Have Read More ›

Something you probably already suspect: It happened many times: The presence of these chunks, making up 2%, on average, of the genome of anyone with roots in Europe, Asia, Australia or the Americas, pointed to a single period of intermingling – probably 50,000 to 60,000 years ago – not long after Homo sapiens emerged from Africa. But that simple story was complicated by the discovery that people in East Asia have up to 20% higher Neanderthal ancestry than present-day Europeans. … Evidence for multiple matings already exists, in the form of a 40,000 year old human fossil from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor, whose Neanderthal DNA nonetheless did not become part of modern-day human genomes.Dyani Lewis, “Humans and Neanderthals Read More ›

Anyone familiar with beavers will know that the big busy rodents can transform roads into ponds. They are making a comeback in Alaska: Beavers may be infiltrating the region for the first time in recent history as climate change makes conditions more hospitable, says Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Or maybe the expansion is a rebound after trapping reduced beaver numbers to imperceptible levels in the early 1900s, he says. Nobody knows for sure. And the full range of changes the rodents are generating in their new Arctic ecosystems hasn’t been studied in detail. But from what Tape and a few other researchers can tell so far, the effects could be profound, and most of Read More ›

Well, PayPal’s Peter Thiel put it more politely but… that’s the bottom line. We don’t usually hear tech moguls talking this way. More frequent news is stuff like Is it Google-com or Google.gov? or Digital dictatorship. But Thiel thinks the riot is over: “The reformation is going to happen,” Thiel added, noting it won’t come from within, but from the “outside.” Thiel made the comments in a keynote speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Collegiate Network editors’ conference. The group funds independent and conservative-minded campus news outlets at universities across the nation, and Thiel is an alumnus of the 39-year-old nonprofit, founding the Stanford Review in the late 1980s. … In reality, higher education is in trouble, he said, citing Read More ›