The BBC has also thought that chimpanzees were entering the Stone Age. And now: Eminent anthropologist Frans de Waal explains that politicians have a lot to learn from how chimpanzees show empathy. “How chimpanzees reveal the roots of human behaviour” at BBC Reality: Chimpanzees don’t seek humans out the way dogs do. In many ways, dogs are more like humans than chimpanzees are and better able to communicate with us emotionally. Dogs don’t seek out chimpanzees, come to think of it, though recently, some researchers needed to convince themselves that something like that was happening between monkeys and wolves. (Uh, no.) Physical resemblance is apparently not all it’s cracked up to be. Serious study might be worthwhile. Follow UD News Read More ›

It had to happen: Someone making epigenetics stand in for the selfish gene, an all-purpose gene-splain: If epigenetic research utilizing these new technologies will successfully shed some light in disease prevention, diagnosis, and therapy, then the research can expand to study epigenetics related to human behavior and moods. Aggression, violence, adultery, sexual preferences, risk-taking, happiness, depression, and even spirituality may all be affected by gene regulation, including epigenetics, via mechanisms not yet precisely defined. There also is much evidence that diet, sleep, fasting, exercise, and stress regulate gene expression but here, too, the way they do it needs to be explored. Incorporating these new epigenetic technologies when examining the multiple biological factors that regulate gene expression will better illuminate whether Read More ›

One of the commonest objections we meet when we discuss design inferences — especially concerning the genetic code, is that a claim is “just an analogy” (with implied conclusion that analogies are weak or fallacious). This then extends to inductive arguments used. This common error must be corrected and (as will be shown) the principle of distinct identity helps us to do so. Before we show that, let us pause to note from the Stanford Enc of Phil, just to counter-weight the tendency of many objectors to be quickly dismissive of anything said by “one of those IDiots” without bothering to actually address the substantial issue at stake: >>An analogy is a comparison between two objects, or systems of objects, Read More ›

The skeleton was of a 32-year-old man: Neanderthals walked upright, had spines straighter than those of modern man, would have been strong and sturdy, and breathed deeply from their bell-, not barrel-shaped ribcages, according to a recently published article written by an international team of scientists. Busting open the myth of the arm-dragging, hunched-over caveman, the scientists, based at universities in Israel, Spain, and the United States, drew their conclusions from a recently completed 3D virtual reconstruction of the ribcage of the Kebara 2 skeleton — aka “Moshe” — the headless but almost complete Neanderthal remains unearthed in 1983 in a northern Israel cave.Amanda Borschel-Dan, “3-D model of Neanderthal rib cage busts myth of ‘hunched-over cavemen’” at Times of Israel Read More ›

We used to think the picture was pretty simple but not any more: By sequencing and analyzing 15 ancient genomes found throughout the Americas—six of which were older than 10,000 years—these researchers determined that, around 8,000 years ago, the ancestors of Native Americans were still on the move, migrating away from Mesoamerica (what is today Mexico and Central America) toward both North and South America. These groups moved rapidly and unevenly, sometimes interbreeding with local populations, complicating the genetic—and historical—picture even further. George Dvorsky, “Three New DNA Studies Are Shaking Up the History of Humans in the Americas” at Gizmodo Apparently, they traveled “great distances at breathtaking speed.” Potter said genetic data is wonderful, but it doesn’t tell us the Read More ›

From Mind Matters: Much popular literature leaves the impression that living organisms are machines or even billions of them linked together. For example, at Medium, we learn, Brains receive input from the outside world, their neurons do something to that input, and create an output. That output may be a thought (I want curry for dinner); it may be an action (make curry); it may be a change in mood (yay curry!). Whatever the output, that “something” is a transformation of some form of input (a menu) to output (“chicken dansak, please”). And if we think of a brain as a device that transforms inputs to outputs then, inexorably, the computer becomes our analogy of choice… … But organisms differ Read More ›

Eric Holloway explains Jonathan Bartlett’s account of the human mind as a halting oracle: In his paper, “Using Turing oracles in cognitive models of problem-solving” Jonathan Bartlett proposes to model the human mind as a halting oracle. A brief explanation: Computer science pioneer Alan Turing (1912–1954) imagined a universal machine that can copy any other machine. However, this machine has a critical limitation: It cannot determine whether any given machine will run forever or not. This is known as the halting problem: “There can be no general procedure to decide if a self-contained computer program will eventually halt.” A halting oracle is a non-mechanical entity that can solve the halting problem for all machines. A common objection to Bartlett’s idea Read More ›

In an excerpt from his recent book, Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even If the Universe Doesn’t, a psychiatrist explains how we can have meaning even though we don’t: People assume that our human sense of purpose is dependent on the universe having a purpose, and without such purpose they assume that life has no meaning. This is a wholly unsubstantiated assumption. Our purposeless universe has become infused with local pockets of purpose, and this has happened through entirely natural, spontaneous processes. Purpose emerged in the universe with life itself. Purpose and meaning (and morality too) can be entirely explained as natural phenomena, emergent from a random, material universe. All living creatures are purposeful. Simple creatures Read More ›

From a review of James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality Can science tell us how we ought to behave? In Science and the Good, a book that crosses the boundaries of history, philosophy, and psychology, sociologist James Davison Hunter and philosopher Paul Nedelisky examine nearly 400 years of scientific attempts to discover the sources and meaning of morality. That effort, they conclude, has failed. Science can tell us the way things are but not the way things ought to be. In the language of philosophy, it can’t derive an “ought” from an “is.” … Before the dawn of the Enlightenment era, late-medieval scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas had Read More ›

A historian draws our attention this post from late 2016, a reflection on the survival of classical learning during the Christian era, in response to “Skep,” an energetic atheist blogger: But the usual way that those who are forced to admit that there were, in fact, many medieval natural philosophers studying all kinds of proto-scientific ideas, and doing so in the tradition of the Greeks and Romans and their Islamic successors, deal with this awkward fact is to claim that these poor scholars were cowed by the terrible restrictions of the Church and tightly constrained in what they could explore. Which, right on cue, “Skep” proceeds to do: “The fact is there weren’t a lot of scientists around for the Read More ›

Rabbi Moshe Averick, author of  The Confused World of Modern Atheism (Mosaica Press, 2016) addresses the “God of the Gaps” – the claim that the intersections between the material and the immaterial in nature are just “gaps” waiting to be filled in (with special reference to the origin of life): The first thing I would bring to your attention – although not the essential point – is that when we discuss the Origin of Life we are not talking about a “gap” in scientific knowledge. A gap implies some acceptable and tolerable missing piece of the puzzle that we expect to fill in within some reasonable amount of time. What we actually see is more like the ocean between the coast Read More ›

Post World War II, scientists studying origins, sensed a moral mission to tell the story in order to encourage us to be better people. The close-knit hunter-gatherer clans that represented all humanity co-operated for survival and were chock full of moral lessons for us all. But was it true?: Readers and reviewers lumped Morris, Ardrey and Lorenz together as promoting a powerful new vision of humans as animals. (To be fair, each author saw different moral systems and imperatives emerging from their research, but these nuances mattered less to readers than their shared zoomorphic vision.) The view of humans as specialised animals carried implications for who among the scientists could truly judge what it meant to be human. If our Read More ›

It’s now suggested that people likely to live long tend to find each other (assortative mating). How else to explain this?Researchers found that siblings’ and first cousins’ lifespans were well correlated but also: But spouses’ lifespans were correlated, too. That could be easily explained by spouses sharing the same household and lifestyle: eating the same healthy diet or puffing on cigarettes together. But the researchers noticed something odd: the lifespans of other relatives related only by marriage also correlated. That can’t be explained by genes, and it can’t be explained by shared environment. So Ruby and his colleagues started investigating the lifespans of in-laws. They looked at siblings-in-law, and first-cousins-in-law, and then further afield, at relationships like “the sibling of Read More ›

We run this story as a public service. Sometimes the pressure might get to you but it is almost never entirely that person’s fault and this is not the way to go about dealing with it: Graduate student Zijie Wang has pleaded guilty to poisoning a co-worker in the chemistry labs at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He had been dosing his co-worker’s food with N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), used to induce cancer in rats, which initially made the victim vomit and gave him diarrhoea. The victim – who survived and testified in court on 2 November – subsequently installed a camera on his desk, and recorded Wang pipetting a substance into his food. Wang is due to be sentenced on 11 Read More ›

Back in the 1960s, space scientists needed to know if it is true that a cat always lands on its feet: NASA contributed funding to the paper “A Dynamical Explanation of the Falling Cat Phenomenon,” published in the International Journal of Solids and Structures, by Stanford’s T.R. Kane and M.P. Scher. What was so significant about the paper was that it demonstrated that cats are physically capable of rotating their body in mid-air to right themselves when falling. A cat employs specific motor functions in order to achieve this self-righting mechanism, and the paper analyzed these functions as equations that could then be applied to humans. While this function isn’t very useful to humans on earth, it’s critically important in Read More ›