This post went viral yesterday at Mind Matters: The 2014 science fiction film Transcendence featured a scientist who uploaded his consciousness into an AI program. Many people talk as though things like that are just around the corner. But industry pros say it isn’t really possible. Why not? François Chollet, author of Keras, a framework for the Python deep learning language, offers a list of reasons, but starts by pointing to an underlying misconception: that a super-AI could be developed that would go on creating more super-AIs until something vastly more intelligent than a human being arises. He points out that such a process has not actually happened in the universe of which we have knowledge: An overwhelming amount of Read More ›

The mechanome is the underresearched “ the set of proteins or molecular entities that sense or respond to forces” within the cell (Allen Liu). Our earlier stab at the subject here at UD garnered 354 comments, so there’s no shortage of interest. The mechanome (and mechanobiology in general) plays a key role in research into artificial cells. Suzan Mazur is the author of The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing ‘the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin’. Suzan Mazur talks to mechanical and biomedical engineer Allen Liu, one of the people best placed to offer some insights:   Suzan Mazur: The Liu Lab at the University of Michigan is particularly interested in the mechanobiology of the cell lipid membrane. Would you briefly describe your Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Humans have extraordinarily large brains, which have tripled in size in the last few million years. Other animals also experienced a significant, though smaller, increase in brain size. These increases are puzzling, because brain tissue is energetically expensive: that is, a smaller brain is easier to maintain in terms of calories. Building on existing research on learning, Muthukrishna and colleagues analytically and computationally modeled the predictions of the cultural brain hypothesis and found that this theory not only explains these increases in brain size, but a variety of other relationships with group size, learning strategies, knowledge and life history. The theory relies on the idea that brains expand to store and manage more information. Brains expand in response Read More ›

Neutral evolution, intended to cover for the failures of Darwinian evolution (natural selection), is now being challenged by selectionists: Selection isn’t in doubt, but many scientists have argued that most evolutionary changes appear at the level of the genome and are essentially random and neutral. Adaptive changes groomed by natural selection might indeed sculpt a fin into a primitive foot, they said, but those changes make only a small contribution to the evolutionary process, in which the composition of DNA varies most often without any real consequences. But now some scientists are pushing back against this idea, known as neutral theory, saying that genomes show much more evidence of evolved adaptation than the theory would dictate. This debate is important because Read More ›

Barry:  Can we know with absolute certainty that it is evil to torture a baby for pleasure? JDK:  “There is no possible answer to the question: it’s a meaningless question.” UPDATE: JDK has accused me of being intellectually dishonest for quoting him as saying (1)  there is no possible answer to the question; and (2) it is a meaningless question.  He has implied that the “context” of his statement makes it mean something other than what it appears to mean on its face. OK JDK.  I’ll bite.   Do you believe the question has meaning and it is possible to answer?  If so, answer it.  If not, apologize for saying the quotation was dishonest. SECOND UPDATE: JDK continues to post in Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Captive Goffins are capable of inventing and manipulating tools, even though they aren’t known to use tools habitually. The authors of the present study investigated two questions: do Goffins adjust tool properties to save effort, and if so, how accurately can they adjust tool dimensions for the task? The authors supplied six adult cockatoos with large cardboard sheets to tear into strips as tools for the testing apparatus: a food platform with a food reward set at varying distances (4-16cm) behind a small opening which also varied in width (1-2cm). They found that the Goffins were capable of adjusting the length of their cardboard strip tools to account for variations in food distance, making shorter tools when the Read More ›

A thick-bodied animal in red ocher: Researchers have found older man-made images, but these were abstract patterns, such as crisscrossing lines. The switch to figurative art represented an important shift in how people thought about the world around them — and possibly themselves. Carl Zimmer, “In Cave in Borneo Jungle, Scientists Find Oldest Figurative Painting in the World” at New York Times We actually don’t know that there aren’t older painting (or newer crisscrossed lines). This one was only just found. The caves contain thousands of other images, including hand stencils, animals, abstract signs, and symbols: The animal appears to have a spear shaft stuck in its flank and is one of a series of similar red-orange coloured paintings, which Read More ›

Their fuzz works like an acoustic panel to cut down the noise volume from their movements. From ScienceDaily: While some moths have evolved ears that detect the ultrasonic calls of bats, many types of moths remain deaf. In those moths, Neil has found that the insects developed types of “stealth coating” that serve as acoustic camouflage to evade hungry bats. Neil will describe his work during the Acoustical Society of America’s 176th Meeting, held in conjunction with the Canadian Acoustical Association’s 2018 Acoustics Week, Nov. 5-9 at the Victoria Conference Centre in Victoria, Canada. In his presentation, Neil will focus on how fur on a moth’s thorax and wing joints provide acoustic stealth by reducing the echoes of these body Read More ›

Apparently, the golden age in the distant past of good health due to clean, fresh outdoor living was a myth after all: Anthropologist Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St Louis, US, compiled examination records for two Late Pleistocene infants, six children, four juveniles, six adolescents, 30 prime age adults, and eight older adults, from several archaeological sites around the world. He discovered that all up they showed evidence of 75 skeletal or dental abnormalities. Based on rates of similar disorders in modern human populations, Trinkaus finds the probability that the total is merely an artefact of comparatively small sample size to be “vanishingly small”.Andrew Masterson, “Huge numbers of deformities found in ancient human remains” at Cosmos Trinkaus stresses that Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Roughly 30 percent of the cauliflower coral’s (Pocillopora damicornis) genome was unique compared to several other reef-building corals. In this 30%, many of these genes were related to immune function. This diversity of genes related to immune function, the researchers say, may be important for the long-term survival of coral reefs as climate change and ocean acidification continue to alter the environment to which corals are adapted. “This coral is traditionally thought of as a weed, and yet it may be one of the last corals to survive environmental changes such as climate change,” said senior author of the study Nikki Traylor-Knowles, an assistant professor of marine biology and ecology at the UM Rosenstiel School. An animal like Read More ›

Look how smart he got in the last few decades: This from a discussion of whether Neanderthals had language: Based on these results, most researchers agree Neanderthals were capable of emitting and hearing complex vocalizations. However, they disagree over the implications. While some consider the findings indicative of speech-based language in Neanderthals, others propose these features could have evolved for other reasons, like singing. Neanderthals may have lacked the cognitive abilities for language, but possessed the physical anatomy for musical calls to attract mates or sooth infants. To assess if Neanderthals had the brains for language, researchers usually rely on proxies from the archaeological record — artifacts that required the same cognitive prerequisites as language, such as hierarchical organization or Read More ›

There may be an additional, more sinister explanation for the ongoing reproducibility crisis, he suggests: A stunning report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that researchers often make “inappropriate requests” to statisticians. And by “inappropriate,” the authors aren’t referring to accidental requests for incorrect statistical analyses; instead, they’re referring to requests for unscrupulous data manipulation or even fraud. The authors surveyed 522 consulting biostatisticians and received sufficient responses from 390. Then, they constructed a table (shown below) that ranks requests by level of inappropriateness. For instance, at the very top is “falsify the statistical significance to support a desired result,” which is outright fraud. At the bottom is “do not show plot because it did not show as Read More ›

JDK wrote in a comment to my last post:  “I just believe it is true that there is no Truth that we can know.” I replied by stating that the fact that it is evil to torture a baby for pleasure is certainly true.  And I challenged JDK:  “Deny that. I dare you.” JDK refused my dare and ran for cover. JDK’s statement and my statement are mutually exclusive.  They cannot be both be true.  So it should be easy for JDK to deny my claim if he truly believes his claim.  Yet he refuses to do so. Why?  Because at bottom he is a coward.  He comes into these pages and makes bold claims about the unknowability of truth.  Read More ›

It’s great to see concern for primate apes taking a rational turn that can actually be in their interests: In recent years, wildlife sanctuaries, conservation organizations, and animal rights groups have told the public to stop touching chimpanzees and other wild animals. National Geographic, PETA, and even Instagram draw explicit links between human touch and harm. They discourage wildlife enthusiasts from visiting “fake sanctuaries” that let tourists play with wild animals. Sanctuary accreditation organizations, such as the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA), can refuse to accredit facilities that allow visitors to touch primates. They say that visitor illness, easily communicated through touch, can kill a young chimpanzee. Moreover, this touch—even if it is playful—can harm chimps and other wild animals Read More ›

Based on an analysis of their teeth: Two 250,000-year-old teeth from two Neanderthal children revealed that both of them were exposed to lead twice during their short lifetimes, the first known case of lead exposure in Neanderthals… “Teeth record environmental variation based on the climate, even where you’re growing up,” said Tanya Smith, lead author of the study and associate professor at Griffith University. “That’s possible because when you’re growing, your teeth you actually lock in a record of the chemistry of the water and the food that you’re eating and drinking. Because teeth have these tiny timelines, we can relate the chemistry to the growth to calculate ancient climate records. We can’t do that with any other element of Read More ›