And human beings do too, apparently. From ScienceDaily: The sixth mass extinction is underway, this time caused by humans. A team of researchers have calculated that species are dying out so quickly that nature’s built-in defense mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. If current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct during the next five decades that nature will need 3-5 million years to recover to current biodiversity levels. And that’s a best-case scenario. Hmmm. If evolution is without purpose, as Darwinians insist, how can it be “nature’s built-in defense mechanism”? If it isn’t predictable, as Stephen Jay Gould insisted, what’s with this “best-case scenario”? For that matter, if consciousness is an evolved illusion, aren’t all Read More ›

Instead of looking for fossil at that age, the researchers looked for biomarkers: Rather than searching for conventional body fossils, the researchers have been tracking molecular signs of animal life, called biomarkers, as far back as 660-635 million years ago during the Neoproterozoic Era. In ancient rocks and oils from Oman, Siberia, and India, they found a steroid compound produced only by sponges, which are among the earliest forms of animal life. “Molecular fossils are important for tracking early animals since the first sponges were probably very small, did not contain a skeleton, and did not leave a well-preserved or easily recognizable body fossil record,” Zumberge said. “We have been looking for distinctive and stable biomarkers that indicate the existence of sponges Read More ›

French physicist Louis de Broglie (1892-1987) hoped that quantum mechanics could be brought within the same frame as classical physics via pilot wave theory, which envisioned “concrete particles, always with definite locations, that are guided through space by real pilot waves.” Apparently not. But a series of bouncing-droplet findings since 2015 has crushed this dream. The results indicate that Couder’s most striking demonstration of quantum-like phenomena, back in 2006 — “the experiment that got me hooked on this problem,” the fluid dynamicist Paul Milewski said — was in error. Repeat runs of the experiment, called the “double-slit experiment,” have contradicted Couder’s initial results and revealed the double-slit experiment to be the breaking point of both the bouncing-droplet analogy and de Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Biologists know a lot about how life works, but they are still figuring out the big questions of why life exists, why it takes various shapes and sizes, and how life is able to amazingly adapt to fill every nook and cranny on Earth. An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Arizona State University has discovered that the answers to these questions may lie in the ability of life to find a middle ground, balancing between robustness and adaptability. The results of their study have been recently published in Physical Review Letters. The research team, led by Bryan Daniels of the Center for Biosocial Complex Systems with direction from faculty member Sara Walker of the School of Earth and Read More ›

Just when doctors are abandoning the Hippocratic Oath because of its restriction on killing humans, some propose that scientists adopt a version of the basic idea. Others disagree: The authors suggest that researchers sign off on a number of statements, including: I will practice and support a scientific process that is based on logic, intellectual rigour, personal integrity, and an uncompromising respect for truth; And: I will never let the potential for personal recognition or advancement cause me to act in a way that violates the public trust in science or in me as a scientist. Fleischfresser outlines a number of such proposals in recent history and then quotes the current Oath’s critics: While Doherty reserves judgement on the idea Read More ›

Uniting gravitation with the other forces of nature still eludes us: What we have done recently is to discover a gap in the mathematics that led to the idea that black holes are totally bald. In 2016, Stephen, Andy and I found that black holes have an infinite collection of what we call “soft hair”. This discovery allows us to question the idea that black holes lead to a breakdown in the laws of physics. Stephen kept working with us up to the end of his life, and we have now published a paper that describes our current thoughts on the matter. In this paper, we describe a way of calculating the entropy of black holes. The entropy is basically Read More ›

We thought “purposeful efficiency” was enough to get a researcher fired, but read on: From ScienceDaily: The steps cells take in response to challenges are more complex than previously thought, finds new research published in the journal eLIFE. The study investigates a system relevant to cancer, viral infection, and diabetes as well as Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease, revealing many cases of “purposeful inefficiency” in cellular behavior. These new pathways might offer routes for understanding and perhaps even treating these diseases, the study’s scientists note. “Surprisingly, cells often take an approach that seems quite inefficient,” explains Christine Vogel, an associate professor at New York University’s Department of Biology and the study’s lead author. “However, discovering these unexpected routes helps us Read More ›

And, he says, there is no nice way to put it: A new survey by Gallup shows that only 48% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in academia, down from 57% in 2015. And it’s not just due to partisanship; confidence has fallen among people of all political persuasions. While it is true that confidence has fallen the most among Republicans (17 points), it’s also down among Independents (4 points) and Democrats (6 points). Alex Berezow, “Confidence In Academia Falls Nine Points In Three Years” at American Council on Science and Health Here’s the survey. About the only group enjoying a lot of confidence are the military and small business. Pollsters are not mindreaders, of Read More ›

Elizabeth Warren infamously claimed to be a racial minority, specifically, Native American, in an Association of American Law Schools directory, and in the 1990s her employer, Harvard Law School, touted her minority status in an effort to bolster its “diversity” bona fides.  Warren has taken a lot of heat for claiming to be Native American, because, sadly, her claim is a lie.  Astonishingly, Warren herself has confirmed that her claim was false when she released the results of a DNA test today.  The DNA report, found that ‘the vast majority’ of Warren’s family tree is European, but added that ‘the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor … in the range of 6-10 generations ago.’ Even Read More ›

From the Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences The world of quantum phenomena is full of paradoxes incomprehensible to human intuition and inexplicable to classical physics. This is the thesis we almost always hear when it comes to quantum mechanics. Here are some examples of phenomena that are commonly considered to be typically quantum: a single electron generating interference fringes behind two slits, as if it were passing through both at the same time; particles that are in different states at the same time, only to appear “magically” in one selected state at the moment of observation; measurements without interactions; erasing the past by means of a quantum eraser; or finally, nonlocality, which gives Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Sharing meat after hunting and exchanging other valued food items is considered key in the evolution of cooperation in human societies. One prominent idea is that humans share valuable foods to gain future favors, such that those we chose to share with are more likely to cooperate with us in the future. Despite regularly occurring in humans, sharing food outside of kinship or mating relationships is rare in non-human animals. Our two closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, are two of the rare exceptions, and because of the important role of food sharing in human evolution, examining the sharing patterns of chimpanzees can help to answer questions on how sharing food amongst adults evolved and how it may Read More ›

From report on a study of the rules developed by East African hunter-gatherers (the Hadza) around sharing food: Some camps share food more than others, but Hadza circulate among all camps rather than clustering in the most cooperative ones. Hadza individuals adjust their willingness to share food to the accepted standards, or social norms, of whatever temporary camp they live in, researchers report online September 20 in Current Biology. Social norms develop in poorly understood ways. But factors such as the presence of prolific hunters probably encourage sharing in Hadza camps, says a team led by psychologists Coren Apicella and Kristopher Smith of the University of Pennsylvania. In groups with such norms, cooperators interact only with cooperators and don’t get Read More ›

And he is serious. Even bout the predictive power. At the Guardian Michael Dixon, director of London’s Natural History Museum is upset about the downplaying the teaching of evolution which he perceives to be happening in the United State and Israel (not many details offered). Sarah Chaffee reminds us: If you remember, this is the museum founded by structuralist Richard Owen. The leadership there demonstrated its respect for Owen, a great scientist ahead of his time, by replacing a prominently placed 2,000-pound statue of him with one of Charles Darwin. Removing evolution from biology classes is a bad idea. But Dixon’s attitude is strangely dogmatic. He notes: “Darwin’s theory of evolution not only underpins all biological science, it has an Read More ›

The more that software encompasses the whole of life, the more it needs to take into account the whole of the person using it: In the early days of computing, software developers could completely ignore the spiritual needs of users. Computers were a tool—usually a business tool, used for brief periods to accomplish a task. They were not the backdrop of our lives. Today, however, users are practically attached to their computers—sometimes day and night. More and more human interaction takes place digitally. As the percentage of time that users spend with computers increases, the amount of humanity that software developers need to take into consideration increases as well. In short, because humans are spiritual beings, software needs to start Read More ›

Part I A reply to computational neuroscientist Anil Seth’s recent TED talk Anil Seth’s talk is a breathtaking compendium of fallacies on the mind and the brain. We can learn a lot from him—by understanding the errors into which he falls and the way out of those errors. Part II Does your brain construct your conscious reality? In a word, no. Your brain doesn’t “think”; YOU think, using your brain The brain understands nothing, imagines nothing, sees nothing. It wills nothing. We understand, we imagine, we see, and we will, using our brains. See also: Can machines really learn? A parable of a book that learned Machine learning is a powerful and important tool that is likely to be of great Read More ›