Let’s hope it continues to work for Abbot. A couple of difficulties: 1) It’s not clear that Cancel Culture is an academic community, as opposed to a mob running an academic racket. 2) Many Cancelers will interpret efforts to be nice as evidence of weakness, more or less as wolves do. But so long as the strategy really works, go with it.
Researchers ask: Are we more like primitive fish than we thought?
“the genetic basis of air-breathing and limb movement was already established in our fish ancestor 50 million years earlier” than a transition to land. That sounds like directed evolution, no? The researchers have stumbled onto directed evolution but their careers depend on not recognizing that fact.
Researchers: Huge coelacanth fish is “not a living fossil”
For all practical purposes, the coelacanth is a “living fossil,” in the sense that it is an example of stasis. It wanders a bit genetically over millions of years but doesn’t change much over hundreds of millions of years. Could we say the same of most vertebrates?
Researcher: Humpback whales DON’T learn songs from one another?
Don’t blame Eduardo Mercado. In order to deal safely, if not rationally, with the demand that whales be seen to be nearly as smart as people, he is stuck with making these nonsense claims. The probable situation is that whales don’t vary their songs much because they can’t. One might say the same of many birds.
Chronicles of the war on math: Why math is racist
Wethinks that the big winners are teachers who can’t teach, protected by unions. The big losers are kids who leave school innumerate and must cope with a workplace that no longer needs innumerate people. We have machines now.
Carl Sagan: Did he pack “3 lies into 12 words”?
Art Battson: Apparently, nobody told him that either the Cosmos or its Creator has always existed and it’s not the Cosmos. Given the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics alone, he should have been well aware of that fact.
Chemist James Tour offers a YouTube series on abiogenesis, treated as a form of magic
“In this compelling series of lectures on abiogenesis, James Tour’s riposte slices through both hype and myths using science to critique “science”, demonstrating how experts in the field truly remain clueless on the origin of life.” We recommend that inveterate yay-hoos find someone else to attack.
Just in time for Darwin Day: Abolitionist Frederick Douglass on evolutionary racism
Science historian Michael Flannery points out that Douglass’s comments preceded Darwin’s On the Origin of Species because the basic idea of the “modified monkey” (Thomas Huxley’s phrase) was in Lamarck (and probably in the air).
Researchers: Only one gene separates humans today from extinct ancestors
But wait. Have we established that Neanderthal man was to modern humans as “non-human primates” are? The more we learn about Neanderthal man, the less of a dullard he seems. Let’s keep an eye on this file and see what happens later.
Does the habitability of exoplanets depend on nitrogen?
It plays an unexpected role in planetary temperature, researchers found: While most research about the habitable zone has focused on a star’s brightness (as temperature dictates whether water on a planet could be liquid, ice or gas), new research is showing that this is an extremely simplified and naive picture. The true test for whether Read More…
An animal you would swear was just plant refuse
If it washed up on the beach. The sea whip coral is technically an animal but you might not guess that.
Snowflake structure is a beautiful classic in natural law-based design
At SciAm: Different micro environments in the air dictate the final shape in a way physicists are still trying to understand.
Off topic: Why are we supposed to need a “reality czar”
It turns out to be as Orwellian as you might expect. One of Roose’s experts calls it a “truth commission.”
Odd: Koala fingerprints almost indistinguishable from human ones
Researchers compared the fingerprints of three koalas killed by cars, a chimp that died in captivity, and human ones. The koala prints were more like human ones than the chimp’s were.
Higher mutation rates in non-double helix DNA create intriguing alternative to common ancestry
Researcher: “But it’s possible that the mutation rate is so high in some of these non-B DNA regions that the same mutation could occur independently in several different individuals. If this is true, it would change how we think about evolution.”