Can you believe a typical science site coming to a conclusion that is so evidence-based? We all know that parrots can talk. Some people may have even seen elephants, seals, or whales mimicking speech sounds. So why can’t our closest primate relatives speak like us? Our new research suggests they have the right vocal anatomy but not the brainpower to use it. … We also found that apes have particularly large cortical association areas, as well as a bigger hypoglossal nucleus than other primates. The hypoglossal nucleus is associated with the cranial nerve that controls the muscles of the tongue. This suggests that our closest primate relatives may have finer and more voluntary control over their tongues than other primate Read More ›

Everyone understands that the only conceivable alternative to Darwinism is intelligent design, and everyone understands that ID is a religious idea. Thus if you criticize Darwinism on any minor point you are promoting ID, and promoting religion in the classroom is forbidden by the “freedom from religion” amendment. That is why, no matter how many scientific problems you see with Darwin’s explanation for the causes of evolution, it is unconstitutional to criticize his theory in the classroom. Nevertheless, in case any of you biology teachers want to try this, I have an idea on how you might be able to point out some problems with Darwinism in your classroom without violating the U.S. Constitution, by sharing the following New York Read More ›

He and Gunter Bechly should talk. Recently, Barry Arrington noted the story out of Brown University, where a paper got “disappeared” for making the point — that would seem so obvious to anyone who spends much time with teen girls as to hardly merit a paper — that sexual attitudes can be contagious. Ted Hill is discovering what it is like to be Gunter Bechly (driven from his post and “disappeared” from Wikipedia). In Bechly’s case, it came about because, a former Dawkins fan, he saw that there is evidence for design in nature. In Hill’s case, he was not just marketing eye candy about why men pay on the first date (or don’t) or promoting anti-Semitism (fashionable once again). Read More ›

At Rutgers: How did life arise on Earth? Rutgers researchers have found among the first and perhaps only hard evidence that simple protein catalysts – essential for cells, the building blocks of life, to function – may have existed when life began. Their study of a primordial peptide, or short protein, is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the chemist Günter Wächtershäuser postulated that life began on iron- and sulfur-containing rocks in the ocean. Wächtershäuser and others predicted that short peptides would have bound metals and served as catalysts of life-producing chemistry, according to study co-author Vikas Nanda, an associate professor at Rutgers’ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Human DNA Read More ›

They are looking for dark photons: When positrons slam into the diamond wafer, they immediately merge with electrons and vanish in a faint burst of energy. Normally, the energy released is in the form of two particles of light called photons. But if a fifth force exists in nature, something different will happen. Instead of producing two visible photons, the collisions will occasionally release only one, alongside a so-called “dark photon”. This curious, hypothetical particle is the dark sector’s equivalent of a particle of light. It carries the equivalent of a dark electromagnetic force. Unlike normal particles of light, any dark photons produced in Padme will be invisible to the instrument’s detector. But by comparing the energy and direction of the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Two broad findings have been seen in memory reconsolidation, which is the retrieval and strengthening of a recent memory. The first broad finding is that, during memory reconsolidation, changes in translational control — the process of forming new proteins from activated genes — occur in areas of the brain related to memory formation. The second broad finding is that epigenetic mechanisms — various molecular modifications known to alter the activity of genes without changing their DNA sequence — are also somehow actively involved during memory reconsolidation or strengthening. Now, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have described a novel mechanism that links epigenetic change to translational control. In the Journal of Neuroscience, they report how several Read More ›

About 237 million years ago: The sites underscore that this burst of evolution took place much earlier than researchers had thought, particularly for water-loving insects. Among the remains are fossil dragonflies, caddisflies, water boatmen, and aquatic beetles. Until now, paleontologists had thought such aquatic insects didn’t diversify until 130 million years ago. These insects—which include both predators and plant eaters—helped make freshwater communities more complex and more productive, says Zheng, moving them toward the ecosystems we see today. Elizabeth Pennisi, “Ancient insect graveyards reveal an explosion in bug diversity 237 million years ago” at Science A friend writes to say that the find is “significantly” earlier than expected – partly on account of fossil evidence, but also partly on account Read More ›

That’s a big part of the problem with peer review and replication failures. Don’t believe me? Get this: In response to massive failures in so-called social sciences: “The findings reinforce the roles that two inherent intuitions play in scientific decision-making: our drive to create a coherent narrative from new data regardless of its quality or relevance, and our inclination to seek patterns in data whether they exist or not,” he says. Dingledine also says the results speak to a bigger problem, something Kahneman famously described in an open letter to colleagues in 2012 as a “train wreck looming”: the widespread failure to replicate the findings of many important studies in the social sciences. That wreck may well be upon us. Paul Read More ›

That’s dark energy.topic The most mysterious phenomenon in cosmology – dark energy – may not exist at all, according to Professor Subir Sarkar, head of the particle theory group at the University of Oxford in the UK. In the late 1990s, astronomers found evidence from supernovae that the universe has been expanding faster and faster as it gets older. Having no explanation for what was driving it, they dubbed this accelerating expansion ‘dark energy’. What did you think about these findings at the time? ‘I was sceptical from the beginning. I’m unusual in the cosmology community in that I’ve had experience working in experiments as well as theory, and I didn’t think the astronomers were taking full account of the Read More ›

Story re Sabine Hosenfelder’s comments here. In response, Kirk Durston from P2C kindly writes to say, If anyone is interested in a list of references with links, backing up the serious problem that science is facing right now, I wrote a blog post a while back that has a “Further Reading” section at the bottom of it. It currently stands at 47 links, counting Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest blog post. Here is an example, From Should we have faith in science? Part II: peer-reviewed science papers Austin Hughes, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focusing on the origin of adaptive phenotypes laments, ‘Thousands of papers are published every year claiming evidence of adaptive evolution on the basis of computational Read More ›

Just when we thought we had these thing figured out. Intro of topic Sharks are infamous meat-eaters. The ocean’s buffet of fish, crabs, mussels, shrimp and krill fill the legendary predators’ stomachs and give them sustenance. Now researchers have discovered that one particular species, bonnethead sharks, also dine on seagrass to meet their nutritional needs. The discovery means bonnethead sharks are not carnivores but omnivores — a distinction that changes how the coastal swimmers influence the fragile ecosystems they call home. … That means these coastal sharks once thought to be solely meat-eaters are actually omnivorous and the only known shark species to eat plants. That distinction changes things for ecosystem managers since omnivorous fish are food web stabilizers. Roni Read More ›

  Better than we ever could? Recently, we discussed well-known chemist and atheist proponent Peter Atkins’s claim that science, not philosophy, answers the Big Questions: One class consists of invented questions that are often based on unwarranted extrapolations of human experience. They typically include questions of purpose and worries about the annihilation of the self, such as Why are we here? and What are the attributes of the soul? They are not real questions, because they are not based on evidence. Thus, as there is no evidence for the Universe having a purpose, there is no point in trying to establish its purpose or to explore the consequences of that purported purpose. As there is no evidence for the existence of Read More ›

Explains everything and its opposite! Our philosopher and photographer friend Laszlo Bencze writes to apprise us of “the definitive explanation” of why men want to pay on a first date: “There is an evolutionary reason for this, says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University Bloomington. ‘Women want to know if a man will spend his resources on her,’ she says. ‘For millions of years they needed a partner to provide for their young, and they keep looking for that signal.’” Elizabeth Bernstein, “Who Pays on a Date? That’s Still a Complicated Question” at Wall Street Journal Okay, but on the other hand, as Bencze observes, evolution could also explain the Read More ›

My five year-old granddaughter is brilliant.  But she shares a flaw with many other brilliant people.  She absolutely hates to say “I don’t know.”  And she sometimes just makes concepts up out of whole cloth in an attempt to disguise the fact that she does not know something. Example:  This evening LK brought home Chick-fil-A.  Instead of packets of ketchup, for some reason she got packets of something called “Polynesian Sauce”  that is red and gooey but slightly less viscous than ketchup. The following exchange ensued: Granddaughter:  Papa, this is not ketchup. Papa:  It’s not?  What is it? Granddaughter:  uh, hmmm, uh, it’s Fraxee. Fraxee?  Not bad for a word she made up on the spot to disguise her ignorance.  Read More ›

Over at Evolution News David Klinghoffer summarizes Brown University’s craven abandonment of one of its professors under pressure from the transgender lobby. [Brown professor Dr. Lisa] Littman published her (peer-reviewed) study in PLOS One, “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports,” concluding that young people may pick up gender dysphoria socially, in part through circles of friends and social and other media. That’s not something you are supposed to say. PLOS One and Brown’s School of Public Health, where Littman teaches, caught blowback from activists, and Brown in particular collapsed under the pressure. They took down a news release from their website and replaced it with a “statement, community letter on gender dysphoria study.” All of which Read More ›