From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: Complex numbers, suitably paired, form 4-D “quaternions,” discovered in 1843 by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who on the spot ecstatically chiseled the formula into Dublin’s Broome Bridge. John Graves, a lawyer friend of Hamilton’s, subsequently showed that pairs of quaternions make octonions: numbers that define coordinates in an abstract 8-D space. Matemaical approaches to physics were left behind during the pursuit of answers from collides but, as Wolchover writes, no particles beyond the Standard (Big Bang) model have been found.” One rearcher, Cohl Fury, has since produced a number of results connecting the octonions to the Standard Model that experts are calling intriguing, curious, elegant and novel. “She has taken significant steps toward Read More ›

From Ben Shapiro at Daily Wire: You’ve undoubtedly seen those preening headlines from major outlets about how conservatives are more “authoritarian” by nature than Leftists. See, for example, here and here and here and here and here and here. But it turns out that this is nonsense. Such studies are generally vague and deliberately constructed to make it appear that conservatives are more “authoritarian” than Leftists. In reality, authoritarian personality types exist across the political spectrum. All you have to do is change the incentive structure in the questions, and you’ll suddenly find Leftists who hate freedom and conservatives who love it. Jesse Singal of New York Magazine has a long and worthwhile piece about the scientific flaws in the authoritarian modeling. … Confirmation bias has allowed too many members of the Left to ignore embarrassing Read More ›

From the BBC: Albert Einstein thought the three dimensions of space were linked to time – which serves as a fourth dimension. He called this system space-time, and it’s the model of the Universe that we use today. But Einstein also thought it was possible to fold space-time, creating a shortcut between two distant locations. This phenomenon is called a wormhole, and it can be visualised as a tunnel with two openings, each emerging at different points in space-time. Wormholes might exist naturally in the cosmos; indeed, scientists in Russia are trying to use radio telescopes to detect them. But using wormholes for time travel won’t be straightforward. Indeed not. Unless everything is absolutely determined, some wise person from the Read More ›

From Tobias Richter and Amaia Arranz-Otaegui at Sapiens: The Natufian, dated to 11,700–15,000 years ago, is often described as an important cultural precursor to the Neolithic era. During the Natufian, the world’s earliest stone houses, grinding tools, and sickle blades appear in large numbers in the Levant, suggesting that the hunter-gatherers here included plants, cereals amongst them, more frequently in their everyday diet. Natufian hunter-gatherers were also more sedentary than preceding Paleolithic societies, which may have pushed them onto a road of no return toward plant cultivation and agriculture. … When Arranz-Otaegui told her that it was from a 14,500-year-old hunter-gatherer site in Jordan, it was Carretero’s turn to be stunned. The site was thousands of years older than Çatalhöyük. Read More ›

From Mark Fischetti at Scientific American: Bipolar disorder, for example, was more similar to schizophrenia than to major depression even though clinicians may link bipolar disorder and depression, based on their symptoms. These insights could possibly reveal new treatments, says neurogeneticist Daniel Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles, one of the investigators. More. It’s becoming increasingly evident (see the stories below) that a great deal of what we need to know about a person (or any life form) is not in their genes. See also: At PLOS: “Genes – way weirder than you thought” Bale monkeys more closely related to sister species than same species in different locationsThe “biological species concept” is yet another textbook dead zone. Girl Read More ›

The one that was supposed to waste traditional philosophy? At Mind Matters Today, Back in 1992, philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor said, “…we’re all materialists for much the reason that Churchill gave for being a democrat: the alternatives seem even worse. The new research project [science of mind] is therefore to reconcile our materialism to the psychological facts: to explain how something that is material through and through could have whatever properties minds actually do have…. Thinking of philosophical materialism as a science must have seemed like a step forward at the time. Over twenty-five years later, there have been dozens of theories of consciousness jostling for the podium, most of them “worse than wrong,” even in the eyes of Read More ›

Wolf-Ekkehard Loennig, who worked for 25 years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, is now retired but still writes often on the topic of Darwinism and Intelligent Design. You can find links to his CV and many of his research publications here, and Beautiful Facts is his most recent writing, on orchids and evolution. On July 2 a German TV station ran a 42-minute interview with Dr. Loennig entitled Paleontology and Evolution, but the interview actually covers a wide range of topics related to the Darwinism/ID debate. For me, one of the most interesting segments begins at 23:48, where he recounts attempts to speed up evolution by bombarding plant chromosomes Read More ›

Did you know Mars is going backwards? For the past few weeks, and for several weeks to come, Mars is in its retrograde motion phase. If you chart its position each night against the background stars, you will see it pause, reverse direction, pause again, and then get going again in its normal direction. And did you further know that retrograde motion helped to cause a revolution? Two millennia ago, Aristotelian physics dictated that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Aristarchus’ heliocentric model, which put the Sun at the center, fell out of favor. But what Aristotle’s geocentrism failed to explain was retrograde motion. If the planets are revolving about the Earth, then why do they sometimes Read More ›

From Elizabeth Pennisi at Science: The evolutionary histories of some groups of organisms record repeated transitions from single-celled to multicellular forms, suggesting the hurdles could not have been so high. Genetic comparisons between simple multicellular organisms and their single-celled relatives have revealed that much of the molecular equipment needed for cells to band together and coordinate their activities may have been in place well before multicellularity evolved. And clever experiments have shown that in the test tube, single-celled life can evolve the beginnings of multicellularity in just a few hundred generations—an evolutionary instant. Evolutionary biologists still debate what drove simple aggregates of cells to become more and more complex, leading to the wondrous diversity of life today. But embarking on Read More ›

With some justification. The question arises, who has the right to say so? From Alex Berezow at ACSH: The topic came up on Twitter, the world’s foremost outlet for intellectual discourse. Writer and historian Audra Wolfe, who holds a PhD in the history of science, posted this bizarre tweet: Actually, no, it hasn’t, no matter what the Bunny’s sign says. The scientific method is designed specifically to root out bias and false assumptions, including political ones. Sure, individual scientists can be political, but the scientific method is not. Its ideological agnosticism is why it works so well. In fact, the self-correcting nature of science means it is the best source of secular knowledge that humankind possesses. However, Dr. Wolfe’s characterization Read More ›

Winston Ewert, one of the authors of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics has a new paper at BIO-Complexity: Abstract: The hierarchical classification of life has been claimed as compelling evidence for universal common ancestry. However, research has uncovered much data which is not congruent with the hierarchical pattern. Nevertheless, biological data resembles a nested hierarchy sufficiently well to require an explanation. While many defenders of intelligent design dispute common descent, no alternative account of the approximate nested hierarchy pattern has been widely adopted. We present the dependency graph hypothesis as an alternative explanation, based on the technique used by software developers to reuse code among different software projects. This hypothesis postulates that different biological species share modules related by a dependency Read More ›

From John P. Slattery at Religion Dispatches: In fact, a movement has been underway to resurrect, as it were, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a renewed foundation for theological reflection. According to a November report in America magazine, Pope Francis is already considering removing the “warning” attached to Teilhard’s historical writings, and more recently the National Catholic Reporter reported on an online movement to name him a “doctor of the Church.” Recent scholarly research, however, should cast doubt upon any such movements, as Teilhard’s positive influence may not be able to overcome his commitment to and employment of a philosophy of eugenics and social Darwinism. … Evolution, for Teilhard, is the hermeneutic key for understanding the place of Christ within Read More ›

From John Timmer at Ars Technica: LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves came almost exactly a century after Einstein had formulated his general theory of relativity and an ensuing paper mathematically describing the possibility of gravitational waves. Or at least that’s the story as it was presented to the public (including by yours truly). And in some ways, it’s even true. But the reality of how relativity progressed to the point where people accepted that gravitational waves are likely to exist and could possibly be detected is considerably more complicated than the simple narrative described above. In this week’s Nature Astronomy, a group of science historians lays out the full details of how we got from the dawn of relativity to Read More ›

From SETI’s Seth Shostak, who surely doesn’t welcome this news, at NBC: A recent paper by three researchers at the University of Oxford is throwing shade on those who feel confident that the cosmos is thick with extraterrestrials. … If we own up to the true extent of these uncertainties and do the requisite math, the Oxford study finds that there’s at least a 53 percent chance that we’re alone in the Milky Way and at least a 40 percent chance that we’re alone in the visible universe. Homo sapiens could be the smartest thing going. This result, they claim, melts the Fermi Paradox like butter on a hot griddle — maybe no one has colonized the galaxy because no Read More ›

William Basener writes to say, I posted a conference presentation I gave on my work with John Sanford on the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection with Mutations, posted on YouTube here. The talk was the keynote address at the International Conference on Ecology, Ecosystems, and Conservation Biology, in Toronto Canada (a fairly small but fully secular conference). I was able to give a broadly understandable exposition of the theorems and what they mean to populations. I also included a discussion of what Fisher’s theorem has meant to Neo-Darwinism in the past, what I believe our new result means to the future of Neo-Darwinism. The main result is a formula showing the effect of mutations in combination with selection. Mutations provide Read More ›