Spiders evolving disguises separately, in parallel, are another problem for Darwinism Not that one can directly admit it. From Catherine Offord at The Scientist: The Hawaiian stick spider has evolved the same three color morphs on multiple different islands in parallel, according to research led by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley. The team’s findings, published today (March 8) in Current Biology, provide a rare example of evolution producing the same outcome multiple times and could throw light on the factors constraining evolutionary change. “The possibility that whole communities of these spiders have evolved convergently is certainly exciting,” Ambika Kamath, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who didn’t take part in the study, tells Read More ›

A machine with parts that each do one thing. From Neuroskeptic at Discover: This “behavior-first” approach has revealed many associations between particular functions and particular brain regions. However, Genon et al. say, it has become clear that any given behavioral function involves more than one brain region, and it may be that there is no ‘necessary and sufficient brain area’ for any behavioral function. … his is a fascinating paper. I wonder, however, whether we might end up discovering that all brain regions – or at least, the bulk of the cerebral cortex – have the same core cognitive function? It might be that most of the cortical ‘modules’ are actually doing the same kind of processing, but operating on Read More ›

From Lisa Grossman at Science News, on an effort to update the Drake Equation: If the civilization lasted less than 100,000 years — the time it takes light to cross the galaxy — then the odds of the signals reaching Earth while the civilization is still broadcasting are vanishingly small, the researchers report February 27 at arXiv.org. Humans, for example, have been transmitting radio waves for only about 80 years, so our radio waves cover less than 0.001 percent of the Milky Way. “If the civilization emitted from the other side of the galaxy, when the signal arrives here, the civilization will already be gone,” says Grimaldi, of the Federal Polytechnical School of Lausanne in Switzerland.More. The space aliens have Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: why, and when, can we use mathematics to learn something about our physical Universe? We don’t know the answer to why, but we do know the answer to when: when it agrees with our experiments and observations. So long as the laws of physics remain the laws of physics, and do not whimsically turn on-and-off or vary in some ill-defined way, we know we can describe them mathematically, at least in principle. Mathematics, then, is the toolkit we use to describe the functioning of the Universe. It’s the raw materials: the nails, the boards, the hammers and saws. Physics is how you apply that mathematics. Physics is how you put it all together to make Read More ›

From Andrew Urevig at National Geogaphic: Contradicting some previous accounts, the team argues that this new evidence appears to show that the common ancestor of all panarthropods did not have a complex three-part brain—and neither did the common ancestor of invertebrate panarthropods and vertebrates. … That structure can be traced back through the fossil record. Kerygmachela’s relatively simple brain, preserved as thin films of carbon, includes only the foremost of the three segments present in living arthropods. The researchers are relying on the remarkably hardy tardigrade (water bear) as a surviving example. Not everyone agrees: Tardigrade brains may or may not develop based on segments at all, says Nicholas Strausfeld, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona who was not Read More ›

Last year the commentariat erupted in a frenzy of tut-tutting when it was revealed that Vice President Mike Pence has a personal rule never to eat alone with a woman other than his wife or attend events serving alcohol unless she is with him.  I thought about this story yesterday during a fruitful discussion I had with gpuccio about the limits of free will.  See comments 13-15 to this post. GP summed up his position as follows: I mean that we cannot really know what our real choices are, but that we always have choices.  I will try to be more clear. Your example of an addict is very good for that. We could think that the choice for an addict Read More ›

From NASA: The Twin Study propelled NASA into the genomics era of space travel. It was a ground-breaking study comparing what happened to astronaut Scott Kelly, in space, to his identical twin brother, Mark, who remained on Earth. The perfect nature versus nurture study was born. The Twins Study brought ten research teams from around the country together to accomplish one goal: discover what happens to the human body after spending one year in space. NASA has a grasp on what happens to the body after the standard-duration six-month missions aboard the International Space Station, but Scott Kelly’s one-year mission is a stepping stone to a three-year mission to Mars. More. So what did they find? Among other things, After Read More ›

Here’s my (O’Leary for News) review of James O’Keefe’s American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News (off-topic, unless you intend to rely on them in any way for communications): — Has North American journalism gone undercover? If traditional media were doing their job, few people would have heard of James O’Keefe. O’Keefe’s career as a provocateur started as a prank. On St. Patrick’s Day, 2005, he persuaded an unusually dense Rutgers administrator that persons of Irish descent might be offended by Lucky Charms cereal. She took the bait and removed the “offensive” boxes of cereal from the dining hall. … He was later propelled to fame by his exposure of community organizing group ACORN for Read More ›

From Adam Hargreaves at New Scientist, No doubt you have heard of dark matter, which is thought to make up over a quarter of the universe. We know it’s there; we just haven’t been able to detect it. Well, something similar is afoot in the genome. My colleagues and I have dubbed this elusive genetic matter “dark DNA”. And our investigations into the sand rat are starting to reveal its nature. The discovery of dark DNA is so recent that we are still trying to work out how widespread it is and whether it benefits those species that possess it. However, its very existence raises some fundamental questions about genetics and evolution. We may need to look again at how Read More ›

Critical Rationalist often says that morality is not about applying objective moral principles (which, according to him, do not exist) but about “solving concrete moral problems.”  Here is an example from a recent post: Moral knowledge is relevant in the context of solving concrete moral problems, as opposed to existing independent of them in some abstract sense.  That’s because moral problems are what we actually face and they have concrete impact on the outcome. The obvious problem with CR’s formulation is that the categories “moral knowledge” and “moral problem” cannot even exist if abstract moral principles do not exist, but that is the very proposition he denies. Suppose I decide I want to shoot CR in the head because – Read More ›

Sometimes materialists say things that are just so draw-droppingly stupid, I can’t look away.  Here is one such: the concept of free will is rubbish, but the concept of moral responsibility is not. Kantian Naturalist  

As I noted in my last post, sometimes it is necessary to rub materialists’ noses in the morally odious implications of their ethical views.  They really hate that, and when one does it, some materialists – grasping the monstrous implications of taking materialist premises to their conclusion – will flop around like a fish on the bank, trying desperately to hold onto their materialist premises while avoiding the conclusions to which those premises ineluctably lead. Over the last few days Bob O’H has given us an especially amusing demonstration of this.  Here are his various positions collected.  First, we get several standard materialist statements about how views on the Holocaust are entirely subjective: 1 I’m a moral subjectivist and I’m being Read More ›

Dear readers, We have just added the following to our “Frequently raised but weak arguments against Intelligent Design” in the “Resources” section linked on our home page: 41] What About the Canaanites? Whataboutism is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent’s position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument. A frequent example of whataboutism employed by materialists: ID Proponent: “The Holocaust was objectively evil. Therefore, objective moral standards exist.” Materialist: “What about God’s command to kill the Canaanites? If the Holocaust was evil, wasn’t that evil too?” Notice what the materialist did not do: He did not even address the ID proponent’s argument, far less refute it. Instead, Read More ›

Justin Stover writes at Chronicle Review: he reality is that the humanities have always been about courtoisie, a constellation of interests, tastes, and prejudices that marks one as a member of a particular class. That class does not have to be imagined solely in economic terms. Indeed, the humanities have sometimes done a good job of producing a class with some socioeconomic diversity. But it is a class nonetheless. Roman boys (of a certain social background) labored under the rod of the grammaticus because their parents wanted to initiate them into the community of Virgil readers — a community that spanned much of the vast Roman world, and which gave the bureaucratic class a certain cohesion it otherwise lacked. In Read More ›

Now there’s a psych research question for you. From Mike Klymkowsky at PLOS, more public handwringing about popular distrust of science: Is the popularization of science encouraging a growing disrespect for scientific expertise? So why do a large percentage of the public ignore the conclusions of disciplinary experts? I would argue that an important driver is the way that science is taught and popularized [3]. Beyond the obvious fact that a range of politicians and capitalists (in both the West and the East) actively distain expertise that does not support their ideological or pecuniary positions [4], I would claim that the way we teach science, often focussing on facts rather than processes, largely ignoring the historical progression by which knowledge Read More ›