From Sarah Sloat at Inverse: To fully grasp how we evolved to become modern humans, scientists argue that we need to better understand our ancient ancestors’ brains. Adult human brains today are large and globular, but whether ancient human brains looked like that when our species first emerged has been subject to much speculation. In a study published Wednesday in Science Advances, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology announced that the earliest Homo sapiens did not have globular brains like we have today. Instead, their brains had a shape intermediate between that of Homo erectus and that of the Neanderthals, both of which were somewhat more elongated horizontally. The brain, the authors write, gradually became globular over Read More ›

From Bret Stetka at Scientific American: A study that compares us with other primates finds a brain region linked to social behavior that may offer a biological explanation for why humans, not chimps, produced Shakespeare, Gandhi and Einstein Something is going wrong already if we think that the difference between human beings and gorillas is measured by extreme outliers. Raghanti and Lovejoy believe the human brain’s neurochemical profile was shaped by natural selection due to the various reproductive and survival benefits it conferred. Our evolving chemical signature, they suggest, allowed us to outcompete other apes and early hominins, referring to the numerous humanlike species that arose after our split with chimpanzees over six million years ago. The team speculates humans’ Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Science Today: AIVA [a music generation program] can combine musicals styles — that of, say, Bach and Beethoven, if you feed it enough of those two composers’ works. What such a program can’t do is innovate, says Dr. Marks. It can’t strike out in a new direction of its own, put Bach together with Beethoven and come up with…Stravinsky. Such a leap would be uncomputable, therefore permanently beyond the reach of even the most cleverly designed artificial intelligence. Marks explains the Lovelace test which, unlike the better-known Turing test, focuses precisely on this hard limit to what computer algorithms can do. AI cannot, in this sense, truly create. That indicates an impassable border Read More ›

The opportunity is open and it is time to seize the day. So, I think a comment in a discussion with GP and Dionisio should be headlined: >>My observation is those who are closed minded, indoctrinated and hostile will simply flare up in anger at anything that threatens their favoured evolutionary materialistic scientism or their comfortable fellow-traveller views calibrated not to get them in hot water with the domineering atheists. The issue then is, how well cultured they are. The cultured play at subtle rhetorical games pivoting on evasions and how could you concern trolling which provide more or less respectable “good cop” cover. Then come the “bad cops” who try to run riot, bully, intimidate, slander and stalk. I Read More ›

Sometimes, an issue comes to a head, and there is then need to deal with it. The headline inadvertently shows that we are at such a juncture and the post yesterday on time to take the lead is therefore timely. For, the underlying problem at work on ID is that there is an often implicit but sometimes quite explicit ideologically loaded redefinition of science at work. Accordingly, I think it appropriate to headline my response to Seversky, including the onward accusation of religious bias: KF, 28 (in reply to 21): >>Strawman soaked in ad hominems and set alight to cloud, confuse, poison and polarise the issues: a lot of this reads like complaining because science isn’t coming up with observations Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Paleontologists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto have entirely revisited a tiny yet exceptionally fierce ancient sea creature called Habelia optata that has confounded scientists since it was first discovered more than a century ago. In those days, we had it all sewn up except for a few outliers. Then… The researchers argue that this difference in anatomy allowed Habelia to evolve an especially complex head that makes this fossil species even more peculiar compared to known chelicerates. The head of Habelia contained a series of five appendages made of a large plate with teeth for mastication, a leg-like branch with stiff bristle-like spines for grasping, and an Read More ›

Not always how we think. Forewarned is forearmed. From Emerging Technology at MIT Review: How easy is it for malicious actors to distort the public perception of science? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of James Owen Weatherall, Cailin O’Connor at the University of California, Irvine, and Justin Bruner at the Australian National University in Canberra, who have created a computer model of the way scientific consensus forms and how this influences the opinion of policy makers. The team studied how easily these views can be distorted and determined that today it is straightforward to distort the perception of science with techniques that are even more subtle than those used by the tobacco industry. … Indeed, the Read More ›

From Rebecca Boyle at Quanta: From a seam in one of these hills, a jumble of ancient, orange-Creamsicle rock spills forth: a deposit called the Apex Chert. Within this rock, viewable only through a microscope, there are tiny tubes. Some look like petroglyphs depicting a tornado; others resemble flattened worms. They are among the most controversial rock samples ever collected on this planet, and they might represent some of the oldest forms of life ever found. Last month, researchers lobbed another salvo in the decades-long debate about the nature of these forms. They are indeed fossil life, and they date to 3.465 billion years ago, according to John Valley, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin. If Valley and his Read More ›

From Christian Scientific Society: The meeting will take place January 26-27 at Biola University. On Friday night, we will have a debate between David Snoke (me) and Mike Keas on “Are predatory animals a result of the Fall?” (Mike: yes; David: no). This question lies at the core of much of the debate about science and Christianity: could God have had a hand in what we consider to be natural evils? Are they the result of people’s sin, or random forces, not God? Saturday afternoon, we will have four speakers addressing issues on the general topic of natural evil More. Christian Scientific Society also notes, Save the date for the April meeting in Pittsburgh Dates are April 6-7, at the Read More ›

I recently cited a paper on the evolution of embryonic development and how the evidence contradicts evolutionary theory and common descent. Even the evolutionists, though in understated terms, admitted there were problems. Evolutionary analyses are “reaching their limits,” it is difficult to “conclude anything about evolutionary origins,” genetic similarities “do not necessarily imply common ancestry,” and “conserved regulatory networks can become unrecognizably divergent.” In other words, like all other disciplines within the life sciences, embryonic development is not working. The science contradicts the theory.  Read more

From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of the forthcoming Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (June, 2018), at NPR: For centuries, progress in the foundations of physics has been characterized by simplification. Complex processes — such as the multitude of chemical reactions — turned out to arise from stunningly simple underlying equations. And simplicity carried us a long way. According to physicists’ best theories today, everything in our universe emerges from merely 25 elementary particles and four types of forces. So, yes, simplicity — often in the form of unification — has been extremely successful. For this reason, many physicists want to further simplify the existing theories. But you can always simplify a theory by removing an assumption. Like the assumption that Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers at the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto have described an exceptionally well-preserved new fossil species of bristle worm called Kootenayscolex barbarensis. Discovered from the 508-million-year-old Marble Canyon fossil site in the Burgess Shale in Kootenay National Park, British Columbia, the new species helps rewrite our understanding of the origin of the head in annelids, a highly diverse group of animals which includes today’s leeches and earthworms. This research was published today in the journal Current Biology in the article “A New Burgess Shale Polychaete and the Origin of the Annelid Head Revisited.” … One key feature of the new Burgess Shale worm Kootenayscolex barbarensis is the presence of hair-sized bristles called chaetae on the Read More ›

From Dan Garisto at ScienceNews: Storms of powdery Martian soil are contributing to the loss of the planet’s remaining water. This newly proposed mechanism for water loss, reported January 22 in Nature Astronomy, might also hint at how Mars originally became dehydrated. Researchers used over a decade of imaging data taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to investigate the composition of the Red Planet’s frequent dust storms, some of which are vast enough to circle the planet for months. During one massive dust storm in 2006 and 2007, signs of water vapor were found at unusually high altitudes in the atmosphere, nearly 80 kilometers up. That water vapor rose within “rocket dust storms” — storms with rapid vertical movement — Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The team studied the transparent roundworm (C. elegans), which shares about 60-80% of the same genes as humans, to shed light on the importance of mechanisms regulating the frequency of gene mutations in different cells and organs. “C. elegans and humans share very similar mitochondria, and it is a useful organism as we can genetically tease apart the mechanisms of what is happening at a cellular level,” he said. The researchers developed an exceptionally pure method of isolating mitochondria from specific cells in the body to study them in detail. “We now suspect that there is a mechanism in all animals that can filter out these mutations before they are passed to future offspring, which could otherwise cause Read More ›

The Meltdown-Spectre processor architectural flaw crisis we have been monitoring has deepened as Intel has to patch its initial patch: . . . and as a first wave of the inevitable lawsuits hits. Here, we clip one in San Francisco:   NB: Comment 3 below links and clips documentation AMD has been sued over its response to Spectre. Where also, The Register further reports that there are problems with embedded systems using microprocessors and microcontrollers: >>Patches for the Meltdown vulnerability are causing stability issues in industrial control systems. SCADA vendor Wonderware admitted that Redmond’s Meltdown patch made its Historian product wobble. “Microsoft update KB4056896 (or parallel patches for other Operating System) causes instability for Wonderware Historian and the inability to Read More ›