From Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience: A new study, one of very few of its kind, finds that people typically respond quite positively to the notion of life on other planets. The study investigated the possibility of finding microbial extraterrestrials, not intelligent E.T.s, so people’s responses might be a little different if they were told an armada of aliens were headed toward Earth, cautioned study author Michael Varnum, a psychologist at Arizona State University. Nevertheless, he noted, large portions of people believe that intelligent aliens do exist and that they’ve visited Earth; so even a more dramatic announcement might not ruffle feathers. … “I think there might be something sort of comforting about knowing that life wasn’t an accident that happened Read More ›

A compound eye from the Cambrian Period showed up in a fossil. Here’s what the PR has to say: Professor Euan Clarkson, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, said: “This exceptional fossil shows us how early animals saw the world around them hundreds of millions of years ago. Remarkably, it also reveals that the structure and function of compound eyes has barely changed in half a billion years.” Professor Brigitte Schoenemann, of the University of Cologne, said: “This may be the earliest example of an eye that it is possible to find. Older specimens in sediment layers below this fossil contain only traces of the original animals, which were too soft to be fossilised and have disintegrated over Read More ›

From philosopher Tim Mulgan at Aeon: In academic philosophy today, an interest in extraterrestrial life is regarded with some suspicion. This is a historical anomaly. In Ancient Greece, Epicureans argued that every possible form of life must recur infinitely many times in an infinite universe. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, as modern astronomy demonstrated that our Earth is just another planet and our Sun just another star, the default hypothesis among informed observers was that the Universe is filled with habitable planets and intelligent life. One principal argument for this ‘pluralism’ was philosophical or theological: God (or Nature) does nothing in vain, and therefore such a vast cosmos could not be home to only one small race of Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at ACSH: — Recently, the website Undark, whose publisher is science writer Deborah Blum, published an op-ed by an environmental activist who told lies and half-truths about the safety of glyphosate. This was particularly striking because the website’s editorial team and advisory board have several high-profile names in science journalism, and the site’s stated mission is “true journalistic coverage of the sciences.” So he wrote to her. After some further business, she replied: He now responds: That’s a stunning admission from a journalist. In other words, because it’s an op-ed, facts don’t matter. Buzz off. Would her response be the same if Undark published an article questioning evolution, climate change, or vaccines? For the sake of the truth, Read More ›

The difference religion makes is not what you might expect. My response to “How a ‘pronoun’ class got a young Canadian academic censured ” by Harley J. Sim at MercatorNet: Readers may wish to supplement Harley Sims’s informative article with Mark Steyn’s commentary on the tape Shepherd dared to make (http://bit.ly/2j4yOnk) and the tape/transcript itself (http://bit.ly/2mMPvok). On the tape, she is heard sobbing as she is not permitted to know who her accuser(s) are or what the accusation is. Her communications profs imply that she is like a Nazi for showing her class a video excerpt from an Ontario public TV program (think NPR) in which a professor protests made-up pronouns. These inquisitors imply that she is in big legal trouble, which Read More ›

From Kelly Wilkins at left-wing mag Counterpunch, an interesting take on Darwinism: One of the ways the media has shaped the public’s attitude concerning the distribution of wealth and power in our society, has been by the dissemination of a familiar but menacing ideology, an ideology which teaches that human success and failure is determined by evolutionary fitness — ‘the survival of the fittest’ ethic. This idea sprang from dangerous interpretations of Darwin’s writings, peaked in the age of eugenics and Hitler, and remains to this day in our consciousness because of the language and constructs we continue to use. … The phrase is often and incorrectly attributed to the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, and though Darwin did Read More ›

Naturalism = nature is all there is and humans are not special. Human consciousness, including reason, is an illusion. From Joshua Mayo at First Things: Take the burgeoning subfield of Animal Rhetorics, where theorists now use Aristotle and Derrida to study non-human communication. Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) collaborators are calling on scholars to recover “rhetorical theory in a cross-species context” and transcend “western religio-philosophical traditions that encourage anthropocentrism.” Say nothing of the helter-skelter philosophy that this enterprise represents. The academic agenda is explicit: The humanities ought to move in a non-human direction. Most people who care about higher education have a handful of similar stories, projecting a dismal forecast for the liberal arts. There are certainly enough of them Read More ›

From Retraction Watch: A Nobel Laureate has retracted a 2016 paper in Nature Chemistry that explored the origins of life on earth, after discovering the main conclusions were not correct. Some researchers who study the origins of life on Earth have hypothesized that RNA evolved before DNA or proteins. If true, RNA would have needed a way to replicate without enzymes. The Nature Chemistry paper found that a certain type of peptide — which may have existed in our early history — made it possible for RNA to copy itself. Jack W. Szostak—a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Read More ›

O’Leary for News’ review of . J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, at MercatorNet: A biologist awakens from reductionism and begins to rediscover life The basic problem, he contends, is that current biology requires us to view life forms as machines. Yet a key characteristic of life forms is the intention of remaining alive and purposeful activity toward that end. For Turner, homeostasis (the way a life form balances itself within an environment and all of its cells balance themselves within it in order to stay alive) is central to understanding life, but largely ignored. It’s not hard to see why it is ignored. If life evolved, Read More ›

As everyone knows, the BioLogos Community is on a passionate mission to Darwinize the Christian world. Oddly, though, the zeal that drives that mission is not the product of a disinterested search for the truth. Unlike ID proponents, who begin with rational principles and follow the evidence where it leads, BioLogos members begin with a faith commitment and lead the evidence in that direction. Rather than sit at the feet of nature and learn her secrets, they try to remake her in the image of their faith commitment. For them, there is one apriori truth that must never be denied: God used the random mechanism of Darwinian evolution to produce His intended outcome of homo-sapiens. This absurd proposition, which defines Read More ›

In recent months I have increasingly been called on to give advice to my school clients regarding the rights of so-called transgender students.  The Civil Rights Division in my state (Colorado) has imposed a very strict legal regimen on schools regarding these students, and what that regimen lacks in subtlety it makes up for in predictability.  The law is, essentially, this:  Transgender students get whatever they want.  Does that boy want to use the girls’ restroom?  Then he gets to.  Does he want to change clothes and shower in the girls’ locker room?  Then he gets to.  Does he want to wear dresses?  Then he gets to, etc., etc., etc. Progressives – such as those who dominate the Colorado Civil Read More ›

Abstract:Most vertebrates have a duplex retina comprising two photoreceptor types, rods for dim-light (scotopic) vision and cones for bright-light (photopic) and color vision. However, deep-sea fishes are only active in dim-light conditions; hence, most species have lost their cones in favor of a simplex retina composed exclusively of rods. Although the pearlsides, Maurolicus spp., have such a pure rod retina, their behavior is at odds with this simplex visual system. Contrary to other deep-sea fishes, pearlsides are mostly active during dusk and dawn close to the surface, where light levels are intermediate (twilight or mesopic) and require the use of both rod and cone photoreceptors. This study elucidates this paradox by demonstrating that the pearlside retina does not have rod Read More ›

We typically think of eyes as having one or more lenses for focusing incoming light onto a surface such as our retina. However, light can also be focused using arrays of mirrors, as is commonly done in telescopes. A biological example of this is the scallop, which can have up to 200 reflecting eyes that focus light onto two retinas. Palmer et al. find that spatial vision in the scallop is achieved through precise control of the size, shape, and packing density of the tiles of guanine that together make up an image-forming mirror at the back of each of the eyes. More. The authors dare to use the term “fine-tuned,” with all its career-limiting damage? The pecten scallop uses mirrors Read More ›

From Andy Coghlan at New Scientist: We may owe some of our unique intelligence to a generous supply of a signalling chemical called dopamine in brain regions that help us think and plan. Our brains produce far more dopamine in these regions than the brains of other primates like apes.More. Naturalist ideology requires something like extra dopamine production to be seen as a cause, not an effect.  Of course, what we are really talking about is human consciousness, whose origin no one understands. And whatta feast of just-so science! See also: Human/primate evolution: Eating fruit led to bigger brains? Climate change made us smart Retroviruses play a role in development of human brain? Tooth size not linked to brain size in early humans Read More ›

Here: Artificial Intelligence has leapt to the forefront of global discourse, garnering increased attention from practitioners, industry leaders, policymakers, and the general public. The diversity of opinions and debates gathered from news articles this year illustrates just how broadly AI is being investigated, studied, and applied. However, the field of AI is still evolving rapidly and even experts have a hard time understanding and tracking progress across the field. More. But they are keeping track and it is free. See also: How are those AI spiritual machines coming?