From Becky Feirrera at Motherboard: All stories about robots are, on some level, reflections of human behavior, and Thom’s efforts to flirt like a human—borrowing overheard phrases from others to compensate for his lack of self—is familiar enough in the human dating scene. But by the end of “The Flirtbot’s Condition,” a friendly chat with some barflies seems to temporarily ground Thom in an otherwise flighty world. In exchange, the human characters are reminded that even a malfunctioning robot can stumble across poetry. More. Isn’t the main problem that the robot doesn’t really want or need a relationship anyway? Reminds one of something J. Scott Turner said in Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed Read More ›

Here. Years ago, we pioneered the term noviewer, to describe people who review books without reading them. Now a friend has written to ask for a contest to come up with term to describe the reviewer who is the author’s public relations specialist. For example, the book is called Darwin was right and the reviewer is shouting Amen! fifty times. Or anyway, that is what it sounds like. Sounds like fun. Judged October 15. Free shipping [of a copy of J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It,] to postal address provided by winner. Here are the entries we received: At 1 full bore reviewer At 3 cheer-reader At 6 Read More ›

From Shivali Best at Daily Mail: Professor Cox said that he found ‘no reason at all’ why human intelligence couldn’t be simulated by computers – although he did not express a timeline for this to happen. Classic. Last we heard, the mind doesn’t really exist and our perceptions are hallucinations. funny, all that stuff disappears when these immortality-through-AI ideas hold the floor instead. In a recent article for The Conversation, Professor Richard Jones, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Sheffield outlined some ‘serious problems’ with the idea. He said: ‘To replicate the mind digitally we would have to map each of these connections, something that is far beyond our current capabilities. Even if we could create such a Read More ›

Yes, that Dan Brown, of da Vinci code fame, on the book tour circuit. From Reuters via Daily Mail: Brown said technological change and the development of artificial intelligence would transform the concept of the divine. ‘We will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other,’ he said, forecasting the emergence of ‘some form of global consciousness that we perceive and that becomes our divine’. … ‘Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us … will diminish and eventually disappear,’ he added. More. The perceived “need” for moral judgement disappeared a long time ago, actually. Governments today prefer secular systems where they can make and impose the rules themselves without reference Read More ›

From Sam Kriss at Atlantic: Among philosophers, biologists, and cognitive scientists, this nightmare is an exciting new field of study, known as embodied or extended cognition: broadly, the theory that what we think of as brain processes can take place outside of the brain. In some cases, this isn’t a particularly radical idea. The octopus, for instance, has a bizarre and miraculous mind, sometimes inside its brain, sometimes extending beyond it in sucker-tipped trails. Neurons are spread throughout its body; the creature has more of them in its arms than in its brain itself. It’s possible that each arm might be, to some extent, an independently thinking creature, all of which are collapsed into an octopean superconsciousness in times of Read More ›

Watch the human genome fold itself in four dimensions: By removing and then adding this protein, called cohesin, researchers made specific DNA loops that disappear and then reappear, they report this month in Cell. But cohesin really only affects looping that brings genes on the same chromosome into contact. A second, still-undefined mechanism seems to bring genes from different chromosomes together, the team notes. Notes: Will we ever… reveal all the secrets of life from DNA?: Our metaphors let us down. Science writers like to compare the genome to a textbook or a blueprint. That conveys the fact that it stores information, but glosses over its buzzing, dynamic nature – proteins docking on and off to control the activity of Read More ›

Here. From the paper: “Contrary to what many people believe, “Methodological naturalism is certainly NOT a ‘ground rule’ of science today”. Paper. See also: Why the “Naturalism” Part of “Methodological Naturalism” is Both Misleading and Unnecessary (Barry Arrington)

Science historian Michael Flannery writes to tell us of another early revolt by serious thinkers against Darwinism: While this may be old news, I thought I’d share my belated discovery of the Alpbach Symposium held in March of 1968 edited by Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smythies. The title, Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences, is a fascinating collection from a wide range of scholars, even including the economist Frederich Hayek. Among the more interesting offerings is Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “Chance or Law.” Apparently Bertalanffy, generally regarded as the father of General Systems Theory (GST), was skeptical of neo-Darwinism (esp. natural selection) as an explanation for all of biology. He said, “I think the fact that a theory, Read More ›

Due to more efficient technology, says SETI astronomer Seth Shostak at Nautilus: Most of our experiments so far have used large radio antennas in an effort to eavesdrop on radio signals transmitted by other societies, an approach that was dramatized by Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie Contact. Unlike other alien potboilers, Contact’s portrayal of how we might search for extraterrestrials was reasonably accurate. Nonetheless, that film reinforced the common belief that SETI practitioners paw through cosmic static looking for unusual patterns, such as a string of prime numbers. The truth is simpler: We have been searching for narrow-band signals. “Narrow-band” means that a large fraction of the transmitter power is squeezed into a tiny part of the radio dial, Read More ›

From Eurekalert: Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland have discovered a novel mechanism safeguarding mitochondrial DNA. The study, published in PNAS earlier this week, was carried out in close collaboration with research groups from CBMSO in Madrid, Spain, and Umeå University in Sweden. A central part of the protective mechanism is an unusual enzyme, PrimPol, which can re-initiate mitochondrial DNA replication after damage. Besides nuclear genomic DNA, mitochondria also contain their own small genomes, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which encodes for thirteen essential parts of the cellular respiration machinery. mtDNA is especially vulnerable to oxidative damage as it is located close to the free radical producing mitochondrial electron transport chain. Cells protect their mitochondria by repairing mtDNA as well as constantly Read More ›

From astrophysicist Ethan Siegel at Forbes: The multiverse is inevitable and we’re living in it What is the Multiverse, then? It may go well beyond physics, and be the first physically motivated “metaphysics” we’ve ever encountered. For the first time, we’re understanding the limits of what our Universe can teach us. There is information we need, but that we’ll never obtain, in order to elevate this into the realm of testable science. Until then, we can predict, but neither verify nor refute, the fact that our Universe is just one small part of a far grander realm: the Multiverse. More. In other words, the multiverse is to be accepted as science, even though it may never be testable, thus never Read More ›

Not even the “Grandma looks after the kids” pop sci filler buys this one. From Steve Fleischfresser at Cosmos: Jacob Moorad and Craig Walling from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh in the UK drew on one of the world’s most extensive sources of genealogical information: the Utah Population Database (UPDB), housed at the University of Utah, and drawn from the family records of Mormon settlers to the state. The database contains information on more than eight million people. Moorad and Walling, using a subset of the UPDB for the first empirical test of the models, sought to discover if there is positive genetic correlation between “late-age lifespan and fitness” which is assumed in all three models. Such evidence Read More ›

He concedes that William A. Wilson makes some good points at First Things but … A truly excellent article on the metaphysics underlying the scientific enterprise. Every debate on MN needs to begin with this essay. I know the first paragraph sounds very post-modern, but by the time you reach the end of the essay, I think you will see it isn’t post-modernism that is the enemy–it’s the false idol of Enlightenment objectivity. ===================================================================== While it is true that we are drowning in data and filter it to just the relevant aspects before we construct a theory, it is not true that the data itself is biased. Data is objective, and therefore is some metaphysical sense, objective science is possible Read More ›

From Irby Lovette at All About Birds: Just a few steps from my desk here at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a tall cabinet holds 800 stuffed reminders of how difficult it can be to define the exact boundaries between bird species. These specimens are hybrids between what we now know as the Baltimore Oriole (which breeds in eastern North America) and Bullock’s Oriole (which breeds in the West). In between, Baltimore and Bullock’s Orioles meet up and interbreed in the cottonwood-lined corridor formed by the Platte River valley in Nebraska. In the 1950s, a team of Cornell scientists—motivated by then-new ideas about what hybridization might mean for how we define bird species—traveled along the Platte collecting specimens of orioles Read More ›

With comments by Michael Behe. The finding is a setback for origin of life theories that depend on conservation of favorable mutations. Creation-Evolution Headlines draws our attention to a very recent paper on the Lenski long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) which shows that, contrary to hopes, Darwinian fitness did not overcome mutational decay: “Here, we document the rapid genome decay of hypermutable bacteria even during tens of thousands of generations of sustained adaptation to a laboratory environment.” Abstract: Understanding the extreme variation among bacterial genomes remains an unsolved challenge in evolutionary biology, despite long-standing debate about the relative importance of natural selection, mutation, and random drift. A potentially important confounding factor is the variation in mutation rates between lineages and over Read More ›