From What Is Thought? by AI expert Eric B. Baum (2004, pp 226-27): Consciousness has many aspects. We are aware of our world and our sensations. We have a sense of self. We have goals and aspirations. We seem to have free will and moral responsibility. Yet, as I’ve said, the mind is equivalent to a Turing machine. Moreover, we have arisen through evolution and are descended from microbes by a smooth chain of evolution, with more complex mental processes at each stage evolved from the processes at the one before. Where in this process did consciousness enter? Why are we conscious? What is consciousness?” “The conclusion that we do not really have free will, discussed earlier in the context Read More ›

Convergent evolution of mimetic species confounds classification. From ScienceDaily: The scientists discovered numerous cryptic species-two or more species erroneously classified as one species-as well as single species mistakenly described as two or three. Frequently, species discriminated with genetic data are each others’ closest relatives, but can be distinguished by stark genetic differences; this suggests a lack of interbreeding — a hallmark of species distinctiveness. However, in Elymnias, Lohman and his associates found that cryptic species were unrelated to each other and resulted from a novel cause: mimicry. Different species on different islands of the Indo-Australian Archipelago frequently evolved to resemble a single, widespread model species, and different Elymnias species therefore evolved to resemble each other. Lohman and his colleagues conducted Read More ›

From Leah Burrows at Harvard SEAS: Even Charles Darwin, the author of “The Origin of Species”, had a problem with species. “I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties,” Darwin wrote in his seminal 1859 work. His followers have been exploiting the concept ever since, to confuse discussions about evolution with an all-knowing sneer. Indeed, nothing says “Darwin snob” like indifference to the mess that the entire concept of speciation is in. In a paper published in Physics Review E, Tikhonov outlines a framework for rethinking the language of species classification. Classical models of biology start from the assumption that the differences between species are, for the most part, clearly defined, and Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Exceptionally preserved trilobite fossils from China, dating back to more than 500 million years ago, have revealed new insights into the extinct marine animal’s digestive system. Published today in the journal PLOS ONE, the new study shows that at least two trilobite species evolved a stomach structure 20 million years earlier than previously thought. “Trilobites are one of the first types of animals to show up in large numbers in the fossil record,” said lead author Melanie Hopkins, an assistant curator in the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. “Their exoskeletons were heavy in minerals, and so they preserved really well. But like all fossils, it’s very rare to see the preservation of soft Read More ›

Further to why flu vaccines so often fail, from Jon Cohen at Science, on efforts to find out wy the flu vaccine is so “lackluster”(10% to 60& protection): They’re questioning what was once received wisdom: that the vaccine fails when manufacturers, working months ahead of flu season, incorrectly guess which strains will end up spreading. And they’re learning instead that the vaccine may falter even when the right strains were used to make it, perhaps because of how it is produced or quirks of individual immune systems. “It’s much more complicated than we thought,” Osterholm says. “I know less about influenza today than I did 10 years ago.” … Danuta Skowronski, an epidemiologist at the BC Centre for Disease Control Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: The Universe began not with a whimper, but with a bang! At least, that’s what you’re commonly told: the Universe and everything in it came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang. Space, time, and all the matter and energy within began from a singular point, and then expanded and cooled, giving rise over billions of years to the atoms, stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies spread out across the billions of light years that make up our observable Universe. It’s a compelling, beautiful picture that explains so much of what we see, from the present large-scale structure of the Universe’s two trillion galaxies to the leftover glow of radiation permeating all of Read More ›

Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent, is a sociologist who studies, among other things, the ID community. In a recent paper in European Management Journal, he reflects on the relationship between expert opinion in a field and the evaluations by educated outsiders. He opposes Brexit, but says, First, I consider Brexit in relation to my own long-standing anti-expertist approach to social epistemology, which in many ways makes me a kindred spirit to the Brexiteers. Next, I turn to the struggle of parliamentary elites which eventuated in the win for Brexit, focussing on the Brexiteers’ distinctive epistemic and ethical strategy with regard to public opinion. Finally, I consider the unforeseen emergence of a Rousseau-style ‘general will’ with regard to Brexit, which is where Read More ›

I recently wrote a short story at Evolution News, I think a lot of people thought it was just a silly story, but it did have a point, even if I didn’t do a very good job of getting the point across. The point is that the reason Darwinism seems even remotely plausible depends entirely on the incredible ability of living things to reproduce, generation after generation, without significant degradation over time. Darwinism seems plausible to many people against the backdrop of real living species which, while awaiting accidents which might lead to further advances, incredibly, somehow, are able to maintain their current complex structures and pass them on for many generations. We are so used to seeing reproduction without Read More ›

Several of the usual suspects howled in indignation at my last post, Back to Basics on Whether Truth is Adaptive.  Seversky, goodusername, Pindi, Starbuck, critical rationalist, and rvb8 all embarrassed themselves to one degree or another. This surprised me, because my thesis – that evolutionary theory predicts that belief in the truth is not always adaptive, and, conversely, belief in a falsehood can be adaptive – is a commonplace among evolutionary theorists.  It is not the least bit controversial, as I made plain with quotes from Pinker, Baum, Hoffman, Varki, Brower, and even Darwin himself (his famous “horrid doubt” quote). So I challenged my interlocutors.  If you don’t think what I am saying is true, then cite a paper that Read More ›

From Mario Aguilera at U San Diego News: Intricate human physiological features such as the immune system require exquisite formation and timing to develop properly. Genetic elements must be activated at just the right moment, across vast distances of genomic space. “Promoter” areas, locations where genes begin to be expressed, must be paired precisely with “enhancer” clusters, where cells mature to a targeted function. Faraway promoters must be brought in proximity with their enhancer counterparts, but how do they come together? When these elements are not in sync, diseases such as leukemia and lymphoma can result. How does this work? Biologists at the University of California San Diego believe they have the answer. Calling it the “big bang” of immune Read More ›

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From philosopher Bernardo Kastrup at Scientific American: An article on the neuroscience of infant consciousness, which attracted some interest a few years ago, asked: “When does your baby become conscious?” The premise, of course, was that babies aren’t born conscious but, instead, develop consciousness at some point. (According to the article, it is about five months of age). Yet, it is hard to think that there is nothing it feels like to be a newborn. The question seems to turn on the ability to recognize and represent one’s own consciousness to onself or others. By mistaking meta-consciousness for consciousness, we create two significant problems: First, we fail to distinguish between conscious processes that lack re-representation and truly unconscious processes. After Read More ›

From the Salk Institute: Is it better to do a task quickly and make mistakes, or to do it slowly but perfectly? When it comes to deciding how to fix breaks in DNA, cells face the same choice between two major repair pathways. The decision matters, because the wrong choice could cause even more DNA damage and lead to cancer. Salk Institute scientists found that a tiny protein called CYREN helps cells choose the right pathway at the right time, clarifying a longstanding mystery about DNA repair and offering researchers a powerful tool that could guide better treatments for cancer. The work appears in Nature on September 20, 2017.More. And it all just happens, you understand without any intelligence underlying Read More ›

Prize: A hardback copy of J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something Alive and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It Recently, a friend linked us to the fact that Amazon had deleted 900 reviews of US 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s new book, What Happened: Books get reviewed badly, and people leave reviews for books they didn’t read or products they’ve never used. These things happen. But of the book’s 1,600 or so reviews as of this morning, only 338 were from users with verified purchases of the book—that is, those who actually bought the item on Amazon.com. A person could conceivably buy a book in a store and then hate it so much she runs Read More ›

From the Science paper by Robert F. Service: The challenges of fieldwork are minor compared with the storm of criticism she’s endured for the central claim of her work: that her team has recovered fragments of proteins from dinosaurs as old as 80 million years. The evidence, which she has laid out in a series of papers in Science and other journals, challenges traditional notions of what a fossil is: a stone replica of the original bone. If that “stone” includes proteins from the living animal, “I don’t know what the definition is anymore,” Schweitzer says. More important, being able to analyze intact dinosaur proteins would transform paleontology into a molecular science, much as ancient DNA research has transformed the Read More ›