From Skeptic Reading Room: The Hoax The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial. That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it. This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim Read More ›

From Denise Chow, the list includes Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton has a long political history advocating for children and families, gender equality and health care reform, but in 2016, during her bid to secure the Democratic nomination for president, Clinton turned her attention to the paranormal. In a radio interview and then later on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Clinton said she wants to review files about UFOs and the mysterious Area 51 site in Nevada and make them public. “I would like us to go into those files and hopefully make as much of that public as possible,” she told Kimmel. “If there’s nothing there, let’s tell people there’s nothing there.” Area 51, located about 80 miles (130 kilometers) northwest of Read More ›

From Griffiths University (Queensland, Australia): Fit and healthy Tasmanian devils are being taken down by deadly facial tumours that are attacking the “best” animals in the population, according to novel research led by Griffith University. The research, published in the scientific journal Ecology Letters, shows that devils that catch devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) have higher survival and reproductive rates prior to disease-induced death than individuals that do not become infected. Typically infectious diseases affect mostly older, younger, or less healthy individuals. However, the team of scientists from Australia and the US, led by Dr Konstans Wells of Griffith’s Environmental Futures Research Institute (EFRI), found that devils with higher fitness are at highest risk of infection and death from facial Read More ›

Science historian Michael Flannery offers a vid link below. He notes, Two things are important to bear in mind: first, nothing in Hoyle’s rejection bears upon a teleological universe (Hoyle’s steady state can–and did–coexist with a purposeful and intelligently guided universe); and second, Hoyle’s rejection of the big bang still allows him to have very skeptical view of “safe” science and government power. The frequently repeated claim that Fred Hoyle was an atheist has been greatly exaggerated. While Hoyle had been an atheist early in his career, he didn’t end that way. This is made clear in his book, The Intelligent Universe (1983) where he argued that “the information-rich” universe was guided and controlled by an “overriding intelligence,” and in Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Bones are composites of protein fibers, collagen, and a biomaterial, hydroxyapatite. The more orderly the arrangement of the collagen fibers, the more stable the bone, but the more slowly it normally grows as well. The bones of mammals thus have a special structure. This allows them to grow quickly and yet remain stable. “We call this bone form fibrolamellar,” says the paleontologist. Together with his PhD student Christen D. Shelton (now at the University of Cape Town), the scientist looked at humerus bones and femurs from a long-extinct land animal: the mammal predecessor Ophiacodon. This lived 300 million years ago. “Even in Ophiacodon, the bones grew as fibrolamellar bones,” says Sander to summarize the analysis results. “This indicates Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The Garden of the Ediacaran was a period in the ancient past when Earth’s shallow seas were populated with a bewildering variety of enigmatic, soft-bodied creatures. Scientists have pictured it as a tranquil, almost idyllic interlude that lasted from 635 to 540 million years ago. But a new interdisciplinary study suggests that the organisms living at the time may have been much more dynamic than experts have thought. Scientists have found It extremely difficult to fit these Precambrian species into the tree of life. That is because they lived in a time before organisms developed the ability to make shells or bones. As a result, they didn’t leave much fossil evidence of their existence behind, and even less Read More ›

From Daniel Engber, reviewing Richard Harris’s Rigor Mortis at Slate: Rigor may not always serve the public good. In biomedicine, everyone is looking for positive results—meaningful, affirmative experiments that could one day help support a novel treatment for disease. (That’s true both for scientists who study biomedicine at universities and those employed by giant pharmaceutical companies.) In that context, rigor serves to check scientists’ ambition and enthusiasm: It reins in their wild oversteps and helps to keep experiments on track. But not every field of research enjoys the same harmony of goals. In the sciences most relevant to policy and regulation—such as climatology, toxicology, and nutrition—academics’ focus on making new discoveries is counterbalanced by another group of researchers, funded by Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: This is true for all types of probabilities! So the next time something unlikely happens, or you realize that something very unlikely must have already occurred, remember that no matter how unlikely it is, the odds of it happening weren’t infinitely small. Its existence, just like our existence, already disproves that possibility! More. Siegel attempt to marshall Bayesianism to make his case that vanishingly small odds make no difference. But, of course, it isn’t the odds of single events that we must consider, but the odds of complex patterns, not always dependent on each other. Nice try, of the kind that traditional media robotically sponsor. Can readers imagine the uproar if someone argued for the Read More ›

From Mindy Weinberger, interviewing SETIs Seth Shostak at LiveScience: “The search should continue, simply because it’s a very interesting question,” he said. “Is Earth special? Is it the only place around with intelligent life? That would be remarkable — but it’s just as remarkable to find you’re not the only kid on the block. That’s something that would change our view of ourselves forever,” he said. More. But how or why would their discovery “change our view of ourselves forever”? Wouldn’t we still be the same? See also: But surely we can’t conjure an entire advanced civilization? and How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: Human teeth evolved from the same genes that make the bizarre beaked teeth of the pufferfish, according to new research by an international team of scientists. The study, led by Dr Gareth Fraser from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, has revealed that the pufferfish has a remarkably similar tooth-making programme to other vertebrates, including humans. Published in the journal PNAS, the research has found that all vertebrates have some form of dental regeneration potential. However the pufferfish use the same stem cells for tooth regeneration as humans do but only replace some teeth with elongated bands that form their characteristic beak. … “Our study suggests the same genes are instrumental in the early Read More ›

From Stuart Clark at the Guardian: To many these past 12 months seem as if we have already slipped into a parallel universe but Brexit and Trump are nothing compared to the alternate universes some astronomers are contemplating Brexit? Trump? Keep your political obsessions to yourself, Stuart. Say more about the evidence for parallel universes. It sounds bonkers but the latest piece of evidence that could favour a multiverse comes from the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society. They recently published a study on the so-called ‘cold spot’. This is a particularly cool patch of space seen in the radiation produced by the formation of the Universe more than 13 billion years ago. The cold spot was first glimpsed by NASA’s WMAP Read More ›

From Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God: at his book blog: It’s an odd pattern. It was this problem that came to mind as I recently revisited Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design and the Future of Faith, by Philip Kitcher. Kitcher is a philosopher at Columbia University, and he specializes on biology. His book was published by Oxford University Press, and was the recipient of the 2008 Lannan Notable Book Award. We should take his views seriously. His book begins with a forceful assertion: “From the perspective of almost the entire community of natural scientists world-wide, this continued resistance to Darwin is absurd. Biologists confidently proclaim that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection Read More ›

From George Musser at Nautilus: It has a built-in arrow. It is fundamental rather than derived from some deeper reality. Change is real, as opposed to an illusion or an artifact of perspective. The laws of physics act within time to generate each moment. Mixing mathematics, physics and philosophy, Maudlin bats away the reasons that scientists and philosophers commonly give for denying this folk wisdom. The mathematical arguments are the target of his current project, the second volume of New Foundations for Physical Geometry (the first appeared in 2014). Modern physics, he argues, conceptualizes time in essentially the same way as space. Space, as we commonly understand it, has no innate direction — it is isotropic. When we apply spatial Read More ›

Today’s Google Doodle honors the Antikythera mechanism discovered in 1901 from the Antikythera shipwreck. This remarkable object has been the subject of intense study for more than a century, with various theories about its precise origin and construction still being put forward.  Debates have played out about when it was constructed, by whom it was constructed, and the purpose of its construction. Yet no-one has questioned whether it was designed. It was clear from the characteristics of the object itself that it was designed. It was clear that it was designed before subsequent questions were asked or (tentatively) answered about who designed it, when it was designed, how it was designed, where the designers came from, what their purpose was, whether there Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Paper. (paywall) PhD student Qingdi Wang has tackled this question in a new study that tries to resolve a major incompatibility issue between two of the most successful theories that explain how our universe works: quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The study suggests that if we zoomed in-way in-on the universe, we would realize it’s made up of constantly fluctuating space and time. “Space-time is not as static as it appears, it’s constantly moving,” said Wang. … Unlike other scientists who have tried to modify the theories of quantum mechanics or general relativity to resolve the issue, Wang and his colleagues Unruh and Zhen Zhu, also a UBC PhD student, suggest a different approach. They Read More ›