From Jeffrey Marlow at Discover blog: “CHNOPS” is one of science’s most revered acronyms, an amalgamation of letters that rolls of the tongues of high school biology students and practicing researchers alike. It accounts for the six elements that comprise most biological molecules: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur. Biologists have traditionally assumed that all six elements were prerequisites, as each one is found in several of life’s most essential molecules. But what if earlier life forms weren’t quite so demanding? Could a sustainable metabolism actually exist without one of these seemingly essential elements? To explore this revolutionary possibility, Joshua Goldford, a graduate student in Boston University’s Bioinformatics Program, led a theoretical study taking aim at phosphorous and its Read More ›

Readers may not have heard the explosion when the New York Times’ remaining subscribers discovered that their Tree Deathstar had published a columnist who questions global warming hysteria. Publisher Sulzberger has been begging the enraged elitists to quit cancelling their subscriptions ever since. Possibly, the enraged ex-Times readers are too young to recall the era when newspapers routinely published non-editorial board opinions on the op-ed page. That is why it was called the op-ed page (“opposite” the “editorial”). That oppressive ancient custom predates the war on free speech. Formerly, Times readers would have felt somewhat foolish if they explained in polite company that an opposing opinion was a “trigger” for their latest emotional meltdown and/or lifelong freakout. In the 1990s, Read More ›

I (News) usually run this kind of question on Sunday but at a recent post, “Intelligent design: The materialist double standard” there was an exchange: Bob O’H: Seriously, what is the IDers’ answer to the “who designed the designer” question? (failure to answer this will – of course – immediately condemn all IDers as poopyheads, despite any efforts by the Federation of Creationist Scientists, International/Overseas to suppress this categorisation) and it was replied to: Barry Arrington: Bob, have you ever heard the old saw “there’s no such thing as a stupid question?” It is false. Stupid questions abound. The one you just asked is one of them. As has been pointed out on these pages 1,303,261 times (all of which Read More ›

Does anyone remember the Altenberg 16, a group of dissenting evolution theorists who met so nervously at the Konrad Lorenz institute in Austria that they locked a journalist out of the meeting?* They seem to be continuing to write papers, according to Massimo Pigliucci, I have just spent three delightful days at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for theoretical biology in Vienna, participating to a workshop of philosophers and biologists on the question of how to think about causality, especially within the context of the so-called Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the currently unfolding update to the standard model in evolutionary theory. Here’s one: Susan Foster, Incorporating the environmentally sensitive phenotype into evolutionary thinking: phenotypic plasticity mediates the relationship between selection and genotype Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: Here are four reasons why the war against freedom will not just somehow lose itself, without our taking any action: 2. Progressive academics are training “child soldiers” to carry out their revolution against intellectual freedom. Put simply, they are teaching their rioting students attitudes, values, and beliefs that guarantee failure in work and healthy relationships. Reader, would you want, as a colleague, someone who put a middle-aged woman professor at Middlebury College in the hospital ? No? Then think what your answer means. In an age when most graduates face job shortages, students who have been encouraged in transgressive behaviour must simply continue their “revolution” off campus. That may be all they know how to Read More ›

From Jesse Emspak at LiveScience: What Is Intelligence? 20 Years After Deep Blue, AI Still Can’t Think Like Humans “Good as they are, [computers] are quite poor at other kinds of decision making,” said Murray Campbell, a research scientist at IBM Research. “Some doubted that a computer would ever play as well as a top human. “The more interesting thing we showed was that there’s more than one way to look at a complex problem,” Campbell told Live Science. “You can look at it the human way, using experience and intuition, or in a more computer-like way.” Those methods complement each other, he said. Although Deep Blue’s win proved that humans could build a machine that’s a great chess player, Read More ›

From Center or Science and Culture at Evolution News & Views: A recent article in Nature Ecology & Evolution, “Public literacy in evolution,” discusses a newly launched project to push evolution on the European public. Called EvoKE, or “EVOlutionary Knowledge for Everyone,” the project’s main concern is to find ways to increase “European citizens’ acceptance and understanding of evolution.” In multiple places, the article quotes EvoKE leaders who are worried about the level of “acceptance” of evolution. Translation: Right now, in Europe, it is still safe to follow the maxim: If it sounds unbelieveable, don’t believe it. And when in doubt, doubt. But EvoKE aims to fix that: To summarize, the resolution claims that intelligent design is a form of Read More ›

Yet again a materialist comes into these pages (this time rvb8) and asserts that ID necessarily entails a supernatural designer.  The conversation usually goes something like this: Materialist:  ID is not science, because it studies the supernatural. ID Proponent:  No, that’s wrong.  ID is the study of design in nature.  While the designer may be supernatural, he is not necessarily so. Mat:  No, you are dissembling. ID:  Why do you say that? Mat:  Because the design of living things would require a miracle, and miracles are, by definition, supernatural. ID:  Let me get this straight.  You believe that blind, unguided natural forces are sufficient to account for the staggering complexity and diversity of life. Mat:  That’s right.  That is why Read More ›

From Anurag A. Agrawal and Editor: Judith L. Bronstein at The American Naturalist: Abstract: A charm of biology as a scientific discipline is the diversity of life. Although this diversity can make laws of biology challenging to discover, several repeated patterns and general principles govern evolutionary diversification. Convergent evolution, the independent evolution of similar phenotypes, has been at the heart of one approach to understand generality in the evolutionary process. Yet understanding when and why organismal traits and strategies repeatedly evolve has been a central challenge. These issues were the focus of the American Society of Naturalists Vice Presidential Symposium in 2016 and are the subject of this collection of articles. Although naturalists have long made inferences about convergent evolution Read More ›

From Ray Cavanaugh at Salvo: After his ordination [to the priesthood], Lemaître won a scholarship to study abroad and headed to Cambridge University, where he worked with the astronomer Arthur Eddington. He then migrated from Cambridge in the U.K. to Cambridge, Massachusetts, so he could study at Harvard and M.I.T., where he earned a doctoral degree. Returning to Belgium (at least for a while), he was appointed professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. Right around this time, he published the formidably titled paper, “A Homogenous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radiation, Taking Account of the Radial Velocity of Extragalactic Nebulae,” which questioned Einstein’s idea of a static universe. … By the latter half of the 1920s, Read More ›

From Robert H. Nelson at the Conversation: The question of whether a god exists is heating up in the 21st century. According to a Pew survey, the percent of Americans having no religious affiliation reached 23 percent in 2014. Among such “nones,” 33 percent said that they do not believe in God – an 11 percent increase since only 2007. Such trends have ironically been taking place even as, I would argue, the probability for the existence of a supernatural god have been rising. He offers five reasons God probably exists, but that’s not new. This is: As I say in my book, I should emphasize that I am not questioning the reality of natural biological evolution. What is interesting Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: This might seem like out-and-out science fiction, but not all of it belongs to the “fiction” category: traveling through time is the one thing in science that you can’t help yourself from doing no matter what you do! The question is how much you can manipulate it for your own ends, and control your motion through time. Physicist Siegel offers theories that enable forward or backward motion through tme but says But that’s a mathematical solution; does that mathematics describe our physical Universe, though? It appears not to be the case. The curvatures and/or discontinuities we’d need our Universe to have are wildly incompatible with what we observe, even near neutron stars and black holes: Read More ›

From Nguyen A, Yosinski J, and Clune J (2015) at Evolving Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently been achieving state-of-the-art performance on a variety of pattern-recognition tasks, most notably visual classification problems. Given that DNNs are now able to classify objects in images with near-human-level performance, questions naturally arise as to what differences remain between computer and human vision. A recent study revealed that changing an image (e.g. of a lion) in a way imperceptible to humans can cause a DNN to label the image as something else entirely (e.g. mislabeling a lion a library). Here we show a related result: it is easy to produce images that are completely unrecognizable to humans, but that state-of-the-art DNNs believe Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. … “Many exciting things Read More ›

Animals we thought were extinct sometimes aren’t. From Julia Brown at New Scientist: Will Bill Laurance and his team find Tasmanian tigers lurking in Australia’s remote Cape York peninsula? Numerous animals that were thought to be extinct have recently been rediscovered. Here are our top five species that came back from the dead – and two more that might also have been written off too soon. More. This subject has heated up recently on account of possible sightings of the Tasmanian wolf (tiger), a marsupial that was believed to have gone extinct in the last century. Possibly, current technology would help us determine the chances that an actual species has actually gone extinct. The fact that one hasn’t seen any Read More ›