It’s all about fear, see? From Dan Ariely and Vlad Chituc at New Scientist: It’s explained by the fact that, in a famous 1950s experiment, baby rhesus monkeys preferred a soft cloth with no nourishment to a wire that dispensed milk. In nature, emotions typically align with self-interest: most mother monkeys provide both comfort and milk. Emotions are how evolution motivates us to do what we need to survive. A newborn triggers love, so we nurture; a rustle at night triggers fear, so we run. … Earlier this week, the US joined the likes of Russia in electing somebody who knows the power of fear very well. Although many forces brought us here, it’s notable that Trump pawned the nation’s Read More ›

A friend noted this book, Admirable Evasions How Psychology Undermines Morality (2015), by psychiatrist and essayist Theodore Dalrymple: In Admirable Evasions, Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures. Dalrymple reveals how the fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is Read More ›

BBC division. It’s hard to believe anyone writes this stuff in the face of overwhelming evidence of the fact. But ideology can blind people to obvious facts. In this case, that’s partly because the “humans are not special” message is a form of virtue signaling that parasitizes conservation issues and, fueled by sentimentality, can withstand the most obvious evidence. From David Robson at BBC: The guests lining up outside a Brisbane gallery were not your typical culture vultures; in fact, until recently they’d never seen a painting in their life. But with just a little training, they developed their own artistic taste, showing a clear preference for Picasso’s crystalline constructions or Monet’s dreamy soft focus as they wandered lazily through Read More ›

From Bruce Sterling, reviewing The Singularity from Journal of Consciousness Studies, at New Scientist: Creating superintellingence may be inevitable, unless we are already living in a simulation. A collection of AI essays grapples with this weighty issue … While the book is a tremendous flight over the craggy AI landscape, it settles no disputes and has little or nothing in the way of practical counsel. Kant, Hume and Descartes are major intellectual presences here, apparently because explosively proliferating future AI singularities are going to be plenty worried about these three dead European guys. (paywall) More. Introduction by editor Uziel Awret free here. More contents here. This all comes of not knowing or caring to know what information even is, or Read More ›

Sometimes, popular debates and commenters can put their fingers on a key issue, almost in passing. In this case, in addressing the cognitive dissonance issue triggering  many reactions to the rise of Donald Trump to US President-Elect (I confess, my own surprise* . . . ) Dilbert’s Scott Adams has dropped a real clanger of a wake-up call: Here is a money-shot clip from his current blog article, “The Cognitive Dissonance Cluster Bomb”: >>As I often tell you, we all live in our own movies inside our heads. Humans did not evolve with the capability to understand their reality because it was not important to survival. Any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough. That’s Read More ›

Over at PhysOrg they have a story about how certain bacteria, when under stress conditions, shut themselves down and put themselves into a persistent state. They do it by modifying the chemicals involved in t-RNA. No, it’s not a “point mutation”—which is tauted as an icon of Darwinian evolution, but the utilization of an “alternate genetic code.” IOW, it’s regulated and ‘directed,’ and is ready-at-hand when needed. So, with this new information, the whole story of bacterial resistance now needs to be rethought. And, guess what, instead of pointing to “point mutations” (no pun intended), it points rather to “design.” Oh, those poor Darwinists/evolutionists. Another day; another bad day for Darwinism. From the press release: Dedon suspects that other families Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Chimpanzees often use tools to extract or consume food but which tools they choose for which purpose can differ depending on where they live. In 2010, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, initiated the ‘Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee’ to characterize and understand the differences in chimpanzee behaviours in un- and poorly studied ape populations across Africa. This is how the researchers encountered a new behavioural variant: Algae fishing with long robust tools at a temporary research site in Bakoun, Guinea. … . “The PanAf project represents a new approach to studying chimpanzees and will provide many interesting insights into chimpanzee demography and social structure, genetics, behavior and culture,” says Hjalmar Read More ›

This one, at his blog: I don’t like to nitpick much any more, but their post is exceptionally misleading. The “latest” is not that Homo naledi just fell into the Dinaledi chamber. I never said that, so let me elaborate. … The bones did not just fall into the Dinaledi chamber. I feel quite confident in affirming the original hypothesis that complete Homo naledi bodies were intentionally placed in the Dinaledi chamber, and I expect future research will continue to support this hypothesis.More. For the record, we did not think Dr. Wood thought that the bones just fell in. But the paper he critiques (which posits that the bones were not placed in the cave intentionally) would seem to leave Read More ›

From Joshua A. Krisch at The Scientist: Juric and colleagues developed a method for quantifying the average strength of natural selection against Neanderthal genes. They found that selection against individual Neanderthal alleles is very weak, suggesting that our ancient ancestors accumulated many slightly deleterious alleles, which—within their small enclaves—were hardly noticeable when inherited. But once Neanderthals integrated into larger human populations, the researchers proposed, these alleles entered the crucible of natural selection and were weeded out of modern human genomes. In the statement, Juric acknowledged that population size was but one factor. More. We actually have little idea why it happened and that is a key problem with Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutation). In the absence of evidence, Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: And so now our own focus shifts north in England, up the M11 to Cambridge University where the “Beyond Materialism: Biology for the 21st Century” conference opens at Hughes Hall on Saturday at 9 am. This gathering will feature scientists and scholars from U.S., U.K., Israel, Germany, and Sweden, plus leading advocates of intelligent design well known to readers of Evolution News, including Stephen Meyer, Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger, and Paul Nelson. If you found the RS meeting less provocative than you might have expected, join us tomorrow morning for a full day of challenging and candid discussion. Find the full program here, along with registration information. More. Darwin demolition: Someone’s gotta do Read More ›

John Searle gives a nice talk at Google about real intelligence vs. machine intelligence. The conversation is interesting for a number of reasons, including some historical background of Searle’s famous “Chinese Room Argument.”
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From Michael Skinner at Aeon: Darwin’s theory that natural selection drives evolution is incomplete without input from evolution’s anti-hero: Lamarck If sneers had weight, the Darwinian sneers against Lamarck over the last century or so would have crushed the Royal Society building to rubble. Let’s remember that when we hear bafflegab PR about how nothing has changed. When we read stuff like this, a lot of things have changed. One problem with Darwin’s theory is that, while species do evolve more adaptive traits (called phenotypes by biologists), the rate of random DNA sequence mutation turns out to be too slow to explain many of the changes observed. Scientists, well-aware of the issue, have proposed a variety of genetic mechanisms to Read More ›

From Mindy Weisberger at LiveScience: The newest additions to the Dutch National Police (DNP) are North American “immigrants”: bald eagles that are specially trained to take down airborne drones. The initiative is a first for law enforcement, according to DNP officials. They announced in a statement, released Sept. 13, that the DNP is currently the only police force in the world to include raptors on its roster for drone defense. For the past year, the DNP has tested eagles’ prowess against flying drones, collaborating with a private company called Guard from Above that trains raptors to snatch drones out of the sky. The tests were so successful, the DNP reported, that the police force recently purchased juvenile bald eagles that Read More ›

From Andrew Tarantola at Engadget: The Harvard study examined 36 patients with similar brainstem lesions, 12 of which were comatose. The study sought to determine why that dozen of people lost consciousness while the other 24 retained theirs. The researchers quickly zeroed in on one region: the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum. Ten of the twelve comatose patients suffered damage to this area, while only one of the conscious patients did.More. It will be interesting to see if this is replicated. One guesses that it is a bit more complex. See also: Evading the hard problem of human consciousness: Consciousness is in everything! and What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness Follow UD News at Twitter!

From anthropologist Todd Wood at his blog: First up, in a surprisingly speculative paper in the South African Journal of Science, Wits professor Francis Thackeray proposed that the bones of H. naledi had lichen stains on them from exposure to light. If correct, the resting of the bones on the surface would imply that the bodies of H. naledi were not intentionally deposited in the Dinaledi chamber but just fell in there. I say this was speculative, since Thackeray’s argument (as I understood it) was based on visual similarity of some stains on the bones to stains on some rocks that might have been made by lichens. More. Colleagues say no, the stains are not consistent with lichen growth in Read More ›