With all this talk of language, what with Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech coming out, here’s an interesting new approach: From Sarah Knapton at Telegraph: The discovery challenges the fundamental principles of linguistics, which state that languages grow up independently of each other, with no intrinsic meaning in the noises which form words. But research which looked into several thousand languages showed that for basic concepts, such as body parts, family relationships or aspects of the natural world, there are common sounds – as if concepts that are important to the human experience somehow trigger universal verbalisations. The study found, that in most languages, the word for ‘nose’ is likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, Read More ›

From Ian Tattersall’s review of Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky at New York Review of Books: Around 300,000 years ago a conceptually new type of stone implement began to be made in both Africa and Europe… But significantly, in this time range there is only one putative—and hugely arguable—symbolic artifact known: a vaguely anthropomorphic lump of rock from the Golan Heights that may have been slightly modified to look more human. More. So, readers, is it an artifact? Is it an accident? Note: The copy quoted is behind a paywall. The whole article is worth the price because it is a good overview of the background to Tom Wolfe’s attack on Chomsky Read More ›

Video: (Please understand this i/l/o the context of complacency, attack and the lesson of Jan Sobieski. Ask yourself, in your heart is our civilisation worth fighting for given the likely alternatives (or, does it deserve to die . . . or be utterly “transformed”), and why or why not?) Ponder, our geostrategic challenges, and how our underlying worldviews . . . whether or not dressed up in a lab coat . . . and deep-rooted perceptions shape how we act, whilst geostrategic realities (and some pretty ruthless operators out there) shape consequences: Where do we go from here? What is the likely consequence? END

From Jane Qiu at Nature: Keen to get to the bottom of its people’s ancestry, China has in the past decade stepped up its efforts to uncover evidence of early humans across the country. It is reanalysing old fossil finds and pouring tens of millions of dollars a year into excavations. And the government is setting up a US$1.1-million laboratory at the IVPP to extract and sequence ancient DNA. … “Many Western scientists tend to see Asian fossils and artefacts through the prism of what was happening in Africa and Europe,” says Wu. Those other continents have historically drawn more attention in studies of human evolution because of the antiquity of fossil finds there, and because they are closer to Read More ›

No, we know… This is not our high school genetics. From the Salk Institute: LA JOLLA—Our brains contain a surprising diversity of DNA. Even though we are taught that every cell in our body has the same DNA, in fact most cells in the brain have changes to their DNA that make each neuron a little different. Now researchers at the Salk Institute and their collaborators have shown that one source of this variation—called long interspersed nuclear elements or L1s—are present in 44 to 63 percent of healthy neurons and can not only insert DNA but also remove it. Previously, these L1s were known to be small bits of DNA called “jumping genes” that copy and paste themselves throughout the Read More ›

From Belinda Smith at Cosmos Magazine: Around 4.5 billion years ago, an object slammed into Earth vaporising most of the planet into a scorching cloud from which the moon was born. Geochemists in the US – Kun Wang from Washington University in St Louis and Stein Jacobsen at Harvard – examined minuscule amounts of potassium in moon and Earth rocks and found minute differences – possible only if their raw materials were thoroughly mixed in a superheated fog before they coalesced. The work, published in Nature, pokes a hole in the theory that the moon was born from a low-impact collision. More. In truth, we do not know very much about how the moon was formed, and theories rise and Read More ›

Imagine if atheistic materialism was actually true and humans are nothing more than biological automatons – complexly programmed and reactive robots that behave and think in whatever manner happenstance chemical interactions dictates at any given time.  Let’s think about what would actually mean. There would be no way for a biological automaton to determine whether or not any statement was in fact true or not since all conclusions are driven by chemistry and not metaphysical “truth” values; indeed, a biological automaton reaches conclusion X for exactly the same reason any other reaches conclusion Y; chemistry.  If chemistry dictates that 1+1=banana, that is what a “person” will conclude. If chemistry dictates they defend that view to the death and see themselves Read More ›

Before we get back to our sober coverage, from Ewen Callaway at Scientific American: Geneticists have traced the history of beer’s most important ingredient: yeast. By sequencing the genomes of nearly 200 modern strains of brewer’s yeast, the research reveals how, over hundreds of years, humans transformed the wild fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae into a variety of strains tuned for particular tipples. An evolutionary tree of the yeast strains revealed distinct families of yeast used for making wine, bread and saké, and two distantly related groups of ale yeast, including strains from Belgium, Germany, Britain and the United States. More. Genomics will be used to produce new strains. Evolution goes really fast when there is design and purpose involved. And who Read More ›

From Wintery Knight: Atheist Luke Muehlhauser interviews well-respect cosmologist Luke Barnes about the fine-tuning argument, and the naturalistic response to it. … In one of my funniest and most useful episodes yet, I interview astronomer Luke Barnes about the plausibility of 11 responses to the fine-tuning of the universe. Frankly, once you listen to this episode you will be better equipped to discuss fine-tuning than 90% of the people who discuss it on the internet. This episode will help clarify the thinking of anyone – including and perhaps especially professional philosophers – about the fine-tuning of the universe.More. It is a podcast with useful outline notes. Here are some of Barnes’s other articles on the subject. See also: Our solar Read More ›

For, on that day, Poland — personally led by its king — rode to the rescue of our Civilisation at the gates of Vienna. (Details — and movie, here; also see on Complacency Day, here.) Be it solemnly moved that from this day forward, we shall remember: Complacency Day, Sept 10; 9/11-01, Sept 11; Sobieski Day, Sept 12. Seconds? I close with a paraphrase from Santayana and others: those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are doomed by that folly to repeat its worst chapters. END PS: Summary video on the charge: This gives broader background:

This is a great video, and all those with interest in biological evolution should watch it.
Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: One of the main goals of the foundation is to bring together science and religion. Among the many things they are funding to accomplish this is a $871,000 grant to Arizona State University to fund Think Write Publish Fellowships in Science and Religion. If you’re a hard-up writer, these people will give you the opportunity to get $10,000 to write “creative nonfiction stories about harmonies between science and religion” and help you get them published. Sure. The world needs more flatulence. If you tried to show that the universe shows evidence of design, chances are, you’d get nowhere. These people a interested in the warm, the fuzzy, the deniable.) Over the Read More ›

Just a reminder to those wanting to present at the AM-Nat (Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism) Biology conference, abstracts are due October 28th.

Read More ›

From the conclusion of Douglas Axe’s Undeniable: That the deepest questions in biology have not yet been answered means they are still asking to be answered. Anyone who cares to examine the facts carefully will see that the old answers were wrong. They have now been erased, in our minds anyway, and we must sit down to take the test again, with new minds and new resolve. Having learned much since Darwin’s day, we have every reason for optimism this time. Speaking as a scientist, I can’t think of a more attractive message to convey to young people of technical ability. Speaking as a human, though, I see something even more beautiful. Yes, the deepest questions in the scientific study Read More ›

From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, By now, 2014 [when Chomsky’s critic Everett appeared], Evolution was more than a theory. It had become embedded in the very anatomy, the very central nervous system of all modern people. Every part, every tendency, of every living creature had evolved from some earlier life form—even if you had to go all the way back to Darwin’s “four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere” to find it. A title like “The Mystery of Language Evolution” was instinctive. It went without saying that any “trait” as important as speech had evolved… from something. Everett’s notion that speech had not evolved from anything—it was a “cultural tool” man had made for himself—was Read More ›