From ScienceDaily: A new study suggests that ravens can be as clever as chimpanzees, despite having much smaller brains, indicating that rather than the size of the brain, the neuronal density and the structure of the birds’ brains play an important role in terms of their intelligence. … The large-scale study concluded that great apes performed the best, and that absolute brain size appeared to be key when it comes to intelligence. However, they didn’t conduct the cylinder test on corvid birds. (For some reason, humans were not tested for the ability to get food out of the end of a tube instead of striking at the middle… ) Can Kabadayi, together with researchers from the University of Oxford, UK Read More ›

The response to Barry’s recent post, How Did Mathematics Come to be Woven Into the Fabric of Reality? pretty much lays bare the issues: “Why is the universe we live in connected by an unreasonably beautiful, elegant and effective mathematical structure?” The naturalist says we just evolved to see the world as making sense, but don’t really know. Defending Darwin means that much to him … At 73, I noted, Aleta at 81: Sorry, that won’t work. Either man is observing something that underlies the universe and working within those given results or mathematics is an adaptation for survival (it could be completely irrational and is only tangentially related to how the universe works). The second position saves naturalism (and Read More ›

From Joseph Bottum, a review of David Wootton’s The Invention of Science at Weekly Standard, David Wootton has written a long book to save science from something, even if he’s not quite sure what that something is. The demystification, deconstruction, and doubt of post-modernity, maybe. Or revitalized religious faith, from Radical Islam to Protestant Fundamentalism. Certainly, Wootton wants to rescue modern science from its historians. He calls this a new history, and he means it: The text would be a third shorter if Wootton could keep himself from diatribe, from savaging nearly every author who has had the temerity to write about the history of science before David Wootton came along to save the day. … Wootton knows the wonder-working Read More ›

From Deborah Berry at The Conversation: In 2012, the biopharmaceutical company Amgen reported that it had been unable to reproduce 47 of 53 “landmark” cancer papers. For confidentiality reasons, however, the company did not release which papers it could not replicate and thus did not provide details about how it repeated the experiments. As with the psychology studies, this leaves the possibility that Amgen got different results because the experiments were not performed the same way as the original study. It opens the door to doubt about which result – the first or the repeat test – was correct. Several initiatives are addressing this problem in multiple disciplines. Science Exchange; the Center for Open Science, a group dedicated to “openness, integrity Read More ›

Further to “Men probably evolved beards for intimidation … ”* at Real Clear Science philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze fills us in on the breakiest story in evo psych: The Cornull University “Evolution in Action” study group headed by Dr. Davidson Petney has just released an abstract of their latest results. They have discovered a gene-linked trait in certain men of Eastern European descent which causes them to prefer cuff links over cuff buttons. This trait has been demonstrated to result in a reproductive advantage because women of wealth and discernment are more attracted to cuff link wearing men than those who rely upon buttons. The typical woman who is drawn to cuff link men is described as “a Bette Davis/Greta Garbo Read More ›

Pay no attention to the coffee room logo. It really happened, as follows, related in New Statesman: The story of the search for gravitational waves is ostensibly a grandiose tale, involving billions of light-years of space, decades of preparation, and multimillion-dollar instruments: interferometers that stretch for kilometres but must be sensitive to billionths of a billionth of one metre. In Levin’s hands, however, the story shrinks to a human scale. She has delivered a compelling and haunting account of the flawed and flailing souls who were pulled together by the hope of finding gravitational waves but who, like the black holes they were trying to detect, destroyed each other in the process. The first casualty is Joseph Weber, the pioneer of Read More ›

Sarah Scoles at the Smithsonian Magazine on the multiverse: Astronomers are arguing about whether they can trust this untested—and potentially untestable—idea Detailing the objections of those who want evidence, she then explains, Other scientists say that the definitions of “evidence” and “proof” need an upgrade. Richard Dawid of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy believes scientists could support their hypotheses, like the multiverse—without actually finding physical support. He laid out his ideas in a book called String Theory and the Scientific Method. Inside is a kind of rubric, called “Non-Empirical Theory Assessment,” that is like a science-fair judging sheet for professional physicists. If a theory fulfills three criteria, it is probably true. First, if scientists have tried, and failed, to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The researchers discovered a traveling spike generator that appears to move across the hippocampus — a part of the brain mainly associated with memory — and change direction, while generating brain waves. The generator itself, however, produces no electrical signal. “In epilepsy, we’ve thought the focus of seizures is fixed and, in severe cases, that part of the brain is surgically removed,” said Dominique Durand, Elmer Lincoln Lindseth Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Case School of Engineering and leader of the study. “But if the focus, or source, of seizures moves — as we’ve described — that’s problematic.” … The team is also trying to understand what these non-synaptic events do and whether they are relevant to processing Read More ›

We all learned pi in school in the context of circles.  Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.  It is an irrational number approximated by 3.14. It turns out that pi shows up all over the place, not just in circles.  Here is just one instance.  Take a piece of paper and a stick.  Draw several lines along the paper so that the lines are the length of the stick from each other.  Then randomly drop the stick on the paper.  The probability that the stick will land so that it cuts a line is exactly 2/pi, or about 64%.  If one were to perform millions of trials, one could use the results to perform a Read More ›

When Nature is giving you the advice, … you know there’s a problem and you better listen. There is no handbook that describes what to do in these situations. If you decide to be a whistle-blower, you must realize that it will be stressful. And because it is so stressful, you want to ensure that any investigations that are carried out will be robust. Every case needs to be considered on an individual basis, but I hope that sharing my recommendations will help others who find themselves in a similar position. But then, inexplicably: Avoid public disclosure. In my view, it is not appropriate to make public statements about such cases until they are resolved. It would have been much Read More ›

So says Sam Kriss at Wired: Neil deGrasse Tyson is, supposedly, an educator and a populariser of science; it’s his job to excite people about the mysteries of the universe, communicate information, and correct popular misconceptions. This is a noble, arduous, and thankless job, which might be why he doesn’t do it.More. We think Tyson should have stuck to a winning formula. He seems to be everywhere saying everything. The multiverse, the computer sim, the Inquisition vs. Bruno, global warming… See also: Tyson bombshell: Universe likely just computer sim … See what we mean? Follow UD News at Twitter!

BioLogos? They’re Christians for Darwin, or evolution or something, but for sure not for ID or anything. At Hump of the Camel, Jon Garvey, a retired British physician and theologian, notes that BioLogos writers accuse ID folk of heretical or bad theology by thinking of God as a designer. But, he says, their own theological leanings are much further from classical Christian orthodoxy than anything written by ID folk: But I felt I had to comment on a recent thread on BioLogos, in which the argument is made that Intelligent Design implies that God is merely one amongst a number of possible designers, whereas God is, in fact, not to be compared with any other agent. … I would not Read More ›

Recently, we’ve seen some rather abrupt shifts: The Royal Society is suddenly rethinking the importance of Darwinism in evolution—which will have huge ramifications even if they lose heart and flee the scene. It’s enough that they even considered such grave apostasy. For most people who grew up in the English-speaking world, evolution (indeed, all of biology) is Darwinism. The American Darwin-in-the-schools lobby, for example, has no similar interest in horizontal gene transfer, hybridization, epigenetics, or other ways evolution can happen. No one is suing the school board over chromosome doubling or getting their pants in a knot over convergence. But then these demonstrated ways evolution can happen do not add up to a grand naturalist scheme either. It’s more like Read More ›

The problem with epigenetic mechanisms is that they respond to future, unforeseen, environmental challenges. They don’t work in the present, and so even if random mutations somehow created such mechanisms, they would not be selected for. In other words, epigenetic mechanisms contradict evolutionary theory—there is no fitness improvement at the time of origin by random mutations, so there is no selection. Nor do evolutionists have an explanation for this—they don’t even try. Consider a paper discussing a particular epigenetic mechanism subtitled: “The Evolution of a Complex Epigenetic Pathway in Flowering Plants.”  Read more

From Michael Denton,’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, Admittedly, there are still many prominent figures such as Michael Ruse, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins who strictly adhere to a pan-adaptational framework and to the notion that all macroevolutionary phenomena, from the origin of life to the origin of man, can be generally accounted for by the same mechanism, cumulative selection, that works at the microevolutionary level. But despite these dyed-in-the-wool Darwinists, there is now a growing chorus of dissent within mainstream evolutionary biology! A significant number of researchers, particularly in the new field of evo-devo, now argue that macroevolution requires an explanatory framework different from that of microevolution—thus confirming the underlying leitmotif of Evolution, a Theory in Read More ›