Epigenetics at work, sure, but … From ScienceDaily: Flexible gene expression may regulate social status in male fish For a small African fish species, a colorful dominant male does better in life, winning access to food and females. New research by Stanford biologists suggests that this lucky outcome is regulated at a genetic level, by turning genes on and off. … Fernald studies Astatotilapia burtoni, one of the hundreds of cichlid fish species inhabiting Lake Tanganyika in eastern Africa, because of the unique ways they have evolved over time. For male A. burtoni, dominance is everything. They battle frequently for territory, with the victor winning access to the two most important resources — food and females. Sporting bright rainbow-colored scales, Read More ›

In a 2010 book. So, is the problem with the Theory of Everything that it doesn’t include information? From The Guardian (2010): Physicist Vlatko Vedral explains to Aleks Krotoski why he believes the fundamental stuff of the universe is information and how he hopes that one day everything will be explained in this way Book. Blurb: In Decoding Reality, Vlatko Vedral offers a mind-stretching look at the deepest questions about the universe–where everything comes from, why things are as they are, what everything is. The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, he writes, but information–and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena. This view Read More ›

Time doesn’t go backward, and that is a problem in current physics. From Quanta: Why should the fundamental laws have that bizarre and problem-posing property, T invariance? The answer we can offer today is incomparably deeper and more sophisticated than that we could offer 50 years ago. Today’s understanding emerged from a brilliant interplay of experimental discovery and theoretical analysis, which yielded several Nobel prizes. Yet our answer still contains a serious loophole. As I’ll explain, closing that loophole may well lead us, as an unexpected bonus, to identify the cosmological “dark matter.” … We are told, there are “grounds for optimism.” A theortical paarticle called the “axion”: The theory of axions predicts, in a general way, that axions should Read More ›

From Jonathan Haidt at Heterodox Academy: New Study Indicates Existence of Eight Conservative Social Psychologists A new data set has come in. Bill von Hippel and David Buss surveyed the membership of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. That’s a professional society composed of the most active researchers in the field who are at least five years post-PhD. It’s very selective – you must be nominated by a current member and approved by a committee before you can join. Von Hippel and Buss sent a web survey to the 900 members of SESP and got a response rate of 37% (335 responses). So this is a good sample of the mid-level and senior people (average age 51) who produce most Read More ›

Are people allowed to say this in pop science venues now, like something that is just true? From physicist Tom Hartsfield at RealClearScience: String theory has been the darling of the theoretical physics community for decades. It has reigned as the dominant theory in prestigious US research institutions since the 1980s. Elegant books, TV shows, and grandiose TED talks have hyped it to the public. Brilliant theoretical physicists tell us that this theory is the best answer to the hardest problem that their field has ever attacked. All that is fine, but here’s the unequivocal truth: string theory has failed as a scientific theory. … Discussing the conference last month, he pleads for empiricism, taking evidence seriously: The fire igniting Read More ›

From a (paywalled) review in Science of Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science (Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis, Eds. Harvard 2015): Before Columbus discovered America, people believed that the world was flat. When the apple struck Newton’s head, he discovered gravity and replaced God with objective truth. Gregor Mendel was a lone genius who discovered genetics. You will probably have heard at least some of these stories—you may even have believed them—but this delightful collection of short, thought-provoking essays shows that they are all myths. So pointing out that the pop sci lore on these subjects is largely myth is now going mainstream? Used to be, earnest Christian profs wrote this stuff. They were correct, and often engaging, Read More ›

From a brief review in Scientific American of A Brief History of Creation: Science and the Search for the Origin of Life (Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves II, Norton, 2015): No scientific quandary is as confounding, controversial or important as the question of how life began, argue journalist Mesler and geochemist Cleaves. “It touches upon not only how we came to be, but why we came to be,” they write. “It is, in a sense, the ultimate question.”More. Maybe. How much of the problem is rather this: The search is not so much for what happened as for what happened that is consistent with a naturalist perspective? Thus we hear about chance, law, self-organization (which is actually not completely Read More ›

Not only are mouse data often meaningless for humans, but according to a recent piece by Monya Baker in Nature News: Reports of hundreds of biomedical experiments lack essential information. Whereas reports of clinical trials in major medical journals routinely state how many patients die or drop out of analysis during the course of a study, animal studies generally fail to report this figure — or drop animals without saying why, according to a team led by Ulrich Dirnagl at the Charité Medical University in Berlin. That lapse could significantly bias results, the team reports in the journal PLoS Biology. … Dirnagl’s team reviewed 100 reports published between 2000 and 2013 describing 522 experiments that used rodents to test cancer Read More ›

From Nature: “We think bumblebees are using this ability to perceive electrical fields to determine if flowers were recently visited by other bumblebees and are therefore worth visiting,” says Robert. “We had no idea that this sense even existed,” says Thomas Seeley, a behavioural biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “Assuming we can replicate the findings, this is going to open up a whole new window on insect sensory systems for us to study.” More. See also: Does intelligence depend on a specific type of brain? The way insect intelligence develops may be different as well. Bees, like many insects, exhibit “an incredibly wide variety of intelligent behaviors.” But, according to some researchers, insect intelligence tends to increase Read More ›

Everywhere I go … Rats! This should have happened approx December 8, 2015, not January 8, 2016: A friend writes to say that an open access paper at eLIFE includes the words, Tissue organization, spindle orientation, and the GKPID complex itself are all examples of complexity, defined as the integrated functioning of a system made up of differentiated, interacting parts. More. Friend asks: Contrast this with what Michael Behe said years ago defining irreducible complexity: “A single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function of the system ” Note: The Brainyquote version adds, “wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” Hmmmm. Readers? See also: Is it Read More ›

From RealClearScience: “Animal models are limited in their ability to mimic the extremely complex process of human carcinogenesis, physiology and progression,” McMaster University scientists Isabella Mak, Nathan Evaniew, and Michelle Ghert, wrote in 2014. “Therefore the safety and efficacy identified in animal studies is generally not translated to human trials.” While the systems that regulate gene activity are generally the same in mice and humans, there are key biological differences in other areas that prevent successful results from applying to humans. Transcription factor binding sites, where information is passed on, differ for between 41 and 89 percent of the genes that our species share. Moreover, unlike humans, mice used in studies are often highly inbred. The mouse immune system is Read More ›

From O’Leary for News’s night job: Twitter vs. religious conservatives? Enforcing rules against hate speech selectively is worse than not enforcing them at all. Astroturf: Fake social media consensus harms politics A surge of popularity or concern may in reality be manufactured at a few terminals for pay or promotion. Decision time for Facebook: Censor or no? But on whose behalf does the social media giant censor? Latest toy fad: Baby Snitch The doll at least talks and listens to the kid. But who else does? Dating apps: A date with HIV? It’s making a comeback due to the online hookup culture. MOOCs: Is free higher ed help, hype, or havoc? The galloping cost of university is thought to be Read More ›

By James Hannam: As it happens, much of the evidence marshaled in favor of the conflict thesis turns out to be bogus. The Church never tried to outlaw the number zero or human dissection; no one was burnt at the stake for scientific ideas; and no educated person in the Middle Ages thought that the world was flat, whatever interpretations of the Bible might imply. Popes have had better things to do than ban vaccination or lightning conductors on churches. The thought of a pope excommunicating Halley’s Comet is absurd, but this has not prevented the tale of Calixtus III doing just that from entering scientific folklore.

Recently, we noted the new “bold new take” book on whether Darwinism explains higher taxa (which raises the quite undaring question whle offering an equally unconvincing alternative. And a “public goods” approach to Darwinism that leads to design. Plus an attempt to separate Darwin from his mentor Malthus that sheds worse light on Darwin than Malthus. So a reader writes to ask if we have addressed Simon Conway Morris’s The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe Became Self-Aware? Yes we did: See Evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris on how the universe became self-aware What? Self-aware? and ET, call pretty much anywhere at THIS point. Especially call Simon Conway Morris, Cambridge, Collect. This from a review from an arts and letters Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: Are There Patterns in Invertebrate Brains and Intelligence? Reptiles and fish sometimes show signs of intelligence despite having quite different brains from mammals. But, being exothermic, they don’t do much of anything very often. For example, turtles may rescue each other, but can also spend months in a state of icy torpor with little adverse effect. At one time, it was assumed that the intelligence to rescue would not co-exist with lengthy inertia (the reptilian or triune brain hypothesis). Actually, the two qualities can co-exist, though they wouldn’t be simultaneous. Invertebrate just means “not a vertebrate,” so there is no single type of invertebrate brain: Invertebrates have immensely diverse nervous structures and body plans, revealing Read More ›