Within our lifetimes, according to Daily Dot’s Dylan Love: Neal VanDeRee, officiator at the Church of Perpetual Life: I believe that it is inevitable that the arrival of a superintelligence is bound to happen, and when looking at the current course of AI, this should be within our lifetime. I would imagine that it could very nearly replicate life as we know it now, but without pain, suffering, and death. Naturally, time will tell. Lincoln Cannon: For practical and moral reasons, I trust in our opportunity and capacity as a human civilization, to evolve intentionally into compassionate superintelligence. I don’t think it’s inevitable, and I do think there are serious risks. But I do trust it’s possible, particularly if we Read More ›

Says Janet Cameron here: Science owes a great deal to philosophy from its very beginning, and continues to do so to this day. As Cools continues: “At every step of the way, from the application of the rules of logic, to the justification of why we should value or emphasize one set of facts over another in any specific application, the formulation of scientific theories relies heavily on philosophy. In fact, science was originally a branch of philosophy – natural philosophy – until that branch of inquiry became so large it specialized and branched off, then branched again into physics, biology, chemistry and so forth: we could say that science was grafted out of philosophy.” Philosophy is the love of Read More ›

Here: ‘I don’t know if you want to call it a crisis,’ says Alex Holcombe, associate professor of psychology at the University of Sydney. ‘But, we do know that of the efforts to try to systematically reproduce the findings, whether they be in cancer biology, whether they be in psychology, the success rate has not been impressive.’ In 2011, a paper from Bayer Pharmaceuticals reported that the company could only reproduce the findings of a quarter of studies published about particular drug candidates. Another company, Amgen Corporation, could only reproduce 11 per cent of the cancer and blood studies they looked at. ‘This was a shocking result,’ wrote the authors of the Amgen paper. ‘All the efforts that I’ve seen, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The team studied a plant-eating stick insect species from California called Timema cristinae known for its cryptic camouflage that allows it to hide from hungry birds, said CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Samuel Flaxman. T. cristinae comes in several different types — one is green and blends in with the broad green leaves of a particular shrub species, while a second green variant sports a white, vertical stripe that helps disguise it on a different species of shrub with narrow, needle-like leaves. While Darwinian natural selection has begun pushing the two green forms of walking sticks down separate paths that could lead to the formation of two new species, the team found that a third melanistic, or brown variation of Read More ›

“There’s more to inheritance and how a body develops than simply DNA. You get your genes from your parents — but how those genes are interpreted is far from straightforward.” Epigenetics See also: Mathematician Peter Saunders on Darwinism and epigenetics Follow UD News at Twitter!

Further to Philosopher of science: Schoolbook Darwinism needs replacement (Witzany: All these concepts that dominated science for half a century are falsified now), we read: Debunking the biggest genetic myth of the human tongue In 1940, the prominent geneticist Alfred Sturtevant published a paper saying the ability to roll one’s tongue is based on a dominant gene. In 1952, Philip Matlock disproved Sturtevant’s findings, demonstrating that seven out of 33 identical twins didn’t share their sibling’s gift. If rolling the tongue was genetic, then identical twins would share the trait. Sturtevant later acknowledged his mistake. But, of course, it stayed in the textbooks. Apparently, the skill can be taught to some people, but … This doesn’t mean tongue rolling has no Read More ›

From Ediacaran period (635 to 542 million years ago) fossils in Newfoundland: Apparently asexual reproduction that the researchers compare to that of plants (though it’s unclear that other branches of life cannot do this). So it appears, here: A significant fossil find on the Newfoundland coastline could shed light on what may be the oldest physical evidence of reproduction in a complex organism. A team led by researchers from England’s University of Cambridge found the fossils in the Trinity Bay North area. The new fossils were estimated to be 565 million years old and belonged to Fractofusus, a type of rangeomorph. Rangemorphs, marine organisms that looked a bit like ferns, were some of the earliest complex organisms on Earth. Earlier life Read More ›

That is, why inferring design on functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information, e.g.: and equally: . . . makes good sense. Now, overnight, UD’s Newsdesk posted on a Space dot com article, Is Our Universe a Fake? The article features “Philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.” I think Bostrom’s argument raises a point worth pondering, one oddly parallel to the Boltzmann brain popping up by fluctuation from an underlying sea of quantum chaos argument, as he discusses “richly detailed software simulation[s] of people, including their historical predecessors, by a very technologically advanced civilization”: >>Bostrom is not saying that humanity is living in such a simulation. Rather, his “Simulation Argument” seeks to show Read More ›

Good thing it’s Friday nite. From Space.com I began bemused. The notion that humanity might be living in an artificial reality — a simulated universe — seemed sophomoric, at best science fiction. But speaking with scientists and philosophers on “Closer to Truth,” I realized that the notion that everything humans see and know is a gigantic computer game of sorts, the creation of supersmart hackers existing somewhere else, is not a joke. Exploring a “whole-world simulation,” I discovered, is a deep probe of reality. More. Maybe the supersmart hackers are themselves creations of supersmart hackers. So it’s supersmart hackers all the way down? See also: How this nonsense came to be considered science. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Commenter psypaul writes regarding those (such as Sam Harris) who say consciousness is an illusion. Consciousness is an illusion….to whom? Who is being deceived? Isn’t ‘self’ an illusion as well? Doesn’t the concept of ‘illusion’ require a perceiver (person)? Absurdity. Indeed, psypaul.  As with much of the drivel that comes pouring out of the materialists, this is a statement of purported universal truth that requires an implicit exception for the speaker, thus rendering absurd its claim to being universal. “Consciousness is an illusion – except for me right now; I’m aware of (that is to say, “conscious of”) the illusion.” “There is no meaning.  Except what I just said.  That has meaning.” “We deconstructionists assert absolutely that all texts have Read More ›

The modern synthesis (schoolbook Darwinism) must be replaced, says philosopher of science Günther Witzany. Modern synthesis The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis is the name given to the school of thought which is now broadly accepted by evolutionary scientists around the world. Formal amalgamation of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Gregor Mendel’s genetics and August Weismann’s germ plasm theory was key to the Modern Synthesis, but other advances in population genetics and palaeontology were also important. From an interview with Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, at Huffington Post: Over the last half dozen years, philosopher of science and language, Günther Witzany, working from his private practice in Austria, has organized and/or co-organized two major conferences, Read More ›

Today professor Ted Davis, historian and Fellow at the BioLogos Foundation, explainswhy BioLogos does not promote the Warfare Thesis. Davis explains that just because the Warfare Thesis (the claim that Christianity often conflicts with and opposes scientific advances) is wrong doesn’t mean there aren’t real conflicts here and there. Davis points to geocentrism and the young-earth beliefs as examples of legitimate conflicts between religion and science. Davis’ point is that while the overarching model of Warfare between religion and science is flawed, there certainly are particular conflicts. So while we need to clarify the failure of the Warfare Thesis, we must not over compensate. We must not reject any and all conflicts as unreal:  Read more

Further to New Scientist asks What if we could talk to animals? No one with horse sense should be surprised by this: Horses share some surprisingly similar facial expressions to humans and chimps, according to new University of Sussex research. Mammal communication researchers have shown that, like humans, horses use muscles underlying various facial features – including their nostrils, lips and eyes – to alter their facial expressions in a variety of social situations. The findings, published in PLOS ONE today (05 August 2015), suggest evolutionary parallels in different species in how the face is used for communication. The study builds on previous research showing that cues from the face are important for horses to communicate, by developing an objective Read More ›

What if … We learn to talk to animals? That’s one of the big ideas that could, they say,  transform what it means to be human: Actually, we can talk to animals. We do. They don’t say anything back though. Probably never will. One needs to sign in/buy something to read the subsequent classic New Scientist piffle. But do note this (free): Steven Wise, a lawyer at the Florida-based Nonhuman Rights Project, which brought the lawsuit, argues that if chimps are declared legal persons, they should be granted rights to protect their fundamental interests. “That would certainly include bodily liberty and likely bodily integrity as well,” he says. We could no longer keep chimps in captivity, never mind subject them Read More ›

If they do: Astronomers are constantly uncovering the “most distant,” “most massive” or “most energetic” objects in our universe, but today, researchers have announced the discovery of a truly monstrous structure consisting of a ring of galaxies around 5 billion light-years across. … Astronomers believe these GRBs (and therefore the galaxies they inhabit) are somehow associated as all 9 are located at a similar distance from Earth. According to its discoverers, there’s a 1 in 20,000 probability of the GRBs being in this distribution by chance – in other words, they are very likely associated with the same structure, a structure that, according to cosmological models, should not exist. Where have we heard this before? Copernicus, you are not going Read More ›