Trivers. Vignette of Stephen Jay Gould here (a reluctant Darwinian, so Trivers doesn’t like him): As I left his office, I said to myself, this fool thinks he is bigger than natural selection. Perhaps I should have said, bigger than Darwin, but I felt it as bigger than natural selection itself—surely Stephen was going for the gold!! Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen personally thought he was something of an intellectual fraud precisely because he had a talent for coining terms that promised more than they could deliver, while claiming exactly the opposite. One example was the notion of “punctuated equilibria”—which simply asserted that rates of (morphological) evolution were not constant, but varied over time, often with periods Read More ›

Life forms always make sense. Some theories do not. From Phys.org: By sequencing multiple Trichodesmium genomes—and using a wide variety of samples to ensure that there was no error—researchers found that only about 63 percent of the bacteria’s genome is expressed as protein. That’s an incredibly low amount for a bacterium and unheard of for a free-living oligotroph. (lives under very poor conditions, in this case it thrives massively in barren stretches of the ocean) “The unique evolutionary path reflected in this genome contradicts nearly all accounts of free-living microbial genome architectures to date,” said lead author Nathan Walworth, a Ph.D. candidate at USC. “Different evolutionary paths are foundational to all arenas of biology, including biotechnology, so it is important Read More ›

The preceding Ediacaran life forms (635 to 542 mya) were gone already? Eaten up by early Cambrians (542 to 513 mya)? From New Scientist: The disappearance of the Ediacarans from the fossil record has long troubled biologists. Leading theories are a catastrophic mass extinction, that Ediacarans got eaten or had their habitat destroyed by newly evolved animals, or no longer left fossils because of a change in ocean conditions. But a careful search by Marc Laflamme of the University of Toronto in Mississauga and colleagues threw up no geochemical signatures of low-oxygen conditions or other turmoil to support the idea of an environmentally driven mass extinction. And given that soft-bodied Cambrian animals are fossilised within rocks like the famed Burgess Read More ›

From New Scientist: The term “parapsychology” can raise eyebrows. Do you encounter opposition to what you do? There is occult baggage attached to the field, which is really not related to what we actually do. We are scientists. Sometimes other scientists describe parapsychology as a pseudoscience, and that’s unfair. I’ll stick my neck out and say that the methodological standards of parapsychologists are sometimes higher than those of psychologists. For example, since 2012 I’ve been operating a parapsychology study registry; psychologists are only now starting to take study registration seriously. Parapsychologists are making extraordinary claims, so we have to ensure our research eliminates as many artefacts and normal explanations as we can. … Then it trails off into subscription brushland… Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “If quantum gravity in a flat space allows for a holographic description by a standard quantum theory, then there must by physical quantities, which can be calculated in both theories — and the results must agree,” says Grumiller. Especially one key feature of quantum mechanics -quantum entanglement — has to appear in the gravitational theory. When quantum particles are entangled, they cannot be described individually. They form a single quantum object, even if they are located far apart. There is a measure for the amount of entanglement in a quantum system, called “entropy of entanglement.” Together with Arjun Bagchi, Rudranil Basu and Max Riegler, Daniel Grumiller managed to show that this entropy of entanglement takes the same value Read More ›

At his blog, Curious Wavefunction, Ash Jogalekar* muses on the thinking of chemistry Nobelist John Pople (1998): But one of the simpler problems with training sets is that they are often incomplete and miss essential features that are rampant among the real world’s test sets (more pithily, all real cows as far as we know are non-spherical). This is where Pople’s point about presenting the strengths and weaknesses of models applies: if you are unsure how similar the test case is to the training set, let the experimentalists know about this limitation. Pople’s admonition also speaks to the more general one about always communicating the degree of confidence in a model to the experimentalists. Often even a crude assessment of this Read More ›

Hans Fiene’s video here brought to mind our recent exchanges on the nature of evidence in these pages. Be sure to watch to the end past the credits.

I have a question for non-ID proponents only and it is very simple: Is there even one tenet of modern evolutionary theory that is universally agreed upon by the proponents of modern evolutionary theory?

From Quanta Magazine: Life emerged so long ago that even the rock formations covering the planet at that time have been destroyed — and with them, most chemical and geological clues to early evolution. “There’s a huge chasm between the origins of life and the last common ancestor,” said Eric Gaucher, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The stretch of time between the origins of life and the last universal common ancestor saw a series of remarkable innovations — the origins of cells, metabolism and the genetic code. But scientists know little about when they happened or the order in which they occurred. Scientists do know that at some point in that time span, living creatures Read More ›

Here: A sponge essentially carves organs out of negative space, using its layers and jelly to delineate a complex network of channels and pores, which transport nutrients and waste much like a human kidney or bloodstream. This Spartan anatomy is so efficient that a single sponge can filter up to a thousand times its body volume of water in one day. Off the coast of Canada, reefs of glass sponges (so named for their silicate skeletons) can clean more than five hundred vertical feet of overlying water. And, if they take in dirt or toxins, sponges can clear themselves out with a languorous sneeze. … Even some professional biologists disregard sponges as lowly, primitive proto-animals, sitting at the bottom of Read More ›

Here, Michael Le Page reviews biochemist Nick Lane’s new book, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is? Living cells are powered by a totally unexpected process. The energy from food is used to pump protons across a membrane to build up an electrochemical gradient. This gradient drives the machinery of life, like water from a dam driving a turbine. And Lane argues that life has been powered by proton gradients from the very beginning. Forget all those primordial soups or “warm ponds”: only the natural proton gradients found in undersea alkaline hydrothermal vents could have provided the continuous flux of carbon and energy that life requires. These vents may be common on rocky planets so, if this Read More ›

Earlier we noted that the “We share 99% of our DNA with chimps” claim rises again” (Like Dracula it can’t really die, as it is culturally needed. So it just keeps rising from the grave. Evidence is irrelevant.*) In a paywalled article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Henry Gee reviews Thomas Suddendorf’s The Gap: Suddendorf’s task is to get into the minds of apes to get a more precise idea of what it is that separates us from the other apes. He concludes that the difference springs from six interdependent facilities, some of which are present in some degree in other creatures but which, in humans, reinforce one another, bootstrapping us from the mud and into the firmament. These Read More ›

From Tim Maudlin at PBS Nova blog: Many questions about the nature of reality cannot be properly pursued without contemporary physics. Inquiry into the fundamental structure of space, time and matter must take account of the theory of relativity and quantum theory. Philosophers accept this. In fact, several leading philosophers of physics hold doctorates in physics. Yet they chose to affiliate with philosophy departments rather than physics departments because so many physicists strongly discourage questions about the nature of reality. The reigning attitude in physics has been “shut up and calculate”: solve the equations, and do not ask questions about what they mean. … If your goal is only to calculate, this might be sufficient. But understanding existing theories and Read More ›

A friend writes to inform me that his son’s high school biology teacher is busily indoctrinating him into Darwinism by writing test questions that force the student to spew back Darwinist party-line answers in order to receive credit. Here are the questions: 1. One argument made against evolution is: evolution is random, so it cannot generate complex, orderly organisms. Explain why this statement is false. 2. Some people argue that evolution cannot be observed today. Explain how natural selection is observable in each of the following professionals (and makes their work more difficult): medical professionals, exterminators, and farmers. If the student were in college, I would advise him to simply spew back the party line as the teacher expects. At Read More ›

Closing our religion coverage a bit late today, here’s an interesting item on eight common factors as to why atheists change their minds. One key reason appears to be that they are propagandized to think that theists are dumb. But then, as one witness writes, And then there’s Leah Libresco—another atheist blogger turned Catholic. Leah recalls the challenging impact of reasonable Christians in her academic circle: “I was in a philosophical debating group, so the strongest pitch I saw was probably the way my Catholic friends rooted their moral, philosophical, or aesthetic arguments in their theology. We covered a huge spread of topics so I got so see a lot of long and winding paths into the consequences of belief.” Read More ›