Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Aurelio Smith’s Analysis of Active Information

Recently, Aurelio Smith had a guest publication here at Uncommon Descent entitled Signal to Noise: A Critical Analysis of Active Information. Most of the post is taken up by a recounting of the history of active information. He also quotes the criticisms of Felsentein and English which have responded to at Evolution News and Views: These Critics of Intelligent Design Agree with Us More Than They Seem to Realize. Smith then does spend a few paragraphs developing his own objections to active information. Smith argues that viewing evolution as a search is incorrect, because organisms/individuals aren’t searching, they are being acted upon by the environment: Individual organisms or populations are not searching for optimal solutions to the task of survival. Organisms are passive Read More ›

Guest Post: Constancy of Self in Light of Near Death Experiences – A Disproof of Materialism

The following is a guest post be nkendall: One of the striking things about our experience as conscious, thinking humans is how constant our sense of self–our identity–is. Never in my life has there been any suspension or change of my conscious sense of who I am other than during sleep. Throughout our lives our brains change considerably. A myriad of new synaptic connections are formed especially in the early years. Yet one’s identity is immutable. Aside from these ongoing modifications of the brain, there are catastrophic changes as well. Those who have experienced surgery under general anesthesia or suffered cardiac arrest have had their brains shut down and consciousness suspended even if only briefly. Near death experiences represent a Read More ›

FYI-FTR: To JF (attn EL) on fitness functions, islands of function & bridging active information

Overnight, HT Mung, this was drawn to my attention: JF, TSZ: At the UD thread there were some loud dismissals of models that had genotypes and a fitness surface. It was declared that these genetic algorithms weren’t models of evolution. Actually DEM called such models “evolutionary search”, so they don’t seem to agree with the ID supporters in the UD thread. I think I should headline my reply, FTR: _______________ >> The concern is not whether hill climbing can work incrementally to give local optimisation or some close cousin to that; which can legitimately be described as evolution and tracked to correlate with the actually empirically observed case: microevolution. That hill climbing approach, we all learned in our first calculus Read More ›

Three diverse animals independently arrived at maximal fin speed solution

From ScienceDaily: Moving one’s body rapidly through water is a key to existence for many species. The Persian carpet flatworm, the cuttlefish and the black ghost knifefish look nothing like each other — their last common ancestor lived 550 million years ago, before the Cambrian period — a new study uses computer simulations, a robotic fish and video footage of real fish to show that all three aquatic creatures have evolved to swim using the same mechanical motion. These three animals are part of a very diverse group of aquatic animals — both vertebrate and invertebrate — that independently arrived at the same solution of how to use their fins to maximize speed. And, remarkably, this so-called “convergent” evolution happened Read More ›

Peer review “very good at sifting mediocre papers”

Measuring the effectiveness of scientific gatekeeping Significance Peer review is an institution of enormous importance for the careers of scientists and the content of published science. The decisions of gatekeepers—editors and peer reviewers—legitimize scientific findings, distribute professional rewards, and influence future research. However, appropriate data to gauge the quality of gatekeeper decision-making in science has rarely been made publicly available. Our research tracks the popularity of rejected and accepted manuscripts at three elite medical journals. We found that editors and reviewers generally made good decisions regarding which manuscripts to promote and reject. However, many highly cited articles were surprisingly rejected. Our research suggests that evaluative strategies that increase the mean quality of published science may also increase the risk of Read More ›

300 mya vampire squid has quite different reproduction from other squid

From ScienceDaily: While other squid reproduce all at once late in their lives, vampire squid appear to alternate between reproductive and resting phases. It’s a pattern of multiple spawning more common among fish. The researchers have now characterized the reproductive status of more than 40 vampire squid females. They report that one female in the sample, despite being in a reproductive resting phase, had released at least 3,800 eggs yet still retained 6,500 viable oocytes for future spawning. Assuming an average batch size of 100 eggs, the researchers suggest that this one female had already spawned about 38 times, with eggs in reserve for another 65 or so spawning episodes. Dawinism did not predict this, but as readers will see Read More ›

Neanderthals didn’t die out because modern hunting weapons were better?

This month, the Neanderthals died out because they couldn’t harness fire and last month wolves helped current humans kill off Neanderthals (as noted at the time, these theses are vulnerable to the first Neanderthal burial that turns up a wolfhound skeleton and/or the remains of fires. Anyway, there is a cottage industry of speculations as to why the Neanderthals “died out,” when the genetic evidence points to them simply being submerged in the general human population and losing a separate identity. That happens to distinctive groups today. Okay, the month isn’t even up yet but here at ScienceDaily we find a contrarian thesis: Modern humans did not bring about the demise of the Neanderthals due to superior weapons: There has Read More ›

Mathematician Peter Woit on how things have changed re quantum gravity

Changed sociologically, that is. Here: These days, things have changed. If you’re at Perimeter, prominent activities include: This week’s conference on a very technical issue in string theory, superstring perturbation theory. This month’s course of lectures on Explorations in String Theory. The next public lecture will feature Amanda Peet promoting string theory. Peet has been one of the more ferocious partisans of the string wars. The text advertising her public talk a few years back at the Center for Inquiry in Toronto warned attendees who might consider “parrotting of critical views by outsiders like Lee Smolin.” Numerous events mentioned, including For a more balanced view of quantum gravity issues, you might want to spend your time in France, where the Read More ›

Naturalism may explain religion – provided it is naturalist religion

From: Imagine a world of religions that naturalism might indeed be able to explain: Regarding the phenomenon of religion, here are two curious things: When naturalists (materialists) study religion, they get so many basic facts wrong, one wonders why they bother, except to bolster their own view. Second, they mainly study “revealed” religion, where the world is interpreted through a divine message (or some would say, an acute insight), revealing a higher order of reality. The recognized principal purpose of religion in that case is understanding of reality, not control over it. But it was not always so. Closing this series on the human mind, I would like to take you on a journey back to a time much closer Read More ›

Sociobiologist Robert Trivers offers vignettes of Darwin’s saints

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 ›

A new ocean mystery: Bacterium allegedly doesn’t make sense

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 ›

So the Cambrian really was an explosion then?

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 ›

Paywalled article in New Scientist on the paranormal?

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 ›

Oh, not this again… Is the universe a hologram?

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 ›

Does your method work because of or in spite of your theory?

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 ›