Stick to coffee

New Scientist keeps wanting me (O’Leary for News) to pay to read an article advertised as follows: Our last common ancestors It’s the original “missing link”: the extinct ape that is the common ancestor of chimps and humans. But we still don’t know what it looked like, or indeed, whether we can be sure there was a single ancestor. … We all have our uncertainties, but we don’t usually expect people to pay to share them. From what one can tell, human evolution studies are in massive flux today, principally owing to more actual information. Couple recent stories: “Extinct” human group Denisovans’ genes found in Oceania peoples The way the article is written, the authors seem to want to advance the Read More ›

From Hugh Ross at Salvo: During my graduate school days at the University of Toronto (late 1960s) I took a short summer course, Advances in Planetary Physics, taught by astronomer Carl Sagan. Sagan was a rising star then and well on his way to becoming the science popularizer and communicator for which he later became famous. Most of the course and nearly all of the informal evening discussions focused on the possibility that extraterrestrial intelligent life existed and on the kinds of civilizations such beings would have established. In Sagan’s mind, there was absolutely no doubt that extraterrestrial intelligent beings (ETI) existed. Furthermore, he was convinced that on many planets in our galaxy ETIs had developed civilizations far more technically Read More ›

From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at Salvo: It is important to understand the fundamental difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Animals such as apes have material mental powers. By material, I mean powers that are instantiated in the brain and wholly depend upon matter for their operation. These powers include sensation, perception, imagination (the ability to form mental images), memory (of perceptions and images), and appetite. Nonhuman animals have a mental capacity to perceive and respond to particulars, which are specific material objects such as other animals, food, obstacles, and predators. Human beings have these powers, too, but they also have mental powers that entail a profoundly different kind of thinking. Unlike animals, humans think abstractly, and they have the power Read More ›

From the publisher’s copy for The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters by Daniel M.Wegner and Kurt Gray The Mind Club explains why we love some animals and eat others, why people debate the existence of God so intensely, how good people can be so cruel, and why robots make such poor lovers. By investigating the mind perception of extraordinary targets–animals, machines, comatose people, god–Wegner and Gray explain what it means to have a mind, and why it matters so much. Fusing cutting-edge research and personal anecdotes, The Mind Club explores the moral dimensions of mind perception with wit and compassion, revealing the surprisingly simple basis for what compels us to love and hate, to harm Read More ›

From David Eagleman’s review of David Gelernter’s The Tides of Mind, The problem of consciousness sits at the heart of neuroscience, and it is into this question that Yale computer-science professor David Gelernter steps with his fascinating “The Tides of Mind.” At the heart of Mr. Gelernter’s book is a critical observation often overlooked by artificial-intelligence researchers and neuroscientists alike: Your conscious experience is not just one thing. Instead, it falls on a spectrum. At one end, you’re attuned to the outside world; as you move further down the spectrum, you’re increasingly inside your own head, recalling memories and daydreaming. Each day you journey back and forth along the spectrum; your conscious experience changes hour by hour. … Mr. Gelernter Read More ›

From Zach Risdon at The Rebel: We generally think that those who push politically correct agendas on campus congregate in the social sciences. These people are annoying, but surely they have little influence on society as a whole, or more specifically, within medicine and science — fields focused on creating, discovering and building technology for the betterment of human existence, right? Well, I hate to break it to you, but the answer is an emphatic “no!” For example, the University of Calgary Department of Anthropology offers a course entitled “Sex and Gender.” As a student in that same department and college, my experience there has been almost always positive. However, this course is an exception. Here is the course outline Read More ›

From the New York Times, we learn: Ancestors of Modern Humans Interbred With Extinct Hominins, Study Finds The ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and another extinct line of humans known as the Denisovans at least four times in the course of prehistory, according to an analysis of global genomes published Thursday in the journal Science. The interbreeding may have given modern humans genes that bolstered immunity to pathogens, the authors concluded. “This is yet another genetic nail in the coffin of our oversimplistic models of human evolution,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, a research scientist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in the study. The new study expands on a series of findings Read More ›

Should psychologists sue for mental abuse? Lord knows, social sciences are troubled and easy to mock. After all, we don’t know if a physics prof is describing hadrons accurately. But we sense we might very well know more than the psych prof does about the dynamics driving our workplace. Especially if it turns out that he is one of a minority percentage of the population who holds to identified political views and helps suppress challenges from within the profession. Sure, they can get away with that if taxpayers are forced to fund them, but no one can be forced to take it seriously. So we read, for example, at Vox, In a recent blog post titled “I was wrong,” he Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: According to a new study, our ancestors between 2 and 3 million years ago started to spend far less time and effort chewing by adding meat to their diet and by using stone tools to process their food. The researchers estimate that such a diet would have saved early humans as many as 2.5 million chews per year, and made possible further changes that helped make us human. One of the biggest puzzles in human evolution is how species such as Homo erectus evolved smaller teeth, smaller faces, and smaller guts, and yet managed to get more energy from food to pay for their bigger brains and bodies before cooking was invented. “What we showed is that…by processing Read More ›

A friend writes to note what philosopher of science, John Elof Boodin (1869-1950), had to say about natural selection: The principle of natural selection is indeed an important contribution to biology. But it is a negative, not an architectonic, principle. It does not explain why variations appear, why they cumulate, why they assume an organization in the way of more successful adaptation. Organisms must, of course, be able to maintain themselves in their life environment and in the physical environment, in order to leave descendants and determine the character of the race. But that is all natural selection tells us. It does not explain the traits and organization of organisms nor why they become well or badly adapted to their Read More ›

From Perry Marshall’s blog, Cosmic Fingerprints: Not only has Dawkins ruined science, he’s ruined atheism too. 20 years ago, an atheist was an intellectual with whom one could have a reasonable dialogue. Today, most people experience atheists as bellicose angry males who commonly suffer from depression, who post anonymous tirades all over the internet so they can share their misery with everyone else. We have the New Atheists to thank for this. And their four horsemen. Dawkins – Dennett – Harris – Hitchens. Wanna have an intelligent discussion about atheism? Read Voltaire, Nietzche or Bertrand Russell. Agree or disagree, they will force you to think. Wanna have a pointless shouting match with a bunch of mannerless name-callers who make up just-so Read More ›

Not to start up the infinity battle again (okay, maybe we are … ), from New Scientist: Explanimator: Does infinity exist in the real world? … Some mathematicians are trying to rebuild the foundations of mathematics without the infinite. But if there is a biggest number, what would happen when you add one to it? The solution could be thinking of numbers as a cycle rather than a linear series, some sort of loop where you revert back to the beginning. It’s a little strange, but then so is infinity. More. The reader who forwarded the tip comments, “Compared to William Lane Craig’s lectures, this article seems shallow and infantile.” Here’s Craig. Readers can decide: See also: Durston and Craig Read More ›

Jonathan Wells, author of The Myth of Junk DNA , writes to say, re Mycoplasma mycoides Just Destroyed Evolution Like Venter’s earlier work, this is interesting. But as Hunter has pointed out, the minimal genome still has too much specified complexity to be explained by unguided evolution. Mycoplasma, the organism used by Venter’s lab, is parasitic or saprophytic. That is, it lives off other organisms or off organic waste from other organisms. In other words, it requires other living things for its survival. If anyone wants to infer anything about the origin of life from Venter’s minimal genome, they first have to explain the origin of other, more complex life forms. (Indeed, the stripped-down Mycoplasma made by Venter requires full Read More ›

My friend Steve used to have an old Pontiac that was in shambles. Somewhere along the line the front bumper had fallen off, and somebody welded on an I-beam as a replacement. It was a rust bucket that was literally falling apart, but the funny things was, that old car just kept on running, seemingly on inertia. A hose might spring a leak or a belt might snap, but it kept on running. Steve’s Pontiac had become a fixture—for better or worse, it had been running for decades and it was unbelievable that it would ever stop. Why breakdown now, it could always run one more day.  Read more