Daily Archives: May 11, 2017

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Pro-Europe win raises scientists hopes Researchers in France reacted with relief and optimism to Emmanuel Macrons sweeping victory in the countrys presidential elections on 7 May. Macron decisively defeated his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Front National party, who had threatened to take France out of the European Union. The pro-European president-elect promised in his campaign to save Frances research and higher-education budgets from cuts and to launch a science-driven innovation programme to create jobs.

Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty

Cap on grants The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, will limit the amount of funding that scientists supported by the agency can hold at any one time. The policy, announced on 2 May, is intended to make it easier for early- and mid-career scientists to obtain NIH grants. The agency said it will not set a hard limit on the number of grants or the amount of funding that individual researchers can receive. Instead, it will introduce a grant-support index that assigns a point value to each type of grant on the basis of its complexity and size. Currently, just 10% of grant recipients win more than 40% of the NIHs research money.

Mixed societies A total of 36 women were inducted last week into the leading scientific societies of the United States and the United Kingdom. On 2 May, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced 84 new members, 23 of whom (27%) are women. And on 5 May, the Royal Society, Britains oldest and most prestigious scientific society, named 13 women (26%) in its 2017 class of 50 fellows. In addition, NAS president Marcia McNutt, a geophysicist, was made a foreign member of the Royal Society.

New shores David Lipman is stepping down as director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in Bethesda, Maryland, the institute announced on 3May. Lipman, who has directed the NCBI since its creation in 1988, was responsible for launching the literature database PubMed and the DNA-sequence repository GenBank, along with other public bioinformatics databases. Lipman will now serve as chief science officer at a private food-science company, Impossible Foods in Redwood City, California.

Failed deal Dutch universities have failed to reach a new agreement with Oxford University Press (OUP) over access to the publishers academic journals. On 1 May, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands, which led the negotiations, said that the countrys research universities were unable to agree to the British publishers latest licensing proposal, because it did not include an offer for affordable open access to research articles in OUP journals. The Netherlands aims to make the results of all publicly funded science freely accessible by 2020.

Secret mission After nearly 718 days in space, the US Air Forces unmanned X-37B spaceplane landed at NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 7 May. The reusable plane, which looks like a miniature space shuttle, was on an unspecified mission to carry out experiments in orbit. It was the fourth and longest flight yet for the military programme, and the first to land in Florida rather than at an Air Force base in California.

US Air Force

DIY memo The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm has called on European Union member states to review their procedures for authorizing do-it-yourself gene-engineering kits produced in the United States. The kits, which are intended to contain a harmless strain of the common laboratory bacterium Escherichia coli, use CRISPR precision-editing technologies and are targeted at citizen scientists. The move followed the discovery in March by German authorities that some kits had been contaminated with pathogenic bacteria, including some multidrug-resistant strains. Germany has since banned their import. The ECDCs assessment report concluded that the risk of infection to users is low.

Dead flowers A paperwork blunder has led to the accidental destruction of a valuable botanical reference collection, according to media reports. In March, biosecurity officers with the Australian quarantine authorities destroyed allegedly mislabelled samples of rare nineteenth-century daisies, which the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris had sent on loan to Brisbane. Australian authorities have asked for a review of the incident, the BBC reports.

Call for diversity Canadian universities must develop plans to diversify the composition of some of their most prestigious posts, according to a requirement announced on 4May by a trio of science-funding agencies. The new rule applies to the Can$265-million (US$194-million) Canada Research Chairs Program, which funds an estimated 1,600professorships at Canadian higher-education institutions. By December, universities with five or more research chairs must present a plan to increase the representation of women, indigenous peoples and other minority groups, as well as people with disabilities. Progress reports are required annually, and the agencies warned that failure to fulfil the requirements could result in the withholding of funds.

Advisers axed The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has dismissed at least five academic researchers from a scientific advisory board. The scientists were notified on 5May that their appointments to the 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors had expired and would not be renewed, according to media reports. An EPA official said the agency would consider replacing them with representatives from EPA-regulated industries. The US House of Representatives has also passed a Republican-sponsored bill to restructure another EPA advisory board; critics say the legislation would make it easier for industry representatives to serve.

Nazi review Germanys Max Planck Society has launched a 1.5-million (US$1.6-million), three-year study to discover as much as possible about the victims of Nazi euthanasia programmes whose brains were acquired by scientists for neuroscience research. Around 200,000 physically or mentally disabled people were murdered during the programmes. On 2May, the society named a four-member international team that will try to identify those victims whose remains are still in Max Planck institutes and those who were interred in a special ceremony in 1990. The team will also try to reconstruct exactly what happened to the brain preparations, and how they may have been used in research and research publications.

Irrational doctrine Serbias evolutionary society has expressed concern over a renewed attack on Charles Darwins theory of evolution by some 170Serbian academics, including engineers, physicians, artists, philosophers, journalists, teachers and clergy. On 3 May, the group signed a petition to include the teaching of creationist theory in schools and universities. The academics also claim in a letter to the education and science ministry, the parliament, Serbias Academy of Sciences and Arts and its leading universities that Darwins dogmatic theory lacks scientific confirmation. In response, scientists with the evolutionary society said that the signatories and their creationist reasoning lack understanding of simple biology. In 2004, the Serbian education ministry had attempted in vain to ban evolutionary theory from school curricula.

Charitable donations to British universities surpassed the 1-billion (US$1.3-billion) milestone for the first time last year. The 110 universities that took part in the latest RossCASE survey of charitable giving secured a total of 1.06billion in philanthropic income in the academic year 201516. Donations were up 23% on the previous year and have almost tripled over the past 12 years. Fifty-five per cent of this income came from organizations, and 45% from individual donors.

Source: Council for Advancement and Support of Education

1516 May A Royal Society meeting in Newport Pagnell, UK, addresses how long-term climate change has affected marine palaeolandscapes.

1519 May The International Conference on Precision Physics and Fundamental Physical Constants takes place in Warsaw.

Read more:

DIY gene engineering, an attack on Darwinism and a probe into Nazi science. - Nature.com

Eric Metaxas at BreakPoint is one of our favorite popular commentators on evolution. In a broadcast, he takes note of our commentary here. As we noted last month, Octopus Genetic Editing Animals Defy Their Own Neo-Darwinism.

From Metaxas on how The Octopus Outsmarts Darwin Again:

The Tel Aviv researchers found tens of thousands of such RNA recoding sites in cephalopods, allowing a creature like the octopus to essentially reprogram itself, adding new riffs to its basic genetic blueprint. In other words, these invertebrates dont care that they didnt inherit the smart genes. They make themselves smart, anyway.

Of course, an animal cant be the author of its own intelligence, and this is not a process anyone believes cephalopods perform consciously. Rather, it is a marvelous piece of adaptive programming built-in to their biology.

Darwinists have tried to spin this feat as a special kind of evolution. But the folks at Evolution News cut through this nonsense and identify RNA editing for what it is: non-evolution.

Neo-Darwinism did not make cephalopods what they are, they write. These highly intelligent and well-adapted animals edited their own genomes, so what possible need do they have forblind, random, unguided evolution?

This is also an emerging field of research, which means its possible, in theory, that other organisms make extensive use of RNA editing, and were just not aware of it, yet.

If, as one popular science website puts it, other creatures can defy the central dogma of genetics, the implications for Darwins tree of life, and his entire theory, are dire.

But if cephalopods and the complex information processing that makes them so unique are in fact the result of a Programmer of a Designer the waters of biology become far less inky.

A friend asks if this phenomenon is an example of Lamarckism, according to which organisms evolve by adapting to their environments and then passing on newly acquired characteristics to their offspring. We wouldnt call it that, but we do call it a problem for neo-Darwinism. Among other reasons, thats because it reveals that organisms need much more information than is provided by DNA sequences. Therefore, DNA mutations cannot provide sufficient raw materials for evolution.

This latest research is impressive, but RNA editing is not new. As Eric Metaxas smartly anticipates, there is indeed extensive RNA editing in other organisms, too including humans.

Care for documentation? Find it here:

That would make the problem for Darwinism even more acute than Eric suggests.

Photo: Octopus tetricus (Gloomy Octopus), by Sylke Rohrlach (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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More on Octopus RNA Editing A Problem for Neo-Darwinism - Discovery Institute

commentary By Robert H. Nelson | 13 mins ago Does God exist? Michael Peligro, CC BY-ND

The question of whether a God exists is heating up in the 21st century. According to a Pew survey, the percentage of Americans having no religious affiliation reached 23 percent in 2014. Among such nones, 33 percent said that they do not believe in God an 11 percent increase since only 2007.

Such trends have ironically been taking place even as the rational probabilities for the existence of a supernatural God have been rising. In my 2015 book, God? Very Probably, I explore five rational reasons why it is very probable that such a God exists.

In 1960, the Princeton physicist and subsequent Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner raised a fundamental question: Why did the natural world always so far as we know obey laws of mathematics?

Most working mathematicians today believe that mathematics exists independent of physical reality. It is the job of mathematicians to discover the realities of this separate world of mathematical laws and concepts. Physicists then put the mathematics to use according to the rules of prediction and confirmed observation of the scientific method.

But modern mathematics generally is formulated before any natural observations are made and many mathematical laws today have no known existing physical analogues.

Einsteins 1915 general theory of relativity, for example, was based on theoretical mathematics developed 50 years earlier by the great German mathematician Bernhard Riemann that did not have any known practical applications at the time of its intellectual creation.

In some cases, the physicist also discovers the mathematics. Isaac Newton was considered among the greatest mathematicians as well as physicists of the 17th century. Other physicists sought his help in finding a mathematics that would predict the workings of the solar system. He found it in the mathematical law of gravity, based in part on his discovery of calculus.

At the time, however, many people initially resisted Newtons conclusions because they seemed to be occult.

How could two distant objects in the solar system be drawn toward one another, acting according to a precise mathematical law? Indeed, Newton made strenuous efforts over his lifetime to find a natural explanation but in the end he conceded failure. He could say only that it is the will of God.

Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics, little has changed in this regard. As Wigner wrote, The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.

In other words, as something supernatural, it takes the existence of some kind of a God to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible.

Other leading physicists and mathematicians have since offered similar views.

The great British physicist Roger Penrose in 2004 put forward a vision of a universe composed of three independently existing worlds mathematics, the material world and human consciousness. As Penrose acknowledged, it was a complete puzzle to him, how the three interacted with one another outside the ability of any scientific or other conventionally rational model to explain.

How can physical atoms and molecules, for example, create something that exists in a separate domain that has no physical existence, human consciousness?

It is a mystery that lies beyond science.

This mystery is the same one that existed in the Greek world view of Plato, who believed that abstract ideas (above all mathematical) first existed outside any physical reality. The material world that we experience as part of our human existence is an imperfect reflection of these prior formal ideals. For Plato, the realm of such ideals is the realm of God.

Indeed, in 2014 the MIT physicist Max Tegmark argued in Our Mathematical Universe that mathematics is the fundamental world reality that acting in a God-like fashion drives the universe.

The workings of human consciousness are similarly miraculous. Like the laws of mathematics, consciousness has no physical presence in the world; the images and thoughts in our consciousness have no measurable dimensions.

Yet, our nonphysical thoughts somehow mysteriously guide the actions of our physical human bodies. This is no more scientifically explicable than the mysterious ability of nonphysical mathematical constructions to determine the workings of a separate physical world.

Until recently, the scientifically unfathomable quality of human consciousness inhibited the very scholarly discussion of the subject. Since the 1970s, however, it has become a leading area of inquiry among philosophers.

Recognizing that he could not reconcile his own scientific materialism with the existence of a nonphysical world of human consciousness, a leading atheist, Daniel Dennett, in 1991 took the radical step of denying that consciousness even exists.

Finding this altogether implausible, as most people do, another leading philosopher, Thomas Nagel, wrote in 2012 that, given the scientifically inexplicable the intractable character of human consciousness, We will have to leave [scientific] materialism behind as a complete basis for understanding the world of human existence.

The supernatural character of the workings of human consciousness offers a second strong rational grounds for raising the probability of the existence of a supernatural God.

Darwins theory of evolution in 1859 offered a theoretical explanation for a strictly physical mechanism by which the current plant and animal kingdoms might have come into existence, and assumed their current forms, without any necessary role for a God.

In recent years, however, traditional Darwinism and later revised accounts of neo-Darwinism have themselves come under increasingly strong scientific challenge. From the 1970s onwards, the Harvard evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould, for example, complained that little evidence could be found in the fossil record of the slow and gradual evolution of species as theorized by Darwin.

In 2011, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist James Shapiro explained that, remarkably enough, many micro-evolutionary processes worked as though guided by a purposeful sentience of the evolving plant and animal organisms themselves a concept far removed from the random selection processes of Darwinism.

With these developments bringing standard evolutionary understandings into growing question, the probability of a God existing has increased correspondingly.

For the past 10,000 years at a minimum, the most important changes in human existence have been driven by cultural developments occurring in the realm of human ideas.

In the Axial Age (commonly dated from 800 to 200 B.C.), world-transforming ideas such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and the Hebrew Old Testament almost miraculously appeared at about the same time in India, China, ancient Greece and among the Jews in the Middle East these peoples then having little interaction with one another.

The development of the scientific method in the 17th century in Europe and its modern further advances have had at least as great a set of world-transforming consequences. There have been many historical theories, but none capable of explaining as fundamentally transformational a set of events as the rise of the modern world. It was a revolution in human thought, operating outside any explanations grounded in scientific materialism, that drove the process.

That all these astonishing things, verging on miracles, happened within the conscious workings of human minds, functioning outside physical reality, offers further rational evidence in my view for the conclusion that human beings may well be made in the image of [a] God.

In his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, the American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace said that Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Even though Karl Marx, for example, condemned the illusion of religion, his followers, ironically, worshiped Marxism. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre thus wrote that for much of the 20th century Marxism was the historical successor of Christianity, claiming to show the faithful the one correct path to a new heaven on Earth.

In several of my books, I have explored how Marxism and other such economic religions were characteristic of much of the modern age. So Christianity, I would argue, did not disappear as much as it reappeared in many such disguised forms of secular religion.

That the Christian essence, as arose out of Judaism, showed such great staying power amidst the extraordinary political, economic, intellectual and other radical changes of the modern age is a fifth rational reason for thinking combined with the other four that the existence of a God is very probable.

(Robert H. Nelsonis a professor ofpublic policy and the University of Maryland)

Read more from the original source:

Five rational arguments why God (very probably) exists - Religion News Service