Author: Evolution News
Flying Fish in the Darwin Magic Show
First there was one; now, like magic, there are two independent flying fish families that “evolved.” They just evolved.
Spiders Have Eight (Well-Designed) Eyes
Spiders are good for scaring people at Halloween, but they’re really intelligently designed animals more scared of us than we are of them, with eight eyes to alert them of our approach.
The Cell as an Information-Sharing Domain
The only cases of systems where we observe optimization of signal to noise are (1) life and (2) human-engineered communication systems.
Whale Imitates People, Person Imitates Whales
If we were peer-reviewing the article in Current Biology, our review would consist of one three-letter interjection.
Pseudoscience, Eugenics, and Demarcation
Look here: A physicist who seems to understand the demarcation problem proceeds to demarcate “pseudoscience” on his own authority. Alex Wellerstein reviewed a book on pseudoscience that explicitly warns about the challenge of differentiating between science and pseudoscience. Wellerstein, of the Center for the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics in Maryland, wrote in the Oct. 12 issue of Science this summary of what Michael D. Gordin said about the “demarcation problem” in his new book, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. Velikovsky’s cosmic catastrophism is, for Gordin, also a case study on the famously intractable demarcation problem, the difficulty of coming up with firm criteria for what separates science from nonscience, or Read More ›