If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
‘Grue Jay’ Spotted in a Texas Backyard Is First-of-Its-Kind Hybrid (Russell McLendon, 10/07/25, Science Alert)
An odd bird found in a Texas backyard is the offspring of two distantly related species, separated by 7 million years of evolution, whose ranges only recently began to overlap due to climate change, researchers report in a new study.
The Tragic God: Love and Mourning at the End of Time (Daniel Gauss, 10/12/25, 3Quarks)
One day, a rabbi came to speak to our teaching staff. I was touched when he singled me out with a friendly gesture, a small, personal act of welcome from a community that had warmly embraced me, and I was happy to be a part of, even though I came from a different religious background.He said, genuinely smiling widely, “I heard this guy here is quite a mensch! Yes? No?” To my relief my kind and supportive colleagues smiled at me and nodded their heads. “So he’s a good guy? I heard the kids like him. OK.”
The rabbi continued, “Now here’s my question. If I were to put Dan, this good guy, in Antarctica, in a hut with food and water, but no life, no life at all, not even a cockroach, nothing alive for miles around, nothing living that Dan could see, so Dan would be completely isolated, would he still be good?”
It was a clever setup. Most nodded. Some said, “Yeah, of course he would. He’s good, period, wherever he is.” But the rabbi, still smiling, said, “Well, if you think about it, you can’t be ‘good, period’. Goodness without someone to be good to isn’t goodness.”
Then he offered a startling analogy: this, he said, was God’s condition before “creation.” Only with others, with creation, with humanity, could God be good. Goodness needs relationship. Without humanity, God was not good, and God needed to be good. God had just been itching to be good.
Is Life a Form of Computation?: Alan Turing and John von Neumann saw it early: the logic of life and the logic of code may be one and the same. (Blaise Agüera y Arcas, MIT Reader)
Although this is seldom fully appreciated, von Neumann was one of the first to establish a deep link between life and computation. Reproduction, like computation, he showed, could be carried out by machines following coded instructions. In his model, based on Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, self-replicating systems read and execute instructions much like DNA does: “if the next instruction is the codon CGA, then add an arginine to the protein under construction.” It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.Of course, there are meaningful differences between biological computing and the kind of digital computing done by a personal computer or your smartphone. DNA is subtle and multilayered, including phenomena like epigenetics and gene proximity effects. Cellular DNA is nowhere near the whole story, either. Our bodies contain (and continually swap) countless bacteria and viruses, each running their own code.
It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.
Biological computing is “massively parallel,” decentralized, and noisy. Your cells have somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 quintillion ribosomes, all working at the same time. Each of these exquisitely complex floating protein factories is, in effect, a tiny computer — albeit a stochastic one, meaning not entirely predictable. The movements of hinged components, the capture and release of smaller molecules, and the manipulation of chemical bonds are all individually random, reversible, and inexact, driven this way and that by constant thermal buffeting. Only a statistical asymmetry favors one direction over another, with clever origami moves tending to “lock in” certain steps such that a next step becomes likely to happen.
This differs greatly from the operation of “logic gates” in a computer, basic components that process binary inputs into outputs using fixed rules. They are irreversible and engineered to be 99.99 percent reliable and reproducible.
Biological computing is computing, nonetheless. And its use of randomness is a feature, not a bug. In fact, many classic algorithms in computer science also require randomness (albeit for different reasons), which may explain why Turing insisted that the Ferranti Mark I, an early computer he helped to design in 1951, include a random number instruction. Randomness is thus a small but important conceptual extension to the original Turing Machine, though any computer can simulate it by calculating deterministic but random-looking or “pseudorandom” numbers.
Parallelism, too, is increasingly fundamental to computing today. Modern AI, for instance, depends on both massive parallelism and randomness — as in the parallelized “stochastic gradient descent” (SGD) algorithm, used for training most of today’s neural nets, the “temperature” setting used in chatbots to introduce a degree of randomness into their output, and the parallelism of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which power most AI in data centers.
Traditional digital computing, which relies on the centralized, sequential execution of instructions, was a product of technological constraints. The first computers needed to carry out long calculations using as few parts as possible. Originally, those parts were flaky, expensive vacuum tubes, which had a tendency to burn out and needed frequent replacement by hand. The natural design, then, was a minimal “Central Processing Unit” (CPU) operating on sequences of bits ferried back and forth from an external memory. This has come to be known as the “von Neumann architecture.”
Turing and von Neumann were both aware that computing could be done by other means, though. Turing, near the end of his life, explored how biological patterns like leopard spots could arise from simple chemical rules, in a field he called morphogenesis. Turing’s model of morphogenesis was a biologically inspired form of massively parallel, distributed computation. So was his earlier concept of an “unorganized machine,” a randomly connected neural net modeled after an infant’s brain.
These were visions of what computing without a central processor could look like — and what it does look like, in living systems.
Claims of pure bloodlines? Ancestral homelands? DNA science says no. (Alvin Powell, September 18, 2025, The Harvard Gazette)
Human history is rife with contentions about the purity (and superiority) of the bloodlines of one group over another and claims over ancestral homelands.More than a decade of work on ancient human DNA has upended it all.
Instead, Harvard geneticist David Reich said on Monday, increasingly sophisticated analysis of genetic material made possible by technological advances shows that virtually everyone came from somewhere else, and everyone’s genetic background shows a mix from different waves of migration that washed over the globe.
Quantum Mechanics and the Problem of Minds (Society of Catholic Scientists, October 13, 2025, Church Life Journal)
This leads us to a basic question. In quantum mechanics, there is always a “system” that is measured and that is described by a wave function, and an “observer” who makes observations or measurements of the system that collapse the wave function. The question is where the “system” ends and the “observer” begins.
Suppose that I am the observer, and the system I am studying is a radioactively unstable nucleus. One could count only the nucleus as the system, and consider the Geiger counter, my sensory organs, the part of my brain that processes the information from my sensory organs, and me in toto as the observer. Alternatively, one could lump the Geiger counter in as part of the system, meaning that there would be a wave function describing both the nucleus and the Geiger counter. Everything else would be considered the observer. Or one could consider not only the nucleus and the Geiger counter but also my sensory organs as part of the system. One could move more and more over from the observer side of the line to the system side. So it is somewhat arbitrary where the line between the “system” and the “observer” (sometimes called the “Heisenberg cut”) is drawn. Nevertheless, the logic of quantum mechanics requires that it must be drawn, and it must be drawn in such a way that there is something on each side of it. If one tries to put everything on the “system” side, so that there is nothing left on the “observer” side—so that there is no longer an observer at all, or any observation—you end up with a wave function that never collapses and probabilities that never jump to give definite outcomes. To quote Eugene Wigner again:
Even though the dividing line between the observer, whose consciousness is being affected, and the observed physical object can be shifted towards the one or the other to a considerable degree, it cannot be eliminated.
What is it that must remain on the “observer” side of the “Heisenberg cut”? It cannot be any part of his or her body, for these are physical and should be describable by wave functions. It is hard to escape the conclusion that there is some aspect of the mind of the observer that is non-physical.
It’s getting harder for scientists not to believe in God (Michel-Yves Bolloré, 12 October 2025, TYhe Spectator)
It is true that the existence of God cannot be proved incontrovertibly. While absolute proofs only exist in the theoretical domains of mathematics and logic, relative proofs are what we normally deal with, and what is generally considered ‘evidence’ in everyday life. If, like Richard Dawkins, we take a rational and scientific approach to the existence or non-existence of God, then we should only be persuaded by multiple, independent, and converging pieces of evidence.
Scientists across many fields of inquiry are now coming round to the idea that the thermal death of the universe and the Big Bang are strong evidence that our cosmos had an absolute beginning, while the fine-tuning of the universe and the transition from inert matter to life imply (separately) some more extraordinary fine tuning, showing the intervention of a creator external to our world.
With sets of converging evidence from different scientific disciplines – cosmology to physics, biology to chemistry – it is increasingly difficult for materialists to hold their position. Indeed, if they deny a creator, then they must accept and uphold that the universe had no beginning, that some of the greatest laws of physics (the principle of conservation of mass-energy, for example) have been violated, and that the laws of nature have no particular reason to favour the emergence of life.
Weighing up the evidence on each side of the scale is a matter of intellectual rigour, and the question ‘Is there a creator God?’ is one we should all be asking ourselves, with serious implication for every one of us. What’s intriguing is that it’s actually the youth, who you’d think would be more preoccupied with more mundane and practical concerns, that are leading the way.
A blue jay and a green jay mated, researchers say. Their offspring is a scientific marvel (CNN, September 29, 2025)
The bigger question scientists are puzzling over, though, is why does the mystery bird exist?
“We think it’s the first observed vertebrate that’s hybridized as a result of two species both expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change,” said Brian Stokes, a doctoral student of biology at the University of Texas at Austin and first author of the study published September 10 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
Interbreeding Hybrid Giant Salamanders Are Creating A Very Sticky Situation For Conservationists: Escapees of the restaurant trade are making things tricky for the conservation of giant salamanders. (Tom Hale, 10/02/25, IFL Science)
Scientists have noted how these two species managed to “hit it off” and started hybridizing in Japan’s streams. In a 2024 study, researchers collected 68 samples from giant salamanders in the Kamogawa River of Kyoto, as well as several samples from private collections, aquariums, and zoos throughout Japan.They found that some of these individuals were hybrids of Japanese giant salamander and Chinese giant salamander, created by the two species interbreeding. In some cases, it appears that hybrid offspring also mated with each other or others from the “genetically pure” populations, creating an even deeper mix of hybridity and gene mixing.
The Math Says Life Shouldn’t Exist: New Study Challenges Origins Theories (Mark Thompson, 8/31/25, Universe Today)
A new study addresses one of science’s most enduring questions: how did life first arise from nonliving matter on the early Earth? Using advanced mathematical methods, Robert G. Endres of Imperial College London developed a framework indicating that the spontaneous emergence of life may have been far more difficult than previously thought.
The research highlights the immense challenge of generating structured biological information under realistic prebiotic conditions, underscoring how unlikely it would have been for the first living cell to appear naturally.
we are all designist.
Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet) (Adam Frank, July 8, 2025, Noema)
In this way, over time, scientists began to imagine a perspective-less perspective, a supposed God’s-eye view of the universe — free of any human bias. The philosopher Thomas Nagel calls this the “view from nowhere.” And this philosophical position eventually became synonymous with mainstream science itself.The development of the thermometer, and from it the science of thermodynamics, offers a notable example of our scientific culture’s blind spot. In it, we can see how those unchanging elements of experience are extracted and then, in time, misconstrued as a false perspective-less perspective.
The embodied feeling of being hot or cold is a basic example of direct experience. But developing a measurable scale of this experience for future scientific inquiry took centuries of work. Much of this story played out in what we now call laboratories, where those elements of experience could be isolated and probed. First, hot and cold needed to become correlated with something like the level of alcohol or mercury in a graduated tube. This was the invention of thermometry. Once a way to measure degrees was established, those degrees could then be used to investigate other focal points of experience, like the boiling point of water. A mathematically formulated theory of thermodynamics was then slowly developed, describing the relationship between temperature and heat flow. Later, higher levels of abstraction came as the random motions of unseen atoms — studied via the new field of statistical mechanics — were recognized as the true nature of heat. In this way, more phenomena studied in labs became describable in ever more precise terms. Along with those new, precise descriptions came new, powerful capacities to control the world via technologies like heat engines or refrigeration.
As this upward spiral of abstraction was traversed, something, however, was lost. In what Husserl called the “surreptitious substitution,” abstractions like thermometric degrees were treated as more real than the experience they imparted. Eventually, the first-person, embodied experience of being hot or feeling cold was pushed aside as a phantom epiphenomenon, while abstracted quantities like temperature, enthalpy, Gibbs potentials and phase space became more fundamental and more real. This amnesia of experience is science’s blind spot.
Science is nothing more than a product of consciousness.