Angry Birds Evolution, out today on iOS and Android, is a flick-and-spin style mobile game in which players collect and evolve characters like Dolores, the avian doctor with a penchant for vicious rectal exams.

Something is causing the pigs to flock to Bird Island in droves, and its up to the player to form teams of collectible characters and flick the pigs back to whatever bacon-scented hell they hail from.

Like most non-core Angry Birds games, Evolution is a licensed take on a different popular mobile genre. In this case, its those games where you launch characters Beyblade-style into an arena, bouncing off enemies to do damage.

Players collect and evolve bird characters as they play. Each falls into a color categoryred, yellow, blue, black, white and suchand each category has its own special ability that activates during play. Black birds can become targeted bombs. White birds pass through enemies in a straight line, damaging all.

Its a solid entry in the mobile sub-genre. The game plays well, and theres plenty of strategy and angling involved in taking out the various pigs players are pitted against.

The action is fine, but the tone is a bit off. The Angry Birds franchise is popular with kids. Hell, were just coming off a major animated motion picture. The humor here is definitely adult-leaning. Look at Wade here.

Maybe its just me, and that bird is not talking about his penis. And hey, everybody gets rectal exams, right?

For the most part the new characters created for the game are culled from various pop culture sources, and theyre mostly harmless.

Adult humor aside, Angry Birds Evolution is a nifty little game so far, especially if youre into slamming things against other things and collecting characters. Just known that you might have to explain some grown-up words to your kids should they get their hands on it.

Read more:

Angry Birds Evolution Takes The Birds Vs. Pigs Battle To A Weird Place - Kotaku

Like so many post-MTV pop stars who elevate image cultivation to a discrete art form, Lana Del Rey is at her best in music videos. While her songwriting recipe hasnt changed much over the years (sad girls + Americana + string sections + quotes from other famous songs), her artistry has slowly revealed itself in a series of promo clips and short films that registered the evolution of what once appeared to be an absurdly thin persona. Were no closer to knowing the real Lizzy Grant than we were almost six years ago, when Video Games premiered, but the 25 videos she's released since achieving fame as Lana Del Rey have endowed her alter ego with more depth than once seemed possible.

Now, shes preparing to release her fourth album, Lust for Life, next month. Naturally, she's pushing her aesthetic forward with a few new videos, so it seemed time to have a look back at the LDR persona on film.

Most of us got our first glimpse of Lana Del Rey in this self-directed video, which juxtaposes pouty closeups of the singer with nostalgic shots of Hollywood landmarks, American flags, mid-century home movies, and black-and-white footage of skater boys. At first glance, Video Games seems shoddily constructed and a touch juvenile, like a Pinterest board collecting all the images Del Rey hoped to incorporate into her nascent persona. Even her smartest critics found her campy in an unintentional, trying-too-hard way at first.

But if you look closely enough at Video Games, youll see that Del Rey has always been cannier than she let on. Mixed in with all that Instagram-friendly imagery of pretty Lana and idyllic California is a clip of the deeply intoxicated actress Paz de la Huerta falling over in a beaded gown, as paparazzi halfheartedly mumble You OK? and keep snapping photos. Considering were looking at de la Huertaa minor actress whose drunken antics had already made her a cultural punchline by 2011rather than, say, Marilyn Monroe, this isnt a vision of glamorous dissipation. Like the lyric Its you, its you, its all for you repeated in a listless monotone, the de la Huerta nod suggests that even a pre-fame Lana Del Rey understood Hollywood to be just as cruel and humiliating as it is alluring.

Del Rey used to bill herself as a gangster Nancy Sinatra, a phrase that evoked some combination of big hair, vintage dresses, and the frisson of danger inherent in depictions of organized crime, from Scarface to American Gangster. She played that persona to the hilt in her first big-budget video, for the title track of her debut album, Born to Die. Shot at Frances Palace of Fontainebleau and directed by Yoann Lemoine (who recently made Harry Styles fly in Sign of the Times), it intersperses shots of Del Rey on a throne, flanked by tigers, with flashbacks to a date with a tattoo-covered boyfriend that turns deadly. Shes in the afterlife now, is the eventual implication, a martyr to romance in a flowing white dress and flower crown.

The two halves of the video reflect the two simplistic extremes of the Lana Del Rey archetype: the virginal Coachella queen and the sexy bad girl in denim cutoffs and Converse. Its narrative, meanwhile, captures everything that is romantic and clever and problematic about her at once. From a feminist perspective (which supposedly doesnt interest Lana much in comparison with, you know, SpaceX and Tesla), the story of an abused woman who is rewarded for her suffering with a place in heaven is noxious to the core. And yet, the affectlessness with which Del Rey plays her character, especially in those scenes from beyond the grave, can also read as an acknowledgment that the myth shes rehashing in Born to Die is essentially hollow.

The most heated arguments about Lana Del Rey tend to revolve around one question: Is she playing to male fantasies (and female fantasies shaped by patriarchal visions of ideal womanhood), or is she mirroring them in ways that are actually supposed to be disconcerting? She digs her heels into that thin line in the ten-minute short film for Ride, from her Paradise EP. Directed by the frequent Rihanna, Drake, and Taylor Swift collaborator Anthony Mandler and scripted by Del Rey, it pairs the songs lonely-drifter lyrics with classic symbols and characters of the American road: bikers, hookers, seedy motels, an unfortunate and perhaps intentionally outrage-baiting feathered headdress, convenience stores where you buy a 20 oz. of orange soda and drink it against a wall as you inhale gasoline fumes.

In the end credits, Del Rey labels her character in the film an artist. Its a bold title to bestow upon a woman who, as far as we can glean from both the visuals and the monologues that bookend the song, seems to have left a middling music career for life on the road as a prostitute and biker chick. It takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it to know what true freedom is, she intones before the music starts playing. Again, her relationship to fame is unhinged: How bleak is the entertainment industry when a transient life of rest stops and rough-looking johns is preferable? Judging by how sad Del Rey looks in the scenes where shes singing onstage, the difference between performing and turning tricks is that at least the latter makes you an active participant, rather than a pretty face to be worshipedor perhaps more aptly for LDR, criticizedfrom afar.

More than anything else, Lizzy Grants Lana Del Rey project is a long, slow meditation on the archetypes America holds dear. Some of the most prominent onescowboys, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, Del Reys own Virgin Mary figureappear in the opening moments of her most ambitious video project, Tropico. From there, she and model/actor Shaun Ross play Eve and Adam, getting down in a pink-hued Garden of Eden. Set to Del Reys Whitman-quoting Body Electric, the first of three Paradise tracks that appear in the 27-minute film, its a sequence that subtly draws out the parallels between all of these gendered ideals.

But its the final two sections of the Tropico triptych, another Del Rey-Mandler collaboration, that really bring her worldview into focus. Amid her readings of I Sing the Body Electric and Allen Ginsbergs Howl, she and Ross reappear as a modern L.A. couple embodying exaggerated visions of contemporary masculinity and femininityhes a gangster and shes a stripper (who, it must be acknowledged, is coded as Latina in a way that is just as uncomfortable as the headdress from Ride). They regain the bliss they experienced in Eden by abandoning society and heading for the hills, where they dance in golden fields straight out of a Terrence Malick movie. The visuals are sappy, but they also seem like clues that Del Rey isnt really celebrating the characters she inhabits in Ride and Born to Die. They have to escape from the ancient archetypes that shaped and trapped them before they can be free.

Compared with the ambitious short films that accompanied Paradise, the music videos Del Rey made to accompany her second album, Ultraviolence, seem almost slight. By then shed had time to process her polarizing effect on music fans, so what makes Italian director Francesco Carrozzinis iPhone-shot clip for the records title track worth revisiting is the way it incorporates the audience.

Dressed as a bride, Del Rey wanders a garden path. Theres someone with her, but the only glimpse we get of him is a pair of male hands that feed her cake and stick their fingers in her mouth. The camera follows her, in a point-of-view shot, as she enters an empty church and proceeds to the altar. In the videos final seconds, she turns around to look nervously into the lens. This is a lonely, uneasy wedding, and it forces the viewer into the role of the unseen groom. While her early videos were about communicating Del Reys aesthetic and philosophy, Ultraviolence confronts us with the desires and prejudices that we project on herand on beautiful women in general.

The real Lizzy Grant was born and raised in New York, but Lana Del Rey is a California girl. While her debut riffed on 50s Hollywood glamour, her third album, Honeymoon, embraced the iconography (but not really the sound) of the Golden States psychedelic 60s counterculture. No matter what you think of Father John Misty, theres no denying that he and Del Rey make perfect co-cult leaders in Freak, which she also directed. The video surrounds the pair with a bevy of white-clad women as they take hits of acid and suck down Kool-Aid in a none-too-subtle nod to Jonestown.

Del Rey always has occupied a strange space between the musical mainstream and the indie worldshes less a classic crossover success than a pop artist who uses the signifiers of the underground to lure in savvier listeners (or, more cynically, to brand herself). In that sense, enlisting Misty and scattering her album with drug references might read as a predictable play for authenticity, but theres a bit more than that going on in Freak. Its not clear whether she, FJM, and their followers are tripping or dead in the second half of the 11-minute clip, as the soundtrack switches to Debussys Claire de Lune and they all float blissfully underwater. In true Lana style, the line between fantasy and tragedy isnt blurred so much as nonexistent.

Early in her career, many wondered whether Lana Del Rey was kidding. As became clear with the 2014 release of Ultraviolence cut Brooklyn Baby (sample lyrics: Well, my boyfriend's in the band/He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed/I've got feathers in my hair/I get down to Beat poetry), the better question wouldve been: Is Lana trolling? The rollout for her fourth album, Lust for Life, has felt especially mischievous, from a title lifted wholesale from Iggy Pops greatest solo record to Coachella Woodstock in My Minda single whose title is actually embarrassing to say out loud.

Although shes already released videos for the title track and Love, the most distinctive imagery associated with Lust for Life appears in the trailer. Del Rey has probably always been more self-aware than shes given credit for, but this preview, directed by Clark Jackson, finds her actually having fun with her odd, aloof starlet image. In a black-and-white clip embellished with eerie, sci-fi sound effects, shes a witchy figure living in a secret apartment inside the H of the Hollywood sign, delivering a sort of meta-monologue on her own creative process that makes elliptical reference to our sad current political reality: When Im in the middle of making a record, especially now, when the world is in the middle of such a tumultuous period, I find I really need to take the space for myself far away from real life, to consider what my contribution to the world should be in these dark times.

Theres a throughline of dark SoCal iconography connecting this Lana with the one we met in Video Games, who looked as if she were nervously auditioning to be an Urban Outfitters model. Regardless of whether that, too, was an act (and it probably was), now that shes established her aesthetic and fan base, the Lust for Life trailer doesnt do anything that could be construed as pandering. Instead of promoting the Lana Del Rey persona, it capitalizes on the humor inherent in this constructed identityand doesnt seem to mind losing anyone who doesnt get the joke. Whether you buy into it or not, Del Reys schtick is so simultaneously simple yet totally immersive that its always threatening to exhaust itself. Four albums into her career, going all-in on self-awareness may be the best choice she couldve possibly made to ensure her longevity.

More:

The Evolution of the Lana Del Rey Persona in 7 Videos - Pitchfork

The Microsoft Surface Pro has undeniably carved out a new segment in the PC space. But what was once a powerful, but heavy, thick, and unwieldly tablet when it was first launched, has become a thin, light, and even more powerful tablet in the following years. It was really the launch of the Surface Pro 3 that finally changed Microsofts fortunes in the hardware game. This was the first Surface Pro that was able to bring the weight and thickness into check, and the 3:2 aspect ratio screen was a revelation in this product category where 16:9 or 16:10 displays were really all that was offered in the Windows world.

In October 2015, Microsoft launched the refreshed Surface Pro 4 which was a bigger improvement than you would have guessed. The overall dimensions and look of the tablet were similar to the Pro 3, but the display was a big step forward, offering 267 pixels per inch, and outstanding color reproduction. The new keyboard launched with the Surface Pro 4 was really one of the biggest highlights though, offering an edge to edge keyboard with island keys, and a far more useable trackpad as well.

Now approaching the summer of 2017, its been a while since the Surface Pro 4 launched, but its successor has finally come to market: the Microsoft Surface Pro (2017). Yes, Microsoft has dropped the numbering system and this is probably the the most appropriate time to do it, I feel but far more important than whatever name Microsoft picks is the hardware. Although on the outside it may seem to be a small refresh, Microsoft has over 800 new custom parts inside, improving their flagship 2-in-1 device in several key areas.

The Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book were the first devices launched with Intels Skylake-U series processors, and Microsoft had to work overtime to sort out some power management issues with the then-new Skylake platform and Modern Standby. So its perhaps not that surprising to see them sit out the initial launch of Kaby Lake until they could ensure they had all the bugs worked out.

But with the launch of the Surface Pro this year, theyve now moved onto the latest Intel CPUs, which offer both improved performance and thermals. Microsoft has not made any other dramatic changes for processing though, and the Surface Pro keeps the same CPU lineup as the outgoing model, but with 7th generation replacing 6th generation. That means there is a Core m3-7Y30 4.5 W CPU in the base model, a Core i5-7300U in the mid-range, and a Core i7-7660U in the top end. However Microsoft has also extended the passive cooling configuration to the Core i5 as well. This change comes thanks to some important improvements in the cooling system, which well take a look at in a bit.

Intel Core i5-7300U (2C/4T, 2.6-3.5GHz, 3MB L3, 14nm, 15w)

Intel Core i7-7660U (2C/4T, 2.5-4.0GHz, 4MB L3, 14nm, 15w)

The new Surface Pro is certainly evolution rather than revolution, but considering the success Microsoft has seen with the Pro, its hard to argue with the company's choice. In fact, despite the older generation CPU, it wouldn't be a stretch to state that the Surface Pro 4 wasstill the top of its category, with the best display, good battery life, and great performance. The new Surface Pro makes more subtle improvements, keeping many of the successful attributes of the outgoing model.

One of the features that many will be happy to see is that Microsoft will finally be offering a 4G LTE model as well, although it wont be available for a couple of months. Its one of the requests theyve had from many of their customers, so its great to see it as an option.

Accessories have been one of Microsofts strongest suits, especially with the keyboard and pen that launched with the Surface Pro 4. Both the keyboard and pen have seen continuous improvement, and once again, Microsoft has released new versions as well. The flip side to that however is that the one accessory that was included with previous Surface Pros, the Surface Pen, is no longer included. This is a process that started with the Surface Pro 4 where Microsoft introduced some mid-cycle SKUs that dropped the pen for a lower cost and has now been extended to the entire lineup.

Overall it's tough to make massive changes when you already have one of the most successful products in a category, but well dig into the changes that are here and see how the latest Surface Pro stacks up both against the competition, as well as the outgoing model.

Continued here:

The Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) Review: Evolution - AnandTech

Nevertheless, the team does not insist that their results prove insects were the primary reason that plants developed spines, prickles and thorns. To the contrary, Kariyat said, We think that spines evolved against mammalian herbivores. But they suspect that at some point in history, the horsenettles and other plants found an even more effective weapon toxic alkaloids in their tissues and mammals stopped eating them regularly. The caterpillars, which were largely unaffected by the alkaloids, became specialists at preying on the plants. Evolution may then have co-opted the plants spines for a new defensive purpose, a phenomenon known as exaptation. So over time, these spines have started to have an additional benefit, helping the plant win the arms race against the insects, he said.

The unexpected results were a bit hard for others in the field to swallow. When I first read this paper, my overwhelming response was: Oh, thats just [nonsense] there are so many problems! said Angela Moles, a research professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who studies the ecological strategies of plants. Then the more I read it, the more I was, like, Actually, its right. Her sentiments were echoed by Mick Hanley, an associate professor at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, who was lead author on a 2007 review paper about plants structural defenses. I looked at it atfirstand Ithought,hmm. Then I read it again, and I saw that it all sort of hangs together, he said.

Others are less convinced. Im not sure that we can conclude from their results that spinescenceis an adaptation against insect herbivory, said Tristan Charles-Dominique, a plant-evolution specialist at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in China. He and William Bond, emeritus professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, used phylogenetic methods to show in 2016 that the diversity of spiny plants in Africa coincided with an uptick in bovid mammals, such as wildebeests and gazelles. That finding supports the traditional view that spines defend against large mammals.

I think they did a good job at showing that the feeding rate of caterpillars is indeed slowed down as their movement is disrupted, said Charles-Dominique, but I think that there is quite a lot of information to be gathered before being able to test the potential coevolution between spiny plants and insects.

Kariyat does not disagree. One of the things we want to see is whether this effect is just on the caterpillars, he said. He explained that they also want to better quantify how insects are affected by impaired movement: How much does it affect their growth and development and pupation, and how does that affect them long term?

But Kariyat and Meschers findings arent the first to suggest a potential role for spinescence in deterring insects. Moles noted that the results are consistent with paleontological evidence that spines evolved before large herbivores. She pointed to a 1970 review paper by the late British paleobotanist William Gilbert Chaloner, in which he noted that a number of plants from more than 400 million years ago showed small apparently non-vascularized appendages on the stem, distributed more or less randomly and variously termed spines, emergences, teeth or enations.

So weve got a lot of species with these funny prickles that we dont know what they do, Moles explained, and its, I dont know, at least 10 or 20 million years before the first terrestrial vertebrate herbivores start appearing.

The results highlight a tricky issue in the study of evolution and adaptation: Because of exaptation, understanding the current function of a trait is very different from inferring the evolutionary pressures under which it initially evolved. Its impossible to track why a defense that works now might have evolved millions of years ago, Hanley said. Those spines could have evolved for a completely different reason that has nothing to do with herbivory.

Indeed, hypotheses about the original purpose of plant spines range far beyond the deterrence of herbivores of various sizes. Its been theorized that the spines might have boosted plants surface area to enhance photosynthesis, or that they helped to direct water to the plants roots. Or that they first helped plants to sprawl and climb. Other than being able to replay the evolutionary tape over millions of years, Hanley said, weve got no real way of knowing.

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The Thorny Truth About Spine Evolution - Quanta Magazine

For one thing, the gameplay feels smoother than ever before, something you'll notice the moment you start a match, pass the ball around and try to score some goals. The players are much easier to control and their general body movement isn't as stiff as in past editions of the game. Pro Evolution Soccer 2018 is still powered by Konami's Fox Engine, which has been featured in franchises like Metal Gear Solid. This time around, though, the company says it wanted to focus on more than simply improving the gameplay. As such, the menus are now much easier to browse and look at, while the new "enhanced visual reality" makes the players closer resemble their real-life appearance.

In what's a marketing plot more than anything, Konami is bringing none other than Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt into PES 2018. What that means is you'll be able have him on your My Club team, playing alongside Messi, Neymar and the rest of the football stars in the game. Bolt, a Manchester United supporter, has always said he wants to be a pro soccer player, so at least now he'll have that chance in a virtual world. "We wanted to do things differently, a little bit crazy," says Adam Bhatti, the game's product and brand manager. That's the reason Argentina legend Diego Maradona will also be a part of Pro Evolution Soccer 2018.

I don't know if I'll be playing it over my football game of choice, FIFA, as I have done in the past. But, based on the few matches I played here at E3 2017, it's great to see Konami's franchise continuing to get better every year, even if it may not even on the same level as FIFA yet. You can make that call for yourself when Pro Evolution Soccer 2018 arrives September 14th in the US, and a couple days later in Europe. The game is going to be available for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC.

Follow all the latest news from E3 2017 here!

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'Pro Evolution Soccer 2018' continues to be a pleasure to play - Engadget

Forbes

The Zig-Zagging Evolution Of Search Engine Algorithms Forbes Is the complexity of Google's search ranking algorithms increasing or decreasing over time? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Nikhil ...

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The Zig-Zagging Evolution Of Search Engine Algorithms - Forbes

Southern California based Iconic Guitars has released the Evolution S Series line of guitars.

Iconic Guitars launched The Evolution line as a follow up to their popular Vintage Series line of guitars. These new models take their visual cue from the classic S shape and expand the tonal capabilities and playability to otherworldly new heights. The distinctive looks, impeccably selected tone woods, remarkable finishes, and contemporary appointments all combine for an amazing guitar with rich, pure, articulate tone.

The Evolution Series S and S Limited offer a unique array of custom options including pickup configuration, neck profile and wood configuration, fret size and body tone woods. The Evolution S models are available in an extensive palette of pearl and candy colors.

The Evolution S Limited models feature Master Grade, book-matched maple or other exotic tone wood tops, each uniquely dyed and masterfully finished with matching pearl or candy back, sides and head stock.

The Evolution S is a spectacular guitar designed to perform well beyond the expectations of the discerning player and exceed the needs of professional, touring and recreational musicians alike.

Standard features on the Evolution S and Evolution S Limited models include: Select Alder body 5A Flame or Quilt Maple or other exotic tone wood tops (Limited models) Quartersawn Maple neck with Maple, Indian Rosewood or Ebony fretboards 10 14 Compound Radius Fretboard 1.687 nut width with hand cut Tusq Nut .047 X .104 Jescar Nickel Silver frets (Stainless optional) Lollar or Bare Knuckle pickups standard (HH, HSS, HSH) Hipshot Contour bridge Hipshot Open Back Locking Tuners Emerson Electronics with Schaller 5-way Megaswitch

Retail pricing for the Evolution S model starts at $2099 and $3099 for the T Limited and includes a G&G Deluxe Embroidered hard shell case or Reunion Blues Gig Bag.

Available at select dealers nationwide or for more information on the Evolution S Series guitars and more see iconicguitars.com

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Iconic Guitars Releases New Evolution S Series - Guitar World Magazine

Zero times anything is zero. The odds of life just happening by chance are zero.

This universe just springing into being by chance is impossible. It takes a leap of blind faith to believe in evolution, unguided or guided. Of course, there are tiny changes within kinds. It seems to me, usually when the evolutionists make their case, they point to these tiny changes.

The analogies to the improbability of evolution by a random process are endless.

The odds against our universe, of the earth, of the creation, to have just come into being with no intelligent design behind the grand scheme are greater than all of these impossible scenarios.

Forget the works of Shakespeare. What are the odds of a monkey randomly typing away simply spelling the nine-letter word evolution by chance? That doesnt sound too hard, does it?

Dr. Scott M. Huse, B.S., M.S., M.R.E., Th.D., Ph.D., who holds graduate degrees in computer science, geology and theology, wrote a book about creation/evolution back in the early 1980s, The Collapse of Evolution. Huse has done extensive study on these questions of random probability. I had the privilege of interviewing him about it for Dr. D. James Kennedys television special, The Case for Creation (1988). It was a type of Scopes Trial in reverse filmed on location in Tennessee, in the very courtroom where the 1925 monkey trial took place.

Later, Huse created a computer program to determine the odds of a monkey typing the word evolution. He notes that the odds are one in 5.4 trillion, which statistically is the same thing as zero. Any casino that offered such horrible odds would lose customers quickly, because no one would ever win. Forgive my bluntness, but the suckers have to win something before they start losing big.

Heres what Scott told me in an email: The typical personal computer keyboard has 104 keys, most of which are not letters from the alphabet. However, if we ignore that fact and say the monkey can only hit keys that are letters of the alphabet, he has a one in 26 chance of hitting the correct letter each time.

Of course, he has to hit them in the correct sequence as well: E then V then O, etc. Twenty-six to the power of nine (the number of letters in the word evolution) equals 5,429,503,678,976.

So, the odds of him accidentally typing just the nine-letter word evolution are about one in about 5.4 trillion. From a purely mathematical standpoint, the bewildering complexity of even the most basic organic molecules [which are much more complicated than a nine-letter word] completely rules out the possibility of life originating by mere chance.

Take just one aspect of life amino acids and protein cells. Dr. Stephen Meyer earned his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science at Cambridge University. In his New York Times bestselling book, Darwins Doubt (2013), Meyer points out that the probability of attaining a correct sequence [of amino acids to build a protein molecule] by random search would roughly equal the probability of a blind spaceman finding a single marked atom by chance among all the atoms in the Milky Way galaxy on its face clearly not a likely outcome (Page 183).

And this is just one aspect of life, the most basic building block.

In the interview I did with Scott Huse long ago, he noted: The probability of life originating through mere random processes, as evolutionists contend, really honestly, is about zero. If you consider probability statistics, it exposes the naivet and the foolishness, really, of the evolutionary viewpoint.

Dr. Charles Thaxton was another guest on that classic television special from 1988. He is a scientist who notes that life is so complex, the chances of it arising by mere chance is virtually impossible. Thaxton, now with the Discovery Institute, has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, and a post-doctorate degree in molecular biology and a Harvard post-doctorate in the history and philosophy of science.

Thaxton notes: Id say in my years of study, the amazing thing is the utter complexity of living things. Most scientists would readily grant that however life happened, it did not happen by chance.

The whole creation points to the Creator. Huse sums up the whole point: Simply put, a watch has a watchmaker and we have a Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Media wishing to interview Jerry Newcombe, please contact media@wnd.com.

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The odds of evolution are zero - WND.com

THE PROGNOSIS

President Trump has showered praise upon the GOP bill to overhaul Obamacare. He threw a big Rose Garden celebration once the House passed it. He promised it would transform the nations health-care system into one ofthe worlds finest.

And yesterday, behind closed doors, he told a group of Senate Republicans it is mean.

Trump apparently critiqued the health-care bill passed by House Republicans in front of more than a dozen senators he hosted for lunch at the White House. The president said the senators should make their own version more generous, according to congressional sources who leaked to the Associated Press. That's pretty different from whatTrump said when the cameras were turned on. He had some tart words for Democrats, instead:

Of course, the GOP senators didn't share those comments with the press, either. Conference Chair John Thune (R-S.D.), who attended the lunch, said Trump talked about making sure that we have a bill that protects people with preexisting conditions and how to design a tax credit for purchasing insurance that works for lower-income and elderly people in particular, my colleagues Kelsey Snell and Sean Sullivan report.

I think he realizes, you know, our bill is going to move, probably, from where the House was and he seems fine with that, Thune said. He talked about making sure that we have a bill that protects people with preexisting conditions.

It's hardly surprising that Trump would privately feel this way about the House's American Health Care Act, which is projected to leave 23 million more Americans without health coverage. After all, Trump was a longtime advocate of government-runhealth-care programsin many other developed countries. In his book "The America We Deserve," Trump praised Canada's single-payer system and wrote that the United Statesmust similarly have universal health care.

But Trump has publicly bragged about the AHCA in such sweeping terms and with such outward confidencethat his candid moment yesterday dramatically emphasizes the incongruity of his past personal views and the outlook of Republicans he's trying to work with to sweep much of Obamacare aside.

Unsurprisingly, the president's zigzag health-care evolution can be traced in his tweets. Let's take a tour of what he's said about the GOP health effort:

From right after the House bill passed:

Then, a strange nod to the Australian health-care system during the same time period:

And a helping hand for Senate Republicans embarking on the politically perilous process:

But suddenly, a shift (about three weeks after applauding the AHCA's House passage):

Now -- as senator struggle to pass their own version of health care -- Trump has characterized the version passed in the lower chamber as "mean."

The president may -- or may not -- be referring to the fact that many experts believe that allowing states to opt out of certain insurance requirements and allow insurers to charge more to cover sick people (see my colleague Glenn Kessler's fact check on the subject). Trump could also be talking about criticism that the House bill allows insurers to charge older people (who are likely to be sicker) up to five times more than younger ones (the healthier part of the population).

Or Trump could be referring to something else entirely.

Twitter was aflame over the comment:

From CNBC's Chief Washington Correspondent John Harwood:

From the New York Times's Chief Washington Correspondent Carl Hulse:

BREAKING NEWS THIS MORNING: A gunman opened fire this morning on Republican lawmakers practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game in Alexandria, Va., "possibly injuring several including at least one lawmaker, Steve Scalise, the majority whip, according to police and a congressman. Alexandria police would only confirm that a shooting had occurred and that one person was in custody," reports Peter Hermann, Paul Kane and Patricia Sullivan. For more real-time updates, check the Post website.

AHH, OOF and OUCH

AHH: One insurer is expanding into more Affordable Care Act marketplaces instead of withdrawing from them -- and could help fill some holes. Health insurer Centene announced plans Tuesday tostart offering coverage on exchanges in Missouri, Kansas and Nevada. It also will expand its presence in Florida, Ohio, Texas and Washington, among other states, the AP reports.

"This growth spurt could fill some big holes that have developed in the exchanges, the only place where people can buy individual coverage with help from an income-based tax credit," according to the AP. "Currently, 25 counties in Missouri, 20 in Ohio and another two in Washington have no insurers lined up to sell coverage on the exchange in 2018."

OOF: Mandatory new nutrition fact labels have been delayed indefinitely, the FDA announced yesterday. "The labels, championed by former first lady Michelle Obama, were supposed to add a special line for 'added sugars'and emphasize calorie content in large, bold text," the Post's Caitlin Dewey reports."They had been scheduled for rollout in July 2018, with a one-year extension for smaller manufacturers."

"The delay is the latest reversal ofthe Obama administrations nutrition reformsunder Trump," Caitlin writes. "On April 27, the FDA also delayed rules that would have required calorie counts on restaurant menus. A week later, the Department of Agriculture loosened the minimum requirements for the amount of whole grain in school lunches and delayed future sodium reductions....Consumer groups are already slamming the Nutrition Facts delay as an attack on public health. The largest groups in the food industry, meanwhile, is celebrating what it calls a win for 'common-sense'regulation."

OUCH: Attorney General Jeff Sessions is asking congressional leaders to undo federal medical-marijuana protections that have been in place since 2014, according toa May letter that became public Monday, my colleague Christopher Ingraham reports. The protections, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment,prohibit the Justice Departmentfrom using federal funds to prevent states from implementing their own lawsauthorizingthe use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana.

In his letter, Sessions citeda "historic drug epidemic" to justify a crackdown on medical marijuana. But that's at odds with what researchers know about current drug use and abuse in the United States. The epidemic Sessions refers to involves deadly opiate drugs, not marijuana, Chris writes.

HEALTH ON THE HILL

--Several top Senate Republicans sought to temper expectations yesterday that theycanproduce a final health-care draft by the end of the week -- or even by the end of the month. Finance Committee Chairman OrrinG. Hatch (R-Utah)chuckled quietlywhen we asked if they'll be ready to vote on a bill before the July 4 recess.

"I think we're a ways away," Hatch said. Asked when legislation might be done, he laughed again. "When we get it done," he said.

--Other Republicans emerging from their health-care huddlesaid theres an openness to retain some of the ACAs taxes in order to pay for more generous benefits. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said thats the big question. It depends on what its going to take to get to 50 [votes], he said. So thats really the timing and thats the deciding factor. Conservatives would not be happy, as I wrote yesterday.

But Hatch said he would prefer to repeal all of the ACAs taxes. Id like to have no taxes, he said.

--But as senators downplayed their rate of progress, a top House Republican dialed up expectations. House Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) predicted to the Wall Street Journal's CFO Network meeting yesterday that afinal bill will pass the Senate and land on the presidents desk before August. Waldenadded that there's been "radio silence" from his Senate colleagues as they've been drafting their own bill.

--The effort has grown increasingly dependenton the fragile alliance between Senate GOP leaders and a man they have clashed bitterly with for years: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Kelsey and Sean report.

"Senate leaders are struggling to build conservative support for their emerging bill, with GOP aides and senators voicing growing skepticism that hard-right Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) can be convinced to back it," they write. "Conservative organizations, meanwhile, are complaining that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is offering proposals that would not sufficiently dismantle the law known as Obamacare."

"But Cruz, after building a national brand stoking tensions with McConnell and his top deputies, is, in his own words, trying to get to yes.' The former presidential hopeful has spoken positively about the negotiations, which he helped kick-start. His investment in the talks has generated cautious optimism among many Republicans that he wont walk away from a delicate effort from which McConnell, with a 52-seat majority and Vice President Pence as a potential tiebreaking vote, can afford only two defections," my colleagues report.

--Democrats had an unexpected opportunity yesterday to press even harder on their criticisms of Republicans for writing their health-care bill behind closed doorswhen television reporters covering the Capitol were told midday Tuesday to stop recording interviews in Senate hallways. What would have been adramatic and unexplained break with tradition that was soon reversed amid a wide rebuke from journalists, Democratic lawmakers and free-speech advocates, my colleague Elise Viebeck reports.

"The controversy started Tuesday around noon, when staffers from the Senate Radio and Television Correspondents Gallery, which operates workspace for networks in the Capitol, told reporters from major television networks, with no warning, to stop recording video in the hallways," Elise writes.

"Gallery staffers blamed the shift on the Senate Rules Committee, which has official jurisdiction over media access in the upper chamber, according to journalists who shared detailed accounts of the developments on Twitter....The directive touched off a day of confusion as the Rules Committee denied issuing new restrictions and gallery staffers refused to explain their part in the drama."

Rules Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) eventually issued a statement saying there will be no policy shift onwhere reporters can go on the Senate side of the Capitol building. But that was after many Democrats tried to link it to how Republicans aren't being transparent on health care:

Hillary Clinton even chimed in yesterday:

PRICE CHECK

--Republicans who have been trashing the Congressional Budget Officelately for its unflattering score of their health-care bill might be more pleased with an estimate out from the actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The actuary says the House-passed bill would strip health coverage from 10 million fewer people than projected by the CBO -- and estimates it willsavethe federal government $328 billion instead of $119 billion the CBO estimated.

The New York Times' Margot Sanger-Katz took note:

Why are the estimates so different? Politico's Paul Demko explains that CMS and CBO made some different assumptions:

"The disparity is a result of differing assumptions about whether cost-saving measures in the House bill will work," Paul writes. "The CMS actuary and CBO have disagreed in the past on the budgetary effects of legislation, including surrounding the enactment of Obamacare. The new actuary's analysis does not estimate the effects of taxes repealed."

--Vice President Pence pulled a Paul Ryan yesterday when he used a chart to reinforcehis arguments against the ACAin aspeechat the Department of Health and Human Services. Here's what Pencesaid (while gesturing to his chart):

"Back when Obamacare was first passed, just over seven years ago, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 23 million Americans would be covered by now. Thats the blue line on the far left. It quickly became apparent that this was far-fetched to put it mildly."

But Pence'schart didn'ttell the full story, according to a fact-check from theAP's Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar.

The facts: It's true that only 10.3 million people are enrolled this year in the subsidized health-insurance markets, not the 23 million the Congressional Budget Office had originally projected.

The details:The chart omitted this relevant information: Ofthe new enrollees, 12 million were supposed to get coverage through the law's Medicaid expansion. But 19 states have refused to expand Medicaid because of opposition from Republicans, a big contributor to why enrollment fell so short of the CBO's initial projection. "Together, the Medicaid expansion and subsidized private health insurance have reduced the number of uninsured by about 20 million people, bringing the uninsured rate to a historic low of about 9 percent, according to the government," Ricardo writes.

INDUSTRY RX

A cottage industry has sprung up to instruct people on how to tamper with drug formulations to get high.

Laurie McGinley

STATE SCAN

Many companies have said theyll leave the marketplaces, citing rising costs and Trump-fueled uncertainty.

Kim Soffen and Kevin Uhrmacher

Advocates say the report needs further study to determine whether there have been broader improvements for low-income residents or if they have left a gentrifying city.

Michael Alison Chandler

California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra said Tuesday that he supports a proposal for California to adopt a single-payer health plan and believes it will eventually be enacted because consumers will become fed up with the current system that he said is unaffordable to many.

LA Times

DAYBOOK

Today

Coming Up

SUGAR RUSH

Watch President Trumps full remarks about health care in Milwaukee:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said during his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the "suggestion that I participated in any collusion ... is an appalling and detestable lie":

Here'sa fact check on President Trump's claim thathis nominees faced record-setting long delays:

And on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a First Lady Melania Trump got emotional about finally moving into the White House:

Read the original:

The Health 202: Trump's health care evolution can be traced in his tweets - Washington Post

Forbes

Ubisoft's 'Black Flag' Evolution, 'Skull and Bones,' Steals The Show At E3 Forbes Ubisoft did not disappoint when it came to surprises at E3 today, chief among them the first look at Skull and Bones, a new ship-based, pirate combat game built on the bones of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, but existing as an entirely separate entity ... Skull and Bones: E3 2017 Cinematic Announcement Trailer | Ubisoft [US]YouTube Skull and Bones: E3 2017 Multiplayer and PvP Gameplay | Ubisoft [US]YouTube Skull and Bones: E3 2017 What You Need to Know | Ubisoft [US]YouTube Ubisoft all 128 news articles »

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Ubisoft's 'Black Flag' Evolution, 'Skull and Bones,' Steals The Show At E3 - Forbes

First, Mitsubishi came for the Eclipse, and I did not speak out -- because I wasn't ever really a fan of the Eclipse. Now, Mitsubishi's gunning for the Evo, and there's nothing you or I can do about it.

The final Lancer Evolution went off into the sunset last year, but the Evolution name will return, although not in a form you might want. According to an interview between Motoring.com.au and Trevor Mann, chief operating officer at Mitsubishi, the next Evolution-badged vehicle could be none other than a crossover.

Three years is a long time to wait. Six is an eternity.

Mitsubishi's global boss told the outlet that the company's next performance car doesn't necessarily have to be a sedan. When pressed for a timeline for this revived performance icon, Mann told the site that it would be between three and six years from now. That's plenty of time to clutch all the enthusiast pearls you've got.

While it might sound (and probably is) heretical, Mitsubishi's not in a position to be doing anything other than making money. With mediocre sales, especially in the US, it has been relying on its current strength -- building lots of inexpensive crossovers -- to help bolster sales. Having its performance halo be a crossover shouldn't come as a surprise.

This wouldn't be the first strange badge-related move from Mitsubishi. Earlier this year, it unveiled the Eclipse Cross, a new crossover meant to slot between the Outlander Sport and Outlander. You may recognize the name Eclipse from a series of popular 1990s all-wheel-drive sport coupes. That's how I prefer to remember the name, but again, Mitsubishi is leveraging what it can to grow the company.

The Lancer Evolution was an all-wheel-drive performance sedan that was locked in an unending battle with the Subaru WRX STI, both on the road and on rally stages around the world. With the Evo gone, Subaru's had that little chunk of a segment nearly to itself, and judging by this news, that's probably not going to change any time soon.

54

2015 Lancer Evolution Final Edition marks the end of Mitsubishi's sport compact icon

Continued here:

The next Mitsubishi Evolution might be a crossover - Roadshow - CNET

The evolution of characters in film and the celebrities who play said characters is extraordinary when you can condense it into a short clip or visual. Side by side pictures are always great aids for comparison. However, until today I dont think Ive ever seen a cartoonist ever draw up evolution in the way that Jeff Victor has. He has a keen eye for detail and has amassed a tremendous portfolio of illustrations that demonstrate this evolution.

Heres what Jeff had to say:

My name is Jeff Victor and Im anLA-based artist. I have designed characters for animation at such studios as Nickelodeon, Dreamworks, Warner Brothers, and Cartoon Network. Currently, Im working as a childrens book illustrator, but when Im not drawing for work, Im drawing for fun. I am a huge movie fanatic and expresses my love for my favorite movies though my art, by drawing adorkable renditions of famous characters.Star Wars is a particular favorite and shows up frequently in my work.

View post:

Artist Illustrates The Evolution Of Famous Actors And Characters - TVOvermind

A look at the many manifestations of the superheroine on-screen.

Have you heard theres a Wonder Woman movie out? Of course you have, its all anyones been talking about for the last few weeks. The film is a commercial success, a critical success, hell, its a social success, and our glee at its success is due in no small part to the long and obstacle-ridden road the character took to the big screen.

Most folks can only remember the Lynda Carter TV series from the 70s, but there have been far more televisual and cinematic interpretations of Diana Prince than just that, like a series prior to Carters, several animated takes, and a couple projects that have crashed and burned before the public could see them like a feature based on a Joss Whedon script and an NBC live-action series starring Adrienne Palicki (Friday Night Lights).

In the latest supercut from Burger Fiction, the on-screen evolution of Wonder Woman is traced through its past struggles to its recent triumph, telling a story every bit as wonderful as the one currently conquering the worldwide box office.

Wonder Woman

See the rest here:

Once Upon a Time on Paradise Island: The Cinematic Evolution of Wonder Woman - Film School Rejects

Five years ago, Gregory Chaitin, a co-founder of the fascinating and mind-bending field of algorithmic information theory, offered a challenge:1

The honor of mathematics requires us to come up with a mathematical theory of evolution and either prove that Darwin was wrong or right!

In Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics2, co-authored by William A. Dembski, Winston Ewert, and myself, we answer Chaitins challenge in the negative: There exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. Period. By model, we mean definitive simulations or foundational mathematics required of a hard science.

We show that no meaningful information can arise from an evolutionary process unless that process is guided. Even when guided, the degree of evolutions accomplishment is limited by the expertise of the guiding information source a limit we call Baseners ceiling. An evolutionary program whose goal is to master chess will never evolve further and offer investment advice.

Here I answer ten frequently posed questions about and objections to Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics.

1. Why yet another book dissing Darwinian evolution?

Solomon was right. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.3 There are gobs of books written about evolution, pro and con. Many are excellent. So whats so important about Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics? On the topic of evolution, the conclusion is in: There exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. Hard sciences are built on foundations of mathematics or definitive simulations. Examples include electromagnetics, Newtonian mechanics, geophysics, relativity, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, optics, and many areas in biology. Those hoping to establish Darwinian evolution as a hard science with a model have either failed or inadvertently cheated. These models contain guidance mechanisms to land the airplane squarely on the target runway despite stochastic wind gusts. Not only can the guiding assistance be specifically identified in each proposed evolution model, its contribution to the success can be measured, in bits, as active information.

And, as covered in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, we suspect no model will ever exist to substantiate the claims of undirected Darwinian evolution.

2. But Darwinian evolution is so complicated, it cant be modeled!

If this objection is true, we have reached the same conclusion by different paths: There exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution.

3. You model evolution as a search. Evolution isnt a search.

We echo Billy Joel: We didnt start the fire! Models of Darwinian evolution, Avida and EV included, are searches with a fixed goal. For EV, the goal is finding specified nucleotide binding sites. Avidas goal is to generate an EQU logic function. Other evolution models that we examine in Introduction to Evolutionary Informaticslikewise seek a prespecified goal.

The evolution software Avida is of particular importance because Robert Pennock, one of the co-authors of the first paper describing Avida,4 gave testimony at the Darwin-affirming Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District bench trial. Pennocks testimony contributed to Judge Joness ruling that teaching about intelligent design violates the establishment clause of the United States Constitution. Pennock testified, In the [Avida computer program] system, were not simulating evolution. Evolution is actually happening. If true, Avida and thus evolution are a guided search with a specified target bubbling over with active information supplied by the programmers.

The most celebrated attempt of an evolution model without a goal of which were aware is TIERRA. In an attempt to recreate something like the Cambrian explosion on a computer, the programmer created what was thought to be an information-rich environment where digital organisms would flourish and evolve. According to TIERRAs ingenious creator, Thomas Ray, the project failed and was abandoned. There has to date been no success in open-ended evolution in the field of artificial life.5

Therefore, there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution.

4. You are not biologists. Why should anyone listen to you about evolution?

Leave aside that this question reeks of the genetic fallacy used in debate to steer conversation away from the topic at hand and down a rabbit trail of credential defense. The question is sincere, though, and deserves an answer. Besides, it lets me talk about myself.

The truth is that computer scientists and engineers know a lot about evolution and evolution models.

As we outline in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, proponents of Darwinian evolution became giddy about computers in the 1960s and 70s. Evolution was too slow to demonstrate in a wet lab, but thousands and more generations of evolution can be put in the bank when Darwinian evolution is simulated on a computer. Computer scientists and engineers soon realized that evolutionary search might assist in making computer-aided designs. In Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, we describe how NASA engineers used guided evolutionary programs to design antennas resembling bent paper clips that today are floating and functioning in outer space.

Heres my personal background. I first became interested in evolutionary computation late last century when I served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE6 Transactions on Neural Networks.7 I invited top researchers in the field, David Fogel and his father Larry Fogel, to be the guest editors of a special issue of my journal dedicated to evolutionary computing.8 The issue was published in January 1994 and led to David founding the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computing9 which today is the top engineering/computer science journal dedicated to the topic.

My first conference paper using evolutionary computing was published a year later10 and my first journal publication on evolutionary computation was in 1999.11 That was then. More recently my work, funded by the Office of Naval Research, involves simulated evolution of swarm dynamics motivated by the remarkable self-organizing behavior of social insects. Some of the results were excitingly unexpected12 including individual member suicidal sacrifice to extend the overall lifetime of the swarm.13 Evolving digital swarms is intriguing and we have a whole web site devoted to the topic.14

So I have been playing in the evolutionary sandbox for a long time and have dirt under my fingernails to prove it.

But is it biology? In reviewing our book for the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), my friend Randy Isaac, former executive director of the ASA, said of our book, Those seeking insight into biological or chemical evolution are advised to look elsewhere.15 We agree! But if you are looking for insights into the models and mathematics thus far proposed by supporters of Darwinian evolution that purport to describe the theory, Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics is spot on. And we show there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution.

5. You use probability inappropriately. Probability theory cannot be applied to events that have already happened.

In the movie Dumb and Dumber, Jim Careys character, Lloyd Christmas, is brushed off by beautiful Mary Samsonite Swanson when told his chances with her areone in a million. After a pause for introspective reflection, Lloyds emergent toothy grin shows off his happy chipped tooth. He enthusiastically blurts out, So youre telling me theres a chance! Similar exclamationsare heard from Darwinian evolutionist advocates. Darwinian evolution. So youre telling me theres a chance! So again, we didnt start the probability fire. Evolutionary models thrive on randomness described by probabilities.

The probability-of-the -gaps championed by supporters of Darwinian evolution is addressed in detail in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. We show that the probability resources of the universe and even string theorys hypothetical multiverse are insufficient to explain the specified complexity surrounding us.

Besides, a posteriori probability is used all the time. The size of your last tweet can be measured in bits. Claude Shannon, who coined the term bits in his classic 1948 paper,16 based the definition of the bit on probability. Yet there sits your transmitted tweet with all of its a posteriori bits fully exposed. Another example is a posteriori Bayesian probability commonly used, for example, in email spam filters. What is the probability that your latest email from a Nigerian prince, already received and written on your server, is spam? Bayesian probabilities are also a posteriori probabilities.

So a hand-waving dismissal of a posteriori probabilities is ill-tutored. The application of probability in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics is righteous and the analysis leads to the conclusion that there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution.

6. What about a biological anthropic principle? Were here, so evolution must work.

Stephen Hawking has a simple explanation of the anthropic principle: If the conditions in the universe were not suitable for life, we would not be asking why they are as they are. Gabor Csanyi, who quotes from Hawkings talk, says, Hawking claims, the dimensionality of space and amount of matter in the universe is [a fortuitous] accident, which needs no further explanation.17

So youre telling me theres a chance!

The question ignored by anthropic principle enthusiasts is whether or not an environment for even guided evolution could occur by chance. If a successful search requires equaling or exceeding some degree of active information, what is the chance of finding any search with as good or better performance? We call this a search-for-the-search. In Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, we show that the search-for-the-search is exponentially more difficult that the search itself! So if you kick the can down the road, the can gets bigger.

Professor Sydney R. Coleman said after the Hawkings MIT talk, Anything else is better [than the Anthropic Principle to explain something].18 We agree. For example, check out our search-for-the-search analysis in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics.

7. What about the claim that All information is physical?

This is a question we have heard from physicists.

In physics, Landauers principle pertains to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation and leads to his statement all information is physical.

Saying All computers are mass and energy offers a similar nearly useless description of computers. Like Landauers principle, it suffers from the same overgeneralized vagueness and is at best incomplete.

Claude Shannon counters Landauers claim:

It seems to me that we all define information as we choose; and, depending upon what field we are working in, we will choose different definitions. My own model of information theorywas framed precisely to work with the problem of communication.19

Landauer is probably correct within the narrow confines of his physics foxhole. Outside the foxhole is Shannon information which is built on unknown a priori probability of events which have not yet happened and are therefore not yet physical.

We spend an entire chapter in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics defining information so there is no confusion when the concept is applied. And we conclude there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution.

8. Information theory cannot measure meaning.

Poppycock.

A hammer, like information theory, is a tool. A hammer can be used to do more than pound nails. And information theory can do more than assign a generic bit count to an object.

The most visible information theory models are Shannon information theory and KCS information.20 The consequence of Shannons theory on communication theory is resident in your cell phone where codes predicted by Shannon today allow maximally efficient use of available bandwidth. KCS stands for Kolmogorov-Chaitin-Solomonoff information theory named after the three men who independently founded the field. KCS information theory deals with the information content of structures. (Gregory Chaitin, by the way, gives a nice nod-of-the-head to Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics.21)

The manner in which information theory can be used to measure meaning is addressed in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. We explain, for example, why a picture of Mount Rushmore containing imagesof fourUnited States presidents has more meaning to you than a picture of Mount Fuji even though both pictures might require the same number of bits when stored on your hard drive. The degree of meaning can be measured using a metric called algorithmic specified complexity.

Rather than summarize algorithmic specified complexity derived and applied in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, we refer instead to a quote from a paper from one of the worlds leading experts in algorithmic information theory, Paul Vitnyi. The quote is from a paper he wrote over 15 years ago, titled Meaningful Information.22

One can divide[KCS] information into two parts: the information accounting for the useful regularity [meaningful information] present in the object and the information accounting for the remaining accidental [meaningless] information.23

In Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, we use information theoryto measure meaningful information and show there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution.

9. To achieve specified complexity in nature, the fitness landscape in evolution keeps changing. So, contrary to your claim, Baseners ceiling doesnt apply in Darwinian evolution.

In search, complexity cant be achieved beyond the expertise of the guiding oracle. As noted, we refer to this limit as Baseners ceiling.24However, if the fitness continues to change, it is argued, the evolved entity can achieve greater and greater specified complexity and ultimately perform arbitrarily great acts like writing insightful scholarly books disproving Darwinian evolution.

We analyze exactly this case in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics and dub the overall search structure stair step active information. Not only is guidance required on each stair, but the next step must be carefully chosen to guide the process to the higher fitness landscape and therefore ever increasing complexity. Most of the next possible choices are deleterious and lead to search deterioration and even extinction. This also applies in the limit when the stairs become teeny and the stair case is better described as a ramp. As Aristotle said, It is possible to fail in many wayswhile to succeed is possible only in one way.

Heres an anecdotal illustration of the careful design needed in the stair step model. If a meteor hits the Yucatan Peninsula and wipes out all the dinosaurs and allows mammals to start domination of the earth, then the meteors explosion must be a Goldilocks event. If too strong all life on earth would be zapped. If too weak, velociraptors would still be munching on stegosaurus eggs.

Such fine tuning is the case of any fortuitous shift in fitness landscapes and increases, not decreases, the difficulty of evolution of ever-increasing specified complexity. It supports the case there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution.

10. Your research is guided by your ideology and cant be trusted.

Theres that old derailing genetic fallacy again.

But yes! Of course, our research is impacted by our ideology! We are proud to be counted among Christians such asthe Reverend Thomas Bayes, Isaac Newton, George Washington Carver, Michael Faraday, and the greatest of all mathematicians, Leonard Euler.25 The truth of their contributions stand apart from their ideology. But so does the work of atheist Pierre-Simon Laplace. Truth trumps ideology. And allowing the possibility of intelligent design, embraced by enlightened theists and agnostics alike, broadens ones investigative horizons.

Alan Turing, the brilliant father of computer science and breaker of the Nazis enigma code, offers a great example of the ultimate failure of ideology trumping truth. Asa young man, Turing lost a close friend to bovine tuberculosis. Devastated by the death, Turing turned from God and became an atheist. He was partially motivated in his development of computer science to prove man was a machine and consequently that there was no need for a god. But Turings landmark work has allowed researchers, most notably Roger Penrose,26 to make the case that certain of mans attributes including creativity and understanding are beyond the capability of the computer. Turings ideological motivation was thus ultimately trashed by truth.

The relationship between human and computer capabilities is discussed in more depth in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics.

Take Aways

In Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, Chaitins challenge has been met in the negative and there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. According to our current understanding, there never will be. But science should never say never. As Stephen Hawking notes, nothing in science is ever actually proved. We simply accumulate evidence.27

So if anyone generates a model demonstrating Darwinian evolution without guidance that ends in an object with significant specified complexity, let us know. No guiding, hand waving, extrapolation of adaptations, appealing to speculative physics, or anecdotal proofs allowed.

Until then, I guess you can call us free-thinking skeptics.

Thanks for listening.

Robert J. Marks II PhD is Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University.

Notes:

(1) Chaitin, Gregory. Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical. Vintage, 2012.

(2) Marks II, Robert J., William A. Dembski, and Winston Ewert. Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. World Scientific, 2017.

(3) Ecclesiastes 12:12b.

(4) Lenski, R.E., Ofria, C., Pennock, R.T. and Adami, C., 2003. The evolutionary origin of complex features. Nature, 423(6936), pp. 139-144.

(5) ID the Future podcast with Winston Ewert. Why Digital Cambrian Explosions FizzleOr Fake It, June 7, 2017.

(6) IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electrical Engineers, is the largest professional society in the world, with over 400,000 members.

(7) R.J. Marks II, The Joumal Citation Report: Testifying for Neural Networks, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, vol. 7, no. 4, July 1996, p. 801.

(8) Fogel, David B., and Lawrence J. Fogel. Guest editorial on evolutionary computation, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks 5, no. 1 (1994): 1-14.

(9) R.J. Marks II, Old Neural Network Editors Dont Die, They Just Prune Their Hidden Nodes, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, vol. 8, no. 6 (November, 1997), p. 1221.

(10) Russell D. Reed and Robert J. Marks II, An Evolutionary Algorithm for Function Inversion and Boundary Marking, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation, pp. 794-797, November 26-30, 1995.

(11) C.A. Jensen, M.A. El-Sharkawi and R.J. Marks II, Power Security Boundary Enhancement Using Evolutionary-Based Query Learning, Engineering Intelligent Systems, vol. 7, no. 9, pp. 215-218 (December 1999).

(12) Jon Roach, Winston Ewert, Robert J. Marks II and Benjamin B. Thompson, Unexpected Emergent Behaviors from Elementary Swarms,Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 45th Southeastern Symposium on Systems Theory (SSST), Baylor University, March 11, 2013, pp. 41-50.

(13) Winston Ewert, Robert J. Marks II, Benjamin B. Thompson, Albert Yu, Evolutionary Inversion of Swarm Emergence Using Disjunctive Combs Control, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems, v. 43, #5, September 2013, pp. 1063-1076.

Albert R. Yu, Benjamin B. Thompson, and Robert J. Marks II, Swarm Behavioral Inversion for Undirected Underwater Search, International Journal of Swarm Intelligence and Evolutionary Computation, vol. 2 (2013). Albert R. Yu, Benjamin B. Thompson, and Robert J. Marks II, Competitive Evolution of Tactical Multiswarm Dynamics, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 563- 569 (May 2013).

Winston Ewert, Robert J. Marks II, Benjamin B. Thompson, Albert Yu, Evolutionary Inversion of Swarm Emergence Using Disjunctive Combs Control, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems, vol. 43, no. 5, September 2013, pp. 1063-1076.

(14) NeoSwarm.com.

(15) Review of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, vol. 69 no. 2, June 2017, pp. 104-108.

(16) Claude E. Shannon, A mathematical theory of communication, Bell System Technical Journal 27: 379-423 and 623656.

(17) Gabor Csanyi Stephen Hawking Lectures on Controversial Theory, The Tech, vol. 119, issue 48, Friday, October 8, 1999.

(18) The bracketed insertion in the quote is Csanyis, not ours.

(19) Quoted in P. Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 170.

(20) Cover, Thomas M., and Joy A. Thomas. Elements of Information Theory. John Wiley & Sons, 2012.

(21) Review for Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics.

(22) Paul Vitnyi, Meaningful Information, in International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation: 13th International Symposium, ISAAC 2002, Vancouver, BC, Canada, November 21-23, 2002.

(23) Unlike our approach, Vitnyis use of the so-called Kolmogorov sufficient statistic here does not take context into account.

(24) Basener, W.F., 2013. Limits of Chaos and Progress in Evolutionary Dynamics. Biological Information New Perspectives. World Scientific, Singapore, pp. 87-104.

(25) Christian Calculus.

(26) See, e.g., Penrose, Roger. Shadows of the Mind. Oxford University Press, 1994.

(27) Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time (1988). AppLife, 2014.

Photo credit: Postman85, via Pixabay.

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Top Ten Questions and Objections to Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics - Discovery Institute

Typecasting happens behind the camera as often as it does in front of it. Shawn Levy, whose brand as a Hollywood director was typified by family blockbusters likeCheaper by the Dozen and Night at the Museum, wanted the production company those hits yielded, 21 Laps, to be much more than a vehicle for him to crank out more of the same.

I know what it feels like to be perceived as limited in what you do, Levy told moderator Pete Hammond of Deadline on Sunday during a panel at the Produced By conference.

When Twentieth Century Fox came to Levy after the smash success ofNight At The Museuma decade ago and offered him a first look deal, the Canadian native and Yale graduate saw an opportunity to build a company that would support filmmaker voices.

I wanted it to be a production company, said Levy, not just a vanity deal for me to direct.

About seven years ago, Levy was joined by Dan Levine and Dan Cohen, who helped him line up projects across the gamut of budget, genre and platform. The chemistry has taken time to develop, but in recent years 21 Laps has produced some of the biggest hits on both big and small screens in recent years, including ParamountsArrival and NetflixsStranger Things. During the session, the three principals at 21 Laps detailed how all the pieces have gradually fallen into place.

We have our various tastes, added Levy. We have our opinionsBut at the end of the day were there to help shepherd and protect the directors vision and voice. Thats what I always want when I direct.

The breakthrough came in 2013 when a low-budget romantic comedy, The Spectacular Now, became a hit at Sundance. A movie about teen-age life saddled with an R rating, it charmed most critics but grossed only $6 million. No matter for Levy, it was the companys turning point.

Before we did Spectacular Now, 21 Laps was just about comedy and family films, he said. From the minute it came out, it was a turning point. No longer were we just saying we could do different things. We were doing it.

No film better illustrates the evolution of that vision than Arrival, the science fiction movie that starred Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. After acquiring book rights, they went to Fox to pitch it under their agreement.

They didnt think it was for them at the time, said Levine. Like with many projects, if they dont feel and dont want it, theyve never handcuffed us from making it elsewhere.

Arrival landed at Paramount Pictures, where the alien contact movie directed by Denis Villeneuve (Sicario) became a critical and commercial success, earning eight Oscar nominations and winning one (for sound editing). Made for a shade under $50 million, it surpassed $100 million at the U.S. box office and $200 million worldwide.

Along with Arrival, 2016 brought Stranger Things, a fantasy horror-drama with Spielberg-ian flourishes that sold to Netflix after it was turned down by numerous studios. You really have to believe in the project and director and writers and just keep fighting, said Levine. A bunch of people may say you cant make that but were passionate.

He added, I call it sticking your face in the fan. You just keep going. If you dont give up, thats when you get it done.

Levy recalled a friend who was ready to give up because he said movies he spent years working on didnt love him back.

If you really love them and stick your face in the blade every once in a while, said Levy, they will love you back.

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Sean Levy, 21 Laps Partners On Shingle's Dramatic Evolution ... - Deadline

NHM London

Fossils of early members of Homo sapiens found in Morocco (left) display a more elongated skull shape than do modern humans (right).

Researchers say that they have found the oldest Homo sapiens remains on record in an improbable place: Morocco.

At an archaeological site near the Atlantic coast, finds of skull, face and jaw bones identified as being from early members of our species have been dated to about 315,000 years ago. That indicates H. sapiens appeared more than 100,000 years earlier than thought: most researchers have placed the origins of our species in East Africa about 200,000 years ago.

The finds, which are published on 7 June in Nature1, 2, do not mean that H. sapiens originated in North Africa. Instead, they suggest that the species' earliest members evolved all across the continent, scientists say.

Until now, the common wisdom was that our species emerged probably rather quickly somewhere in a Garden of Eden that was located most likely in sub-Saharan Africa, says Jean-Jacques Hublin, an author of the study and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Now, I would say the Garden of Eden in Africa is probably Africa and its a big, big garden. Hublin was one of the leaders of the decade-long excavation at the Moroccan site, called Jebel Irhoud.

Hublin first became familiar with Jebel Irhoud in the early 1980s, when he was shown a puzzling specimen of a lower jawbone of a child from the site. Miners had discovered a nearly complete human skull there in 1961; later excavations had also found a braincase, as well as sophisticated stone tools and other signs of human presence.

The bones looked far too primitive to be anything understandable, so people came up with some weird ideas, Hublin says. Researchers guessed they were 40,000 years old and proposed that Neanderthals had lived in North Africa.

More recently, researchers have suggested that the Jebel Irhoud humans were an archaic species that survived in North Africa until H. sapiens from south of the Sahara replaced them. East Africa is where most scientists place our species origins: two of the oldest known H. sapiens fossils 196,000 and 160,000-year-old skulls3, 4 come from Ethiopia, and DNA studies of present-day populations around the globe point to an African origin some 200,000 years ago5.

Hublin first visited Jebel Irhoud in the 1990s, only to find the site buried. He didnt have the time or money to excavate it until 2004, after he had joined the Max Planck Society. His team rented a tractor and bulldozer to remove some 200 cubic metres of rock that blocked access.

Their initial goal was to re-date the site using newer methods, but in the late 2000s, the team uncovered more than 20 new human bones relating to at least five individuals, including a remarkably complete jaw, skull fragments and stone tools. A team led by archaeological scientist Daniel Richter and archaeologist Shannon McPherron, also at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, dated the site and all the human remains found there to between 280,000 and 350,000 years old using two different methods.

The re-dating and the tranche of new human bones convince Hublin that early H. sapiens once lived at Jebel Irhoud. Its a face you could cross in the street today, he says. The teeth although big compared with those of today's humans are a better match to H. sapiens than they are to Neanderthals or other archaic humans. And the Jebel Irhoud skulls, elongated compared with those of later H. sapiens, suggest that these individuals' brains were organized differently.

Hublin/Ben-Ncer/Bailey/et al./Nature

A facial reconstruction of fragments of an early Homo sapiens skull found at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco.

This offers clues about the evolution of the H. sapiens lineage into todays anatomically modern humans. Hublin suggests that anatomically modern humans may have acquired their characteristic faces before changes to the shape of their brains occurred. Moreover, the mix of features seen in the Jebel Irhoud remains and other H. sapiens-like fossils from elsewhere in Africa point to a diverse genesis for our species, and raises doubt about an exclusively East African origin.

What we think is before 300,000 years ago, there was a dispersal of our species or at least the most primitive version of our species throughout Africa, Hublin says. Around this time, the Sahara was green and filled with lakes and rivers. Animals that roamed the East African savanna, including gazelles, wildebeest and lions, also lived near Jebel Irhoud, suggesting that these environments were once linked.

An earlier origin for H. sapiens is further supported by an ancient-DNA study posted to the bioRxiv preprint server on 5 June6. Researchers led by Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University in Sweden sequenced the genome of a boy who lived in South Africa around 2,000 years ago only the second ancient genome from sub-Saharan Africa to be sequenced. They determined that his ancestors on the H. sapiens lineage split from those of some other present-day African populations more than 260,000 years ago.

Hublin says his team tried and failed to obtain DNA from the Jebel Irhoud bones. A genomic analysis could have clearly established whether the remains lie on the lineage that leads to modern humans.

Palaeontologist Jeffrey Schwartz, at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says the new finds are important but he is not convinced that they should be considered H. sapiens. Too many different-looking fossils have been lumped together under the species, he thinks, complicating efforts to interpret new fossils and to come up with scenarios on how, when and where our species emerged.

Homo sapiens, despite being so well known, was a species without a past until now, says Mara Martnon-Torres, a palaeoanthropologist at University College London, noting the scarcity of fossils linked to human origins in Africa. But the lack of features that, she says, define our species such as a prominent chin and forehead convince her that the Jebel Irhoud remains should not be considered H. sapiens.

Shannon McPherron, MPI EVA Leipzig/CC-BY-SA 2.0

The site in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. When the site was occupied by early humans, it would have been a cave; the covering rock and much sediment was removed by work in the 1960s.

Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, who co-authored a News & Views article accompanying the studies, says he was baffled by the Jebel Irhoud remains when he first saw them in the early 1970s. He knew that they werent Neanderthals, but they seemed too young and primitive-looking to be H. sapiens. But with the older dates and the new bones, Stringer agrees that the Jebel Irhoud bones stand firmly on the H. sapiens lineage. They shift Morocco from a supposed backwater in the evolution of our species to a prominent position, he adds.

For Hublin, who was born in nearby Algeria and fled at the age of eight when its war of independence began, returning to North Africa to a site that has captivated him for decades was an emotional experience. I feel like I have a personal relationship with this site, he says. I cannot say we closed a chapter, but we came to such an amazing conclusion after this very long journey. It blows my mind.

Read more from the original source:

Oldest Homo sapiens fossil claim rewrites our species' history - Nature.com

KDRV

Drift Evolution Showcases Emotional Appeal of Drift Racing KDRV MEDFORD, Ore.--The hundreds of drivers in the valley's two-day Drift Evolution Event show the momentum the sport has gained. Like an emphatic bat flip in baseball or an impassioned touchdown dance in football, those in the drifting community view their ...

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Drift Evolution Showcases Emotional Appeal of Drift Racing - KDRV

After two seasons of inconsistent playing time for the Mets, Michael Conforto grabbed hold of the starting left field job in 2017 with an All-Star worthy first two months. On the one hand, that's not totally shocking. Conforto was selected in the 2014 MLB Draft 10th overall -- Kyle Schwarber was the only college hitter selected ahead of him. On the other hand, Conforto wasn't drafted at all out of high school. In his three years at Oregon State, he went from off the scouting radar to an early first round pick.

Taking a longer view, in the span of six years, he went from an undrafted high school shortstop from Redmond High School in Washington to a guy who can do this:

And this:

Thanks to the Major League Scouting Bureau we have a snapshot of Conforto's evolution from unspectacular high school shortstop to first round pick.

Toward the end of his freshman year in Corvallis, the MLSB filed a scouting report based on an extended four-game evaluation of Conforto. He had moved to right field at Oregon State, and the problem with his profile was apparent: He couldn't really hit.

As a result of that bleak hitting outlook, Conforto received an OFP -- overall future projection -- of 50, meaning he projected as nothing more than an average major leaguer.

However, once he got to Oregon State, all Conforto did was hit. As a freshman, he hit .349 with a school-record 76 RBI on his way to being named Pac-12 Freshman of the Year. He hit .328 as a sophomore and was named Pac-12 Player of the Year. Prior to his junior year, he was named by Sporting News as the preseason Player of the Year for all of college baseball.

Prior to that junior season, another scouting report was filed on Conforto that reflected the clear fact that, in fact, he could hit.

Not only could he hit for power, but he also was able to make adjustments within an at-bat. It would be hard to construct a more glowing summary of an outfield prospect:

Unsurprisingly, this report produced a more optimistic future outlook for Conforto: a solidly above-average regular at the Major League level.

There's no doubt that there's something these reports all missed on: Conforto's arm. Neither report projected his arm as better than average, which doesn't at all explain this:

Or this:

In other words, Conforto didn't stop evolving just because MLSB reports were no longer filed for him. Nearly three years after he was drafted, Conforto continues to grow into the player that his early selection projected.

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Michael Conforto's scouting reports show his evolution from undrafted high schooler to first round pick - MLB.com

Two views of a composite reconstruction of the earliest known Homo sapiens fossils from Jebel Irhoud based on micro computed tomographic scans of multiple original fossils. Dated to 300 thousand years ago these early Homo sapiens already have a modern-looking face that falls within the variation of humans living today. However, the archaic-looking virtual imprint of the braincase (blue) indicates that brain shape, and possibly brain function, evolved within the Homo sapiens lineage.

Philipp Gunz

View looking south of the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco. The remaining deposits and several people excavating them are visible in the center. At the time the site was occupied by early hominins, it would have been a cave, but the covering rock and much sediment were removed by work at the site in the 1960s.

Shannon McPherron

The mandible from the individual dubbed Irhoud 11 is the first, almost complete adult mandible discovered at the site of Jebel Irhoud. The bone morphology and the dentition display a mosaic of archaic and evolved features, which the researchers believe place it close to the root of our own lineage.

Jean-Jacques Hublin

Here are some of the fossils being uncovered at Jebel Irhoud. In the center of the image, in a slightly more yellow brown tone, is the crushed top of a human skull (Irhoud 10) and visible just above this is a partial femur (Irhoud 13) resting against the back wall.

Steffen Schatz

Some of the Middle Stone Age stone tools from Jebel Irhoud. Pointed forms such as a-i are common in this period. Also characteristic are the so-called Levellois prepared core flakes.

Mohammed Kamal

Scientists Shannon McPherron (left) and Abdelouahed Ben-Ncer discussing the new fossils finds from Jebel Irhoud. The crushed skull from Irhoud 10 is just barely visible above the blue dustpan.

MPI EVA Leipzig

Daniel Richter drilling into the site of Jebel Irhoud as part of his work dating the deposits containing the fossils and stone tools. Richter applied thermoluminescence dating to heated flints coming from the excavations, and demonstrated that the site is about 300 thousand years old. The holes are drilled for dosimeters which measure the background radiation of the sediments for an entire year. Knowing the background radiation and the charge trapped in the heated flints, the age can be determined.

Shannon McPherron

Until this week, the earliest known fossils of Homo sapiens were about 200,000 years old. But two recent papers in Naturehave obliterated that date with a report of 300,000 year-old skull fragments from five individuals found in Morocco. The researchers who discovered the fossils call them "early Homo sapiens." But other scientists say this misrepresents the complex story of human evolution.

The Moroccan remains tell a complicated tale. While their faces are shaped almost exactly like those of modern humans, their skulls are sloped and elongated like much earlier species. While the media exploded with reports about how we've discovered the "earliest" Homo sapiens, the real story isn't that simple.

These papers are just part of a much larger debate about how and where humans evolved.

The five early humansthree adults, a child, and an adolescentwere found in what would have been a roomy, pleasant cave about 300,000 years ago. Located on a Moroccan hillside between Marrakesh and the Atlantic coast, the site known as Jebel Irhoud was until recently beena mine and a quarry. Miners first discovered human remains there in the 1960s, but they were identified as 40,000 year-old Neanderthals. Max Planck Institute evolutionary biologist Jean-Jacques Hublin wasn't satisfied with this explanation.

Unable to let go of his hunch, Hublin started periodically excavating at Jebel Irhoud in the 1980s. In 2004, he got lucky: Hublin's team uncovered an area of the site untouched by decades of quarrying. There, he told reporters at a press conference, they found a perfectly-preserved package of red clay about 3 meters deep, withlayers containing the remains of five humans along with campsite debris such as stone tools, butchered animal bones (mostly gazelle), and charcoal from a fire. Some of the bones and tools were burned too, perhaps from cooking.

The charred remains were another stroke of luck. They meant that evolutionary biologist Daniel Richter, Hublin's colleague at Max Planck, could determine the age of these objects using a technique called thermoluminescence (TL) dating. Put simply, TL dating works by measuring how much radiation an object has absorbed since it was last heated. It works only on materials like rocks and sediments with crystalline structures.

By averaging the results of TL dating on several tools and sediment layers at Jebel Irhoud, Richter determined that the fossils were about 300,000 years old, from a period called the Middle Stone Age. This date was also found using another technique, electron spin resonance dating, used on the tooth enamel from some of the fossil finds.

The dates were solid, so Hublin and his colleagues analyzed the fossils to see where they fit in the human evolutionary tree. There were no traces of DNA in the fossils, so they had only cranial shapes to guide them. Perhaps the most striking thing about the Irhoud people was their faces. These ancient people could easily have wandered around in a modern city and passed as one of us"as long as they wore a hat," Hublin joked. Their faces and tooth shapes were modern, but their elongated skulls looked more like much earlier hominins. At that point, Hublin and his colleagues dubbed them "early Homo sapiens." In an e-mail to Ars, Hublin clarified that they aren't modern humans, but instead "representative of populations directly ancestral to us."

Composite reconstruction of a fossil skull from Jebel Irhoud, based on micro computed tomographic scans of multiple original fossils. The brain case is roughly the size of a modern human's, but it slopes backward instead of creating a taller, bulbous shape.

Perhaps most important, these individuals were hunting in North Africa, far from Ethiopia and South Africa, where previous examples of ancient humans have been found. This undermines the hypothesis that humans evolved in sub-Saharan Africa and spread out from there into Eurasia. Hublin and colleagues call the Jebel Irhoud finds strong evidence for the Pan-African hypothesis, which holds that modern humans evolved all over the continent. Disputing the popular notion that there's an East African "Eden" or cradle of humanity, Hublin argued: "If there is an Eden, it's the size of Africa."

No scientists I spoke with disputed the Irhoud fossil ages, but some were less than impressed with the magnitude of Hublin and his colleagues' discovery. University of Hawaii geneticist Rebecca Cann, known for dating humanity's last common female ancestor (so-called Mitochondrial Eve), called the Nature papers "incremental at best." An evolutionary biologist who preferred to remain anonymous added that calling any ancient human fossil in Africa "the earliest whatever" is "clickbait."

These scientists don't like the way Hublin and his colleagues suggest that the "earliest" Homo sapiens walked the Earth 300,000 years ago. Evolution is a constant process, with no perfect beginnings and endings, so there can never really be an "earliest" version of humanityonly transitional forms between one species and the next. Cann elaborated in a series of e-mails with Ars:

We figure the genetic lineage of our species is placed in Africa, with dates that vary depending on which set of loci/chromosomes/geographic group/SNP vs. [whole genome sequence] gets assayed. The rough estimate of the split between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens is placed at 500-600,000 years ago. So this site should have hominins on the Homo sapiens side, roughly half way down to modern. Most evolutionary biologists would say: "OK that's lots of variation over space/time, so expect transitional forms." What do I see? Transitions. [It's a] nothingburger.

Cann suspectsthe Jebel Irhoud people are just another transitional stage in hominin evolution, and hardly the "earliest" Homo sapiens. If anything, they're a middle stage, stuck halfway between our common ancestor with Neanderthals and modern humans. This is nice, but it's hardly news; as she put it, it's an evolutionary nothingburger. Other scientists felt that the results weren't a breakthrough, given that they just confirm evolution is a series of gradual changes. As Arizona State University evolutionary biologist Curtis Marean put it, the findings are "very important to know, but perhaps not unexpected."

Philipp Gunz, another Max Planck evolutionary biologist who worked with Hublin on the fossils at Jebel Irhoud, said the team isn't disputing any of this. Still, he thinks the "earliest" Homo sapiens label fits. "Our view is that Jebel Irhoud falls close to the root of the Homo sapiens lineage," he told Ars via e-mail. "I recognize that species do evolve over time, and I am convinced that the Homo sapiens fossils from Jebel Irhoud are a beautiful illustration of such changes within an evolving lineage."

For his part, Hublin thinks the problem ultimately boils down to semantics. "In the end if one does not call them 'sapiens,' what should they be called?" he asked via e-mail. "A new name of species like [scientists would have done] in the 19th century? Or a generic term mixing all sorts of unrelated fossils? All this seems a bit ridiculous when any geneticist would tell you that most likely all the hominins of the last 2 million years could interbreed."

You have very early skulls from Spain, some people call them Homo antecessor, that have some of the facial features of modern humans over 700,000 years ago. Maybe that early population is connected to the common ancestors of humans and Neanderthals. If that were the case, its not too surprising to see some similar facial features in a later African population. It might be closer to modern humans, but it might also represent a different offshoot of that early ancestral population.

Our flattened, delicate facial features may actually be from an ancestor who pre-dated both Neanderthals and the Jebel Irhoud line. If that's the case, we're likely to see a lot of early groups of hominins running around Africa and Eurasia with so-called human faces. That doesn't mean they all evolved into modern humans.

Added Hawks, "I don't think we should redefine 'modern human' to include things like Jebel Irhoud. That just avoids the interesting questions. How were these complex hominins interacting? How did they all coexist on this continent?"

Listing image by Philipp Gunz

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300000 year-old early Homo sapiens sparks debate over evolution - Ars Technica

Birds in cities often sing at a higher pitch, perhaps to be better heard against higher levels of background noise. Photograph: Sue Tranter RSPB Images/PA Wire

Foxes loitering around rubbish bins and pigeons roosting in train stations: urban animals are widely regarded as the dregs of the natural world.

However, according to biologist Simon Watt, cities represent some of the worlds hotspots for evolution and behavioural adaptation. Speaking at the Cheltenham science festival, Watt, who is founder of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, said: The ice caps are melting, the rainforest is shrinking, the one environment that is growing is cities. If were going to look for evolutionary shifts right now in our world, the place to look is cities.

In his talk, Watt cited a host of examples of how the urban environment is prompting new genetic shifts and unexpected behaviours. A proportion of black cap warblers, which used to migrate to Morocco or southern Spain, have shifted their route to Britain where urban heat islands and garden bird feeders allow them to survive at more northerly latitudes than was previously possible.

The ones that come to Britain are starting to get shorter wings better for manoeuvrability, worse for long flights and longer beaks, which are better to get through the wee bars of garden bird feeders, although worse for things like fruits and berries.

In Australia, the mating croak of the male pobblebonk frog has been steadily rising in pitch, an adaptation that means it can still attract females in the presence of the background rumble of motorway traffic.

Pobblebonks never hear their parents, so its an evolutionary shift, said Watt. Outside the urban setting the frogs with the deepest croak tend to be most attractive to females. They still would be the most attractive males if they could be heard, but its become an advantage to have a falsetto, he added. Barry White is out, Justin Bieber is in.

Birds have also changed their vocalisations, although this appears to be acclimatisation rather than evolution. In general we can say that birds in cities have a couple of things in common. They tend to sing at a higher pitch, they tend to use fewer notes and they tend to sing faster, he said. They have their own urban music. This happens across all the species, they sing at different times at night because theyve got street lights. They are not quite sure when its bedtime. It does mean that some of these birds are stressed out.

A weed, called Crepis sancta which looks like a delicate version of the dandelion, is evolving to release higher numbers of heavy seeds and fewer light floaty ones (the plants produce a mixture) because of its concrete-bound existence. If youre in concrete, theres no point in distributing your seeds widely, youre better to just land your seeds in the patch next to you, said Watt.

There is even a species, sometimes known as the London Underground mosquito, which has adapted from a southern mosquito variety to survive in the warm underground spaces of northern cities.

Watt said the types of species that are able to thrive in urban environments tend to be adaptable omnivores, relatively intelligent and scavengers by nature.

In other words theyre rather a lot like us, he said. He added that the changes taking place in the urban environment were sometimes neglected, even by the scientific community. We dont have to go to Borneo to watch evolution in action.

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Cities should be studied as evolutionary hotspots, says biologist - The Guardian