Is gender a mere tool of the patriarchy? Or is it hardwired prior to birth?

If there are superstar scholars, Berkeley professor Judith Butler is a superstar. She is best known for pioneering the idea that "male" and "female" are merely social constructs. She writes that "because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all." For this insight, she has been rewarded with an avalanche of scholarly honors and prizes, including the Mellon Prize, which carries with it a $1.5 million cash award. (By comparison, the Nobel Prize gets you just $1.1 million.)

Butler is a professor of comparative literature, not a neuroscientist, but her ideas about gender have become widely accepted worldwide in the nearly 30 years since the publication of her book Gender Trouble. In 2017, Cordelia Fine, professor of historical and philosophical studies at the University of Melbourne, published a book titled Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the myths of our gendered minds Following Butler, Fine asserted that any claims that women and men differ significantly in brain or behavior are simply myths perpetuated by the heteronormative patriarchy. Fine's book promptly received the Royal Society's prestigious prize for best science book of the year.

I know many other mathematicians and engineers who share my low opinion of Darwinism, but most are reluctant to express their views publicly because they feel that the issue is simply outside their area of expertise and they will not be taken seriously. I also tend to defer to specialists on scientific issues outside my discipline - until those specialists try to tell me something clearly absurd, for example, that unintelligent forces alone could have reorganized the basic particles on Earth into computers and airplanes and Apple iPhones. Then I don't hesitate to jump into the debate. I have done so, for example, in a 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer opinion piece, "A Mathematician's View of Evolution," and in a 2017 Physics Essays article, "On 'Compensating' Entropy Decreases."

A Very Simple Principle

It is really not necessary to be a biochemist or a paleontologist to understand the main issue in the debate between Darwinism and intelligent design. That is because it is a very simple principle, as I keep emphasizing: natural (unintelligent) causes do not create order (or information). They destroy it. That is the main theme of the first half of my video "Why Evolution Is Different."

Humans will always make the final decision on whether armed robots can shoot, according to a statement by the US Department of Defense. Their clarification comes amid fears about a new advanced targeting system, known as ATLAS, that will use artificial intelligence in combat vehicles to target and execute threats. While the public may feel uneasy about so-called "killer robots", the concept is nothing new - machine-gun wielding "SWORDS" robots were deployed in Iraq as early as 2007.

Our relationship with military robots goes back even further than that. This is because when people say "robot", they can mean any technology with some form of "autonomous" element that allows it to perform a task without the need for direct human intervention.

These technologies have existed for a very long time. During World War II, the proximity fuse was developed to explode artillery shells at a predetermined distance from their target. This made the shells far more effective than they would otherwise have been by augmenting human decision making and, in some cases, taking the human out of the loop completely.

So the question is not so much whether we should use autonomous weapon systems in battle - we already use them, and they take many forms. Rather, we should focus on how we use them, why we use them, and what form - if any - human intervention should take.

In space, no one can hear an asteroid scream. But astronomers just used the Hubble telescope to see one destroying itself.

A 2.5-mile-wide asteroid called 6478 Gault was first discovered in 1988, and it seemed like many of the other 800,000 known space rocks.

But in January, astronomers saw something strange in survey telescope images: Gault had become "active" and sprouted a big, bright tail - much like a comet's - that stretched more than 500,000 miles long. A dimmer second tail was found several weeks later.

Some space rocks that initially look like asteroids are later found to be comets when they pass close to the sun. The boost in solar energy can warm up ice and other frozen compounds hidden under layers of dust, turning those materials into gases and leading the rock to spew out comet debris to form a long, glowing tail.


Gault didn't seem to fit the bill, though, since it lurks about 214 million miles away from the sun in a fairly circular orbit between Mars and Jupiter. In other words, it never swung close to the sun. So scientists wondered if another space rock had collided with Gault, splashing its dusty guts all over space.

New Australian research highlights the increasing risk of "technoference'" - the disruptive impact of mobile phones.

Nearly a quarter of women surveyed and 15% of men could be classified as problematic mobile users, the researchers say. That jumps to 40.9% for the 18-to-24 age group.

And it's a rapidly escalating problem.

The researchers, led by Oscar Oviedo-Trespalacios from the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety at Queensland University of Technology, surveyed 709 people aged 18 to 83 in 2018, using questions replicated from a similar survey in 2005.

They then compared the findings and discovered significant increases in people blaming their phones for everything from losing sleep to becoming less productive or taking more risks while driving.

Today 19.5% of women 11.8% of men say they lose sleep due to the time they spend on their mobile phone, compared with just 2.3% and 3.2% respectively in 2005.

One in eight men say their productivity has decreased as a direct result of the time they spend on their mobile - compared to none in 2005.

Hundreds of huge, bacteria-killing viruses have been newly discovered lurking in all kinds of environments, including our guts. Their massive genomes code for many proteins not found in smaller viruses, including CRISPR systems used to attack both their bacterial hosts and rival viruses.

The massive viruses have long gone unnoticed because the standard methods used to look for bacteria-killing viruses, or bacteriophages, literally filter them out. Instead, a team has found them by looking at all the DNA present in a variety of samples, an approach known as metagenomics.

The researchers then pieced together the genomes of the huge phages using a method developed by team leader Jill Banfield at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bacteriophages are the most common entities on Earth. There can be many millions in a drop of seawater. Almost all known phages have genomes tens of thousands of DNA letters long at most. Larger ones were thought to be very rare. But earlier this year, Banfield's team reported finding more than a dozen phages with genomes up to 540,000 DNA letters long in the guts of humans and animals.

In his 2014 book, Our Mathematical Universe, physicist Max Tegmark boldly claims that "protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars" are all redundant "baggage." Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behavior of matter is supposedly real, not matter itself. For Tegmark, the universe is a "set of abstract entities with relations between them," which "can be described in a baggage-independent way" - i.e., without matter. He attributes existence solely to descriptions, while incongruously denying the very thing that is described in the first place. Matter is done away with and only information itself is taken to be ultimately real.


This abstract notion, called information realism is philosophical in character, but it has been associated with physics from its very inception. Most famously, information realism is a popular philosophical underpinning for digital physics. The motivation for this association is not hard to fathom.

Indeed, according to the Greek atomists, if we kept on dividing things into ever-smaller bits, at the end there would remain solid, indivisible particles called atoms, imagined to be so concrete as to have even particular shapes. Yet, as our understanding of physics progressed, we've realized that atoms themselves can be further divided into smaller bits, and those into yet smaller ones, and so on, until what is left lacks shape and solidity altogether. At the bottom of the chain of physical reduction there are only elusive, phantasmal entities we label as "energy" and "fields" - abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.

This is the third in a series of posts responding to the extended critique of Darwin Devolves by Richard Lenski at his blog, Telliamed Revisited. Professor Lenski is perhaps the most qualified scientist in the world to analyze the arguments of my book. He is the Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, a MacArthur ("Genius Award") Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences with hundreds of publications. He also has a strong interest in the history and philosophy of science. His own laboratory evolution work is a central focus of the book. I am very grateful to Professor Lenski for taking time to assess Darwin Devolves. His comments will allow interested readers to quickly gauge the relative strength of arguments against the book's thesis.

Unintended Consequences

I have already addressed several of the issues that Lenski has raised at his blog in his third post on Darwin Devolves, "Is the LTEE Breaking Bad?," in my responses (here, here, and here) to the review by my Lehigh colleagues, because they cited his work frequently. Nonetheless, repetition is a fine teaching tool. So here I will again speak to those issues and also address a few others.

In "Is the LTEE Breaking Bad?" Lenski agrees that the beneficial mutations seen in his Long Term Evolution Experiment are overwhelmingly degradative or loss-of-function ones. Even so, that does not concern him because "the LTEE represents an ideal system in which to observe degradative evolution." Beneficial degradative changes are only to be expected there, it seems.

The LTEE was designed (intelligently, in my opinion!) to be extremely simple in order to address some basic questions about the dynamics and repeatability of evolution, while minimizing complications. It was not intended to mimic the complexities of nature, nor was it meant to be a test-bed for the evolution of new functions. The environment in which the bacteria grow is extremely simple. ...

Indeed, the LTEE environment is so extremely simple that one might reasonably expect the bacteria would evolve by breaking many existing functions. That is because the cells could, without consequence, lose their abilities to exploit resources not present in the flasks, lose their defenses against absent predators and competitors, and lose their capacities to withstand no-longer-relevant extreme temperatures, bile salts, antibiotics, and more. [Emphasis in the original.]

In other words, there are many tools in the robust E. coli genomic toolbox that wouldn't be needed in the Michigan State lab. It could lose them without immediate consequence. In fact, there may even be some benefit to losing them, either by simply saving the energy of making them, or by diverting resources to other pathways that are more heavily used in the lab environment.

For the first time, scientists have engineered the complex biological process of translation into a designer organelle in a living mammalian cell. Research by the Lemke group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) -- in collaboration with JGU Mainz and IMB Mainz -- used this technique to create a membraneless organelle that can build proteins from natural and synthetic amino acids carrying new functionality. Their results -- published in Science on 29 March -- allow scientist to study, tailor, and control cellular function in more detail.

During evolution, the development of new organelles allows cells and organisms to become more complex, due to the ability to sort cellular processes into specific hotspots. "Our tool can be used to engineer translation, but potentially also other cellular processes like transcription and post-translational modifications. This might even allow us to engineer new types of organelles that extend the functional repertoire of natural complex living systems," explains Christopher Reinkemeier, PhD student at EMBL and JGU Mainz and co-first author of the paper. "We could for example incorporate fluorescent building blocks that allow a glimpse inside the cell using imaging methods."

"The organelle can make proteins by using synthetic non-canonical amino acids. Currently we know of more than 300 different non-canonical amino acids -- compared to 20 which are naturally occurring. We are no longer restricted to the latter ones," says co-first author Gemma Estrada Girona. "The novelty we introduce is the ability to use these in a confined space, the organelle,, which minimises the effects on the host."

Given enough time, even a tidy room will get messy. Clothes, books and papers will leave their ordered state and scatter across the floor. Annoyingly, this tendency toward untidiness reflects a law of nature: Disorder tends to grow.

If, for example, you cut open a pressurized scuba tank, the air molecules inside will spew out and spread throughout the room. Place an ice cube in hot water and the water molecules frozen in the ordered, crystalline lattice will break their bonds and disperse. In mixing and spreading, a system strives toward equilibrium with its environment, a process called thermalization.

It's common and intuitive, and precisely what a team of physicists expected to see when they lined up 51 rubidium atoms in a row, holding them in place with lasers. The atoms started in an orderly pattern, alternating between the lowest-energy "ground" state and an excited energy state. The researchers assumed the system would quickly thermalize: The pattern of ground and excited states would settle almost immediately into a jumbled sequence.

And at first, the pattern did jumble. But then, shockingly, it reverted to the original alternating sequence. After some more mixing, it returned yet again to that initial configuration. Back and forth it went, oscillating a few times in under a microsecond - long after it should have thermalized.

It was as if you dropped an ice cube in hot water and it didn't just melt away, said Mikhail Lukin, a physicist at Harvard University and a leader of the group. "What you see is the ice melts and crystallizes, melts and crystallizes," he said. "It's something really unusual."

Physicists have dubbed this bizarre behavior "quantum many-body scarring." As if scarred, the atoms seem to bear an imprint of the past that draws them back to their original configuration over and over again.