I’ve updated the Illustration.

Seems like they got it straight from the university press release here. I guess we can cut them some slack for using a bit of AI given the recent job losses at that university. They are reported to have lost around 4000 full time staff places in the last year, part of Australia’s recent cut backs to universities that don’t get much international reporting. That’s may hurt their ability to do quality research. Professor Archer noted that "quite clearly, from the many fascinating animals that we’ve already found in this deposit since 1983, we know that with more digging there will be a lot more surprises to come,”. So lets hope they continue to get support.

So he’s talking about the Christian version of God but what specific variant. There’s lots to select from you know. Do other Abrehamic religions get a pass or just his present kind of evangelical nuttery.

Its a pattern in the data that’s consistent unless our observations are very strangely skewed. Even if it only shows that gigantic planets tend to come in matched sets within a solar system that is quite interesting. As the paper suggests it warrants more investigation which might show that the correlation is true for all planets forming together in a system or not. That might have to do with how often, major inward moving currents form in a solar nebula, changing the distribution of matter towards a few giants as in our own solar system, or perhaps the metalicity of the original disk material is a factor ie more frozen gas and less rock. In any case a very interesting result, especially if it continues to hold up. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory should over time add many additional exoplanets to our records as it will survey billions of stars and can detect planets in types of systems not currently covered by TESS.

From the interview: The main takeaway is that humans are special, but so are birds and reptiles. So our brains are amazing, but bird brains are even as amazing. We have neurons other species do not have. But the chicken, even the chicken, they do have neurons that we don’t have. So evolution has found so many different ways to generate complex brains, not just only one direct pathway from amphibians to humans. In this case, the tree of intelligence is a tree. It’s not just a single branch.

Ah that what happens when you Google an article which explanes some historical connection to Plato etc but it then uses that to make a completely unrelated point ie woke is bad. I should have read the whole thing before linking it. Looking at the other articles on the site it is indeed mostly right wing propaganda. A better point is Dawnkin’s post about Platonic forms here https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25366 in response to the question what scientific idea should be retired in 2014? He points out essentialism is a problem for accepting evolution, and for so many other things.

And Plato would have gotten away with it too, if not for those meddling kids and their cladistics. Essentialism has been hugely damaging and is the foundation of most types of Creationism. https://newdiscourses.com/2021/02/essentialism-logical-fallacy-plaguing-us-since-plato/

Indeed, and in addition if your religion is not supported by the facts it’s time to revise its assumptions. Religion can deal with new evidence, it’s just rather slow compared to say human lifetimes. I suspect thats because the basis of many faiths reasoning is built on philosophy, Christianity in particular. Which is a kind of precursor to experimental science where progress is slow or even circular.

Also, for those concerned that Human brains have shrunk over the last thirty thousand years, there is good news: A large-scale study published in March 2024 by researchers at UC Davis Health found human brains have been getting larger over the last few decades. Study participants born in the 1970s had 6.6% larger brain volumes and almost 15% larger brain surface area than those born in the 1930s. This steady increase for people born after the 1930s, is believed to be due to better nutrition. https://health.ucdavis.edu/news/headlines/human-brains-are-getting-larger-that-may-be-good-news-for-dementia-risk/2024/03