Seed magazine profiles the recent work from John Ioannidis, author of the groundbreaking article “Why most published research findings are false”.
I’ve written about him before in several contexts and the importance of understanding this research. The counter-intuitive thing is how much his research redeems science as an enterprise and emphasizes how denialists can abuse our literature.
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PLoS has an intriguing article providing additional reasons why the thermodynamic arguments against evolution are more than silly. It’s called the maximum entropy production (MEP) hypothesis, and John Whitfield describes why life is actually may be favored by the second law of thermodynamics.
At first glance, life and the laws of thermodynamics seem to be at loggerheads. Most glaringly, the second law states that over time, any system will tend to the maximum level of entropy, meaning the minimum level of order and useful energy. Open a bottle of perfume in a closed room, and eventually the pool of scent will become a smelly cloud. Organisms do their damnedest to avoid the smelly cloud of equilibrium, otherwise known as death, and a common argument of anti-evolutionists is that the universe’s tendency toward disorder means that natural selection cannot make living things more complex.