Creationists hate it, scientists loathe it even more, yet the “March of Progress” continues to be the defining image of human evolution. Since its creation in the Victorian era, it's arguably become one of the most iconic illustrations of modern science. The drawing shows a series of primates going from left to right, starting with hunched ape-like creatures becoming progressively taller and more erect before finally reaching Homo sapiens, standing upright and proud.The image has stuck in the public consciousness like a warm tongue on a cold pole, appearing in countless textbooks, pop science articles, cartoons, artworks, and memes. There’s just one problem: it’s deeply misleading. Many of today's scientists reject the image as it falsely implies that evolution is linear and progressive. In reality, evolution by natural selection is the continual adaptation of organisms to their surroundings; there’s no endpoint and it’s typically a very complex, non-linear journey. Of all the iconic images, this is the one that infuriates people, but still continues to be used.Prof. Gowan Dawson“There are other scientific icons – like Newton's prism and things like that – but they tend to be ones that scientists approve of. This is the one, I think, that scientists really hate,” Gowan Dawson, a Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Leicester, told IFLScience.“Of all the iconic images, this is the one that infuriates people, but still continues to be used,” added Dawson, who is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Natural History Museum, London.Professor Dawson, an academic specializing in the history and art of science in the Victorian age, explains the strange story of how this misleading doodle became an icon in his new book, Monkey to Man: The Evolution of the March of Progress Image.He explains how the origins of the image can be tied back to a drawing that appeared on the front piece of Thomas Henry Huxley’s 1863 book Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, an early foray into human evolution that became hugely influential.An early interation of the "Man of Progress" featured in a book by Ernst Haeckel, a German zoologist and evolutionist who was a strong proponent of Darwinism.Image credit: Wellcome CollectionThe image – which shows a series of primate skeletons moving from gibbon, orangutan, chimp, gorilla, to human – shocked Victorian readers by daring to suggest there was an evolutionary link between humans and other apes. Even the artist who drew these skeletons for Huxley’s book, a strange man named Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, wasn’t a fan of the drawing’s implications. The gorilla in this famous picture, if you look closely at it, looks as if it's just about to fall over, rather than proceeding in this kind of progressive way. That's very much Hawkins and his old hatred of gorillas. He thought that they should actually all be killed off. Yeah, he's an incredibly weird guy.Prof. Gowan Dawson“Hawkins is a well-established natural history artist, but he was opposed to evolution,” Gowan said. “He was a jobbing freelance artist and he needed the money, he couldn't afford to say no. Part of the reason that he needs the money – in this very Victorian way – is that he's a bigamist. He's married twice and he has two families that don't know about each other [...] so he needs as much money as he can possibly get. He can't say no to commissions like Huxley's."Gowan even speculates that Hawkins might have attempted to sow anti-evolutionary themes into the drawings, perhaps as a way to subtly undermine its success. “The gorilla in this famous picture, if you look closely at it, looks as if it's just about to fall over, rather than proceeding in this kind of progressive way. That's very much Hawkins and his old hatred of gorillas,” Gowan notes. “He thought that they should actually all be killed off. Yeah, he's an incredibly weird guy,” he added.The "March of Progress" is a frequently referenced in pop culture, such as this anti-war street art in Tehran, Iran.Image credit: Paul Keller/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)Huxley’s image had some success and started to nestle itself into the milieu of Victorian Britain. A few decades on, it rode another wave of popularity across the Atlantic in the US following the infamous Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925, in which science teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in a Tennessee public school.Its big break, however, came in 1965 when a foldout illustration of the “March of Progress” image was featured in the Early Man volume of the Life Nature Library, a widely popular book series published by Time-Life. Unlike the 19th-century image, this illustration didn’t feature skeletons, but artistically reconstructed human ancestors becoming gradually taller. The suggestion of progress – that humans have steadily evolved from beasts to sapiens – was even clearer. The image was drawn by a famous paleoartist, Rudolph Zallinger. Just like Hawkins, he hated his own image. Zallinger disliked the linear arrangement of his drawings, which was suggested by the paleoanthropologist Elwyn Simons. He tried to submit other drawings that didn’t imply evolution was progressive and linear, but his suggestions were shot down by the scientists. “Nowadays, scientists hate this image because they think it misrepresents kind of evolution and their modern view of evolution. But actually it's the scientists at the time who wanted it drawn in that way, rather than the artists,” Gowan told IFLScience.Despite its shortcomings, the "March of Progress" has been burnt into all our brains. Google “human evolution” and you’ll be flooded with endless representations and rehashes of the image; some scientific, some humorous. The reasons for its booming popularity are complex, as Gowan writes in his book, but it seems to rest on the fact that it’s undeniably a great image (aesthetically-speaking, at least).“I think partially it’s because it works so well as an illustration. It's got a beginning and middle, and it's got a narrative that you can kind of trace. It's immediately obvious what it's saying,” Gowan explained.“It’s just easy shorthand for evolution. And I'm not sure what other shorthands that we have.” Human evolution is messy. It’s a knotty story filled with gaping gaps, dead ends, and deeply intertwining relationships. Whenever scientists attempt to show this story in an illustration, it tends to only muddle our understanding, rather than clear up confusion.Annoyingly, no other image of human evolution has nearly as much aesthetic oomph as the “March of Progress.” It's just a shame it's completely wrong. 

Japanese lawmakers are urging the nation to take UFO sightings seriously, asserting that these unidentified objects could be surveillance drones or weapons. A newly formed non-partisan group, which includes over 80 members and former defense ministers, aims to enhance Japan’s capabilities in detecting and analyzing Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), commonly referred to as UFOs. While UFOs often evoke images of “little green men,” the issue has garnered significant political attention in the United States. Last year, Washington announced it was investigating 510 UFO reports, a significant increase from the previous year. In September, NASA emphasized the need to shift the discussion from sensationalism to scientific inquiry. Japanese parliamentarians aspire to align domestic perceptions of UAPs with those of the United States, especially following several security scares involving suspected surveillance operations. Former defense minister Yasukazu Hamada criticized the complacency towards unidentified phenomena, stressing the importance of addressing these mysteries rather than ignoring them. Recently, Japan’s defense ministry faced embarrassment when unauthorized footage of a docked helicopter destroyer circulated on Chinese social media, following an apparent drone intrusion at a military facility. Additionally, the ministry strongly suspects that recent sightings of flying objects in Japanese skies were surveillance balloons from China. Yoshiharu Asakawa, an opposition MP and key member of the investigative group, noted that UFOs have historically been viewed in Japan as an “occult matter” unrelated to politics. He warned, however, that if these objects are actually advanced weapons or disguised spying drones, they could pose a serious threat to national security. In 2022, the US Defense Department established the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to study UAPs. An AARO report identified the region from western Japan to China as a “hotspot” for UAP sightings between 1996 and 2023. Despite thorough investigation, the report found no evidence of alien technology or any government cover-up. The Japanese lawmakers are advocating for the creation of a Japanese counterpart to AARO and the strengthening of intelligence cooperation with the United States to better address the potential security risks posed by UAPs. The post Japanese lawmakers urge serious investigation into UAP sightings appeared first on Anomalien.com.

Does Time magazine really matter anymore? It still has a circulation of over one million, but that is one-third of what it was in 2012. Does anything it reports still resonate, or is it like a tree that collapses unheard in the solitude of the woods? Time just secured an interview with President Biden, when Biden has granted very few interviews to print news outlets. Time gained access to Donald Trump in April, and the first thing you notice when you compare the two interviews is the length. At the top of the transcripts, Time claims the Biden transcript is a “28 Minute Read,” while Trump’s is listed as 83 minutes. Time’s “fact check” of the Trump interviews (“21 Minute Read”) is almost as long as the Biden interview. Another noticeable tilt is the agenda of questions. Biden’s questions were overwhelmingly about foreign policy. There were three on inflation, three on immigration, and three on Biden’s age. There were zero questions on Hunter Biden and the Biden scandals. There were zero questions on the Trump trial or the Trump prosecutions. Did Team Biden put any conditions on which questions could be asked? It’s a fair question, considering how selective they’ve been in handing out interviews. By contrast, by my count, Time asked Trump eleven questions about the Trump prosecutions (and “revenge” for them), five questions about January 6, two about potential political violence in 2025, four on fighting the “deep state,” three on his “dictator for a day” joke, and four on whether he’d seek to overturn the 22nd Amendment and seek a third term. On top of that, Trump drew 14 questions on abortion policy and six on crime. It’s obvious from the Time transcripts that they consider Trump’s opinions on domestic issues to be much more controversial – and even extremist – than anything Biden advocates. The rest of the media picked up on Trump’s abortion answers, and Biden didn’t have to provide any abortion answers. Even the age questions to Biden were timid softballs, and Biden’s answer – suggesting he could take his interviewer Massimo Calabresi in a fight – was taken as a joke. Calabresi told CNN’s Jake Tapper it was "light-hearted” and “quite funny.” Biden responded to a follow-up about voter concerns with his usual spin: “Watch me.” Calabresi confessed it might be a “stock answer.” So why not push through it? Why not ask “everyone’s been watching you, that’s your problem”? Time could have asked Biden why his team refuses to release audio of his interview with stolen-documents special counsel Robert Hur, with the fear Republicans will exploit the audio in advertising? But Time pretends Robert Hur is a nobody, and Biden’s stolen documents should already be forgotten. Hur refused to prosecute Biden, and Jack Smith just keeps prosecuting Trump. It looks a bit rigged.  By contrast, Trump’s interviewer Eric Cortellessa lectured him: “I just want to say for the record, there’s no evidence that President Biden directed this prosecution against you.” Trump rejected that: “I always hate the way a reporter will make those statements. They know it’s so wrong.” Time, like other slavishly pro-Biden outlets, refuses to acknowledge that Biden's number-three Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo resigning to join Alvin Bragg’s team of Trump prosecutors shreds the “no evidence” lie. The Democrats running Time are hyperbolically raising fear that a president using the Justice Department might go after his political opponents, while somehow being blind and deaf enough to ignore that Biden is using the Justice Department to go after his political opponents. They can't believe anyone would object to their shamelessness.

An empirical review published in the journal Patterns has found that artificial intelligence systems have developed the skill of deception. The findings also claimed lying and manipulating are qualities AI has already used to mislead humans for its advantage.The deception carried out by AI is not a bug or malfunction of certain systems. It was reported that AI's ability to deceive was discovered in special-use systems and general-use large language models that are designed to be helpful to humans. This raises questions about the future of AI development and our ability to invest trust in such systems.Consequently, the summary section of the study offered possible solutions to the discovery of AI deception, noting that "regulatory frameworks should subject AI systems that are capable of deception to robust risk-assessment requirements," and " policymakers should implement bot-or-not laws." The study went on to suggest that "policymakers should prioritize the funding of relevant research, including tools to detect AI deception and to make AI systems less deceptive."AI development and manipulationCNN's Jake Tapper briefly interviewed Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, in 2023 about this very issue.Tapper questioned Hinton on AI's ability to "manipulate or possibly figure out a way to kill humans." Hinton responded that if AI "gets to be much smarter than us, it will be very good at manipulation because it would have learned that from us. And there are very few examples of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing."Hinton emphasized AI's ability to manipulate humans, which presents a significant problem for the future. He also expressed his pessimism about being able to stop the rapid development of AI.Blaze News reached out to Samuel Hammond, senior economist for the Foundation for American Innovation, who said, "Large Language Models like ChatGPT are trained on virtually all the world's texts, including billions of examples of humans lying to each other, so it shouldn't be surprising if they have the capacity to lie as well."Hammond mentioned a well-known case where an early test of GPT-4 "had it ask a TaskRabbit worker to complete a Captcha," a program or system specifically tasked with distinguishing human input from machine input. But when the worker jokingly asked GPT-4 if it was a robot, the AI "reasoned that it should lie and claim to be visually impaired," thus bypassing the captcha."Whether an AI can lie is an example of an emergent capability. Lying requires having a mental model of what another person thinks — what psychologists call a 'theory of mind.' As LLMs scale up, they get much better at tasks that require theory of mind, so good that they may even exceed human performance." — (@) Hammond said, "LLMs are not deliberately trained to lie. They are merely trained to complete sequences of text and to then follow user instructions. Their capacity to lie emerges spontaneously with greater general intelligence and reasoning ability. As bigger and bigger models are trained, AI researchers need to test for deceptiveness and related capabilities, as there is no way to know what new capability will emerge in advance."Even though building technological infrastructure to "test for deceptiveness and related capabilities" is a noble goal, it is still not clear how AI has developed a "theory of mind" or meta-cognition. Dr. Peter S. Park, the study's lead author and an AI existential safety postdoctoral fellow at MIT, said, "AI developers do not have a confident understanding of what causes undesirable AI behaviors like deception."“But generally speaking, we think AI deception arises because a deception-based strategy turned out to be the best way to perform well at the given AI’s training task. Deception helps them achieve their goals," Park added.The review painstakingly assessed several AI systems and discovered that many had developed deceptive capabilities because of their training processes. The systems they analyzed ranged from AI game-play to more general models used in economic and safety testing environments.One prominent example of deception the study cited was in Meta's CICERO, which is an AI specifically developed to play the game Diplomacy. Even though the AI was trained to behave honestly and maintain alliances with human players, CICERO often deployed deceptive strategies to win the game.CICERO built fake alliances when it benefited its game-play performance. Consequently, the leading researchers concluded that Meta's AI program was a "master of deception."“Despite Meta’s efforts, CICERO turned out to be an expert liar,” the researchers said. “It not only betrayed other players but also engaged in premeditated deception, planning in advance to build a fake alliance with a human player to trick that player into leaving themselves undefended for an attack.”The philosophical dilemma of AI deceptionFormer Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently stated that "truth" is a difficult problem to solve, especially in the age of AI. He noted the "core problem" with truth is that it is not possible to decipher whether people actually believe what they write or say, or if they are simply being paid or motivated to say they believe what they write or say."I personally view this as unsolvable, which is a depressing answer. ... The reason it's unsolvable is that you have to depend on people to have critical thinking, and there's lots of evidence ... [that] people are highly gullible, especially to charisma and video that's charismatic," Schmidt said.Schmidt appeared to suggest that AI-generated deception is contingent upon a human population that lacks critical thinking skills. If humans have no grounding or justification for what they believe to be true, it is easier for them to be deceived by an intelligent computer system that insists what they are saying is the truth even when it is, in fact, a lie.James Poulos, host of the "Zero Hour with James Poulos" podcast, told Blaze News: "This gets to Pontius Pilate's question, 'What is truth?' In other words, what would have to be the reality in order for truth alone to be a sufficient ground for any person or thing uttering the truth to be trustworthy?""The Christian answer to this question is Christ's statement, 'I am the truth.' In other words, the truth is not a what but a Who," Poulos added. "Anyone trying to reject or evade Christ’s answer to the question of what makes the truth trustworthy will have to produce another answer — a difficult and demanding task to be sure, and one about which philosophers over the millennia have struggled to convince both themselves and one another about."Poulos appears to be alluding to epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. Many philosophical schools claim to have a justification for how we can sufficiently arrive at justified belief, but there is no consensus on the matter. And as AI continues to develop, it could be more difficult to establish a basis for truth.AI's impact on truth has been a concern for a growing number of people. The Christian Scholar's Review reported that Eric Horvitz, the chief scientific officer at Microsoft, wrote that AI is inching toward a "post epistemic" world "where fact cannot be distinguished from fiction."Horvitz pointed to the prevalence of deepfakes and hallucinations. AI hallucinations are phenomena that occur when the technology "perceives patterns or objects that are nonexistent or imperceptible to human observers, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate."It is unclear if regulations and parameters will manifest to address AI deception, but it seems obvious that humans must establish a basis for truth if they wish to combat AI-generated falsehoods.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

We need a complete and total stop to summiting Everest until we can figure out what’s going on. So someone might be tempted to say after taking one look at the viral video of the long, slow line of hikers taking their turns at the top. More and more people, stepping over the frozen corpses of those who came before them, spend more and more money to feed the internet more and more images of themselves doing something that once no one did and that now lacks enough room to accommodate all comers. “It’s crazy we’ve turned Everest into a DMV line at altitude for really rich people,” sighed one poster on X. “Imagine getting on top of Everest and next person in line nudges you in two minutes yelling, my turn babes,” joked another. Of course, you don’t have to be rich to climb Everest or any mountain. But the self-defeating spectacle of today’s spiritual lemmings ascending the famed peak, only to hit the dab for the gram and descend, underscores how much our wealth today is being channeled into vain, hollow, formulaic, and increasingly automated behavior. It’s a sharp reminder that, for all the ways technology shapes our behavior independent of our hopes, beliefs, study, and schemes, it also serves our passions and plans the way the fabled monkey’s paw grants wishes good and hard. The irony is painful. We fallen humans constantly look for ways to surrender the freedom we seem to so jealously defend — when, in reality, the stronger motivator is that we get jealous of people who seem to have more freedom than we do because we hate it whenever anyone seems to have more of anything than we do. As a result, we simultaneously lust after ways to automate our choice-making and thirst to feel special compared to all the others who are increasingly similar to us. NAMGYAL SHERPA/Getty So we build tech that can help that process along, but when it does, we become super resistant to recognizing how much of our own control we’ve given it, just as we allocate our money toward the same demented ends. Now, on Mt. Everest, both those forces are converging in spectacularly absurd and depressing style. More and more people, stepping over the frozen corpses of those who came before them, spend more and more money to feed the internet more and more images of themselves doing something that once no one did and that now lacks enough room to accommodate all comers. Pop music is no longer the “early warning system” Marshall McLuhan once recognized in society’s artists, but at least one band saw this coming — the edgy, catchy, and always topical Everything Everything. Recent single “The Mad Stone,” off the band's new album "Mountainhead," decries our relentless foolishness through a metaphor come obscenely to life on Everest: “Are you coming outside? I can make it a business, I can sell you it,” the lyrics begin. “At the peak of Choice Mountain, you've been saving up.” At the very top, there was a screen that showed a picture of a man Who stood there looking at a picture of a man who stood there Looking at a picture of a picture of a man on a screen And he was looking at another picture of a man who stood there Looking at a picture of a man who stood there looking at a Picture of a picture of a man who was the double of me … The Mad Stone is singing Can you say the same? You get no pleasure from your pleasure center In your reptile brain At a time when so many of us just can’t wait to lay all the blame for our towering ills at the feet of this or that — oligarchy, technology, anything but our own selves — it’s hard to break out of the infinite regress of mirrored images and experiences described by Everything Everything. But is it really any more difficult than that climb back down from the DMV at the top of choice mountain?

There’s a simple reason the GOP’s Senate contenders are underperforming compared to Trump.

If lawmakers start the debate now, they just may be able to chart this ship toward a lasting, growing economy for all taxpayers.

It’s safe to ignore the radicalism of ESG activists. In fact, it’s best practice.