At the risk of doing this subject to death (for those who haven’t noticed, I’m fairly set on bacterial regulation of gene expression and, in particular, flagellar assembly), I recently encountered a somewhat revealing quote from one of my favourite overviews of the flagellum — that is, Pili and Flagella: Current Research and Future Trends. In chapter 6 of that book (entitled, “What Is Essential For Flagellar Assembly?”), contributer Shin-Ichi Aizawa writes, Since the flagellum is so well designed and beautifully constructed by an ordered assembly pathway, even I, who am not a creationist, get an awe-inspiring feeling from its ‘divine’ beauty … However, if the flagellum evolved from a primitive form, where are the remnants of its ancestor? Why Read More ›

Today is Thursday, and here is your regular dose of No Free Will?:

Scientists from UCLA and Harvard — Itzhak Fried, Roy Mukamel and Gabriel Kreiman — have taken an audacious step in the search for free will, reported in a new article in the journal Neuron. They used a powerful tool – intracranial recording – to find neurons in the human brain whose activity predicts decisions to make a movement, challenging conventional notions of free will.

– How Free Is Your Will? A clock face, advanced neurosurgery–and startling philosophical questions about the decision to act (Daniela Schiller and David Carmel, Scientific American, March 22, 2011)

The basis of many “no free will” assertions is that people often make a decision before they are consciously aware of it:

Even with the above caveats, though, these findings are mind-boggling. They indicate that some activity in our brains may significantly precede our awareness of wanting to move. Libet suggested that free will works by vetoing: volition (the will to act) arises in neurons before conscious experience does, but conscious will can override it and prevent unwanted movements.

That’s hardly a new discovery, and were it not so, “split-second” decisions would be impossible. Hamlet can dither; the rest of us can’t.  The idea that it poses a challenge to the existence of free will is marketed almost exclusively by those who have a problem with the concept. The authors here more or less recognize the flaws in the typical reasoning when they write, Read More ›

Here’s Ann Coulter, on science as done by trial lawyers and activists:

In response to my column last week about hormesis – the theory that some radiation can be beneficial to humans – liberals reacted with their usual open-minded examination of the facts.

According to Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz devoted an entire segment to denouncing me. He called me toxic, accused me of spreading misinformation and said I didn’t care about science.

One thing Schultz did not do, however, was cite a single physicist or scientific study.

I cited three physicists by name as well as four studies supporting hormesis in my column.

Just think. There was a time when science was based on evidence (not always easy to come by).

Not on myths, rituals, incantations against evil, superstitions, and witless worship.

The latter state pretty much characterises Read More ›

Hannah Waters reports at The Scientist (14th February 2011), The mouse is not enough Early embryonic development differs between mice and cows, suggesting mice may not reflect mammalian development as well as scientists had believed [ … ] Specifically, the mechanism of cell commitment in early embryos differs between mice and cows, suggesting that development in mice may not be representative of development in other mammals, including humans. This research suggests “that the mouse alone is not the ideal model if you want to study mammalian embryogenesis,” said Michael Bader, a cardiovascular biologist who works on rat embryogenesis at the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin and was not involved in the research. Reminds me of the wheeze Read More ›

An interesting research article was published in Nature this week [Wang, K. C., Y. W. Yang, et al. (2011). “A long noncoding RNA maintains active chromatin to coordinate homeotic gene expression.” Nature]. In the study, a fascinating new regulatory role is identified for long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs). Read More>>>

David L. Chandler asks, Are we all Martians? According to many planetary scientists, it’s conceivable that all life on Earth is descended from organisms that originated on Mars and were carried here aboard meteorites. If that’s the case, an instrument being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard could provide the clinching evidence.- “Are you a Martian? We all could be, scientists say — and new instrument might provide proof” (Physorg March 23, 2011) The article provides a useful summary of the state of the evidence, capped by Christopher McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA-Ames Research Center in California who specializes in research related to the possibility of life on Mars, says this work is “very interesting and important.” He says, Read More ›

In “Supplemental or detrimental?: Journals debate the value of supplemental materials”, Michele Solis reports at The Scientist (24th February 2011) on the problem material supplemental to journal publications, available only online, materials publication creates for peer review, and the bold step Journal of Neuroscience and several other journals have taken by just abolishing it: Editor-in-chief John Maunsell argued in an editorial that the escalating amount of supplemental materials had begun to devalue the peer review process.[ … ] “More data, in and of itself, is always a good thing — if there aren’t adverse effects,” said Maunsell, who is also a neuroscientist at Harvard University. But peer review was becoming less effective because many reviewers failed to evaluate the supplemental Read More ›

It is your fault.

In “The Brain Is Not an Explanation,” Wray Herbert (Psychological Science March 23, 2011) tries to bring some rationality to the interpretation of brain science here:

Brain scans pinpoint how chocoholics are hooked. This headline appeared in The Guardian a couple years ago above a science story that began: “Chocoholics really do have chocolate on the brain.” The story went on to describe a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of chocoholics and non-cravers. The study found increased activity in the pleasure centers of the chocoholics’ brains, and the Guardian report concluded: “There may be some truth in calling the love of chocolate an addiction in some people.”

Sure, that’s it. It’s not my fault, it’s Russell Stover’s. As it happens, however, Read More ›

There are minor errors, there are mistakes, there are egregious blunders, there are schoolboy howlers, and then there are absolute whoppers. I’ll let my readers decide how to classify this one from a Mr. Frank Curcio, who is, as we shall see, an educated man.

In a letter entitled “God, science and evolution,” at New Jersey’s largest local website NJ.com, a Mr. Curcio writes in to warn readers:

The creationists are at it again, trying to get their religious dogma taught in public schools as science.

Responding to an earlier letter to NJ.com by a Mr. Michael Wolfe, who wrote that he found it “painful to witness the lengths to which many atheists go in their attempts to deny intelligent design in both creation and perpetuation,” Frank Curcio countered: “I’m a lifelong theist and I do not believe in creationism or intelligent design.” Fair enough. Mr. Curcio later added:

I can assure readers that not every theist wants his or her particular religious beliefs forced on the students in our public schools. A lifelong theist, I have been a scientist and historian since 1959 and from my experience can state that not every religious person is a creationist; not every scientist is an atheist.

I shall let Mr. Curcio’s careless equation of Intelligent Design with creationism pass without comment. Evidently Mr. Curcio is an educated man: a scientist and an historian. I was therefore hoping that his rebuttal of Mr. Wolfe’s views would be a well-argued one, making some substantive points drawn from one or both of his fields of expertise. Instead, Mr. Curcio’s letter betrays a jaw-dropping, bone-headed ignorance of history. I will invite my readers to see how many mistakes they can count: Read More ›

PaV’s recent post Darwinn Step Aside – Survival of the ‘Quickest’ got me thinking again about natural selection and the role it supposedly played in evolution. The conventional wisdom among Darwinists, including Darwin himself, is that NS is a mechanism. The very title of Darwin’s famous tome suggests as much – On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection . The clear implication is that NS is some sort of mechanism. A mechanism by definition is something that does something. Consider the simple dictionary definition of the term “mechanism”

1
a : a piece of machinery b : a process, technique, or system for achieving a result
2
: mechanical operation or action : working 2
3
: a doctrine that holds natural processes (as of life) to be mechanically determined and capable of complete explanation by the laws of physics and chemistry
4
: the fundamental processes involved in or responsible for an action, reaction, or other natural phenomenon

Read More ›

Over at Why Evolution is True, in an article crassly titled, Why God hurt Japan, Professor Jerry Coyne takes pastor Adam Hamilton to task for his personal perspective on the recent magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11.

Now, I’ve already argued here that suffering does not make it absurd to believe in an omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent God, and I’ve attempted to address the problem of suffering here in an article I wrote in response to Professor Anthony Grayling on the recent disaster that affected Japan, so I shall say no more about the matter in this post. By the way, readers can donate to the Japanese Red Cross here and here, or donate to the American Red Cross earthquake relief response here and here.

The phrase “swallowing camels” is often used to refer to believing incredible things. Professor Coyne appears not to realize that he is a camel-swallower extraordinaire. For the difficulties in accepting the existence of an Intelligent Designer of Nature who is also (as many ID supporters like myself believe) omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent, pale in comparison with the sheer impossibility of a world with no Designer at all. For that reason, I regard Professor Coyne as far more credulous than any of the religious fundamentalists whom he regularly lambastes in his posts. Today, I’d like to briefly explain why.

Near the end of his article, Professor Coyne asks:

What would our world be like if God had not created it, and it had arisen in a purely natural manner?

Talk about leading with your chin! This one’s easy. Read More ›

Here’s the latest from PhysOrg:

The process of “spatial sorting” relies on genes for speed accumulating at the increasingly fast-moving frontline. Unlike natural selection – a process first described by Charles Darwin, stating that traits which help an organism survive and reproduce will build up over time – spatial sorting does not require an animal’s survival or reproduction to be increased by it being quicker. The new process can only work within the limits set by natural selection, but may be an important cause of evolutionary change in species that are expanding their ranges into new territory.

There’s a name for this kind of process, isn’t there? I think you would term this a “sieve-like” process. But, IIRC, Richard Dawkins in the Blind Watchmaker says that a “sieve-like” can’t explain the complexity we see. So, here we have “changing gene frequencies” that have no connection to what NS is purported to be able to do. We simply have changing gene frequencies without any “increase in fitness”. It’s simply a matter of non-random mating patterns, patterns that are imposed simply by proximity of mates. I’m more than willing to concede that these kinds of “changing gene frequencies” happen all the time; but I’m not willing to say that this constitutes “evolution”. I think there is some “microevolution” that takes place, but that the most of what happens is right along this sieving process that is proposed by these experimenters. Share your thoughts. Read More ›

A friend writes about this BoingBoing from a member of a four-generation family of secular humanists (originally, an address to the Harvard Humanist Society, April 2010), asking for comments. See what you think, but this jumps out at me:

There’s a quote I love: “Evil is a little man afraid for his job.” I always thought some famous author said it, but I asked my 200,000 followers on Twitter today, and it turns out that Roy Scheider said it in Blue Thunder.

That’s another classic in not-true catchy slogans. Idi Amin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin … were hardly little men and were not afraid for their jobs.

That “little man” type, hardly an endangered species, is good at stamping in the mail and complaining about his co-workers and his bad back, but he only ever becomes a tool of evil when co-opted by genuinely evil – and not little – men. The worst he could do on his own is fail to call an ambulance when someone showed obvious signs of heart failure because he was busy hanging curtains or something.

Ordinary people can be evil. An older, somewhat flawed, but still useful book on what evil can look like in everyday life is People of the Lie by the late psychiatrist, Scott Peck. He recounts, for example, the case of a young man who had crashed up his car in an apparent suicide attempt. It turned out that his parents had given him the gun with which his elder brother had committed suicide as a Christmas gift. Then Peck interviewed the parents and … He became interested in studying how evil works in everyday life. But none of it was about littleness. Had they been more important people, the scope of their evil would have extended far beyond their own family.

Mostly, the rest of the published address is just more not-quite-truisms about growing up, but then there’s this: Read More ›

“Will the real Baby Einstein please stand up?” is the hedder on a university media release aimed at pop science central:

When it comes to what causes genius, nature may be ready to pull a stunning upset over nurture. University of Alberta researcher Martin Mrazik has put forward the argument that an increased presence of a naturally-occuring hormone could mean that genius is determined before birth.In a recent article in Roeper Review, Mrazik and a colleague posit that genius may be caused by prenatal exposure to an excessive level of testosterone. Mrazik notes that there is evidence that this high exposure facilitates increased brain connection. This hormonal “glitch” in-utero, Mraizk notes, would explain why children are born with an affinity for certain areas such as math, science or arts.

I was invited to e-mail or call for details.

Now, the nice thing about Roeper’s thesis is that it is undemonstrable. Read More ›

At Wired Science’s Science News, Rachel Ehrenberg tells us, “Adult Brain Activity Stirs Before Birth” (February 16, 2011):

Nerve cells from developing brains as young as 20 weeks old fire in a pattern that persists into adulthood, researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research provides a glimpse into the behavior of extremely young brain cells and could help scientists understand what happens when brain development goes awry.Cells from the cerebral cortices of 20- to 21-week-old fetuses exhibit bursts of electrical activity interspersed with periods of quiet, researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington found. When the adult brain is sleeping, or under anesthesia, it also displays this busy-then-quiet firing pattern, suggesting it may be an intrinsic property of human brains.

As to why they do it, Read More ›