From ScienceDaily: The silvery fish, roughly the size of a large automobile tire, is known from oceans around the world and dwells hundreds of feet beneath the surface in chilly, dimly lit waters. It swims by rapidly flapping its large, red pectoral fins like wings through the water. Fish that typically inhabit such cold depths tend to be slow and sluggish, conserving energy by ambushing prey instead of chasing it. But the opah’s constant flapping of its fins heats its body, speeding its metabolism, movement and reaction times, scientists report in the journal Science. That warm-blooded advantage turns the opah into a high-performance predator that swims faster, reacts more quickly and sees more sharply, said fisheries biologist Nicholas Wegner of Read More ›

Ever wonder who those peer reviewers are who approve of the non scientific evolution papers which claim that the world arose spontaneously? Well now we know one of them is professor James McInerney who has come cleanas a reviewer of Thijs Ettema’s latest paper which makes the rather startling claim—with McInerney’s full approval—that complex archaea “bridge the gap” between prokaryotes and eukaryotes and share a common ancestry with eukaryotes. That is quite a claim. What Ettema and co-workers discovered was an archaeal phylum they have named “Lokiarchaeota,” after the mythological Norse deity Loki. The moniker is fitting both because the new microorganism was discovered near Loki’s Castle—an area of active hydrothermal vents in the north-Atlantic—and because Loki is, as Stefanie Read More ›

Suzan Mazur interviews Corrado Spadafora: Corrado Spadafora’s laboratory originally discovered that mature sperm cells from a variety of species share the ability to spontaneously take up exogenous DNA molecules and deliver them to oocytes at fertilization: they called that phenomenon cell-mediated sperm-mediated gene transfer (SMGT). That feature was subsequently exploited, in theirs and other laboratories, to generate genetically modified animals in different species. More. Corrado Spadafora: Three aspects need to be seriously recognized. First, epigenetics heavily affects inheritance. Second, there is transgenerational inheritance, that is, information that can be inherited from one generation to the next unlinked from chromosomes, because extrachromosomal DNA or RNA structures can get through the germline to the next generation and cause phenotypic variations in the offspring. Transgenerational Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The discovery of a ‘left-handed’ magnetic field that pervades the universe could help explain a long standing mystery — the absence of cosmic antimatter. A group of scientists, led by Prof Tanmay Vachaspati from Arizona State University in the United States, with collaborators at Washington University and Nagoya University, announce their result in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Readers? Follow UD News at Twitter!

The local tax funded cult, it turns out, is safe. Here: Why Close Relatives Make Bad Neighbors Abstract The number of exotic plant species that have been introducedinto the United States far exceeds that of other groups of organisms, and many of these have become invasive. As in many regions of the globe, invasive members of the thistle tribe, Cardueae, are highly problematic in the California Floristic Province, an established biodiversity hotspot. While Darwin’s Naturalization Hypothesis posits that plantinvaders closely related to native species would be at a disadvantage, evidence has been found that introduced thistles more closely related to native species are more likely to become invasive. In order to elucidate the mechanisms behind this pattern, we modeled the Read More ›

From Real Clear Science: When biologists get together to discuss the nagging mysteries in their diverse field, there’s always that elephant in the room: How did life spring up from non-life? But, according to highly regarded cancer researcher Robert Weinberg, it’s an elephant that most biologists ignore, or at least discreetly avoid. “Origin of life is not something people work on that much because it’s so far away from resolution.” Instead, biologists turn their attention to other problems, fruits that hang a bit lower on the tree. Though these queries may not be of existential interest, they’re no less fascinating. Your Nobel? Here’s one: It is a beautiful irony that the smallest of creatures is at the center of one Read More ›

Consider this comment by Larry Moran: What [johnnyb] (and Meyer) are saying is that if the false Darwinian version of evolution is wrong then Intelligent Design Creationism is correct. You say this even though you know full well that there’s another possibility; namely, that the real, complete, version of evolutionary theory might be correct. I responded For someone who purports to have an understanding of ID solid enough to critique it, you display a remarkable inability to articulate its basic claims. After this exchange I suddenly realized that we on the ID side have a huge advantage over the likes of Moran in at least one respect.  We are not pushing the culturally dominant view, and for that reason we Read More ›

This occurred to me while I was reading Dr. Torley’s latest post. Some Darwinists suggest that at least part of the solution to the mystery of the Cambrian Explosion is expanding the time during which the explosion occurred from ten millions years to 25 million years.  Let’s do some math: Estimated age of the earth:  4.5B years Beginning of Cambrian explosion:  540M years ago Estimated Duration 1:  540M to 550M years ago Estimated Duration 2:  540M to 565M year ago For perspective let’s put this on a 24 hour clock: Formation of the earth to beginning of Cambrian explosion:  12:00.01 AM to 9:07 PM Estimated Duration 1:  9:07 PM to 9:10 PM Estimated Duration 2:  9:07 PM to 9:15 PM Read More ›

New atheism is the basis of schoolbook Darwinism, of course. And it turns out, Massimo Pigliucci, the defender of falsifiability, is not a fan of the new atheist cult: The Harris-Chomsky exchange, in my mind, summarizes a lot of what I find unpleasant about SAM: a community who worships celebrities who are often intellectual dilettantes, or at the very least have a tendency to talk about things of which they manifestly know very little; an ugly undertone of in-your-face confrontation and I’m-smarter-than-you-because-I-agree-with [insert your favorite New Atheist or equivalent]; loud proclamations about following reason and evidence wherever they may lead, accompanied by a degree of groupthink and unwillingness to change one’s mind that is trumped only by religious fundamentalists; and, Read More ›

Compared to those of 500 mya LiveScience: The new research focuses on an oval structure, called the anterior sclerite, found in the heads of ancient arthropods. The anterior sclerite has long baffled researchers, especially because some prehistoric arthropods have it while others don’t, and its location in the head changes, depending on the quality of the fossil. But now, fossilized brains have helped solve that mystery. An analysis of the anterior sclerites in two arthropod fossils, both more than 500 million years old, indicates that the structures were associated with the creatures’ bulbous eyes. The findings provide evidence that these oval structures were associated with nerves originating in the anterior region of the brain, according to the study. … Living Read More ›

Well, so do scientists. And even though they haven’t got a concrete answer, they’ve unearthed (no pun intended) loads of other info on the quest to find out how. Offers “adorable animation” on chemical evolution. Dang. See also, if you are serious: Why origin of life is such a hard problem. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Professor Larry Moran has written a response to my post, A succinct case for Intelligent Design. Unfortunately, Professor Moran gets his facts wrong from the get-go. He writes: It seems to me that the [Intelligent Design creationist] movement concentrates on criticizing evolution (and materialism) and doesn’t really present much of a case for believing that the history of life was directed by gods. Now, it’s no skin off my nose if Professor Moran wants to call us creationists. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. But the Intelligent Design movement has never claimed to have scientific evidence that the history of life was “directed by gods.” What we claim is that certain highly specific, functional systems which are found in living things Read More ›

Over at FT Stephen Barr discusses the history of science since the 1500’s and gives a brief synopsis of Darwin in which he writes: As with heliocentrism, though, the data was at first inadequate or even misleading. Certain transitional forms were not seen in the fossil record till long after Darwin. Charity compels one to conclude that this is simply an unfortunate turn of phrase.  A literal reading is certainly misleading.

See vid below. Figures it’d be some U tenures as per below, but … Once a while back, a rabbi wrote me and asked why, succinctly I didn’t believe evo psych had anything to offer. Well, apart from issues around reason and logic?  I wrote back and said: If it is true that your behaviour and mine can be predicted on the basis of what supposedly happened on the African savannah a million years ago but not on the basis of the founding of human civilizations, Judaism, Christianity, Western culture, and (in my case) Canada—that would mean evolution does not happen. In a million years, nothing happened. Now, I don’t care much whether evolution happens or not. I mean, take Read More ›

Here. Researchers at the RIKEN Evolutionary Morphology Laboratory and the University of Tokyo in Japan have determined that the eardrum evolved independently in mammals and diapsids — the taxonomic group that includes reptiles and birds. Published in Nature Communications, the work shows that the mammalian eardrum depends on lower jaw formation, while that of diapsids develops from the upper jaw. Significantly, the researchers used techniques borrowed from developmental biology to answer a question that has intrigued paleontologists for years. Search Uncommon Descent for similar topics, under the Donate button.