Origin of life researcher Nick Lane, author of The Vital Question asks at The Scientist: Did endosymbiosis-and the innovations in membrane bioenergetics it engendered-make it possible for eukaryotic life to evolve? There’s a black hole at the heart of biology. Why is it that complex eukaryotic cells share so many fundamental traits, from the nucleus to meiotic sex, which are essentially absent from prokaryotes? Most people would be hard pressed to distinguish a human cell from those of a mushroom, a plant, or a zoospore. Yet those cells diverged a billion years ago, and have utterly different ways of life. He argues at The Scientist for membrane bioenergetics: Genes point to an answer, but don’t explain the whole story. All Read More ›

Further to BBC announces: Chimps have entered the Stone Age (Nonsense. Apes smash things with stones the way birds do. They will go on doing that indefinitely. If their cognition permitted more, they would be further along today), over at Evolution News & Views, Ann Gauger has provides a reality-based perspective on chimp intelligence: Chimps as Incipient Humans? Darwinists Debate Some of the reports of stone use appear valid. Capuchins and chimpanzees are all known to use stones to crack open food, and the technique appears to go back thousands of years. But then, no one is disputing that some animals use simple tools. Even otters use stones to break open clam shells. It’s a question worth asking: Does the Read More ›

  From the sign that reads Arbeit Macht Frei (“work makes (you) free”) over the gate at Auschwitz, to the Doublespeak forced on the population by the totalitarian government in 1984, the mutilation of language has long walked hand in hand with evil.  As yet another example, we get this bizarre episode from frequent commenter Zachriel: In a prior thread I asked Z whether he is in favor of chopping up little unborn babies and selling their parts like meat. He responded: The sale of human tissue is illegal in the U.S. As far as we know, no one in the current kerfuffle has been charged with such a crime, but if the evidence supports such a charge, they should Read More ›

Megan Fox at PJMedia writes, Anyone who questions the great religion of Darwinism, specifically that all living things come from one common ancestor and more specifically, that people evolved from apes, is violently and quickly attacked, silenced, and treated like they’re a heretic. … I have personally been threatened by people who say they want to call the state and report me for child abuse because I made a video questioning the validity of some of the evolutionists’ claims at the Field Museum in Chicago. These threats are not to be taken lightly, considering that children have been taken from their parents over idiotic circumstances like a homeschooling father who takes a natural supplement that the FDA doesn’t approve of Read More ›

Well, first, the BBC asks: What makes a planet habitable? Here: Water in liquid form is thought to be a necessity for life on Earth. Based on this, let’s look at the classical definition for the habitable zone as the region around a star, such as our own Sun, where the temperature of any orbiting planet permits water in liquid form. But, as it happens, there are difficulties. What if the planet sports a blanket of white clouds? Clouds are reflective and therefore will cool the planet, acting to push the habitable zone closer to the star. Amusingly, if we calculate this “equilibrium temperature” for the Earth, taking into account its beautifully reflective clouds, then it turns out that we Read More ›

Further to Psychiatry: The trouble with being mad in North America… is that, at times, you’re saner than many pundits: We learn from the BBC Chimpanzees and monkeys have entered the Stone Age We think of the Stone Age as something that early humans lived through. But we are not the only species that has invented it In the rainforests of west Africa, the woodlands of Brazil and the beaches of Thailand, archaeologists have unearthed some truly remarkable stone tools. It’s not the workmanship that makes them special. If anything, a casual observer might struggle to even identify them as ancient tools. It’s not their antiquity that’s exceptional either: they’re only about the same age as the Egyptian pyramids. What Read More ›

… is that, at times, you’re saner than many pundits. Further to Terms to retire from psychological science (Perry: Many terms commonly used in psychology, psychiatry and related fields “should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats”): A new book by Robert Whitaker and Lisa Cosgrove, Psychiatry Under the Influence, investigates how the influence of pharmaceutical money and guild interests has corrupted the behavior of the American Psychiatric Association and academic psychiatry during the past 35 years. The book documents how the psychiatric establishment regularly misled the American public about what was known about the biology of mental disorders, the validity of psychiatric diagnoses, and the safety and efficacy of its drugs. It also looks at Read More ›

O’Leary for News’s night job, on the impact of new media: Old media doesn’t get new media. It is called the internet, not the innernet for a reason. Serious argument: The right to marry a robot This is an argument for the right to marry something that is not human and not a self. Forcing others to recognize one’s machine as a spouse would be a social triumph, of sorts. Had to happen. Internet addiction treatment centre Most of what we see on the internet has a better chance of being false than what we see on our street. Tweet this!: Twitter’s value is way down Facebook, perhaps more human, is doing very well indeed. E-mail spam filters force Nigerian Read More ›

Frequent commenter Popperian often employs the “Possible Possum Gambit.” Here’s how he does it: Barry:  An effect cannot be brought about by a cause that is incapable of producing the effect.  A pile of bricks can “cause” some things if they are organized in a particular way, a house for instance.  But a pile of bricks is incapable of causing a mental image of an imaginary unicorn.  Why?  It should be obvious, but I will spell it out.  A pile of bricks is in a different ontological category from a mental image of an imaginary unicorn.  Therefore, we can rule out a priori “pile of bricks” as a possible cause of “imaginary unicorn.” Similarly, the physical chemicals in the brain Read More ›

The following, dear readers, is what it comes to when the eigenstates of the world have their way: Holly O’Donnell, a former procurement technician with Planned Parenthood partner StemExpress, described in the video how one abortionist thought it was “kinda cool” to arbitrarily stop and start an unborn baby’s heart during the abortion. “‘Hey, Holly, come over here. I want you to see something kinda cool. This is kinda neat,’” an abortionist told O’Donnell. “The moment I see it, I’m just flabbergasted,” O’Donnell said. “This is the most gestated fetus and the closest thing to a baby I’ve seen.” “[The abortionist] has one of her instruments and she just taps the heart and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here and Read More ›

Here’s todays headscratcher from Phys.Org. It appears that to contrive a “mature” micro-RNA (mi-RNA), involved in gene regulation, the cell requires hundreds of kilobases of sequence. How odd. “Mature” mi-RNA’s are ~22 bases in length, and hundreds of thousand of nucleotide bases are needed (of primary-mi-RNA) to effect this ~22-nucleotide regulatory element? Here’s what they say: MicroRNAs are short noncoding RNAs that play critical roles in regulating gene expression in normal physiology and disease. . . . Although mature miRNAs are only ~22 nucleotides, their transcripts are up to hundreds of kilobases long. Primary miRNA transcripts, or pri-miRNAs, are quickly processed into mature miRNAs from hairpin structures located in the exons or introns of pri-miRNA transcripts. One remarkable feature of Read More ›

Purposeful Darwinism? From Mercatornet, The retail giant is conducting an experiment to see how far it can push white-collar employees. After reading the quotes and claims by former and current employees, both named and anonymous, “purposeful Darwinism” doesn’t quite capture what is being described, rather English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ abbreviated view of the state of nature is more fitting: “And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk” said Bo Olson, a former books marketing employee. “Raising children would most likely prevent her from success at a higher level because of the long hours required,” is what Michelle Williamson explained regarding what her boss, Shahrul Ladue, Read More ›

Here’s this snippet from a Phys.Org entry. The most remarkable part of it is that they link “cell-type” evolution to the repression of genes, making one wonder if all the necessary genes needed for all of life was somehow present in an original genome. Obviously there are problems with this thesis in terms of genome length and type, bacterial genomes being ciruclar, while animals generally have discrete chromosomes, but, it’s entirely possible that multi-cellular life represents a complete break with bacteria, and that what we’re seeing here is the ultimate in “front-loading,” where everything is in place, yet, per Behe’s first law of adaptation, we see “loss of function” leading to novelties. And, it should be a little troubling, if Read More ›

From Nature: A 1997 US law mandated the registry’s creation, requiring researchers from 2000 to record their trial methods and outcome measures before collecting data. The study found that in a sample of 55 large trials testing heart-disease treatments, 57% of those published before 2000 reported positive effects from the treatments. But that figure plunged to just 8% in studies that were conducted after 2000. Study author Veronica Irvin, a health scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, says this suggests that registering clinical studies is leading to more rigorous research. Writing on his NeuroLogica Blog, neurologist Steven Novella of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, called the study “encouraging” but also “a bit frightening” because it casts doubt on Read More ›

As in National Geographic: Bonobo peeps point to human language origin (The pop science mind tends to lack practical intelligence. No one even thinks of asking why, if baby bonobo peeping tells us about the roots of human language, it never did anything for the bonobos) and Apes close to speaking? No. (In the middle ages, it was implausible miracle stories but today, it is implausible ape achievement stories. ) And further to Bonobos prefigure language?: Agenda so obvious, it stinks like the garbage on a hot summer night before the pickup. (if bonobos “peep,” that shows they are on the verge of speaking. But if Neanderthals did speak (of course they did), that shows it isn’t a big achievement.) In response Read More ›