October 2015

While the warm-blooded vs. cold-blooded argument rages, from New Scientist: Robert Eagle of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues estimated the body temperature of two types of dinosaur by analysing fossil eggshells. They found that Titanosaurus, a long-necked sauropod around 10 metres long and 13 tonnes in weight, had a body temperature around 38 ̊C, similar to modern mammals. On the other hand, Oviraptor, a theropod about 2 metres long and 35 kilograms in weight, had a body temperature around 32 ̊C. This is still warmer than crocodiles and their relatives, suggesting that oviraptors generated some heat internally to keep their bodies above the ambient temperature and allow them to be more active. But it also suggests their Read More ›

Jupiter’s moon Europa has long been favoured as a possible site for life because of its underground oceans. This from Discovery.com If alien life swims in the ocean beneath Europa’s icy surface, it might have got its start from comets cracking the icy shell to deliver vital pre-life ingredients, say researchers. Imagine a geyser hundreds of kilometers high. Sound crazy? Well, on Jupiter’s moon they exist, and what these super geysers eject could give us invaluable insight into this unique, ice-covered planet. New simulations show that a specific family of comets have the mass, velocity and opportunity to do the job — penetrating the full range of likely Europan ice thicknesses. More. A comet getting through the ice depends on Read More ›

While shopping at the gene counter, we learned from The Scientist : Published genomes are chock-full of contamination. But as awareness of the problem grows, so do methods to help combat it. When Supratim Mukherjee noticed the same bacteriophage sequence popping up again and again in hundreds of microbial genomes from a database he was analyzing, he got excited. Mukherjee, a bioinformatician at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was comparing the metabolic pathways of the microbes, and he began to wonder what the nearly ubiquitous sequence was. “I thought we must have discovered something novel,” he recalls. “This entire bacteriophage genome was intact in all these diverse microbes.” But when Mukherjee looked up the bacteriophage sequence, he learned that it was Read More ›

The philosopher Edward Feser surely needs no introduction here. In today’s short post, I’d like to address, in a non-polemical fashion, one of Professor Feser’s longstanding objections to Intelligent Design: that it is tied to an anthropomorphic conception of the Designer’s Mind, because the intelligence it attributes to this Being is fundamentally no different to our own. Such a Being, argues Feser, could not possibly be the absolutely simple God of classical theism: it is, at best, a mere Demiurge. Feser stated his argument succinctly in a 2014 post titled, Miracles, ID, and classical theism: Paley and ID theory predicate attributes of God and of creatures univocally, whereas for Thomists these predications are to be understood analogously. The problem here Read More ›

Over at RealClearScience, biologist Steven “Ross” Pomeroy has written an interesting piece titled, Why God Cannot Be Proven: A Star Trek Argument. Pomeroy contends that since aliens could duplicate anything that a Deity could do, author Eric Metaxas was wrong to claim that science could make a case for God, as he did an a Wall Street Journal article last Christmas. It strikes me that there are several things wrong with Pomeroy’s argument. I’d like to point out four major flaws before I go on to discuss what I see as a paradox for naturalism which is implied by his argument: if it is correct, then our own species (Homo sapiens) was almost certainly produced by intelligent designers (aliens) who Read More ›

Strikes blow against “ominous specter of irreducible complexity” Archaeal ancestors of eukaryotes are not so elusive any more, says Eugene V. Koonin, Thus, eukaryotes show a qualitatively different level of cellular organization from that of archaea and bacteria, and there are no detectable evolutionary intermediates. Comparative analysis of eukaryotic cells and genomes indicates that the signature advanced functional systems of the eukaryotic cells were already present in the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA). These ancestral features include the actin and tubulin-based forms of cytoskeleton, the nuclear pore, the spliceosome, and the ubiquitin signaling network, to mention only several aspects of the inherent organizational complexity of eukaryotic cells [12]-[16]. The emergence of these fundamental facets of advanced cellular organization presents a Read More ›

From the Guardian: Prehistoric rat-like mammal fossil is earliest showing fur, skin and organs The remains, unearthed in a quarry near Cuenca in central Spain, are more than 60m years older than other fossils that record the soft tissues of prehistoric mammals. The animal’s ear lobe, lung and liver are all fossilised, along with its furry pelt and tiny hedgehog-like spines on its lower back that likely protected it from predators. Researchers even found evidence of a fungal skin infection in the remains. Named Spinolestes xenarthrosus, the insect-eating furball was discovered in 2011 when fossil hunters at the Autonomous University of Madrid, were prising apart thin leaves of fine limestone sediment in the Las Hoyas Quarry. “The preservation of its Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Environmental memories transmitted from a father to his grandchildren … in recent years, scientists have shown that, before his offspring are even conceived, a father’s life experiences involving food, drugs, exposure to toxic products and even stress can affect the development and health not only of his children, but even of his grandchildren. This group, whose paper was just published in Science, has been studying the role of histones (proteins) in the process. So, to test their theory about the possible role of histones in guiding embryo development the researchers created mice in which they slightly altered the biochemical information on the histones during sperm cell formation and then measured the results. (It’s a bit like putting a Read More ›

If we go by the fact that they survive tens or hundreds of millions of years pretty much unchanged: That wasn’t what Darwin told us to expect. Darwin explained clearly and eloquently the pattern we should find in the fossil record if his theory was correct, let alone the juggernaut that his present day supporters insist: It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. However, it hasn’t turned out Read More ›

From Nature: Epigenetic ‘tags’ linked to homosexuality in men The researchers collected DNA samples in saliva from 37 pairs of identical twins in which only one twin was gay, and 10 pairs in which both were gay. By scanning the twins’ epigenomes, the researchers found five epi-marks that were more common among the gay men than in their genetically identical straight brothers. An algorithm they developed based on the five epi-marks could correctly predict the sexual orientation of men in the study 67% of the time. UCLA computational geneticist Tuck Ngun will present the work on 8 October at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Vilain is not surprised to find that epigenetics is associated with Read More ›

From obit: Inherent in the idea of gene regulatory networks was the concept that genome sequences that provided information about how genes should be expressed would be as important as the genome sequences that coded for the proteins themselves. Although non-protein-coding DNA was long considered to be “junk,” Davidson recognized that the key regulatory code resided in this genetic material. In 2006, Davidson co-led a group of 240 researchers from more than 70 institutions that sequenced the purple sea urchin’s genome. In 2008, a consortium of institutions led by Davidson’s lab characterized the 23,000 genes of that genome. In parallel, the Davidson group systematically created a comprehensive functional testing strategy to detect all of the control connections between the genes Read More ›

Rats. From ScienceDaily: Can the passage of time be measured precisely, always and everywhere? The answer will upset many watchmakers. A team of physicists have just shown that when we are dealing with very large accelerations, no clock will actually be able to show the real passage of time, known as ‘proper time.’ “Our calculations showed that above certain very large accelerations there simply must be time disorders in the decay of elementary particles. And if the disturbances affect fundamental clocks such as muons, then any other device built on the principles of quantum field theory will also be disrupted. Therefore, perfectly precise measurements of proper time are no longer possible. This fact has further consequences, because losing the ability Read More ›

From New York mag: In a new paper, “Humans As Superorganisms,” Peter Kramer and Paola Bressan of the University of Padua describe a typical human body as a teeming mass of what they call “selfish entities.” Picture a tree warped by fungus, wrapped with vines, dotted at the base with mushrooms and flowers, and marked, midway up, by what the tree thought the whole time was just a knot but turns out to be a parasitic twin. This is the human superorganism — not the tree, not the tangled mess of things doing battle with it, but the whole chunk of forest — and Kramer and Bressan would like to place it at the very center of the way we Read More ›

From the Weekly Standard: The behavioral sciences scandal On this August morning Science magazine had published a scandalous article. The subject was the practice of behavioral psychology. Behavioral psychology is a wellspring of modern journalism. It is the source for most of those thrilling studies that keep reporters like Vedantam in business. Over 270 researchers, working as the Reproducibility Project, had gathered 100 studies from three of the most prestigious journals in the field of social psychology. Then they set about to redo the experiments and see if they could get the same results. Mostly they used the materials and methods the original researchers had used. Direct replications are seldom attempted in the social sciences, even though the ability to Read More ›

A couple of weeks ago a friend forwarded me a link to this recent article about “ongoing research to record the interaction of environment and evolution” by University of California, Riverside biologist David Reznick. Reznick’s team has been studying adaptive changes in guppies. Reznick’s work focuses on tracking what happens in real-world situations in the wild, rather than the somewhat artificial environments in the lab. As a result, Reznick has gathered some of the more trustworthy and definitive data about changes over time in a real-world environment, largely free from the intervention and interference of the coated lab worker. The article states: The new work is part of research that Reznick has been doing since 1978. It involved transplanting guppies Read More ›