Just as, we are told, climate change jump started it: From Nautilus: Burgers and fries have nearly killed our ancestral microbiome. No wonder I keep running into people who are nearly 100 years of age. (True, I spend a fair bit of time at a local retirement residence, but there was a time when you wouldn’t meet nearly as many people well over 90 anyway. – O’Leary for News ) A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Read More ›

… which is why it isn’t really a science. From Tim Hartsfield at RealClearScience: Statistics Shows Psychology Is Not Science Alex [Berezow] and I have previously detailed what we believe are the requirements for calling a field of study science: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled conditions, reproducibility, and finally, predictability and testability. The failure of psychology (and indeed many other so-called social “sciences”) to meet these criteria often manifests as an obvious symptom: lousy statistics. Statistics is just a language. Like other languages it can be harnessed to express logical points in a consistent way, or it can demonstrate poorly reasoned ideas in a sloppy way. Statistical studies in psychology limp off the runway wounded by poor quantifiability, take Read More ›

Consider this chart: 95% of the models failed, including 100% of the models that predicted catastrophic runaway warming.  If the NY AG is going to prosecute climate scientists for getting the science wrong, shouldn’t he be prosecuting the ones who actually, you know, got it wrong? UPDATE: alanbrad’s comment is so good it deserves to be highlighted: Suppose 95% of weather men predict it will rain 5 inches tomorrow. 2% predict it will rain less than 5 inches, and 3% predict it will sprinkle for a little while. The 95% are saying that you should spend $1000 each on flood insurance. The 3% are saying its not necessary. The 95% are saying the 3% aren’t real scientists, and their research Read More ›

Dr. Moran has asked me to respond to some technical questions over at Sandwalk.  When I started writing this response I intended to put it in his combox.  Then I realized there is a lot in it that is relevant to our work at UD.  So I will put it here and link to it there. Dr. Moran, before I answer your technical questions, allow me to make one thing perfectly clear.  I am not a scientist, much less a biologist.  I am an attorney, and being an attorney has some pluses and some minuses insofar as participating in the evolution debate goes.  Like many people in the last 25 years, I was inspired to become involved in this debate Read More ›

In a recent post I described a scenario and asked a question to Dr. Moran as follows: In a comment to a prior post Larry Moran writes: Craig Venter and his colleagues constructed a synthetic genome and inserted it into a cell. The DNA determined the structure and properties of the organism that grew and after many subsequent generations we have a new species that behaves exactly like it was supposed to based on the genes that the scientists built. Now Dr. Moran, suppose that new species escaped the lab and was captured by a researcher who had no idea about Venter’s work.  Suppose further that researcher concluded that the genome of the creature had been intelligently designed.  Would that researcher’s design Read More ›

The way it jump starts the government-tab business at good hotels. Your climate or mine may or may not be changing, but the hotel’s guests climate will improve a notch. 😉 Anyway, from New Scientist: The specific role of the climate shift in these events is unclear, but it would have changed what foods were available. Carbon isotope data from fossil hominid tooth enamel show that Paranthropus‘s diet was mostly derived from grasses, while the doomed Australopithecus almost exclusively ate plants that weren’t so well adapted to hot temperatures. Early Homo species seem to have eaten a mixture of grasses and non-grasses. Whenever one hears that the “specific role of [insert item] is unclear” and that it “would have” this Read More ›

Discussed as a design but believed, by dogma, not to be a design. From the Atlantic: Genomes are so regularly represented as strings of letters-As, Gs, Cs, and Ts-that it’s easy to forget that they aren’t just abstract collections of data. They exist in three dimensions. They are made of molecules. They are physical objects that take up space-a lot of space. Consider that the human genome is longer than the average human. It consists of around two meters of DNA, which must somehow fit into cells, whose nuclei are about 200,000 times narrower. So it folds. And it folds in such a way that any given stretch can be easily unfolded, so the genes within it can be read Read More ›

Entirely at random, or so the theory runs… From ScienceDaily: While study has long been conducted on vertebrates with sight-sensory systems involving a lens, retina and nervous system, new research reported by the University of Cincinnati and supported by the National Science Foundation is the first to examine how the complex eye system of an invertebrate – the Sunburst Diving Beetle – coordinates the development of its components. Despite the complexity of their eyes, including a bifocal lens, extremely rapid eye growth of the Sunburst Diving Beetle occurs during the transitions between larval stages. In addition, they temporarily go blind as the eye is quickly redeveloped. The findings by Shannon Werner, a recent University of Cincinnati master’s degree graduate in Read More ›

From New York Times: Stonehenge has captivated generation after generation. Archaeologists have over the years cataloged the rocks, divined meaning from their placement — lined up for midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset — and studied animal and human bones buried there. They have also long known about the other monuments — burial chambers, a 130-foot-tall mound of chalk known as Silbury Hill and many other circular structures. An aerial survey in 1925 revealed circles of timbers, now called Woodhenge, two miles from Stonehenge. … After the end of the grand construction phase of Stonehenge, around 2400 B.C., the monument was altered, but the era of megamonument building was over. “That’s basically when their world changed,” Dr. Parker Pearson said. New Read More ›

Remember anthropologist Jonathan Marks? Author of the recent Tales of the Ex-Apes, he took issue with evolutionary psychology in an op-ed recently, at some “Darwin the future” site, where he said “And finally, I can’t shake the feeling that the methodologies I have encountered in evolutionary psychology would not meet the standards of any other science.” No, of course not. Darwinism is only science when it produces results Darwin followers can use. Most of the time, it’s just the racket they enforce on Science Street. It’s becoming entertaining to watch who, helplessly, just pays up. Usually, the toffs with taxpayers’ money to waste. Anyway, anthropologist Barbara J. King opines, That term – ex-apes – get emphasized in the book a Read More ›

A terrorist attack in progress, Sky News live feed: [youtube y60wDzZt8yg] Heads up. END

Here’s the abstract: To unveil the still-elusive nature of metazoan replication origins, we identified them genome-wide and at unprecedented high-resolution in mouse ES cells. This allowed initiation sites (IS) and initiation zones (IZ) to be differentiated. We then characterized their genetic signatures and organization and integrated these data with 43 chromatin marks and factors. Our results reveal that replication origins can be grouped into three main classes with distinct organization, chromatin environment, and sequence motifs. Class 1 contains relatively isolated, low-efficiency origins that are poor in epigenetic marks and are enriched in an asymmetric AC repeat at the initiation site. Late origins are mainly found in this class. Class 2 origins are particularly rich in enhancer elements. Class 3 origins Read More ›

In a comment to a prior post Larry Moran writes: Craig Venter and his colleagues constructed a synthetic genome and inserted it into a cell. The DNA determined the structure and properties of the organism that grew and after many subsequent generations we have a new species that behaves exactly like it was supposed to based on the genes that the scientists built. Now Dr. Moran, suppose that new species escaped the lab and was captured by a researcher who had no idea about Venter’s work.  Suppose further that researcher concluded that the genome of the creature had been intelligently designed.  Would that researcher’s design inference be the true and best explanation of the creature’s genome’s provenance?    

Over at ENV David Klinghoffer highlights the fascism problem in the Democratic party:  The question posed [in the Rasmussen survey] was: “Should the government investigate and prosecute scientists and others including major corporations who question global warming?” . . . “In response, 27% of Democrats called for prosecuting global warming realists. (Remarkably, 11% of Republicans did, too.)” The modern progressive movement (which is housed largely in the Democratic party in the US) was planted in the soil of fascism, as Jonah Goldberg has ably demonstrated in his Liberal Fascism. It seems that the fascist impulse is never far from the center of Democratic politics. Yes, one in ten Republicans said the same thing, which just shows that some people are Read More ›

That doesn’t mean we will get somewhere; it means we could possibly get somewhere. From the Atlantic, on an OOL meeting in Japan: “To kick off the meeting, I’m going to do the only thing I can reasonably do, which is ask the dumbest scientific questions I can think of: Did life originate more than once 4 billion years ago? Do we know for sure that origins of life events aren’t happening today, on the Earth? If life’s origin was a process that took tens of millions of years, how can we hope to repeat that process in an experiment? And what do we even mean when we say that something is “alive”? Not only are these all good questions, Read More ›