From Margaret Wertheim at Aeon: I feel therefore I am … Giulio Tononi’s book Phi (2012) asks the question: ‘How could mere matter generate mind?’ As a neuroscientist, Tononi says this is a mystery ‘stranger than immaculate conception… an impossibility that defie[s] belief’. Nonetheless, he offers us an explanation of consciousness grounded in information theory that has been admired by both Tegmark and Koch. He wants to do for psychic phenomena what Descartes, Galileo and their heirs did for physical phenomena: he wants to explain subjective experience by generalised empirical rules, and he tells us that such experiences have shapes in a multidimensional mathematical space. Personally, I don’t have a problem with the idea that subjective experiences might have mathematical Read More ›

By knocking out plants’ don’t-eat-my-seeds chemicals From The Scientist: Researchers are converting carnivores into herbivores in a bid to make raising animals such as alligators, trout, and salmon more sustainable. It’s no mean feat turning a meat-hungry predator into a plant eater. The American alligator is an apex predator of southern waterways from Texas to the Carolinas. In the wild, adult alligators eat fish, frogs, turtles, snakes, birds, and just about any small mammal they can catch. On alligator farms, the animals chow down on fishmeal and oil processed from wild stocks of sardines, anchovies, and other forage fish harvested from the open ocean. While populations of these fish species have plummeted over the past two decades due to intense Read More ›

Information drives the development of life. But what is the source of that information? Could it have been produced by an unguided Darwinian process? Or did it require intelligent design? The Information Enigma is a fascinating 21-minute documentary that probes the mystery of biological information, the challenge it poses to orthodox Darwinian theory, and the reason it points to intelligent design. The video features molecular biologist Douglas Axe and Stephen Meyer, author of the books Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt.

From Suzan Mazur’s The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin” features an interview with Denis Noble: What is the status now of the gene in your view? Denis Noble: First of all, I go along largely with Jim Shapiro’s view of the difficulty of the definition of a gene. I think it’s actually even more difficult than Jim says. My argument is very simple. Wilhelm Johannsen in 1909 introduced the definition of “gene.” He was the first person to use that word, although he was introducing a concept that existed ever since Mendel. What he was actually referring to was a phenotype trait, not a piece of DNA. He didn’t know about DNA in those days. Read More ›

In the pop science media. From Evolution News & Views: As we saw with tool use, many claims [about ape behaviour] are phrased essentially as predictions that the primates are in the process of developing a culture like that of humans, rather than behaving as they have, largely unnoticed, for tens of millennia. For example, we were told earlier this year that “Apes may be closer to speaking than many scientists think. Koko, the gorilla who has lived with humans for forty years can “control her larynx enough to produce a controlled grunting sound.” While Koko is a very accomplished gorilla, she doesn’t seem to be progressing toward human speech, and it is unclear why she would need to. Similarly, Read More ›

Earlier today, I asked, why do naturalists grudgingly use the word “design”? As it happens, the problem Kirschner and Gerhart acknowledged in 2005 has been discussed elsewhere in the literature. Here are some notes I made on the subject a while back: “Evolution” is spoken of as if it were an agent, which it is—precisely—not supposed to be. Stephen Jay Gould exulted that Darwinism was a “fist as a battering ram,” [1] punching out the lights of design in life forms. Well then, consider this from New Scientist (2010): The remarkable diversity of life on Earth stands as grand testimony to the creativity of evolution. Over the course of 500 million years, natural selection has fashioned wings for flight, fins Read More ›

Lee Spetner, author of The Evolution Revolution, offers the following snippet from a recent book, The Plausibility of Life: “Here and throughout this book we use the word design to mean a structure as it is related to function, not necessarily implying either a human or a divine designer; it is a commonly used term in biology.” Kirschner, M. W., & Gerhart, J. C. (2005). The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [p. 2] Well, actually, they go a bit further than that: [From blurb:] In the 150 years since Darwin, the field of evolutionary biology has left a glaring gap in understanding how animals developed their astounding variety and complexity. The standard answer Read More ›

A friend writes to say, One of the most renowned biologists of the nineteenth century, Alfred Russel Wallace shares credit with Charles Darwin for developing the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet one part of Wallace’s remarkable life and career has been completely ignored: His embrace of intelligent design. Darwin’s Heretic is a 21-minute documentary that explores Wallace’s fascinating intellectual journey and how it sheds light on current debates. The documentary features University of Alabama at Birmingham Professor Michael Flannery, author of the acclaimed biography, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life: For years Alfred Russel Wallace was little more than an obscure adjunct to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Remembered only for prompting Darwin to write On the Origin Read More ›

From Science Daily: New fossil evidence shows that Australia’s fire-prone shrubland open vegetation originated at least 70 million years ago — 40-50 million years earlier than previously thought. The findings, published online ahead of print in the American Journal of Botany, reject prevailing wisdom that Australia was covered with rainforest until 40 million years ago, and that currently dominant native vegetation types evolved after that on a drying continent with increasing fire. “Amazingly, we think part of the ancient vegetation was similar to what you can now see in south-western Australia, and there were even a couple of leaf bits that look just like Banksia,” says Dr Carpenter. “Banksia is one of Australia’s most iconic native plants and is very Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Delay discounting’ is the tendency, given the choice, to take a smaller reward that is available immediately, instead of a larger reward that will be delivered in the future. According to a report presented at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology annual meeting in Hollywood, Florida, delay discounting is strongly influenced by our genetic makeup. That is, it is a trait that can be inherited. Identifying the ‘delay discounting’ genes, and the proteins they code for, will be important for understanding the basis of a variety of psychiatric disorders, especially addictions and other disorders that involve impulsive decision-making. In a study of 602 twins, Dr. Andrey Anokhin and his colleagues at Washington University School of Medicine found that delay Read More ›

Thousands of them, some say. Well, that’ll scare some guys onto the track. From From New Scientist: “Our results suggest that environmentally driven changes carried in sperm cells could represent a mechanism by which obesity is transmitted to the next generation,” says Romain Barrès of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He suggests his findings might lead parents-to-be to consider changing their behaviour before conceiving. We already know that a child’s weight seems to be highly linked to that of their parents. So far, much research into how obesity is passed on has focused on mothers and their diet before or during pregnancy. But the new study suggests that the father’s health may also be important. Comparing the sperm of Read More ›

A friend asks, and one would think the answer is yes. He had been reading my Data Basic post, “Is Information, Not Matter, the Foundation of Life?” and had noted this: For example, information is a relationship between realized and unrealized possibilities. It is created by ruling out possibilities. It increases when we increase its resolution. The first six digits tell us that a phone rings in one small region. A unique ten-digit number reaches our friend’s cell. I think that he is asking, how can false information be part of the foundation of life, which is real? A couple of thoughts come to mind: – False information has impact. It causes thing to happen Many life form rely on Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: For these tiny organisms it is often advantageous to divide the labor of certain metabolic processes rather than performing all biochemical functions autonomously. Bacteria that engage in this cooperative exchange of nutrients can save a significant amount of energy. Indeed, in a previous study, the researchers could already demonstrate that this division-of-metabolic-labor can positively affect bacterial growth. In the new study, they addressed the question how such cooperative interactions can persist if non-cooperating bacteria consume amino acids without providing nutrients in return. The evolutionary disadvantage that results for cooperative cells could lead to a collapse of the cross-feeding interaction. To experimentally verify this possibility, the scientists have monitored co-cultures of cooperating and non-cooperating bacteria. For this, they genetically Read More ›

O’Leary for News’ night job, writing on new media Yik Yak: Digital dorm room or cyberbullying? Words on social media are stripped of voice and context. Rx against online harassment Tips from five expert sources may help with online safety. Storing knowledge for a million years – in DNA? All civilization’s knowledge could exist within a few cubic metres. Facebook: When digital breakups byte too hard We should resist the temptation to get personal on Facebook in the first place. The algorithm does not know, and the world does not care. Let’s save it for the few who do. High school: Where life without smartphones is a form of death? Life online may have later political implications for democracy. Many Read More ›

From Science Daily: In the study, the working group led by Leopold Eckhart investigated the genes responsible for the skin layers of the shell of the European terrapin and a North American species of turtle, in order to compare them with the genes of human skin. The study findings suggest that a hard shell was formed as the result of mutations in a group of genes known as the Epidermal Differentiation Complex (EDC). Comparisons of genome data from various reptiles suggest that the EDC mutations responsible occurred when turtles split off from other reptiles around 250 million years ago. What is remarkable is that the basic organisation of the EDC genes is similar in humans and turtles. This leads to Read More ›