In February 1987, a supernova appeared in the Southern skies, and remained visible for several months. Giant squid, with their large, powerful eyes, must have seen it, too. But if you believe that the act of perception takes place at the object, as Professor Egnor argues in his perspicacious reply to my last post, then you will have to maintain that the squid’s perception of the stellar explosion took place at the location of the supernova itself: somewhere in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy about 168,000 light years from Earth. The problem is that the object itself ceased to exist nearly 200 millennia ago, long before the dawn of human history. Even if the squid that witnessed the explosion Read More ›

From Eurekalert: Birds and humans look different, sound different and evolved completely different organs for voice production. But now new research published in Nature Communications reveals that humans and birds use the exact same physical mechanism to make their vocal cords move and thus produce sound. “Science has known for over 60 years that this mechanism – called the myoelastic-aerodynamic theory, or in short the MEAD mechanism- drives speech and singing in humans. We have now shown that birds use the exact same mechanism to make vocalizations. MEAD might even turn out to be a widespread mechanism in all land-dwelling vertebrates”, says lead author of the paper, Associate Professor Dr. Coen Elemans, Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark. The Read More ›

From University of Bristol: Computer simulations have allowed scientists to work out how a puzzling 555-million-year-old organism with no known modern relatives fed, revealing that some of the first large, complex organisms on Earth formed ecosystems that were much more complex than previously thought. So why do we go on “previously thinking” it was simple? Is it just us, or does anyone else get tired of hitting their heads against a brick wall? Tribrachidium lived during a period of time called the Ediacaran, which ranged from 635 million to 541 million years ago. This period was characterised by a variety of large, complex organisms, most of which are difficult to link to any modern species. It was previously thought that Read More ›

Re the Ediacaran period (before the Cambrian, 635–541 million years ago), from : But what are these peculiar organisms? Their very strange morphology has made relating them to modern organisms very difficult, and they have been suggested to be related to anything from plants, fungi and lichens through to recognisable animals such as worms and arthropods. In a major review of the Ediacaran fossils recently published in Biological Reviews, Graham Budd, professor of palaeobiology in Uppsala University, Sweden, and Sören Jensen, researcher at Badajoz University, Spain, suggest that most of the Ediacarans are very basal representatives of animal lineages, and as such are likely to reveal the hitherto very obscure pathways taken by animal evolution. This goes some way to Read More ›

Well, that’s how The Scientist describes it: How one generation’s experience can affect the next Caution! The article begins by denouncing the crackpot theories of Lysenko along these lines, and piously informs us that “science” has since discovered that there is something in epigenetics after all. Any history that leaves out the ridicule to which Lamarck was routinely subjected, without justification, by Darwin’s followers is revisionism, pure and simple. But then, the people responsible have some butt to cover, right? Meanwhile, Not only is epigenetic information inherited during cellular division, but it can also be passed from one generation to the next in multicellular organisms, a phenomenon known as transgenerational epigenetics. This requires that epigenetic information be carried in the Read More ›

From Washington Post: Tardigrades — otherwise known as water bears or (gasp) moss piglets — are weird. They can survive in the vacuum of space, for starters. So when researchers at the University of North Carolina announced on Nov. 23 that the minuscule animal had hitherto unheard of ratios of DNA borrowed from plants, fungi and bacteria, many in the scientific community were more than happy to believe the strange findings. Now, a lab at the University of Edinburgh claims the results must be an error. … “We just hadn’t seen evidence of that at all,” Blaxter said. The fact that tardigrades have genes they’ve acquired through horizontal gene transfer isn’t up for dispute. But the record-breaking volume didn’t line Read More ›

See here (“Single jaw find shows three “species” to be one”), for example, and here (Science journalist discovers she is part Neanderthal). Oh and, Vince Torley notes “No debate about macroevolution? Surely you’re joking, Professor Coyne!” Surely, he isn’t joking. Darwin’s tenured flock have got on fine for many years without ever taking seriously the mess the whole concept is in. They can hardly take it seriouly anyway because it is central to the most influential academic book, Dawin;’s On the Origin of Species, which supposedly enshrines the single greatest idea anyone ever had, the foundation of their discipline. What’s mere plodding science compared to all that. And yet the concept is just one big mess right now. So big Read More ›

It is simply a matter of time before the Darwinists (I know they prefer “evolutionary biologists,” but evolution is not evolution without “Origin of Species”) will have to give up. Every day in labs around the world, more and more function is being found for “junk” DNA. This is a two-fold problem for the Darwinists. The first problem is that this is NOT what they predicted, even though, quite cavalierly, they say then never said any such thing. But, of course, we know better. Second, there’s the problem of “de novo” genes, and the solution for this is to look to so-called “junk” DNA as a potential template for these ‘new’ genes. If “junk” DNA is ‘neutral,’ then no problem; Read More ›

No, apparently. Lifestyle choices matter too, especially exercise. From Gretchen Reynolds at the New York Times: As I frequently have written in this column, exercise may cause robust improvements in brain health and slow age-related declines in memory and thinking. Study after study has shown correlations between physical activity, muscular health and mental acuity, even among people who are quite old. But these studies have limitations and one of them is that some people may be luckier than others. They may have been born to have a more robust brain than someone else. Their genes and early home environment might have influenced their brain health as much as or more than their exercise habits. Their genes and early home environment Read More ›

From Science: Controversial experiment sees no evidence that the universe is a hologram Working in a disused tunnel with a couple of lasers and a few mirrors, a plucky band of physicists dreamed up a way to test one of the wildest ideas in theoretical physics—a notion from the nearly inscrutable realm of “string theory” that our universe may be like an enormous hologram. However, science doesn’t indulge sentimental favorites. After years of probing the fabric of spacetime for a signal of the “holographic principle,” researchers at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, have come up empty, as they will report tomorrow at the lab. Experiments  won’t change anything. String theory is one of those theories that has Read More ›

Further to Lee Spetner’s comments on the (correct) wiring of the vertebrate eye* (sometimes used as a claim for “poor design”), over at Creation-Evolution Headlines, there are some recent articles on the subject, with lots of links: Two Evolutionary Evidences Debunked (7/23/14) This evolutionary argument began to unravel in 2007 when researchers found that Müller cells, penetrating the thicket of blood vessels in the human retina, actually provide near-ideal vision by acting as wave guides to the individual photoreceptors—providing better performance than could be had if the rods and cones were in front of the blood vessels (see 5/02/2007 and subsequent research reported 5/07/2010 about additional vision enhancements provided by the Müller cells) and Backward Wiring of Eye Retina Confirmed Read More ›

Alternet to the rescue! (We didn’t know it was this bad, by the way): We Can Save Atheism From the New Atheists Like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris There must be another way for nonbelievers than to transform into toxic know-it-alls. … As a philosophical tendency, the New Atheists were popularisers rather than innovators, using advances in biology and neuroscience to illustrate pretty well-worn arguments against religion. Indeed, in some crucial ways, they represent an intellectual step backward from a left that had recognised atheism as necessary but scarcely sufficient. As early as 1842, Marx dismissed those who trumpeted their disbelief to children as “assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the Read More ›

Who often know something about logical reasoning. From Gary Gutting at Salon: Atheists sometimes argue the case against God is the same as the case against Santa Claus. Let’s test the logic Our first concern will be Richard Dawkins’s efforts to refute standard arguments for theism. These efforts suffer from a variety of logical mistakes. His critique of the cosmological argument confuses an implication with a presupposition, while his critique of the ontological argument makes an illegitimate move from distaste for a conclusion to its invalidity. His critique of arguments from religious experience ignores the distinction between when we can explain an experience as illusory and when we should explain an experience as illusory. [Snippet:] Dawkins’s critique of religious experience goes Read More ›

So says Jonathan Witt: Historical scientists proceed like a detective at a crime scene. They begin by identifying one or more causes “now in operation” that seem capable of producing the mystery under investigation. Then they accumulate additional clues in order to narrow the field of viable explanations. If all goes well, patient study will narrow the options until only one viable cause is left standing. So, for instance, careful study of a large Arizona crater and various natural processes convinced geologists that an ancient meteor left the crater. Other explanations were ruled out while the crater explanation grew stronger and stronger the longer they studied the scene. A meteor, as it turned out, was the only type of cause Read More ›

Here.