Swarmbots: Apparently, it takes ingenuity to get a life form to fail, but the trick may come in handy. From Duke University: Duke University bioengineers design cells that die if they leave the confines of their capsule Duke University researchers have engineered microbes that can’t run away from home; those that do will quickly die without protective proteins produced by their peers. Dubbed “swarmbots” for their ability to survive in a crowd, the system could be used as a safeguard to stop genetically modified organisms from escaping into the surrounding environment. The approach could also be used to reliably program colonies of bacteria to respond to changes in their surrounding environment, such as releasing specific molecules on cue. The system Read More ›

From science writer Neel S. Patel at Inverse: “Survival of the fittest” is bigger than just evolutionary biology. You bet. The selfish gene even gives us medical advice. The word Darwinism has become a synecdoche for all the mechanisms implied by the Malthusian concept of “survival of the fittest” — the notion that the strongest members of a system survive to reproduce and pass their genetics on to progeny. But natural selection needn’t be limited to Darwin’s finches. When applying this idea to physics we get quantum Darwinism, the theory that the governing laws of biology apply to particles. It used to be the other way around (physics and chemistry govern biology), but on the eve of its extinction, there Read More ›

If you have a cold. From ScienceDaily: Research suggests that our selfish genes are behind the aches, fever The symptoms that accompany illness appear to negatively affect one’s chance of survival and reproduction. So why would this phenomenon persist? Symptoms, say the scientists, are not an adaptation that works on the level of the individual. Rather, they suggest, evolution is functioning on the level of the “selfish gene.” Even though the individual organism may not survive the illness, isolating itself from its social environment will reduce the overall rate of infection in the group. “From the point of view of the individual, this behavior may seem overly altruistic,” says Dr. Keren Shakhar, “but from the perspective of the gene, its Read More ›

From stalwart of science New York Mag: But scientists are coming to realize that this might not be quite right. A pair of new studies challenge many of the popular assumptions about the psychological effects of wintertime, suggesting that we should look at the season in a new, brighter light. The weather might be gray and chilly, but the latest science says we humans are better at dealing with this than we usually give ourselves credit for, both in terms of our mood and the basic functioning of our brains. The first study is a massive investigation published recently in Clinical Psychological Science involving 34,294 U.S. adults. It casts doubt on the very notion that depression symptoms are worse in Read More ›

Over the past month in response to a suggestion on an infinite temporal past (and the counter argument that such is dubious), there has been quite an exchange on numbers. In that context, it is worth headlining FYI/FTR, HT DS, a unification with continuum — oops, link —  based on surreals discussed by Ehrlich: where also: Such of course provides a lot of breathing room for exploring numbers and relationships in a unified context. Attention is particularly drawn to various ellipses of endlessness (not able to be traversed in finite stage stepwise do forever processes) and to both the trans-finites . . . do not overlook ellipses of endlessness within transfinite ranges — and the infinitesimals including what we could Read More ›

Stacy Trasancos, a homeschooling mother of seven with a Ph.D. in chemistry and an M.A. in Dogmatic Theology who is an Adjunct Professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary, has penned a thoughtful essay over at the Catholic One Faith blog titled, Does Science Prove God Exists? Her answer, in a nutshell, is that while science can provide inductive support for the existence of a Creator, only theology can provide deductive arguments for God’s existence. In any case, we shouldn’t need to prop up our belief in God with scientific arguments. Dr. Trasancos rejects the view that some scientific conclusions are compatible with God’s existence, while others are not. Christians, she says, should start from the fundamental notion that God Read More ›

Abstract from Nature: Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality Since the origins of agriculture, the scale of human cooperation and societal complexity has dramatically expanded. This fact challenges standard evolutionary explanations of prosociality because well-studied mechanisms of cooperation based on genetic relatedness, reciprocity and partner choice falter as people increasingly engage in fleeting transactions with genetically unrelated strangers in large anonymous groups. To explain this rapid expansion of prosociality, researchers have proposed several mechanisms. Here we focus on one key hypothesis: cognitive representations of gods as increasingly knowledgeable and punitive, and who sanction violators of interpersonal social norms, foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation, trust and fairness towards co-religionist strangers. We tested this hypothesis using Read More ›

  My previous post about information jumps, based on the example of the Prickle 1 protein, has generated a very interesting discussion, still ongoing. I add here some more thoughts about an aspect which has not been really analyzed in the first post, and which can probably contribute to the discussion. I will give here only a very quick summary of the basic issue, inviting all those interested to check my first post: Homologies, differences and information jumps and the following discussion, amounting at present at more than 500 posts. So: Prickle 1 is an interesting protein, with rich functional properties, in general still not well understood. With reference to the human form, I have identified two different parts in the protein. Read More ›

This is philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze’s view: I have just finished my fifth reading of Robert J. Spitzer’s book, New Proofs for the Existence of God. In this book Spitzer set himself the task of exploring how far natural theology can take us towards understanding God. The first part of the book deals purely with science, particularly cosmology. In it he discusses the Big Bang; the extreme fine tuning of the of the universe which makes possible the existence of stars, planets, and life; General Relativity; string theory; and quantum physics. This part of the book reads like a science text. In the second part of the book he takes a purely philosophical approach using only the tools of Read More ›

From Sean Pitman (2016): Late last year there was an interesting debate on Premier Christian Radio, “Unbelievable” with Justin Brierley between Stephen Meyer and Charles Marshall over Meyer’s latest book,Darwin’s Doubt. Marshall, a UC Berkeley paleontologist, had published a review of the book in the journal Science a few months earlier and this was Meyer’s chance to respond to Marshall’s less than positive critique. For those interested, the radio debate is available by clicking on the following: (Link) What follows here is my own summery, followed by my own personal take, on the debate: More. See also: Listener’s guide and video series on the book Follow UD News at Twitter!

“One of the world’s most important biological thinkers.” From Scientific American: Excerpted from A Brief History of Creation by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves III. Copyright © 2016 by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves III. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. The year is 3,500,000,000 BC. The place is a rocky outcropping that juts out into a shallow, wave-lapped inlet on a landmass that will one day be called Australia. … atmosphere is filled with toxic gases, and almost completely devoid of oxygen. That will come much later, the product of photosynthesis by tiny organisms that will one day churn away in the primitive oceans. But the ancestor of those Read More ›

An earlier story here today mentioned Dan Graur: Plagiarism in science texts, not just journals? (Maybe, with enough publicity, a public explanation will be forthcoming…) From Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True blog, we learn the twelve truths of Darwinian evolutionary biology, and some other stuff as well: Dan Graur, who is Professor of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston, describes himself on Tw*tter as “A Very Angry Evolutionary Biologist, a Very Angry Liberal, and an Even Angrier Art Lover”. His Tumblr says he ‘has a very low threshold for hooey, hype, hypocrisy, postmodernism, bad statistics, ignorance of population genetics and evolutionary biology masquerading as -omics, and hatred of any kind.’ Anyway, yesterday he tw**eted a link to Read More ›

From Trends in Genetics: Evolutionary theory predicts that factors such as a small population size or low recombination rate can limit the action of natural selection. The emerging field of comparative population genomics offers an opportunity to evaluate these hypotheses. However, classical theoretical predictions assume that populations are at demographic equilibrium. This assumption is likely to be violated in the very populations researchers use to evaluate selection’s limits: populations that have experienced a recent shift in population size and/or effective recombination rates. Here we highlight theory and data analyses concerning limitations on the action of natural selection in nonequilibrial populations and argue that substantial care is needed to appropriately test whether species and populations show meaningful differences in selection efficacy. Read More ›

From David Morrison at Phylonetworks: Some of you may have noticed the recent publication of the following book: Dan Graur (2016) Molecular and Genome Evolution. Sinauer Associates. Chapter 6 is of interest to the readers of this blog, being entitled “Reticulate evolution and phylogenetic networks”. Unfortunately, as originally published, not all of the figures in that chapter acknowledge the source of the illustration. Of personal interest to me, Figure 6.4 [which can be viewed here] is a direct copy of the first part of my Primer of Phylogenetic Networks. Needless to say, Graur’s figure prominently claims to be the copyright of the publisher rather than myself. Neither the author not the publisher has provided a satisfactory explanation, and have made Read More ›

From O’Leary for News’ other blog, Connecting… Apple vs. FBI: Free internet is at stake. Few analysts agree with the FBI that it would end with just this one case. It can’t. Online medical information: Help, hype, or harm? A new coinage, “cyberchondria,” refers to the worry some people experience from overdosing on medical information online Controlling trolls helps keep social media free. But there’s a risk in making trolls more important than we need to. Privacy crunch: Apple vs. the FBI How much do we value privacy vs. government’s stated desire to protect us? Are blogs really out of date? Competition from anybody with an internet connection makes new media different from old media. Robotic surgery: Paging Dr. Carebot? Read More ›