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ID-friendly Brazilian prof wins medal

A friend writes to draw attention to this. Skinny: Marcos Eberlin of the University of Campinas, Brazil, has received the 2016 Thomson Medal for outstanding achievement in mass spectrometry. This prize is awarded biennially by the International Mass Spectrometry Foundation, and will be presented at their upcoming meeting in Toronto. Eberlin is said to be the best-known advocate of intelligent design in Brazil. Follow UD News at Twitter!

An open letter to Archbishop Jerome Listecki

Your Excellency, I humbly ask you to strike a blow for academic freedom, free speech and religious freedom, by publicly forbidding Marquette University from calling itself a Catholic university henceforth, and by revoking the mandate of theology teachers at Marquette University to teach theology. In this letter, I’d like to explain why I believe these drastic measures are necessary and justifiable. Before I go on, I’d better introduce myself. My name is Vincent Torley, and I’m an Australian Catholic layman (now residing in Japan), with a Ph.D. in philosophy and several other degrees. Thanks to my years of study in an open academic environment where people were free to defend any and every point of view, I have a firm Read More ›

Fish mouth filters have complex design

People looking for easy-evolve simplicity missed this: From Nature Communications: Suspension-feeding fishes had been assumed to use dead-end mechanical sieving, in which fluid passes perpendicularly through the filter, whereas particles that are too large to exit through the pores are retained by sieving on the filter surface7. In contrast, crossflow filtration in suspension-feeding fish species has been shown recently to extract food particles without clogging or concentration polarization along the rows of comb-like, mesh-like or knobby gill rakers that form the filter surface on the branchial arches1, 7, 8, 9, 10 (Fig. 1a). However, the inertial lift forces employed in microfluidics devices are too low to account for the lack of contact between food particles and the gill-raker filter1, indicating Read More ›

Low performance kids? Don’t blame the kid’s genes

Says psychologist Oliver James at the Guardian: Low intelligence and high rates of mental illness are more common in poor people. Geneticists maintain that genes play a major role in causing both. But if they were right there would be an inexorable logic that suggests inferior DNA caused poor people to sink to the bottom of the gene pool. In the light of the findings of the human genome project, however, that idea is no longer defensible – as the leading psychologist Ken Richardson recently pointed out in the house magazine of the psychology profession. On the contrary, the implication of the unimportance of genes is that if we changed society in the right ways, we could virtually eradicate not Read More ›

Humans in Germany 1 mya?

From Popular Archaeology: Now researchers Günter Landeck and Joan Garcia Garriga report, for the first time, evidence of early human butchery in the form of cut marks on animal bones and intentional hammerstone-related bone breakage. These human-modified bones were recovered in a small faunal subsample excavated from levels with simple ‘Mode 1’ stone tools. The butchered assemblage was found during fieldwork and surveying of ancient riverbanks and channel erosion sediments. The report authors state that the frequent occurrence of butchery traces on bones of large-sized herd animals, such as an ancient species of Bison, may suggest that the early human occupiers of the site had an enhanced need for meat because of changes resulting in a depletion of nutritive plants Read More ›

Mechanism for passing on epigenetic memories identified?

From ScienceDaily: Dr. Rechavi and his team had previously identified a “small RNA inheritance” mechanism through which RNA molecules produced a response to the needs of specific cells and how they were regulated between generations. “We previously showed that worms inherited small RNAs following the starvation and viral infections of their parents. These small RNAs helped prepare their offspring for similar hardships,” Dr. Rechavi said. “We also identified a mechanism that amplified heritable small RNAs across generations, so the response was not diluted. We found that enzymes called RdRPs are required for re-creating new small RNAs to keep the response going in subsequent generations.” Most inheritable epigenetic responses in C.elegans worms were found to persist for only a few generations. Read More ›

Prehoda and Thornton Find New Levels of Serendipity

A recent study out of the University of Oregon purports to show the evolutionary pathway of a key protein that helps to control the mitotic spindle, a structure inside the dividing cell that distributes the chromosomes to the daughter cells. In fact the research adds to a growing line of evidence destructive of evolutionary theory. Consider the following findings:  Read more

Oldest known multicellulars are Ediacaran seaweed 555 mya

From ScienceDaily: Their age is estimated to be more than 555 million years old, placing the fossils in the last part of Precambrian times, called the Ediacaran Period. They provide a crucial view of Earth’s earliest evolution of multicellular life, which scientists now think started millions of years earlier than previously thought. … Scientists think that an explosion of animal diversity and complexity began near the start of the Cambrian Period, about 541 million years ago. But Dornbos said this fossil find is the latest example of multicellular life forms appearing in the preceding Ediacaran Period. More. Paper. (public access) As the authors say, this helps us understand more about the history of life. What they don’t say is that Read More ›

The metallome: New origin of life hopeful

From Nautilus: A collection of metal atoms called the “metallome” helped drive evolution. The metallome is even changing how we think about life on other planets. The energy required to drive cyclic chemical reactions that are self-replicating—what we might call “life”—could come from reactions of the metallic elements. Our search for extraterrestrial life shouldn’t be restricted to a search for remnants of complex organic molecules. There’s another clear target, with a rather appropriately sci-fi ring to it: Heavy metals in space.More. If only life didn’t need to be alive, it would all be so much simpler. See also: Maybe if we throw enough models at the origin of life… some of them will stick? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Flores man died out sooner than thought

Current humans killed them researchers say: From ScienceDaily: An ancient species of pint-sized humans discovered in the tropics of Indonesia may have met their demise earlier than once believed, according to scientists who reinvestigated the original finding. The group challenges reports that these inhabitants of remote Flores island co-existed with modern humans for tens of thousands of years. … “In fact, Homo floresiensis seems to have disappeared soon after our species reached Flores, suggesting it was us who drove them to extinction,” says Associate Professor Maxime Aubert, a geochronologist and archaeologist at RCHE, who with RCHE’s Director Professor Rainer measured the amount of uranium and thorium inside Homo floresiensis fossils to test their age.More. Paper. (paywall) But then the last Read More ›

Physicist admits hypocrisy about journal failings

From physics prof Philip Moriarity at Symptoms of the Universe: I’m going to put this as bluntly as I can; it’s been niggling and nagging at me for quite a while and it’s about time I got it off my chest. When it comes to publishing research, I have to come clean: I’m a hypocrite. I spend quite some time railing about the deficiencies in the traditional publishing system, and all the while I’m bolstering that self-same system by my selection of the “appropriate” journals to target. Despite bemoaning the statistical illiteracy of academia’s reliance on nonsensical metrics like impact factors, and despite regularly venting my spleen during talks at conferences about the too-slow evolution of academic publishing towards a Read More ›

Darwin’s naturalist catechism

Indoctrination provided painlessly through media and schools: From Salvo: Just as a fish doesn’t “notice” water unless the creek dries up, we often do not notice the catechism underlying the news stories, which forestalls our asking critical questions. Consider the story from late last summer that announced that chimpanzees and monkeys “have entered” the Stone Age (BBC News, August 18, 2015). The basis of the claim is that primates smash things with stones, even choosing the stones best suited to the task at hand. But then, so do some birds. More. No matter. Because we are the 98%-99% chimpanzee, there is a sure and certain hope that chimpanzees are entering the Stone Age. Evidence? No evidence would change anything anyway. Read More ›

A Tunable Mechanism Determines the Duration of the Transgenerational Adaptations

Organisms adapt to environmental challenges. In fact, many different organisms adapt in non-homologous ways to many different, unforeseen, environments. This contradicts evolution. For we are not talking about random changes occurring by chance, occasionally getting luck enough to confer an adaptation, and then propagating throughout the population. We’re not talking about an evolutionary process of random mutations and natural selection. That would take a long time. What we’re talking about are adaptations that specifically address environmental challenges, and occur in a good fraction of the population, over a few generations, or perhaps within a generation. Such directed adaptation occurs quickly.  Read more