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 […]
Month: March 2016
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism Online Conference Preview Completed
UPDATE – updated title to reflect that the conference has already occurred now.
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 […]
AM-Nat Free Conference Preview Today!
For those interested in attending the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism Online Conference, we are doing a free preview session Tuesday (March 29th – today!) at 7:30 PM Central Time. Check back here tomorrow for more details. All you need is your web browser to join.