Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Genetic ancestry is basically a horoscope?

So says conservation biologist Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Think about it. As you travel back in time though your family history, the number of ancestors you have roughly doubles with every generation. Using the most conservative estimate of generation time — 32 years — in the year 1152, you had as many as 134,217,728 potential ancestors. And since genes are scrambled with every generation, it’s very likely you share little to no genetic relation to most of them. They might as well be strangers!… DNA testing companies often take this ambiguity and fill in the blanks with impressive stories that you can show your friends and relatives. Though fascinating, these tales share more in common with astrological horoscopes than historical Read More ›

“Satirical” hoax paper about death camp guard dogs retracted

Extending our arts and culture moment, from Retraction Watch: Death camp dog satire retracted when German journal wasn’t in on joke Totalitarianism and Democracy has removed a paper claiming that German Shepherds belonging to guards at the Berlin Wall descended from dogs used at concentration camps, after learning that the paper was a work of satire, The Guardian reports. The paper, and its author, are the creation of the anonymous group “Christiane Schulte and friends.” This isn’t the first hoax we’ve seen in publishing: Don’t forget journalist John Bohannon, who submitted hundreds of fake papers to open access journals, and more recently conjured up a studythat showed chocolate helps you lose weight. (And, of course, a paper in a Romanian Read More ›

Turning animals half into geometry

From Mashable: The geometric wonders are by Kerby Rosanes, an illustrator from the Philippines, who wields an ink pen and plastic compass like a straight-edge wizard. More of Rosanes’ work can be found on his Society6 page and Instagram. See also: At PBS: Puzzle of mathematics is more complex than we sometimes think Follow UD News at Twitter! More of Rosanes’ work can be found on his Society6 page and Instagram.

Origin of life: Ice cube life on frozen Earth?

Latest improbable scenario for the origin of life, from New Scientist: Did life begin in the freezer? Early Earth may not have been as hot and hellish as we thought. In fact, it may have become a snowball around the time life first emerged. This is according to a fresh analysis of rocks from South Africa that formed about 3.5 billion years ago, during the Archaean period. Previous research suggested that the ocean in which these rocks formed was warm – perhaps around 85̊C. But Maarten de Wit at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, now says the ocean temperature was similar to today’s – and that there is even evidence that ice was present. The Read More ›

Is the Sixth Great Extinction a big myth?

Recently, I was astonished when I came across an article titled, Are We in a ‘Sixth Great Extinction’? Maybe Not, by Ross Pomeroy, an editor of RealClearScience and a zoologist and conservation biologist by training. The author’s candor and intellectual honesty are refreshing: The notion that humans are erasing species off the face of the Earth at near unprecedented levels is a perennial story that has been blared in the media for more than two decades. In the year 2000, the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment estimated that species are going extinct 1,000 times faster than they naturally do, and that this rate could increase to 10,000 times. These rates translate to between 17,000 and 140,000 species going extinct each Read More ›

BBC: Flores Man was not human; doesn’t have chin

From BBC: Mystery ancient hobbit ‘was not human’ Researchers Balzeau and Charlier: “The shape of its skull is definitely not the shape of a modern human skull… Even a human with pathologies [disease].” Taken together, the results of his study, soon to be published in the Journal of Human Evolution, suggest that there is nothing about the skull that fits with any known population of modern human. In other words, the hobbit is not a small and diseased member of our species, Homo sapiens. It’s something much more exotic. Well, that tidies things up, right? Its eyes are very small and its shape is slightly different from H. erectus Crucially, the hobbit also lacked a chin. And as we have Read More ›

Researchers: Humans “speeding up” evolution

Depending on how we define species, extinction, as well as hybridization and evolution. From ScienceDaily: New research from UBC shows that when humans speed up the usually slow process of evolution by introducing new species, it can result in a lasting impact on the ecosystem. The phenomenon is known as reverse speciation and researchers witnessed it in Enos Lake on Vancouver Island where two similar species of threespine stickleback fish disappeared within three years.”When two similar species are in one environment, they often perform different ecological roles,” said Seth Rudman, a PhD student in zoology at UBC. “When they go extinct, it has strong consequences for the ecosystem.” Two species of endangered threespine stickleback fish lived in the lake. One Read More ›

When pop science sounds like mentalist carnival barkers

What else to make of this, from New Scientist?: A lot of problems in today’s world are too big for our brains. An algorithm that identifies how cause and effect are linked could lead us to better solutions … Finding solutions means doing what Newton did with gravity: asking the right questions, teasing out causes and effects, and so building an intellectual framework to explain the puzzle. But how do we do that with the sheer quantity of data sloshing around in today’s world? It’s this problem that has led some to think we need to think seriously about the way we think. Only by rebooting our powers of logic and going beyond what nature has hardwired into our brain Read More ›