From Colin Barras at New Scientist: Where there’s fire there’s often smoke – which might have been bad news for Neanderthals and other ancient hominins. Modern humans carry a genetic mutation that reduces our sensitivity to cancer-causing chemicals found in wood smoke. But Neanderthals and Denisovans apparently lacked the mutation. … The team inserted human and Neanderthal versions of the AHR gene into animal cells in the lab and examined how the cells responded when exposed to these carcinogens. The Neanderthal version proved to be far more likely to cause the production of enzymes that induce a toxic effect. “We were surprised that the differences between the two were so large,” says Perdew. For some compounds there was a 1000-fold Read More ›

In “Why Social Science Risks Irrelevance,” danah boyd at Chronicle Review: My path of inquiry, like that of most scientists, was shaped by the context in which I was operating. As a queer woman trying to sort out sexuality and identity, questions about gender felt natural. I was also a computer scientist at the time, but I knew that computer-science methods could not help me answer my question. So I embarked on a path that forced me to learn psychology, cognitive science, and gender studies. And, as a result, I began a lifelong battle to define my disciplinary identity. Am I a sociologist? An anthropologist? An internet-studies scholar? In the process, I quickly realized that I queered my disciplinary identity Read More ›

Jerry Coyne believes in “science-based determinism” and denies the existence of libertarian free will.  Over at his blog he assures us that he is nevertheless in favor of altering the behavior of other beings (whether dogs or people) through “environmental factors” such as kicks or arguments. He starts off in his OP: you can alter the behavior of a dog by kicking it when it does something you don’t like. (I am NOT recommending this!). After a while the dog, whose onboard computer gets reprogrammed to anticipate pain, will no longer engage in the unwanted behavior. Later in a comment he writes: Reason is no different from a kick: it’s words that people can take on board to see if doing what Read More ›

The spider’s leg accidentally caught and broke while he was being placed in the jar. Luckily, the big guy has just the fix. See also: Spider brains are amazing, say Cornell researchers and Does intelligence depend on a specific type of brain? Follow UD News at Twitter! Hat tip: Digg

Video: [youtube SC9Hx3WpsCk] Blurb at the Amazon page for the book: >>Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the “design intuition”—the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can only be accomplished by someone who has that knowledge. For the ingenious task of inventing life, this knower can only be God. Starting with the hallowed halls of academic science, Axe dismantles the widespread belief that Darwin’s theory of evolution is indisputably true, showing instead that a Read More ›

At Aeon: I consider humans the only linguistic species. We honestly have no evidence for symbolic communication, equally rich and multifunctional as ours, outside our species. But we do have something evidence for something:  the summer silly season. See, for example: Orangutan copies human speech? Must be BBC. Must be summer. The fascinating thing about today’s naturalist science is the way so many key claims are either unfalsifiable (multiverse) or obvious hype (orangutan, above)—or they assume, without any particular basis, a path of history (apes are entering the Stone Age) or geography (galaxies out there teem with life). I (O’Leary for news) volunteer as a writing instructor. “Might be true” is a standard for fiction. An important standard. It distinguishes Read More ›

Responding to Turtles: Shells evolved for digging, not protection?, turtle-knowledgeable reader Paul D. Cook kindly writes to say: – I’m not an expert on turtles. My degrees are in fields of engineering that are unrelated to this subject. But we have had turtles as pets for over 20 years. (Cute & affectionate critters. And while not as smart as a cat or dog, God has still packed more into their pea sized brain, than one would expect.) As soon as I read the article, I wondered about some obvious datapoint that might seem to be outliers for this idea. What about turtles such as the snapping turtles, which have far less protection on their undersides than on their backs. And Read More ›

At PLOSOne, What Is Speciation? Abstract: Concepts and definitions of species have been debated by generations of biologists and remain controversial. Microbes pose a particular challenge because of their genetic diversity, asexual reproduction, and often promiscuous horizontal gene transfer (HGT). However, microbes also present an opportunity to study and understand speciation because of their rapid evolution, both in nature and in the lab, and small, easily sequenced genomes. Here, we review how microbial population genomics has enabled us to catch speciation “in the act” and how the results have challenged and enriched our concepts of species, with implications for all domains of life. We describe how recombination (including HGT and introgression) has shaped the genomes of nascent microbial, animal, and Read More ›

In the current VJT thread on 31 scientists who did not follow methodological naturalism, it has been noteworthy that objectors have studiously avoided addressing the basic warrant for the design inference.  Since this is absolutely pivotal but seems to be widely misunderstood or even dismissed without good reason, it seems useful to summarise this for consideration. This having been done at comment 170 in the thread, it seems further useful to headline it and invite discussion: _________________ >>F/N: It seems advisable to again go back to basics, here, inductive reasoning and why it has significance in scientific work; which then has implications for the design inference. A good point to begin is IEP in its article on induction and deduction Read More ›

From Michael Le Page at New Scientist: Many of the genes in our cells evolved billions of years ago and a few of them can be traced back to the last common ancestor of all life. Now we have the best picture yet of what that ancestor was like and where it lived, thanks to a study that identified 355 genes that it probably possessed. Half alive? One characteristic of almost all living cells is that they pump ions across a membrane to generate an electrochemical gradient, then use that gradient to make the energy-rich molecule ATP. Martin’s results suggest LUCA could not generate such a gradient, but could harness an existing one to make ATP. That fits in beautifully Read More ›

From neuroscientist Simon Gandevia at The Conversation: Spectacular failures to replicate key scientific findings have been documented of late, particularly in biology, psychology and medicine. A report on the issue, published in Nature this May, found that about 90% of some 1,576 researchers surveyed now believe there is a reproducibility crisis in science. … One contributing factor is easily identified. It is the high rate of so-called false discoveries in the literature. They are false-positive findings and lead to the erroneous perception that a definitive scientific discovery has been made. This high rate occurs because the studies that are published often have low statistical power to identify a genuine discovery when it is there, and the effects being sought are Read More ›

From Ed Yong at Atlantic: Tyler Lyson from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science has devised a fascinating new idea about turtle origins. He thinks that their iconic shells evolved not for defense, but for digging. They anchored the powerful arm strokes needed to shift soil and sand. Before turtles became impregnable walking fortresses, they were professional burrowers. For almost a century, biologists argued about how turtles got their shells—a debate almost as slow and plodding as the creatures themselves. Paleontologists mostly argued that the shells evolved from bony scales called osteoderms, which are also responsible for the armor of crocodiles, armadillos, and many dinosaurs. These scales simply expanded to fuse with the ribs and backbone, creating a solid Read More ›