From ScienceDaily: A person’s DNA sequence can provide a lot of information about how genes are turned on and off, but new research out of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine suggests the 3-D structure DNA forms as it crams into cells may provide an additional layer of gene control. As long strands of DNA twist and fold, regions far away from each other suddenly find themselves in close proximity. The revolutionary study suggests interactions between distant regions may affect how genes are expressed in certain diseases. … According to Scacheri, “The big surprise was when we crunched the numbers and compared the risk associated with the amount of heritability that could be explained by the outside variants. By Read More ›

You’d think so, to listen to Lebanese American essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb at Medium.com: What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for. But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — Read More ›

Last night we noted that even New Scientist now seems to accept that it’s time to rethink how evolution works. The author of the New Scientist article is St. Andrews’ Kevin Laland, whose 2015 paper (with colleagues) is here (public access): Scientific activities take place within the structured sets of ideas and assumptions that define a field and its practices. The conceptual framework of evolutionary biology emerged with the Modern Synthesis in the early twentieth century and has since expanded into a highly successful research program to explore the processes of diversification and adaptation. Nonetheless, the ability of that framework satisfactorily to accommodate the rapid advances in developmental biology, genomics and ecology has been questioned. We review some of these Read More ›

But that is ridiculous. No, we don’t mean New Scientist-type ridiculous. We mean serious ridiculous. Stuff we can’t just ignore. New Scientists, get back to your script! You’re supposed to be explaining why Darwinism prevents a plague of disembodied space brains from taking over the world and why information is physical. Whatever happened to the days when we could raise money just by fronting all the nonsense you people put forward? It’s fundraising season! Look. We’ll even give the New Scientist employees a bonus if they can come up with another completely risible idea. But now look at how far they may have strayed beyond the selfish gene: From Kevin Laland, For more than 150 years it has been one Read More ›

From Amanda Doyle at Astrobiology Magazine: Scientists are attempting to put a date on the earliest lifeforms in the kingdom of Animalia, but without an actual cast of a body they’ve had to rely on the credibility of “trace” fossils to show signs of an animal’s presence in the form of footprints, scratches, feeding marks or burrows. Some scientists claim to have found trace fossils made by animals more than a billion years ago, raising controversy over whether animal life could have existed this early. There are also trace fossils from the Ediacaran Period and soft bodied animals were known to exist during this period, so understanding the tracks they made is important for studying the early animals. Giulio Mariotti, Read More ›

Stefaan Blanche and Peter C. Kjærgaard indulge fears at Scientific American: We have both had encounters with creationists. They come in all shades and represent all major denominations. They live in cities and in rural areas. Some are well educated, some belong to the establishment, others don’t. Some are well organized and well funded, others are not. Several are dedicated to a cause, many as missionaries with the role of spreading the word of divine creation as opposed to evolution; others keep to themselves. But despite their differences, they have something in common—they are all Europeans. A certain type of education prevents the average European intellectual from considering the possibility that such a disparate group may be united more by Read More ›

From Hannah Devlin at U.K. Guardian: To thrive in the cut-throat world of academia, scientists are incentivised to publish surprising findings frequently, the study suggests – despite the risk that such findings are “most likely to be wrong”. Paul Smaldino, a cognitive scientist who led the work at the University of California, Merced, said: “As long as the incentives are in place that reward publishing novel, surprising results, often and in high-visibility journals above other, more nuanced aspects of science, shoddy practices that maximise one’s ability to do so will run rampant.” The paper comes as psychologists and biomedical scientists are grappling with an apparent replication crisis, in which many high profile results have been shown to be unreliable. More. It’s Read More ›

From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, reflecting on Tom Wolfe’s new The Kingdom of Speech at Evolution News & Views: I have argued before that the human mind is qualitatively different from the animal mind. The human mind has immaterial abilities — the intellect’s ability to grasp abstract universal concepts divorced from any particular thing — and that this ability makes us more different from apes than apes are from viruses. We are ontologically different. We are a different kind of being from animals. We are not just animals who talk. Although we share much in our bodies with animals, our language — a simulacrum of our abstract minds — has no root in the animal world. More. No, language has no Read More ›

My (O’Leary for News‘) review of Timothy Garton Ash’s Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, here: 1. The United States has created a global “First Amendment” space for the internet, in the sense that Americans tend to assume that the default position is freedom rather than control. “For the hours you are online, you have virtually emigrated to the United States”. Recent loss of US control means loss of this default position, which is likely to be keenly felt elsewhere. 2. “When it comes to enabling or restricting global freedom of expression, some corporations have more power than most states. Were each user of Facebook to be counted as an inhabitant, Facebook would have a larger population than Read More ›

Now it’s time for another entertaining controversy, akin to the eye scratcher about whether cats are technically “domestic” animals: This one’s about whether humans evolved from aquatic apes. Nature broadcaster David Attenborough thinks maybe we did, as set out in a recent BBC Radio 4 series The Waterside Ape. By contrast, Alice Roberts (who has herself broadcast for the BBC on human evolution) and Mark Maislin want us to know, in Scientific American, that it isn’t true: Sorry David Attenborough, We Didn’t Evolve from “Aquatic Apes”–Here’s Why These people do not sound very sure of themselves, do they? Anyway, they trace the idea to zoologist Alister Hardy: Hardy put forward all sorts of features which could be explained as “aquatic Read More ›

From Erica Tennenhouse at Discover Mag: For their training, a computer screen would flash words like “DOWN” or “GAME”, and non-words like “TWOR” or “NELD”, along with a star symbol. Each time the pigeons made a correct identification — pecking the word if it was a real one, or pecking the star symbol beneath a non-word — they were rewarded with a portion of wheat. After the pigeons built up decent vocabularies (the star pupil acquired 58 words), the screen began flashing new words that they had never seen before. And even when faced with these novel words, the pigeons continued to pick out the real words from the non-words with impressive accuracy, according to a study published in Proceedings Read More ›

From Monya Baker at Nature: A gold standard of scientific analysis is fast becoming tarnished, according to a report by a leading meta-researcher. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses distil scientific articles on similar questions into what is meant to be an authoritative take on a particular topic — often how well a particular treatment works across medical settings — and they are key tools in evidence-based medicine. But valuable reports are getting diluted by “a massive production of unnecessary, misleading and conflicted systematic reviews and meta-analyses”, according to John Ioannidis at Stanford University in California, who has published a report in The Milbank Quarterly looking at trends in the publication of these articles. More. Here, we always say, look on the bright Read More ›

From Ewen Callaway at Nature: A pair of 46,000-year-old human teeth has been discovered in Liang Bua, a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores that was once home to the 1-metre-tall ‘hobbit’ species Homo floresiensis. The teeth are slightly younger than the known hobbit remains, which strengthens the case that humans were responsible for the species’ demise.More. One would not wish to be a crown prosecutor arguing a case on so slender a basis. But so often, it is all they have really got. See also: The Little Lady of Flores spoke from the grave. But said what, exactly? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: The geological search for ancient life frequently zeroes in on fossilized organic structures or biominerals that can serve as “biosignatures,” that survive in the rock record over extremely long time scales. Mineral elements such as sulfur are often formed through biological activity. Microbes can also produce a variety of telltale extracellular structures that resemble sheaths and stalks. However, according to new findings published in the journal Nature Communications, carbon-sulfur microstructures that would be recognized today by some experts as biomaterials are capable of self-assembling under certain conditions, even without direct biological activity. These “false” biosignatures could potentially be misinterpreted as signs of biological activity due to their strong resemblance to microbial structures. “Surprisingly, we found that we could Read More ›

Our valued contributor Niwrad send in this post, on recent claims that cancer disproves ID: — Evolutionism is systematic negation of reality and inversion of truth. So we must be prepared to listen to ever more unbelievable things from evolutionists. Here I will examine an example that seems particularly meaningful. Cancer has universally been considered to be biological degeneration. Something in the cellular machinery goes wrong, a proliferation of defective cells grows, leading to a destructive dynamic in the diseased organism. It all starts in the genome, so cancer is an issue of bio-informatics, of programming. In fact, we learned recently that “Microsoft will ‘solve’ cancer within 10 years by ‘reprogramming’ diseased cells.” Conceptually, bugs that start the cancer appear Read More ›