Fulfilling Thomas Huxley’s famous assertion, sort of. Hat tip Oliver Moody, for this item: Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare were produced in response to the familiar idea that if an infinite number of monkeys are given typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. It was translated to a computer environment, producing live updates published on the web, alongside a webcam view of the production scene showing the creative activity in its fuller context. The text was first produced in Paignton Zoo by a group of Sulawesi Macaque monkeys as their contribution to the exhibition GENERATOR (1 May – 22 June 2002, Spacex Gallery), curated by SPACEX & STAR, and supported Read More ›

From time to time materialists come into these pages and argue that DNA is not a true “code.”  This proves nothing other than that materialists are often quite shameless in the arguments they make to prop up their religious views.  We would do well to remind that that arch-materialist Richard Dawkins did not get the memo.  Testifying against interest he writes: After Watson and Crick, we know that genes themselves, within their minute internal structure, are long strings of pure digital information. What is more, they are truly digital, in the full and strong sense of computers and compact disks, not in the weak sense of the nervous system. The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Experiments have shown that it is remarkably easy for protein-like, two-dimensional structures — amyloids — to form from basic building blocks. This discovery supports the researchers’ hypothesis that primal life could have evolved from amyloids such as these. But then we learn: The ETH scientists stress, however, that there is still an important piece of the puzzle missing from their argument in support of the “amyloid hypothesis”: Are amyloids also capable of self-replication, just like RNA molecules? This is conceivable, claim Riek and Greenwald, but there is still no experimental evidence to support it. The professor and his team are working on it. And then we suddenly hear, almost for the first time, what’s wrong with RNA world, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Shimmering carapaces and rattling claws make colourful freshwater crabs attractive to pet keepers. To answer the demand, fishermen are busy collecting and trading with the crustaceans, often not knowing what exactly they have handed over to their client. Luckily for science and nature alike, however, such ‘stock’ sometimes ends up in the hands of scientists, who recognise their peculiarities and readily dig into them to make the next amazing discovery. Such is the case of three researchers from University of New South Wales, Australia, The Australian Museum, Sun Yat-sen University, China, and National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan, who have found a new species and even a new genus of freshwater crab, and now have it published in the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Several years ago, biologists discovered a new type of genetic material known as long noncoding RNA. This RNA does not code for proteins and is copied from sections of the genome once believed to be “junk DNA.” Since then, scientists have found evidence that long noncoding RNA, or lncRNA, plays roles in many cellular processes, including guiding cell fate during embryonic development. However, it has been unknown exactly how lncRNA exerts this influence. Inspired by historical work showing that structure plays a role in the function of other classes of RNA such as transfer RNA, MIT biologists have now deciphered the structure of one type of lncRNA and used that information to figure out how it interacts with Read More ›

From Uri Bram at Nautilus: Human learning is always social, embodied, and occurs in specific practical situations. Mostly, you don’t learn to dance by reading a book or by doing experiments in a laboratory. You learn it by dancing with people who are more skilled than you. … Yes. In its first few decades, artificial intelligence research concentrated on tasks we consider particular signs of intelligence because they are difficult for people: chess, for example. It turned out that chess is easy for fast-enough computers. Early work neglected tasks that are easy for people: making breakfast, for instance. Such easy tasks turned out to be difficult for computers controlling robots. Early AI learning research also looked at formal, chess-like problems, Read More ›

Re nature broadcaster David Attenborough: From Adam Lusher at Independent: Researchers hit back after Sir David signed open letter to The Independent raising concern at the level of suffering involved in many neuroscience experiments on primates Sir David Attenborough has been accused of being seduced by “pseudoscience”, as researchers hit back at his demand for an end to the use of certain types of “cruel” brain experiments on primates. The highly respected naturalist and broadcaster joined leading scientists in signing an open letter to The Independent on Wednesday, saying it was time to stop funding some potentially painful or cruel types of neuroscience experiments on primates. Um, yeah. Why are they doing this? The Americans ended chimp research for human health Read More ›

With all this talk of language, what with Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech coming out, here’s an interesting new approach: From Sarah Knapton at Telegraph: The discovery challenges the fundamental principles of linguistics, which state that languages grow up independently of each other, with no intrinsic meaning in the noises which form words. But research which looked into several thousand languages showed that for basic concepts, such as body parts, family relationships or aspects of the natural world, there are common sounds – as if concepts that are important to the human experience somehow trigger universal verbalisations. The study found, that in most languages, the word for ‘nose’ is likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, Read More ›

From Ian Tattersall’s review of Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky at New York Review of Books: Around 300,000 years ago a conceptually new type of stone implement began to be made in both Africa and Europe… But significantly, in this time range there is only one putative—and hugely arguable—symbolic artifact known: a vaguely anthropomorphic lump of rock from the Golan Heights that may have been slightly modified to look more human. More. So, readers, is it an artifact? Is it an accident? Note: The copy quoted is behind a paywall. The whole article is worth the price because it is a good overview of the background to Tom Wolfe’s attack on Chomsky Read More ›

Video: [youtube ke_OgE_V6tQ] (Please understand this i/l/o the context of complacency, attack and the lesson of Jan Sobieski. Ask yourself, in your heart is our civilisation worth fighting for given the likely alternatives (or, does it deserve to die . . . or be utterly “transformed”), and why or why not?) Ponder, our geostrategic challenges, and how our underlying worldviews . . . whether or not dressed up in a lab coat . . . and deep-rooted perceptions shape how we act, whilst geostrategic realities (and some pretty ruthless operators out there) shape consequences: Where do we go from here? What is the likely consequence? END

From Jane Qiu at Nature: Keen to get to the bottom of its people’s ancestry, China has in the past decade stepped up its efforts to uncover evidence of early humans across the country. It is reanalysing old fossil finds and pouring tens of millions of dollars a year into excavations. And the government is setting up a US$1.1-million laboratory at the IVPP to extract and sequence ancient DNA. … “Many Western scientists tend to see Asian fossils and artefacts through the prism of what was happening in Africa and Europe,” says Wu. Those other continents have historically drawn more attention in studies of human evolution because of the antiquity of fossil finds there, and because they are closer to Read More ›

No, we know… This is not our high school genetics. From the Salk Institute: LA JOLLA—Our brains contain a surprising diversity of DNA. Even though we are taught that every cell in our body has the same DNA, in fact most cells in the brain have changes to their DNA that make each neuron a little different. Now researchers at the Salk Institute and their collaborators have shown that one source of this variation—called long interspersed nuclear elements or L1s—are present in 44 to 63 percent of healthy neurons and can not only insert DNA but also remove it. Previously, these L1s were known to be small bits of DNA called “jumping genes” that copy and paste themselves throughout the Read More ›

From Belinda Smith at Cosmos Magazine: Around 4.5 billion years ago, an object slammed into Earth vaporising most of the planet into a scorching cloud from which the moon was born. Geochemists in the US – Kun Wang from Washington University in St Louis and Stein Jacobsen at Harvard – examined minuscule amounts of potassium in moon and Earth rocks and found minute differences – possible only if their raw materials were thoroughly mixed in a superheated fog before they coalesced. The work, published in Nature, pokes a hole in the theory that the moon was born from a low-impact collision. More. In truth, we do not know very much about how the moon was formed, and theories rise and Read More ›

Imagine if atheistic materialism was actually true and humans are nothing more than biological automatons – complexly programmed and reactive robots that behave and think in whatever manner happenstance chemical interactions dictates at any given time.  Let’s think about what would actually mean. There would be no way for a biological automaton to determine whether or not any statement was in fact true or not since all conclusions are driven by chemistry and not metaphysical “truth” values; indeed, a biological automaton reaches conclusion X for exactly the same reason any other reaches conclusion Y; chemistry.  If chemistry dictates that 1+1=banana, that is what a “person” will conclude. If chemistry dictates they defend that view to the death and see themselves Read More ›

Before we get back to our sober coverage, from Ewen Callaway at Scientific American: Geneticists have traced the history of beer’s most important ingredient: yeast. By sequencing the genomes of nearly 200 modern strains of brewer’s yeast, the research reveals how, over hundreds of years, humans transformed the wild fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae into a variety of strains tuned for particular tipples. An evolutionary tree of the yeast strains revealed distinct families of yeast used for making wine, bread and saké, and two distantly related groups of ale yeast, including strains from Belgium, Germany, Britain and the United States. More. Genomics will be used to produce new strains. Evolution goes really fast when there is design and purpose involved. And who Read More ›