Here: Q: What is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement?VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It’s a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We’re not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. […]
Month: October 2016
Horizontal gene transfer: Virus carries DNA of black widow spider toxin
Everyone goes a bit nuts at Hallowe’en and I (O’Leary for News) just couldn’t resist this one, before I go back to serious work. From ScienceDaily: Biologists sequencing the genome of the WO virus, which infects the bacterial parasite Wolbachia, have discovered that the phage carries DNA that produces black widow spider toxin: the first […]
In Spanish paper, Tom Wolfe calls “Theory of Evolution” a fairy tale?
Iconic culture commentator Tom Wolfe, author of The Kingdom of Speech told Spanish paper, El Mundo (second after El Pais” ): I started reading a bit and I had more and more the feeling that it was a myth. A myth like Thor and Wotan. The theory of evolution does not meet any of the standards of a […]
Sydney: Conference on fine tuning, multiverse, and life, November 24-25, 2016
From University of Sydney: We invite you to the 2016 Fine-tuning, the Multiverse and Life Workshop, hosted at the University of Sydney. Issues of fine-tuning and naturalness are central to evaluating such physical and cosmological theories as inflation and extension to the Standard model of particle physics, including supersymmetry. In addition, our values of the […]
Physicist Rob Sheldon: What ID is really about
It is about understanding the role of information in nature. He writes: If “conservation of energy” was a really big thing in the 19th century, it was because it made a non-material, yet indestructible thing, explicitly existent. Equally significant was Einstein’s claim in the 20th century that matter could be converted into energy. At this point, […]
Researchers: Life could get started quite easily in our Cosmic Zoo
At NDPI Life: The Cosmic Zoo: The (Near) Inevitability of the Evolution of Complex, Macroscopic Life William Bains and Dirk Schulze-Makuch Abstract: Life on Earth provides a unique biological record from single-cell microbes to technologically intelligent life forms. Our evolution is marked by several major steps or innovations along a path of increasing complexity from […]
Knockout gene study shows “beautiful hierarchical structure” underlying cell’s biology
From Veronique Greenwood at Quanta: In a monumental set of experiments, spread out over nearly two decades, biologists removed genes two at a time to uncover the secret workings of the cell. And what did they find?: In all, they found 550,000 pairs that, when removed, result in sickness or death. This network of genetic […]
Space and time may spring up from the quantum entanglement of tiny bits of information?
From Clara Moskowitz at Scientific American: Hundreds of researchers in a collaborative project called “It from Qubit” say space and time may spring up from the quantum entanglement of tiny bits of information … Some skeptics have questioned how productive IfQ can ever be if it is based on an unrealistic foundation. “That certainly is […]
Cosmic coincidences?: New Scientist says multiverse is best explanation!
From New Scientist on our universe’s five most startling coincidences: 1. Dark matter and energy balance 2. Universe lines up along “axis of evil” 3. Universe flat as a pancake 4. Space is all the same temperature 5. Higgs boson keeps the universe stable Having decided that these cirumstances are not coincidences, the New Scientist […]
Can parasitic plants use hosts’ genes against them?
From ScienceDaily: Sneaky parasitic weeds may be able to steal genes from the plants they are attacking and then use those genes against the host plant, according to a team of scientists. In a study, researchers detected 52 incidents of the nonsexual transfer of DNA — known as horizontal gene transfer, or HGT — from […]
Extraterrestrial life: A dead astronaut could seed life elsewhere in the galaxy
We are not making this up. (It’s the time of year, see?) From Cheyenne MacDonald at Daily Mail: It’s now known that the living conditions in space can wreak havoc on the human body – but how might the human body leave its mark on the cosmos? Plans for more rigorous missions have increased the […]
Chimpanzees and bonobos interbreed… but so?
From ScienceDaily: For the first time, scientists have revealed ancient gene mixing between chimpanzees and bonobos, humankind’s closest relatives, showing parallels with Neanderthal mixing in human ancestry. The study showed that one percent of chimpanzee genomes are derived from bonobos. Only one percent? Keep the file open. Paper. (public access) – Marc de Manuel et […]
What if origin of life research rested on a mistake?
A friend suggests we notice a 2007 paper at Nous: Conclusion My argument has been that the following combination of attitudes is misguided: (i) Even if we do yet have an adequate explanation of life’s emergence, knowledge of the physical, chemical, and biological conditions that life requires makes it extremely implausible that life simply arose […]
Darwin freakout 2016: ID as threat to education
From a paper at Perspectives in Science (October 15, 2016): Science Standards: The foundation of evolution education in the United States Abstract: Science standards and textbooks have a huge impact on the manner in which evolution is taught in American classrooms. Standards dictate how much time and what points have to be dedicated to the […]
ID as terrorism?
A friend sends this list of freakouts by Darwin’s followers some years ago, about the dangers the ID community poses: — Evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci (“The Varieties of Denialism,” 2002): ID is “bent on literally destroying science as we know it.” Anthropologist Pat Shipman (2005): I have been “prompted to take ID seriously, and this […]