Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

We still don’t know what nearly half the chromosome does

From Robby Berman at BigThink: While it’s true that every chromosome contains some of 25,000 genes, it now turns out to be the case that this is only a little more than half the story. Computer modeling has revealed that up to 47% of each chromosome is an enigmatic sheath-like substance called the “chromosome periphery,” something about which little is known. That’s because it’s almost impossible to get a good look at in actual chromosomes. … It looks like chromatin do make up from 53% to 70% of chromosomes, but the rests is the mysterious chromosome periphery. Earlier research by Booth suggests that the chromosome periphery requires the presence of the protein Ki-67 that’s believed to act as a surfactant Read More ›

Evidence for self-organization? Microbe redesigned core metabolic pathways

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have developed a computer model which takes into account hundreds of genes, chemical reactions, and compounds required for the survival of Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic microbe on the planet. They found that Prochlorococcus has made extensive alterations to its metabolism as a way to reduce its dependence on phosphorus, an element that is essential and often growth-limiting in the ocean. … Microbes are known to employ three basic strategies to compete for limiting elemental resources: cell quotas may be adjusted, stressed cells may synthesize molecules to make more efficient use of available resources, and cells may access alternatives or more costly sources of the nutrient. In the case of phosphorus, a limiting resource in vast oceanic Read More ›

Hubert Yockey, 1916-2016, and His Contributions to the Intelligent Design Movement

I was sad to recently realize that Hubert Yockey passed earlier (in January) this year. Hubert Yockey, though he personally was against Intelligent Design, made many contributions to science that many of us within the ID community view as pro-ID work. I wanted to take a moment to appreciate and reflect on his contributions as they relate to ID.
Read More ›

Fidel Castro passes on

Overnight, his brother and successor Raul announced the death of the former longest serving non-royal head of a state. While we must condole with those who mourn, we must also recognise his very mixed legacy, as a Communist dictator leading a state that — per fair comment — has been very un-free and hampered in its development. Be that as it may, we must recognise this is the death of a former national leader and widely respected statesman. One, who will be mourned not just by family and friends or countrymen, but far and wide across the world. The development also comes at a pivotal time, when the USA is undergoing its own leadership transition after a very polarised election, Read More ›

Peer review: NgAgo gene editing method not replicated

From Kerry Grens at The Scientist: Researchers continue to fail in reproducing a new gene-editing technique called NgAgo, for Natronobacterium gregoryi Argonaute, an endonuclease. In a report published last week (November 15) in Protein & Cell, scientists from the U.S. and China working independently found no evidence that NgAgo could manipulate DNA sequences.“Some of us have even sent visiting researchers to [Chunyu] Han’s laboratory but they were not allowed to perform genome editing experiments involving mammalian cells when they were there,” the authors, led by Shawn Burgess of the National Human Genome Research Institute, wrote in their report. … More. The publisher is said to be investigating. The good news is that recent serious interest in replicability is making it Read More ›

Astrophysicist: “A vibrant scientific culture encourages many interpretations of evidence”

From Avi Loeb at Nature, on the achievements and limitations of Mayan astronomy: So why, I wondered, didn’t the Mayans go further and infer aspects of our modern understanding of astronomy? They determined the orbital periods of Venus, Mars and Mercury around the Sun, but Earth was at the centre of their Universe. I came to appreciate how limiting prevailing world views can be. … I noticed this bias recently while assessing a PhD thesis. The student was asked to test whether a data set from a large cosmological survey was in line with the standard cosmological model. But when a discrepancy was found, the student’s goal shifted to explaining why the data set was incomplete. In such a culture, Read More ›

Origin of diaphragm pushed back about 50 million years

From ScienceDaily: The researchers conclude that already the least common ancestor of caseids and mammals had a diaphragm more than 300 million years ago — that is about 50 million years earlier than previously assumed. An efficient respiratory system is intertwined with the evolution of warmbloodedness, which in turn molded our entire behavior. This assumed early origin of the diaphragm now demands a reevaluation of these developments.A fossil diaphragm probably will never be found, simply due to its bad chances to become preserved. Science, according to Prof. Perry, therefore depends on functional approximations to trace the origin of this important evolutionary novelty. Dr. Lambertz: “We still don’t know that much about these animals. It has been a long way towards Read More ›

Could there be a new particle hiding in 1990s-era data?

From Jesse Emspak at LiveScience: From 1989 to 2000, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) operated an atom smasher called the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), in which particles were sent crashing into one another at near light speed. A restudy of the data from the now-dismantled LEP collider could prove a hint or just a fluke. When the original LEP experiments were done, the muons were produced in particle collisions (also called “events”) that occurred at certain energies. A graph of particle mass (expressed as energy, per Einstein’s famous E = mc^2) against the number of events per billion electron volts, or GeV, shows a peak at about 10 to 15 GeV and a long “tail” that trails off Read More ›

Darwinism validated not by evidence but “by simplistic games models borrowed from 1940s economics”

From John Hands at Science Focus: At a landmark international conference recently [7-9 November] organised by the Royal Society and the British Academy, several speakers called for a revision of the theory of biological evolution that has been largely unquestioned in the UK and the USA for around 70 years. This paradigm – a combination of Darwinism, population genetics, and what Francis Crick called the central dogma of evolutionary biology – is known as NeoDarwinism, or the Modern Synthesis. Popularised by Richard Dawkins in his bestselling 1976 book The Selfish Gene, it is a statistical model validated not by observation or experiment, but by simplistic games models borrowed from 1940s economics. Those speakers drew attention to several empirically supported mechanisms, Read More ›

Free Live Interactive Webinar Later Today With Dr. Douglas Axe – now linked here!

Later today, Dr. Douglas Axe of the Biologic Institute will be presenting to the Apologetics Academy, a weekly free, live interactive webinar with top scholars representing positions from across the theological and philosophical spectrum. Normally, the webinar takes place on Saturday. However, this week, Dr. Douglas Axe will be speaking today, Friday. His topic is his recent book, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed. The webinar officially begins at 8pm GMT / 3pm EST / 2pm CST / 12noon PST, and can be accessed by clicking on the following URL: https://zoom.us/j/457736238 Doing so will immediately prompt you to download the Zoom software we use. You will then be automatically connected to the webinar room. Whatever your position, Read More ›

Michael Denton’s Evolution (Still) a Theory in Crisis a Spectator “Best Book”?

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: Wow, congratulations to Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton! He has won richly deserved praise in the London Spectator. In a feature highlighting “The best and worst books of 2016,” with choices from a panel of contributors, the distinguished literary critic A.N. Wilson selects Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis  as his best nonfiction work of the year: Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (Discovery Institute Press, £16.80). A sequel to his 1985 book — Evolution: A Theory in Crisis — this takes us up to date with the dazzling developments of life sciences over the past 30 years. Denton is a sceptic about Darwin’s theory of evolution on purely scientific Read More ›

The alt right, popular media, and Darwin

From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: Anyone not committed to Darwinian survival of the fittest cannot be ‘alt right’. I wrote the piece because I had been following the alt right (human biodiversity studies, etc.) for a while on account of a curious incident: An alt right group was promoting a book, Troublesome Inheritance, by a retiring science writer. Their promos landed in my box. They understood the book to be a defense of classic Darwinian racism. At the time I was mainly interested in the way in which popular science media treated Inheritance respectfully but very cautiously. The science writers are all supposed to be pro-Darwin, you see, but anti-racist. It is not clear that the two concepts Read More ›

New Scientist frets over future backlash against science

By 2076. From Michael Brooks at New Scientist: Will we still love technology when robots have taken our jobs, or when insurance companies demand huge premiums because humans are the most dangerous drivers on the roads? Will people smash up self-driving taxis, just as Luddites attacked automated looms? In some small, angry pockets, the backlash is already in full swing. Former mathematician Ted Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, has just published a book called The Anti-Tech Revolution. (paywall) More. It’s helpful that the Unabomber is an entirely average American (“Kaczynski killed three and injured 23 people over the course of an 18-year bombing campaign that often targeted universities and airlines.”) Like all the other rubes, boobs, bubbas, hicks, and hillbillies… Note Read More ›

Royal Society Meet: No “fisticuffs”; serious questions smothered instead

More meetings planned. Snatches from science writer Carl Zimmer at Quanta: While Noble was struggling to respond, Shuker went back to the paper on an iPad. And now he read the abstract in a booming voice. ‘Our results demonstrate that natural selection can rapidly rewire regulatory networks,’” Shuker said. He put down the iPad. “So it’s a perfect, beautiful example of rapid neo-Darwinian evolution,” he declared. Shuker distilled the feelings of a lot of skeptics I talked to at the conference. The high-flying rhetoric about a paradigm shift was, for the most part, unwarranted, they said. Nor were these skeptics limited to the peanut gallery. Several of them gave talks of their own. More. Goodness, the relief that must have Read More ›

Huge ice lake under surface of Mars?

From Mike Wall at Space.com: This vertically exaggerated view shows scalloped depressions in a part of Mars where such textures prompted researchers to check for buried ice, using ground-penetrating radar aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The ice layer, which spans a greater area than the state of New Mexico, lies in Mars’ mid-northern latitudes and is covered by just 3 feet to 33 feet (1 to 10 meters) of soil. It therefore represents a vast possible resource for future astronauts exploring the Red Planet, study team members said. More. One suspects we’ll have to go there to really find out. There are volunteers. See also: Researchers: Life could only exist on Mars far beneath surface Follow UD News at Twitter!