Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Researchers: Bacteria fossils predate the origin of oxygen

From Melanie Schefft at University of Cincinnati Magazine: UC geologist uncovers 2.5 billion-year-old fossils of bacteria that predate the formation of oxygen. They are sulfur-oxidizing bacteria. The 2.52 billion-year-old sulfur-oxidizing bacteria are described by Czaja as exceptionally large, spherical-shaped, smooth-walled microscopic structures much larger than most modern bacteria, but similar to some modern single-celled organisms that live in deepwater sulfur-rich ocean settings today, where even now there are almost no traces of oxygen. In his research published in the December issue of the journal Geology of the Geological Society of America, Czaja and his colleagues Nicolas Beukes from the University of Johannesburg and Jeffrey Osterhout, a recently graduated master’s student from UC’s department of geology, reveal samples of bacteria that Read More ›

Sexual selection is a bogus concept

No, that’s not the way the ScienceDaily media release puts it, of course: Why do some animals have extravagant, showy ornaments — think elk and deer antlers, peacock feathers and horns on dung beetles — that can be a liability to survival? Charles Darwin couldn’t figure it out, but now a Northwestern University research team has a possible explanation for this puzzling phenomenon of evolution. Just think: The team get to be minor saints in the calendar, for helping the Great One. The researchers developed a mathematical model that made a surprising prediction: In animals with ornamentation, males will evolve out of the tension between natural selection and sexual selection into two distinct subspecies, one with flashy, “costly” ornaments for Read More ›

Convergent evolution: Once more, why do unrelated animals have pseudo-thumbs?

From Juliet Lamb at J-Stor: Take the Giant Panda, for example. Watch a panda eat, and you’ll notice the thumb-like appendage that helps it hold onto bamboo stalks. The panda’s thumb isn’t actually a thumb; it’s an elongated wrist bone that opposes the five true fingers of the panda’s hand, allowing it to grip and manipulate the delicate bamboo stalks that form the majority of its diet. For an enormous organism like a panda to survive on an energy-poor resource like bamboo, most of which is composed of indigestible fiber, maximizing eating efficiency is key. Without gripping abilities, pandas would require more effort to consume less bamboo, compromising their ability to meet their energy needs. The misleadingly named Red Panda Read More ›

BTB: Points to ponder as we look at Crick’s understanding of DNA as text, since March 19, 1953

A few days back, I headlined a clip from Crick’s letter to his son Michael, March 19, 1953: The main text is accessible here (with page scans). Sans diagrams: >>My Dear Michael, Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery. We have built a model for the structure of des-oxy-ribose-nucleic-acid (read it carefully) called D.N.A. for short. You may remember that the genes of the chromosomes — which carry the hereditary factors — are made up of protein and D.N.A. Our structure is very beautiful. D.N.A. can be thought of roughly as a very long chain with flat bits sticking out. The flat bits are called the “bases”. […] Now we have two of these chains winding Read More ›

Tool-making from 300 thousand years ago – but by whom no one knows

From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Sixteen years ago, road workers detonated a controlled explosive to remove a large limestone boulder blocking a planned roadway outside of Tel Aviv in Israel. Soon after the dust settled, it became clear that the road would need to be rerouted. The workers had stumbled upon a vast cave, one that had been sealed off for more than 200,000 years! For the researchers who soon began exploring the cave’s expansive interior, it was the find of a lifetime. Now called Qesem Cave, the site has delivered a number of discoveries that live up to its explosive origin. Archaeologists found a 300,000-year-old fireplace, along with tortoise shells that showed signs of burning. Apparently, whoever live there Read More ›

Larry Sanger, Co-founder of Wikipedia, Agrees That it Does not Follow its Own Neutrality Policy. 

Larry Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia and the author of its “neutrality policy.”  Mr. Sanger posted an article today about media bias in which he alluded to the neutrality policy he drafted. I replied (see the combox of the article): “Wikipedia’s neutrality policy.” I’ve been reading Wikipedia articles for years, and from the evidence I would not have thought such a thing exists, or, if it does, the name is somewhat misleading, because the policy would read something like: “On all matters cultural and political, Wikipedia will endeavor to crush conservative viewpoints. Neutrality will not be tolerated.” Just read the post on, for example, intelligent design theory. It is written by the theory’s antagonists, and all efforts to correct Read More ›

Fermi: Where Are They?

Peter Burfeind contemplates the Fermi Paradox and atheists’ obsession with aliens in this post. In a sense, Christian presumptions and its claim of historicity for biblical miracles is more consistent with what should be happening given the premises of evolutionary science. A complex and powerful Godhead with anthropomorphic habits, dimension-jumping beings doing God’s bidding or working against it, frequent interventions in history accompanied by bizarre occurrences in nature—isn’t this what we’d expect in a universe given all the oddities of physics in the context of evolutionary randomness? Meanwhile, the aliens arising from the imagination of modern science fiction, because they have no affiliation whatsoever with the evidence at hand, have a little more than the whiff of blind faith associated Read More ›

Hoyle (with updates from Walker and Davies) on Cosmological Fine Tuning: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has “monkeyed” with the physics as well as the chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature”

Sometimes, it is important to go back to key sources, if we are to break through deep misconceptions.  This is particularly relevant for the design view of science, including on cosmological fine tuning. So, first Sir Fred (a key discoverer of the phenomenon): >>[Sir Fred Hoyle, In a talk at Caltech c 1981 (nb. this longstanding UD post):] From 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 MeV energy level in the nucleus of 12 C to the 7.12 MeV level in 16 O. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your Read More ›

Viruses associated with invertebrates for billions of years?

From ScienceDaily: A groundbreaking study of the virosphere of the most populous animals — those without backbones such as insects, spiders and worms and that live around our houses — has uncovered 1445 viruses, revealing people have only scratched the surface of the world of viruses — but it is likely that only a few cause disease. … “This groundbreaking study re-writes the virology text book by showing that invertebrates carry an extraordinary number of viruses — far more than we ever thought,” Professor Holmes said. “We have discovered that most groups of viruses that infect vertebrates — including humans, such as those that cause well-known diseases like influenza — are in fact derived from those present in invertebrates,” said Read More ›