2016

If you live under the sort of enlightened regime that funds high education. From Prospect: Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, “On the Absence of Absences” that was to be part of an academic conference later that year—in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase “absence of absences” meant. The description provided by the panel organizers, printed below, did not help. The summary, or abstract of the proposed paper—was pure gibberish, as you can see below. I tried, as best I could within the limits of my own vocabulary, to write something that had many big words but which made no sense whatsoever. I not only wanted to see if I Read More ›

Machine, argues Josh Bloom at American Council for Science and Health: I recently wrote that viruses do not come even close to meeting the standards that are generally accepted requirements in defining what “alive” means. But they do have a huge impact on living organisms, because they are miracles of evolution — microbes that exist solely to reproduce, and do so with perfect efficiency and no waste. … What this “bag of chemicals,” which is about 100-times smaller than a bacterium, does is nothing short of amazing. It is way “smarter” than the cell that it infects. Using nothing more than a very specifically-shaped protein spike to locate and attach itself to the host cell, its own genetic material, and Read More ›

Further to “Ginning up dangers of Neanderthal genes,” from The Scientist: “They’ve looked at huge databases of medical records to see if there are traits that correlate with the presence of particular genes from Neanderthals and have found a number of them,” said anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the study. “The take-away is that these genes that we have from these ancient people have effects on our phenotypes, and that’s pretty cool. They are not just shadows that are not doing anything, they are actually participating in our biology.” Sure, but to what extent? Beyond the influence of environment and epigenetics? Hawks also noted that “the [observed] associations are really, really small,” Read More ›

From New Scientist: Tony Capra at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and his colleagues studied an anonymised database containing medical records and genetic data from more than 28,000 people of European descent. Europeans retain some Neanderthal DNA, though the amount and the exact parts they have vary between individuals. They used information from the Neanderthal genome to identify segments of Neanderthal DNA in each person’s genetic data. Then they explored whether particular chunks of Neanderthal DNA in their genomes were associated with a variety of specific medical conditions. They found that certain Neanderthal segments come with a small but significant health risk: people carrying them are about 2 per cent more likely to develop depression and 1.4 per cent likely Read More ›

From Science Daily: Could the food we eat affect our genes? Study in yeast suggests this may be the case “Cellular metabolism plays a far more dynamic role in the cells than we previously thought,” explains Dr Ralser. “Nearly all of a cell’s genes are influenced by changes to the nutrients they have access to. In fact, in many cases the effects were so strong, that changing a cell’s metabolic profile could make some of its genes behave in a completely different manner. “The classical view is that genes control how nutrients are broken down into important molecules, but we’ve shown that the opposite is true, too: how the nutrients break down affects how our genes behave.” The researchers believe Read More ›

From Discover: Earth May Be a 1-in-700-Quintillion Kind of Place One of the most fundamental requirements for a planet to sustain life is to orbit in the “habitable zone” of a star — the “Goldilocks” region where the temperature is just right and liquid water can exist. Astronomers have, to this point, discovered around 30 exoplanets in the habitable zones of stars. Simply extrapolating that figure based on the known number of stars suggests that there should be about 50 billion such planets in the Milky Way alone. Probability seems to dictate that Earth-twins are out there somewhere. But according to Zackrisson, most planets in the universe shouldn’t look like Earth. His model indicates that Earth’s existence presents a mild Read More ›

From Neuroscience News: A transgression can be defined as an “act that goes against a law, rule, or code of conduct; an offense.” Brains Behaving Badly focuses on the Western religious classifications of the “seven deadly sins:” pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Accordingly, this post will attempt to provide a few ideas relating to behaviors that many in the Western world consider to be immoral. This post is an opinion piece covering ideas involving morality, evolutionary psychology, religion and philosophy. As such, much of it is speculative, opinionated and is meant to help spark conversations involving behavior and morality, rather than serve as a definitive scientific paper on any of the subjects discussed. I believe most of Read More ›

From RetractionWatch: Last Friday, WIRED editor Adam Rogers got a direct message on Twitter that no journalist wants to see. Christina Larson, a freelance writer in China, told him she had seen overlap with her own work in a few WIRED stories, and included links to the relevant pieces. “She was gracious, just asking for a link back in the future, said she loved WIRED,” Rogers told Retraction Watch by phone this afternoon. It was early morning in San Francisco, so Rogers thanked her for bringing the issue to his attention, and said he’d look at it more closely when he arrived at his desk some 45 minutes later. It was the start of an episode that would lead to Read More ›

Someone must really do a word study sometime on the many tautologies associated with Darwinism. One that appears in quite a few science media releases is “adaptive.” Science philosopher Karl Popper noted, To say that a species now living “is adapted to its environment is almost tautological,” Popper wrote. “Adaptation or fitness is defined by modern evolutionists as survival value, and can be measured by actual success in survival. There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this.” [Popper, *Unended Quest* 1974, p. 168] A friend notes that R.C. Lewontin said something similar. He doubted that “adaptive” could be a useful term said so repeatedly in the late 1970s, for example, In order to make the Read More ›

From Paul Furber at Brainstorm: Wikipedia lost at least 300 million views in 2015, dropping it from the fifth most viewed website on the planet down to the tenth. This is a good thing for a number of reasons. It started as a good idea in 2001 — an encyclopaedia that anyone could edit. Unfortunately, it’s now a quagmire of bureaucracy, infighting, corruption and agenda-pushing. Try to edit any article that an established editor regards as their pet project and you’ll find your edits reverted in double quick time, regardless of whether you have reliable sources for your edit. Complain about this and you’ll get banned. You personally may be a reliable source, but that won’t matter: Wikipedia doesn’t even Read More ›

From Allen Greer at The Scientist: If inferences about animal emotions are fraught with anthropomorphism and language bias, surely evolutionary principles provide an unbiased way of thinking about animal emotions. But evolution can say only it is plausible that the precursors to human emotions did arise long before humans evolved. Just as certain bones can be identified all the way along the evolutionary tree from primitive fishes to humans so too can certain neuro-anatomical, chemical and physiological substrates associated with emotions in humans be traced well back in our ancestry. But while we can identify these “tangible” substrates in animals, the associated emotions they support, if any, remain a matter of irreconcilable opinion. If stimulation of a part of the Read More ›

Richard Mabey, author of The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination, was interviewed recently by National Geographic: There Is Such a Thing as Plant Intelligence … We tend to judge plants not as autonomous organisms but in terms of what they can do for us. But they’re astonishing in their own right and deserve to be given the same ethical status as animals. … It’s long been known that the trees in a forest are connected by mycorrhizal fungi. This means fungi that live symbiotically with the roots of forest trees. The forest trees can’t grow without them because they haven’t got enough access to the minerals in the soil, and the fungi Read More ›

From Quanta: One of the most influential hypotheses states that it all began with RNA, a molecule that can both record genetic blueprints and trigger chemical reactions. The “RNA world” hypothesis comes in many forms, but the most traditional holds that life started with the formation of an RNA molecule capable of replicating itself. Its descendants evolved the ability to perform an array of tasks, such as making new compounds and storing energy. In time, complex life followed. However, scientists have found it surprisingly challenging to create self-replicating RNA in the lab. Researchers have had some success, but the candidate molecules they have manufactured to date can only replicate certain sequences or a certain length of RNA. Moreover, these RNA Read More ›

To wipe ou memory of stress. From New Scientist: Some plants have “long-term memory”. For instance, Arrhenatherum elatius, a perennial grass species common in Europe, seems to remember drought and is better able to defend against damage from excessive sunlight than plants that haven’t been through an earlier drought. … Plants can preserve such memories across generations, at times via epigenetic mechanisms, which influence whether or not genes are expressed. Ah, a mechanism. If the plant is not using a brain, what is it using? But when Peter Crisp at the Australian National University in Canberra and his colleagues scoured the literature for examples of such memory of stressful events, they found that memory is more the exception rather than Read More ›

There has been a great deal of controversy recently regarding the theory of structuralism, which has been defended by Dr. Michael Denton in his new book, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis and attacked by Professor Larry Moran over at his Sandwalk blog (see here, here, here and here). Evolution News and Views has several articles defending Dr. Denton’s views (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). Let me say at the outset that I have not yet read Dr. Denton’s latest book, which has been reviewed by Barry Arrington here. Rather than reviewing Dr. Denton’s work, my aim in today’s post is to summarize its central thesis, discuss its significance for how scientists should do biology, Read More ›