2016

There is a fair bit of confusion out there around three terms: 1. Evolution 2. Common descent 3. Universal common descent The recent announcement of a rethink evolution conference sponsored by the Royal Society in London in November has meant that many people now know about the growing problems with the textbook Darwinism we learned in school. But confusion among terms can turn productive discussions into shouting matches. Here are some conversation pointers that I have found helpful: 1. Evolution: Life forms can alter greatly over generations, and in many cases permanently. At one time, Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutation) was the default explanation of evolution (often functioning in place of a plausible explanation). That theory, credited to Read More ›

Scientific American asks: Does our Microbiome Control Us or Do We Control It? What the article tells us is not the conventional “they utterly control us” that probably caused you to skip it before: We may be able to keep our gut in check after all. That’s the tantalizing finding from a new study published today that reveals a way that mice—and potentially humans—can control the makeup and behavior of their gut microbiome. Such a prospect upends the popular notion that the complex ecosystem of germs residing in our guts essentially acts as our puppet master, altering brain biochemistry even as it tends to our immune system, wards off infection and helps us break down our supersized burger and fries. In Read More ›

From Dan Falk at Nautilus: In his popular book The Fabric of the Cosmos, physicist Brian Greene explains that although Einstein’s theory demolished Newton’s absolute space, it gave us something else in its place—a four-dimensional structure known as spacetime—and this, Greene argues, is absolute. You and I might disagree about the duration of a parade, or the distance that the marchers covered—but we’d agree on the total distance through spacetime between the start and end of the parade. This is hard to picture, since we can’t see in four dimensions, but it’s guaranteed by the equations in Einstein’s theory. And yet, this is not Greene’s final word on the matter. Physicists now suspect the “Higgs field,” believed to endow particles Read More ›

From New Scientist: First warm-blooded lizards switch on mystery heat source at will The first known warm-blooded lizard, the tegu, can heat itself to as much as 10 ̊C above its surroundings – making it unique among reptiles. But bizarrely, it only switches on its heating system at certain times of the year. … Even when the scientists removed access to sunshine or food for a few days, the lizards still warmed up before dawn. But how do they do it? Last year another group reported the first known warm-blooded fish – the opah – which generates heat by the muscular flapping of its fins. What became of all those theories about how warm-bloodedness evolved in mammals and birds, but Read More ›

Did you catch the headlines about a group of scientists trotting out the venerable old Doomsday Clock because the US has not agreed to destroy its economy in the service of climate change alarmism?   Whatever its merits during the Cold War (when actual Armageddon was sometimes only literal minutes away), the Doomsday Clock today is about nothing but scientists vying for political power.  As the Federalist helpfully explains here: This desire to translate scientific knowledge into political power is likewise at the root of the climate change debate. Climate change scientists who are trying to instill a sense of crisis in us with Doomsday Clocks aren’t telling us that we have to find better ways to continue our way Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Comparing notes boosts cells sensing accuracy To decide whether and where to move in the body, cells must read chemical signals in their environment. Individual cells do not act alone during this process, two new studies on mouse mammary tissue show. Instead, the cells make decisions collectively after exchanging information about the chemical messages they are receiving. Every cell in a body has the same genome but they can do different things and go in different directions because they measure different chemical signals in their environment. Those chemical signals are made up of molecules that randomly move around. “Cells can sense not just the precise concentration of a chemical signal, but concentration differences,” Nemenman says. “That’s very important Read More ›

It’s all in our genes … From Brian Boutwell at Quillette: Why parenting may not matter and why most social science research is probably wrong Based on the results of classical twin studies, it just doesn’t appear that parenting—whether mom and dad are permissive or not, read to their kid or not, or whatever else—impacts development as much as we might like to think. Regarding the cross-validation that I mentioned, studies examining identical twins separated at birth and reared apart have repeatedly revealed (in shocking ways) the same thing: these individuals are remarkably similar when in fact they should be utterly different (they have completely different environments, but the same genes).3 Alternatively, non-biologically related adopted children (who have no genetic Read More ›

That seems like a strange question, but there is a background to it. Marvin Minsky, artificial intellignce pioneer, died on Sunday at the age of 88: Professor Minsky, in 1959, co-founded the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Project (later the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) with his colleague John McCarthy, who is credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence.” Beyond its artificial intelligence charter, however, the lab would have a profound impact on the modern computing industry, helping to impassion a culture of computer and software design. It planted the seed for the idea that digital information should be shared freely, a notion that would shape the so-called open-source software movement, and it was a part of the original ARPAnet, the forerunner to the Read More ›

From New Scientist: Hot stuff. For the first time, wild mammals have been seen responding to higher temperatures by altering chemical structures on their DNA. These epigenetic changes may adjust the activity of specific genes, and some are passed on to offspring. “Global temperatures are rising. It is crucial to understand how wild species are able to cope,” says Alexandra Weyrich of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany. Evolution by genetic mutation and natural selection can be slow. But epigenetic changes that affect how genes are expressed, such as attaching methyl molecules onto DNA, are much faster and more flexible. Experiments in a type of brine shrimp and the plant Arabidopsis thaliana have shown that Read More ›

From Slate: Amy Cuddy’s famous finding is the latest example of scientific overreach. Consider the case of Amy Cuddy. The Harvard Business School social psychologist is famous for a TED talk, which is among the most popular of all time, and now a book promoting the idea that “a person can, by assuming two simple one-minute poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful.” The so-called “power pose” is characterized by “open, expansive postures”—Slate’s Katy Waldman described it as akin to “a cobra rearing and spreading its hood to the sun, or Wonder Woman with her legs apart and her hands on her hips.” In a published paper from 2010, Cuddy and her collaborators Dana Carney and Andy Yap report Read More ›

And gosh, weren’t we hoping it was a pile, but never mind… 😉 From Science: Male mice bequeath an unexpected legacy to their progeny. Two studies published online this week in Science reveal that sperm from the rodents carry pieces of RNAs that alter the metabolism of their offspring. The RNAs spotlighted by the studies normally help synthesize proteins, so the findings point to an unconventional form of inheritance. The results are “exciting and surprising, but not impossible,” says geneticist Joseph Nadeau of the Pacific Northwest Diabetes Research Institute in Seattle, Washington. “Impossible” is exactly how biologists once described so-called epigenetic inheritance, in which something other than a DNA sequence passes a trait between generations. In recent years, however, researchers Read More ›

In the current UD thread on Darwinism and an infinite past, there has been an exchange on Spitzer’s argument that it is impossible to traverse an infinite past to arrive at the present. Let me share and headline what is in effect the current state of play: DS, 108: >>KF, DS, ticking clocks meet dying stars and death of cosmos as useful concentrations of energy die out. There are oscillating universe models which are consistent with an infinite past, as I stated. Replace each tick with a big bang/crunch cycle. And that an actually transfinite number of ticks can in principle occur is the precise thing to be shown. No. I am saying that Spitzer assumes that an infinite number Read More ›

John Wesley, the co-founder of Methodism, would surely have been banned by the United Methodist Church leadership from presenting his views on Intelligent Design at the church’s General Conference in May 2016, were he alive today. His crime? Not only was he unapologetically pro-Intelligent Design, but he also denounced the theory of evolution as godless. In a recent post over at Evolution News and Views, Professor Michael Flannery alluded to Wesley’s pro-ID views. In this post, I intend to remove all possible doubt, by supplying chapter and verse from Wesley’s own writings. (For those readers who haven’t been following the controversy over the United Methodist Church leadership’s decision to bar the Discovery Institute from sponsoring an information table at the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Dr. Hollie Putnam, a National Science Foundation Ocean Sciences Post-Doctoral Fellow, is researching the mechanisms that corals use to respond to altered ocean conditions. Her work in the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa is revealing that some coral are responding to climate change by changing markings on their DNA to modify what the DNA produces. Like punctuation marks in an alphabet, this changes the result (proteins made) without altering the original letters (the DNA). Although this is a known phenomenon in many organisms, how coral use this to their advantage is largely a mystery. … The cauliflower coral, which was vulnerable to acidification, showed an increase in DNA methylation. This ability Read More ›

Remember “Why zebras have stripes? This time we really mean it!“?  Yes, same time last year: Further to How the zebra got its stripes, maybe and How the zebra got its stripes (December 18, 2013), this time really (April 2, 2014), we now learn that it depends on the temperature, … Forget all that! Now, from ScienceDaily: Looking through the eyes of zebra predators, researchers found no evidence supporting the notion that zebras’ black and white stripes are for protective camouflage or that they provide a social advantage. … In the new study, Melin, Caro and colleagues Donald Kline and Chihiro Hiramatsu found that stripes cannot be involved in allowing the zebras to blend in with the background of their environment Read More ›