. . . being, an example of an actual, genuine grassroots-based movement of conscience and reformation in a civilisation giving itself over to ruinous marches of folly driven by toxic agit prop. (It also follows up from the recent post on the three marches, here; and the updated live streaming of the march, here.) Thanks are due to one of the UD family, who I will call X, as given the cyber stalking and on the ground stalking and fringe of dangerous creeps who lurk in the shadows surrounding UD, that is a regrettable necessity. Let me add, a video contrast of two marches just one week apart: [youtube -fY1OGWnr1o] X, you know yourself, and heartfelt thanks go to you Read More ›

From Jane Qiu at Nature: Giant pandas and the distantly related red pandas may have independently evolved an extra ‘digit’ — a false thumb — through changes to the same genes. The two species share a common ancestor that lived more than 40 million years ago. Giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) are distant relatives of other bears, whereas red pandas (Ailurus fulgens) are more closely related to ferrets. Both species subsist on a diet composed almost entirely of bamboo, with the help of a false digit. … In a new study, Wei Fuwen and Hu Yibo, conservation geneticists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Zoology in Beijing, and their colleagues, produced the first genome sequence of the red panda Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A Japanese research team has discovered an evolutionary model for the biological function that creates carbon dioxide from glucose in photosynthesis. They found the mechanism in a primitive, non-photosynthesizing microbe. … By clarifying part of the primitive metabolic pathway for photosynthesis, these findings could help to reveal how the photosynthesis system formed during evolution, a mystery that scientists have so far been unable to solve. – Paper. (public access) Takunari Kono, Sandhya Mehrotra, Chikako Endo, Natsuko Kizu, Mami Matusda, Hiroyuki Kimura, Eiichi Mizohata, Tsuyoshi Inoue, Tomohisa Hasunuma, Akiho Yokota, Hiroyoshi Matsumura, Hiroki Ashida. A RuBisCO-mediated carbon metabolic pathway in methanogenic archaea. Nature Communications, 2017; 8: 14007 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14007More. Wait a minute. We’ve just learned that the mechanism existed Read More ›

Wikipedia: In political jargon, a useful idiot is a person perceived as a propagandist for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of, and who is used cynically by the leaders of the cause. In KF’s expose on agit-prop history and techniques, rvb8 attempts to draw an equivalence between what the progressive left is doing in taking to the streets in “protest”, and KF’s stated views and groups that advocate for those views. He asks: You see, I fail to see why the Soviet agit-prop is wrong, and your own right. I know your ‘right’ is self evident, but not to me, and not to millions like me; what in your opinion is to be done with mine, Read More ›

In this post I argued that liberal (meaning conservative) democracy is based on an attempt to infuse politics with Christian doctrine, especially the inherent dignity and equality of all men.  In this article Peter Burfeind suggests a parallel on the other side of the political divide.  He argues that progressivism is rooted in an ancient Christian heresy known as Gnosticism: Gnosticism applied to politics is Leftism. The gnostic mind is cast in black and white absolutes. It says the world is inherently corrupt in every one of its systems and institutions, and the salvation it proposes is pure light and righteousness. Politically, the gnostic mind can only be revolutionary: a new humanity will arise with new thinking and lead history Read More ›

By limiting what cells can become. From Joshua A. Krisch at The Scientist: The results suggest that a particular class of noncoding RNA works in concert with the latent viral elements of the genome work to limit stem cell potential, and that removing a key miRNA can lift this limitation—at least in vitro. “At first we were a bit dubious about our findings,” said coauthor Lin He, an associate professor of developmental biology at the University of California, Berkeley. “In this experiment, we definitively show that the progeny [of embryonic stem cells] can go to both embryonic and extra-embryonic lineages. That was a pretty incredible moment for us, because we actually convinced ourselves that this finding was real.” More. See Read More ›

From Steve Petersen of Niagara University a paper (2014) arguing for a “normative yet coherent naturalism”: Naturalism is normally taken to be an ideology, censuring non-naturalistic alternatives. But as many critics have pointed out, this ideological stance looks internally incoherent, since it is not obviously endorsed by naturalistic methods. Naturalists who have addressed this problem universally forswear the normative component of naturalism by, in effect, giving up science’s exclusive claim to legitimacy. This option makes naturalism into an empty expression of personal preference that can carry no weight in the philosophical or political spheres. In response to this dilemma, I argue that on a popular (but largely unarticulated) construal of naturalism as a commitment to inference to the best explanation, Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views, on Tom Bethell’s new Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates, he records his own investigation of the evidence, including interviews with lions of science and philosophy such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Colin Patterson, and Karl Popper. Lo and behold, it’s not beyond the intellectual reach of a reporter to get to the bottom of the controversy and to estimate the plausibility of Darwin’s theory. Not a religious apologist or a cheerleader for any competing view, but rather an old-fashioned skeptic, Bethell has been doubting Darwin since he was an undergraduate at Oxford University. … Evolutionary science is in a depressed condition, despite all that the Read More ›