From ScienceDaily: Scientists reveal that a fault in the process that copies DNA during cell division can cause epigenetic changes that may be inherited for up-to five generations. They also identified the cause of these epigenetic changes, which is related to the loss of a molecular mechanism in charge of silencing genes. Their results, which will be published in Science Advances on 16 August, will change the way we think about the impact of replication stress in cancer and during embryonic development, as well as its inter-generational inheritance. Paper. (public access) – A. Klosin, K. Reis, C. Hidalgo-Carcedo, E. Casas, T. Vavouri, B. Lehner. Impaired DNA replication derepresses chromatin and generates a transgenerational inherited epigenetic memory. Science Advances, 2017 DOI: Read More ›

Our atheist friends delight in preening over their rejection of the “irrational” and “magic.”  Not so writes David Bentley Hart: All of which is to say (to return to where I began) that it is absurd to think that one can profess atheism in any meaningful way without thereby assenting to an entire philosophy of being, however inchoate one’s sense of it may be. The philosophical naturalist’s view of reality is not one that merely fails to find some particular object within the world that the theist imagines can be descried there; it is a very particular representation of the nature of things, entailing a vast range of purely metaphysical commitments. Principally, it requires that one believe that the physical order, which Read More ›

Asked at Phil Sci Archive: It is suggested that the apparently disparate cosmological phenomena attributed to so-called ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ arise from the same fundamental physical process: the emergence, from the quantum level, of spacetime itself. This creation of spacetime results in metric expansion around mass points in addition to the usual curvature due to stress-energy sources of the gravitational field. A recent modification of Einstein’s theory of general relativity by Chadwick, Hodgkinson, and McDonald incorporating spacetime expansion around mass points, which accounts well for the observed galactic rotation curves, is adduced in support of the proposal. Recent observational evidence corroborates a prediction of the model that the apparent amount of ‘dark matter’ increases with the age of Read More ›

From Burak Bekdil at Gatestone Institute: More recently, in July, Turkish Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz revealed that the final version of Turkey’s national school curriculum left out evolution and added the concept of “jihad,” as part of Islamic law, in the books. The new curriculum will be put into execution for first, fifth, and ninth graders beginning this year, and will extend to other classes in the 2018-2019 academic year. According to Yilmaz: “Jihad is an element in our religion; it is in our religion… The duty of the Education Ministry is to teach every concept deservedly, in a correct way. It is also our job to correct things that are wrongly perceived, seen or taught”. Although the Turkish government Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Chimpanzees of all ages and all sexes can learn the simple circular relationship between the three different hand signals used in the well-known game rock-paper-scissors. Even though it might take them longer, they are indeed able to learn the game as well as a young child. Jie Gao of Kyoto University in Japan and Peking University in China is lead author of a study in the journal Primates, which is the official journal of the Japan Monkey Centre, and is published by Springer. The research compares the ability of chimpanzees and children to learn the rock-paper-scissors game. … The findings show that chimpanzees can learn the circular pattern at the heart of the game. However, it took them Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Dr Brocks said the rise of algae triggered one of the most profound ecological revolutions in Earth’s history, without which humans and other animals would not exist. “Before all of this happened, there was a dramatic event 50 million years earlier called Snowball Earth,” he said. “The Earth was frozen over for 50 million years. Huge glaciers ground entire mountain ranges to powder that released nutrients, and when the snow melted during an extreme global heating event rivers washed torrents of nutrients into the ocean.” Dr Brocks said the extremely high levels of nutrients in the ocean, and cooling of global temperatures to more hospitable levels, created the perfect conditions for the rapid spread of algae. It was Read More ›

In order to prepare ourselves for the upcoming solar eclipse on Monday, August 21, David Coppedge posted a YouTube video showing the Great Baja Eclipse of 1991 and people’s reactions to it.

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Announcing from on high that it is Against Discrimination, Nature tells us: Science cannot and should not be used to justify prejudice.  No indeed. But is there any general wish that it did? Then, Difference between groups may therefore provide sound scientific evidence. But it’s also a blunt instrument of pseudoscience, and one used to justify actions and policies that condense claimed group differences into tools of prejudice and discrimination against individuals — witness last weekend’s violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the controversy over a Google employee’s memo on biological differences in the tastes and abilities of the sexes. A nice touch that, to equate hapless engineer Damore’s ejection from the Goolag with white supremacist violence. The two Read More ›

Earlier today, we were looking at Sara Walker’s recent paper on origin of life and information (public access). Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts: Sarah Walker has worked in OOL research for almost a decade, getting her experience under Paul Davies at ASU. Davies is a theoretical physicist who also manages to write a pop-sci book every year. He has one or two on the OOL problem, and was a coauthor on at least one paper with NASA scientist Richard Hoover. All that to say that the mainstream media has for the most part ignored Davies and Walker’s contributions. When Davies was a co-author on the “arsenic shadow biosphere” paper, the Darwinistas attacked it with full throated Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: As a postscript to Brian Miller’s reply to MIT physicist Jeremy England, see this from the famed synthetic organic chemist James Tour, writing for the online journal Inference. In “An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Tour sets out this way: Life should not exist. This much we know from chemistry. In contrast to the ubiquity of life on earth, the lifelessness of other planets makes far better chemical sense. Synthetic chemists know what it takes to build just one molecular compound. The compound must be designed, the stereochemistry controlled. Yield optimization, purification, and characterization are needed. An elaborate supply is required to control synthesis from start to finish. None of this is Read More ›

Jeremy England’s origin of life claims have been in the news lately. A friend points us to a paper by Sara Walker: Origins of Life: A Problem for Physics Abstract: The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of complexity that are anywhere near that of even the simplest living systems. A key challenge is identifying the properties of living matter that might distinguish living and non-living physical systems such that we might build new life in the lab. This review is geared towards covering major viewpoints on the Read More ›

Remember that if you are stuck for something to say.  From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost, interviewing neuroscientist Paul Silvia: Paul Silvia: The 2015 paper was our first toes-in-the-water. The whole brain view is really a good way to think about it. Traditionally with creativity and brain work, investigations have addressed: What’s the creative part? Where’s creativity in the brain? What’s the part that lights up? And traditionally, the view has been: The right side is the creative part. But there’s really no part or piece or even single system. Creativity is a very complex thing. Our earlier study was really a pilot study. We had a small number of people and we were pretty limited in how we were looking at Read More ›

Like we said, plenty of time for Darwinians to beat their iron rice bowls into hatchets. From zoologist Jules Howard at Guardian,: Some still attack Darwin and evolution – How can science fight back?  I can save you the effort of reading AN Wilson’s “exposé” on Darwin, which did the rounds over the weekend, characterising the famous scientist as a fraud, a thief, a liar, a racist and a rouser of nazism. Instead, head over to Netflix and watch the creationist made-for-TV movie A Matter of Faith, which covers many of the same arguments – and also includes a final scene in which a fictional evolutionary biologist, standing alone in his study, holds a rubber chicken in his hands and Read More ›

Documentary evidence offered here Didn’t they used to say that the bugs get everybody in the end? See also: From Philip Cunningham: Darwinian Materialism vs Quantum Biology

From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: When I use the term fake news, I do not mean deliberate sabotage of news sites by, for example, Russia’s troll house. Or opposition research marketed as news. Or false information that merits retraction and results in dismissals as at CNN recently. Nor material that is outed by traditional media sources themselves as fake news. Consider, for example, the BBC’s displeasure at the glut of fake anti-Trump stories (“Many people on the left right now are feeling overwhelmed and fearful and unsure of what’s going to happen next”), many of which have also been debunked by Snopes as“patterns of falsehoods.” At some level, the people creating the news have to know that Read More ›