From ScienceDaily: The advent of farming, especially dairy products, had a small but significant effect on the shape of human skulls, according to a recently published study from anthropologists at UC Davis. … Graduate student David Katz, with Professor Tim Weaver and statistician Mark Grote, used a worldwide collection of 559 crania and 534 lower jaws (skull bones) from more than two dozen pre-industrial populations to model the influence of diet on the shape, form, and size of the human skull during the transition to agriculture. They found modest changes in skull morphology for groups that consumed cereals, dairy, or both cereals and dairy. “The main differences between forager and farmer skulls are where we would expect to find them, Read More ›

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: The evolutionary story we have written to explain our ancestors’ move from sea to land may need a rethink. A fossil fish from this era has been discovered with several of the features of land animals – yet it was only distantly related to them. Roughly 360 million years ago, one group of lobe-finned fish began evolving into four-legged, land-living animals that resulted in reptiles, amphibians and mammals like us. … However, a fossil discovered in a quarry in Ningxia, north China, now threatens that stability.More. Yeah. Real history is a bitch. Just a bitch. See also: Our favorite: The leaping blenny

As many of our readers know, one of our most valued and prolific contributors lives on Montserrat.  Irma passed over that island early Wednesday morning.  We have not heard from our contributor since Tuesday evening, and we may not hear from him again for several days if, as expected, power has gone out.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to the residents of the Caribbean islands and the coastal regions who have been or soon will be hit by the storm. UPDATE:  We have heard from KF and he is OK.  The main force of the storm passed slightly to the north of Montserrat.  Let us continue to remember the residents of the small island of Barbuda, which was devastated Read More ›

First, from Casey Luskin in 2014 on Lee Spetner’s The Evolution Revolution here: Many ENV readers might have read, or at least heard of, a well-argued 1996 book by Lee Spetner, Not By Chance. Spetner, who holds a PhD in physics from MIT, has recently published a sequel titled The Evolution Revolution: Why Thinking People Are Rethinking the Theory of Evolution (Judaica Press, 2014). Spetner goes through many examples of non-random evolutionary changes that cannot be explained in a Darwinian framework. He covers some of the natural genetic engineering mechanisms reported by James Shapiro, which can modify an organism’s genome during a period of stress. Of course the big criticism of Shapiro’s arguments is that he never explains how those Read More ›

From Matt Williams at Universe Today: Recent studies have indicated that UV radiation may be necessary for the formation of ribonucleic acid (RNA), which is necessary for all forms of life as we know it. And given the rate at which rocky planets have been discovered around red dwarf stars of late (exampled include Proxima b, LHS 1140b, and the seven planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system), how much UV radiation red dwarfs give off could be central to determining exoplanet habitability. … As always, scientists are forced to work with a limited frame of reference when it comes to assessing the habitability of other planets. To our knowledge, life exists on only on planet (i.e. Earth), which naturally influences our Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: For several decades, scientists have placed polypterids down near the base of the family tree of ray-finned fish, a large group believed to have originated around 385 million years ago. But a new study that used CT scans to probe three-dimensionally preserved fossil fish skulls shakes up the fish family tree by concluding that the emergence of polypterids occurred much later than researchers had thought. The findings also suggest that the origin of all modern ray-finned fish may have occurred tens of millions of years later than is generally believed. … Ray-finned fish represent about half of all backboned animals on Earth. For every species of mammal, bird, reptile and amphibian on land, there is a species of Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A long-standing question in astrophysics is whether the universe’s very first black holes came into existence less than a second after the Big Bang or whether they formed only millions of years later during the deaths of the earliest stars. Alexander Kusenko, a UCLA professor of physics, and Eric Cotner, a UCLA graduate student, developed a compellingly simple new theory suggesting that black holes could have formed very shortly after the Big Bang, long before stars began to shine. Astronomers have previously suggested that these so-called primordial black holes could account for all or some of the universe’s mysterious dark matter and that they might have seeded the formation of supermassive black holes that exist at the centers Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: While the Confederate cause in the Civil War has been the subject of much chatter, the modern racial right owes far more to Charles Darwin than to Robert E. Lee. That’s a takeaway from a pre-print study, “A Psychological Profile of the Alt-Right,” by two social psychologists, Patrick S. Forscher and Nour S. Kteily of the University of Arkansas and Northwestern University respectively. Their news peg, predictably, is the 2016 presidential election. … Much of what they found is no surprise, but the frankness of their questioning about evolution is refreshing … You won’t be startled to hear that alt-right believers were more inclined to dehumanize, in evolutionary terms, their disfavored racial Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Mitochondria, which exist within human cells but have their own DNA, need many different proteins to function — but the process of how they get these has never been imaged in detail. Now a study led by Dr Vicki Gold, of the University of Exeter, has shown that some ribosomes — the tiny factories of cells which produce proteins — are attached to mitochondria. This can explain how proteins are pushed into mitochondria whilst they are being made. The findings open new avenues for studying protein targeting and mitochondrial dysfunction, which has been implicated in diseases including cancer and neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s. “Proteins are responsible for nearly all cellular processes. The cell has to make a Read More ›

From Shawna Williams at the Scientist: There’s potentially more than one way to deal with stuborn viruses like HSV using epigenetic drugs. While no epigenetics-based antivirals are yet on the market, clinical trials are underway to test the use of chromatin-opening cancer drugs in combination with conventional antiretroviral therapies for HIV, and researchers such as Kristie and Bloom are working to better understand how viruses take advantage of hosts’ epigenomes—and how they might be stopped. The potential for manipulating the latent virus to flush it out of hiding makes epigenetic drugs an appealing strategy for researchers looking for a functional cure for HIV, says virologist Melanie Ott of the Gladstone Institutes. Current antiretroviral therapies effectively control the infection, but if Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Symbiotic relationships, which involve two different kinds of organism interacting with close physical contact, are common in nature. However, few prehistoric examples involve soft-bodied animals because they are normally not fossilized. Although fossils of the two species of marine worm, Cricocosmia jinnigensis and Mafangscolex sinensi, have been found before, these are the first reported examples to show other animals attached to them. The smaller worm-like guests, a new species named Inquicus fellatus, are up to 3mm long and attached at their bottom ends to the stiff skin of their hosts, with their feeding ends pointing away. espite the fact that Inquicus fellatus are attached to their host worms, there is little indication they were feeding by penetrating the Read More ›

So a controversial footprint suggests. From Per Ahlberg & Matthew Robert Bennett at RealClearScience: If – and for many it is a big if – the tracks of Trachilos [current apparent ancestor] were indeed made by an early human ancestor, then the biogeographical range of our early ancestors would increase to encompass the eastern Mediterranean. Crete was not an island at this time but attached to the Greek mainland, and the environment of the Mediterranean region was very different from now. The discovery comes just months after another study reported the discovery of 7m-year-old Greek and Bulgarian fossil teeth from a hominin ape dubbed “El Graeco”. This is the oldest fossil of a human-like ape, which has led some to Read More ›

As Stephanie Pappas writes, it’s much more complex than we might think: In 2013, researchers from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program reported at the annual Goldschmidt Conference in Italy that they’d found microbes in 100-million-year-old sediments in the floor of the deep sea, according to the BBC. The microbes were reproducing once every 10,000 years, such a slow rate that scientists weren’t sure if they could really call the microbes “alive.” More. But surely that is a technicality. If they reproduced at all, they are alive. The issues she raises around very old organisms that have remained extant through cloning may be more meaty. We are getting somewhere if we can determine that something is definitely alive without necessarily coming Read More ›

From Mary-Jane Rubenstein at Nautilus: What if God is the creatively emergent order of nature itself? In this case, the difference between pantheism and atheism might be emotional. Einstein, a professed pantheist, wrote that he experienced a “cosmic religious feeling,” a persistent awe at the “sublimity and marvelous order” of the universe. He was not alone. For the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, religion was a feeling of the whole universe at work in each part of it. Or perhaps the difference between pantheism and atheism is ethical. As neo-pagans, ecofeminists, radical environmentalists, new animists, and even some biologists have suggested, the Western opposition between God and world seems to have endorsed our exploitation of nature. So if God is the Read More ›

Here: In this wide-ranging conversation, they discuss how the doctrine of creation makes sense of human dignity, racial equality, true peace and justice, purpose and meaning in life, and more. They also consider recent debates over the historicity of Adam and Eve. See also: Michael Chaberek: Darwinian theory is past its best-before date