Irreducible complexity. From ScienceDaily: Although bacteria have no sensory organs in the classical sense, they are still masters in perceiving their environment. … Swimming Caulobacter bacteria have a rotating motor in their cell envelope with a long protrusion, the flagellum. The rotation of the flagellum enables the bacteria to move in liquids. Much to the surprise of the researchers, the rotor is also used as a mechano-sensing organ. Motor rotation is powered by proton flow into the cell via ion channels. When swimming cells touch surfaces, the motor is disturbed and the proton flux interrupted. The researchers assume that this is the signal that sparks off the response: The bacterial cell now boosts the synthesis of a second messenger, which Read More ›

From Granville Sewell at Evolution News & Views: Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, who studied mutations for 25 years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Köln, Germany, is now retired but still writes often on the topic of Darwinism and intelligent design. He is one of those old-school scientists who believes evidence matters even when it comes to questions of biological origins. … Dr. Lönnig has repeatedly offered examples that defy a gradualist explanation. For example, listen to this interview where he discusses carnivorous plants, whose complicated traps were clearly useless until almost perfect. His discussion of the aquatic bladderwort begins at the 8:30 mark. … Loennig has recently written an article, “Plant Galls and Evolution,” which falsifies Darwinism on Read More ›

Columbia mathematician Peter Woit notes at his blog Not Even Wrong: An article at FQXI on multiverse research they are funding seemed to finally give me an understanding of what this is all about: These are the two conceptually hardest questions in cosmology, according to Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. They go to the core of what it means to exist as a human being making sense of the universe we find ourselves in. And, he adds, unfortunately, there is very little physical knowledge to go on when it comes to working out the answer. Undaunted by the lack of tools to help them, theatrical physicists Eugene Lim of King’s College London, UK, and Read More ›

Every so often a story like this one from Kate Kelland at Reuters provides a backdrop for hand-wringing in science journals along the lines of “Why, why, why doesn’t the public trust science”: Documents seen by Reuters show how a draft of a key section of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) assessment of glyphosate – a report that has prompted international disputes and multi-million-dollar lawsuits – underwent significant changes and deletions before the report was finalised and made public. … One effect of the changes to the draft, reviewed by Reuters in a comparison with the published report, was the removal of multiple scientists’ conclusions that their studies had found no link between glyphosate and cancer in Read More ›

From Dan Samorodnitsky at MassiveSci: This goes for your genome, too. It’s easy to imagine that your genes are clean, orderly, and easily known. Companies like 23andme and Ancestry.com make their bones off this idea, that our building blocks are transparent and readable like a book. But that’s not really what a genome is. Genomes are slap-dash, hodgepodge collections of genes, often in no discernible order. And a lot of it isn’t even the owner’s genes. In the 1950, Barbara McClintock identified “jumping genes,” which could move essentially of their own accord and change the appearance of maize stalks. (That’s a skull-shattering discovery to make, working alone and before the structure of DNA was determined, but because the Nobel Prizes Read More ›

From Andrew Griffin at The Independent: “All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” explained Christian Smorra, the author of a new study conducted at CERN. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is. What is the source of the symmetry break?” The latest possibility was matter and anti-matter’s different magnetism. But new research shows that they are identical in that way too – lending further mystery to the question of why the universe is still around at all. More. Persons who find that this situation seriously interferes with their lifestyle could try complaining to the UN. See also: Read More ›

From Shawna Williams at The Scientist: Ancient fossils reveal how woodless trees got so big: by continuously ripping apart their xylem and knitting it back together. The trees’ woody fibers—namely, xylem, which carries water up the trunk—formed rings in the outer part of the trunk and connected to one another by horizontal strands, says Berry. Soft tissue filled the spaces between the fibrous network. As the trees grew outward, the xylem slowly ripped apart to accommodate the expansion, then knitted itself back together. The cores of the trees were hollow. While the architecture allowed the trees to support their weight as they expanded, they also caused what Stein terms a “structural failure”: the weight bearing down on the tree’s base Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers from the Institute of Population Genetics at Vetmeduni Vienna, using a new and highly specific analysis method, could now provide fresh momentum to help decode the evolutionary dynamics of the Y chromosome. Their study shows that ten times more new genes are transferred onto the Y chromosome in fruit flies than had been previously thought. Some of these new genes even appear to have taken on important functions. … A special surprise for the research team was that four of the 25 newly transferred genes on the Y chromosome have already assumed an important function there. “As these new genes can be found in all individuals of a species, the question arises as to which functions these Read More ›

How about a better question: Are pop science media doomed? No, seriously, from Matthew Cobb, reviewing Jonathan B. Losos’ Improbable Destinies at New Scientist: Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, approaches this through the contrasting views of the late Stephen Jay Gould and University of Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris. Alongside the widespread phenomenon of convergent evolution, life produces many unique forms. The human lineage is one such. But before the reader can conclude that our uniqueness suggests we are the whole point of evolution, Losos plays his trump card: the duck-billed platypus. More. Wow, that’s deep. And it’s also timely, now that a platypus has just been elected Prime Minister of Australia. 😉 Does Cobb’s publishability depend on Read More ›

I often get questions about the immune system, because many in the Darwin lobby point to it as an example of “random mutations”. That is kind of a half-truth, but the full truth is so amazing that it needs to be told more often.
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From ScienceDaily: “More than his loss of a forearm, bad limp and other injuries, his deafness would have made him easy prey for the ubiquitous carnivores in his environment and dependent on other members of his social group for survival,” said Erik Trinkaus, study co-author and professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Fellow Neanderthals did not eat him either, even during hard times. “The debilities of Shanidar 1, and especially his hearing loss, thereby reinforce the basic humanity of these much maligned archaic humans, the Neanderthals,” said Trinkaus, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor. Paper. (public access) – Erik Trinkaus, Sébastien Villotte. External auditory exostoses and hearing loss in the Shanidar 1 Neandertal. PLOS Read More ›

A tulip-shaped feeder. From ScienceDaily: “This was the earliest specimen of a stalked filter feeder that has been found in North America,” said lead author Julien Kimmig, collections manager for Invertebrate Paleontology at the Biodiversity Institute. “This animal lived in soft sediment and anchored into the sediment. The upper part of the tulip was the organism itself. It had a stem attached to the ground and an upper part, called the calyx, that had everything from the digestive tract to the feeding mechanism. It was fairly primitive and weird.” … “The Spence Shale gives us soft-tissue preservation, so we get a much more complete biota in these environments,” he said. “This gives us a better idea of what the early Read More ›

So much for Darwinism. Joshua B. Plotkin writes at Nature: Ecological interactions emerge spontaneously in an experimental study of bacterial populations cultured for 60,000 generations, and sustain rapid evolution by natural selection. (paywall) Yes, that’s the abstract. It’s a model of economy. This is from the article: The authors’ most profound discovery is the spontaneous emergence of ecological interactions that fuel ongoing evolution (Fig. 1). Persistent subgroups have previously been identified in one of Lenski’s populations, but Good et al. reveal that at least 9 of the populations divide into two separate clades (genetic groups). These clades co-exist for tens of thousands of generations, and so must be maintained by some form of interdependence. These emergent ecologies sustain ongoing adaptation Read More ›

From Michael Denton, in Wonder of Water: Whether the remarkable instances in which various properties of water work together to serve a vital end—such as the suite of properties involved in eroding rocks, or the suite of thermal properties involved in temperature regulation—are actually the result of design or not, there is no doubt that they convey a compelling impression of design. Every bit as remarkable, and also highly suggestive of design—perhaps even more so—are those instances where one vital property of water or set of properties is only useful because of another property or set of properties. We have seen many such instances in the previous chapters, and I have referred to them variously as a teleological sequence or Read More ›

From Cardiff University: Fossils from a 374-million-year-old tree found in north-west China have revealed an interconnected web of woody strands within the trunk of the tree that is much more intricate than that of the trees we see around us today. The strands, known as xylem, are responsible for conducting water from a tree’s roots to its branches and leaves. In the most familiar trees the xylem forms a single cylinder to which new growth is added in rings year by year just under the bark. In other trees, notably palms, xylem is formed in strands embedded in softer tissues throughout the trunk. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists have shown that the Read More ›