2017

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From ScienceDaily: Gene therapy using ‘junk DNA’ could lower risk for heart disease Scientists from UCLA and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute successfully used a gene that suppresses cholesterol levels as part of a treatment to reduce plaque in mice with a disorder called familial hypercholesterolemia. In a preclinical study, researchers found that the gene, LeXis, lowered cholesterol and blockages in the arteries, and the treatment appeared to reduce the build-up of fat in liver cells. Familial hypercholesterolemia is an inherited condition characterized by extremely high levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (commonly referred to as “bad cholesterol”) and an increased risk of early heart disease. The LeXis gene belongs to a unique group of genes that until recently were considered Read More ›

OK, raise your hand if you knew that the in the 1600’s advocates of the heliocentric view appealed to God’s greatness to answer geocentric arguments.  Yep.  In fact, the “size of the star” issue was not fully resolved until the 1800s.  The point is that the debate was not purely religion (geo) vs. science (helio).  The geo advocates had scientific arguments that were not fully answered until the 1800s, and the helio advocates sometimes resorted to religious arguments.  Anyone who has followed the standard history of the so-called war of religion against science would be surprised to learn there was nuance.  John Hartnett writes: The size of stars argument went as follows. Sizes of stars were first measured by eye, Read More ›

From Ashley Yeager at the Scientist: A study of five far-flung human populations gives clues to adaptations to environmental pressures. The results revealed a strong link between population-specific DNA methylation, mRNA levels, and genotypes. However, the CpG sites where methylation occurred that had the highest degree of population specificity were more strongly associated with a local variation in a single nucleotide (SNP) compared with the association of mRNA levels with local SNPs. Population-specific DNA methylation patterns are therefore explained better by local genetic variants than population-specific expression levels, the team says. Because the DNA methylation variation appears to be under genetic control, it could greatly affect human adaptability. Fraser notes, however, that the consequences of methylation still aren’t clear. “It Read More ›

From Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic: As the fall semester begins, 15 professors from Yale, Princeton, and Harvard have published a letter of advice for the class of 2021. Think for yourself. The “vice of conformism” is a temptation for all faculty and students, they argue, due to a climate rife with group think, where it is “all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion” on a campus or in academia generally. Mmmm, yes. Especially if one who opposes the group think could get expelled, fired, burned out, or end up in the hospital, … They warn that on many campuses, what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion” doesn’t merely discourage students Read More ›

From Politics in science—High modulation of engagement in intelligent design discourse at Journal of Language and Politics: Intelligent design is a pseudoscientific concept conceived in an attempt to bring religion-based teaching into the classroom. As such, it is involved in a constant struggle for dialogic space with the dominant scientific discourse of the theory of evolution. Here, we use a corpus linguistic approach to study how intelligent design discourse uses engagement to forward its creationistic propositions and at the same time limit the propositions of the theory of evolution. The results suggest that intelligent design discourse employs engagement far more frequently than evolutionary biology discourse, mainly to counter opposing propositions and to entertain its own proposition in their stead. The Read More ›

From science writer Philip Perry at BigThink: If the nature of reality is in fact reducible to information itself, that implies a conscious mind on the receiving end, to interpret and comprehend it. Wheeler himself believed in a participatory universe, where consciousness holds a central role. Some scientists argue that the cosmos seems to have specific properties which allow it to create and sustain life. Perhaps what it desires most is an audience captivated in awe as it whirls in prodigious splendor. Modern physics has hit a wall in a number of areas. Some proponents of information theory believe embracing it may help us to say, sew up the rift between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Or perhaps it’ll aid Read More ›

From Ian O’Neill at LiveScience: Understanding the origin of life is arguably one of the most compelling quests for humanity. This quest has inevitably moved beyond the puzzle of life on Earth to whether there’s life elsewhere in the universe. Is life on Earth a fluke? Or is life as natural as the universal laws of physics? Jeremy England, a biophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to answer these profound questions. In 2013, he formulated a hypothesis that physics may spontaneously trigger chemicals to organize themselves in ways that seed “life-like” qualities. Now, new research by England and a colleague suggests that physics may naturally produce self-replicating chemical reactions, one of the first steps toward creating life Read More ›

From Jun-An Chen and Simon Conn at Genome Biology: Abstract: A report on the Second Aegean International Conference on the Long and the Short of Non-Coding RNAs, held in Heraklion, Greece, 9–14 June 2017. Investigations into gene regulation and disease pathogenesis have been protein-centric for decades. However, in recent years there has been a profound expansion in our knowledge of the variety and complexity of eukaryotic RNA species, particularly the non-coding RNA families. Vast amounts of RNA sequencing data generated from various library preparation methods have revealed these non-coding RNA species to be unequivocally more abundant than canonical mRNA species. Furthermore, insight into the diverse mechanisms and functional roles of these RNA transcripts is emerging, pointing to their roles in Read More ›

From U Chicago’s James Shapiro at Pub Med: Biological action in Read-Write genome evolution. Many of the most important evolutionary variations that generated phenotypic adaptations and originated novel taxa resulted from complex cellular activities affecting genome content and expression. These activities included (i) the symbiogenetic cell merger that produced the mitochondrion-bearing ancestor of all extant eukaryotes, (ii) symbiogenetic cell mergers that produced chloroplast-bearing ancestors of photosynthetic eukaryotes, and (iii) interspecific hybridizations and genome doublings that generated new species and adaptive radiations of higher plants and animals. Adaptive variations also involved horizontal DNA transfers and natural genetic engineering by mobile DNA elements to rewire regulatory networks, such as those essential to viviparous reproduction in mammals. In the most highly evolved multicellular Read More ›

Julie Kelly reports If you need proof that the line between science and politics has been irrevocably erased, look no further than the September edition of Scientific American. In a special issue entitled “Sex and Gender,” the magazine purloins the progressive political agenda and attempts to give it a scientific mooring even when none exists. It represents a wholesale retreat from the principle that science should be apolitical, further jeopardizing the integrity of the scientific establishment and potentially inflicting real harm as it chooses to promote identity politics over solid science. more

From Bengt Autzen at the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science: Musing on Means: Fitness, Expectation and the Principles of Natural Selection How to measure fitness in the theory of natural selection? A fitness measure that has been proposed in both the biological and the philosophical literature is the expected relative reproductive success. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between expected relative reproductive success and future actual evolutionary success. Doing so will not only clarify the use of expected relative reproductive success as a fitness measure but also shed light on the role of fitness in the theory of natural selection. 1 Introduction 2 The Role of Fitness 3 Geometric Mean versus Expected Relative Reproductive Read More ›

The term “machine learning” has started to be thrown around everywhere. However, I just don’t get excited about it, myself.
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From ScienceDaily: Epigenetics may explain how Darwin’s finches respond to rapid environmental changes, according to new research published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. By studying rural and urban populations of two species of Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands, researchers were able to show that while there was very little genetic variation, there were substantial epigenetic differences that could be related to environmental differences resulting from urbanization. Sabrina McNew, PhD student at the University of Utah and lead author of the study said: “Urbanization of the Galapagos has happened relatively recently, so this is a good opportunity to study how animals respond to rapid environmental change.” … Genetic analysis of the birds revealed very little differences in Read More ›

Every assumption has been called into question over the last fifteen years, Colin Barras tells us: Do you believe that human brains have been getting steadily bigger for millions of years, culminating in the extraordinary machine between your ears? Think again, because over the past 15 years, almost every part of our story, every assumption about who our ancestors were and where we came from, has been called into question. The new insights have some unsettling implications for how long we have walked the earth, and even who we really are. Once upon a time, the human story seemed relatively straightforward … It began roughly 5.5 to 6.5 million years ago, somewhere in an east African forest, with a chimpanzee-like ape. Read More ›