2017

From Linda Geddes at New Scientist: Metabolism may be older than life itself and start spontaneously However, the enzyme-free Krebs cycle that Ralser observed isn’t the complete biochemical cycle as it operates in modern cells. That may have come later, after enzymes evolved. Furthermore, the sulphate-driven cycle has so far only been shown to run in one direction (the oxidative one). In some species, the Krebs cycle can also run in reverse and help to incorporate CO2 into the building of new carbohydrates. Some think it may therefore have been involved in early carbon fixation, in which case you’d expect to see the cycle spontaneously turning in this direction too. Until researchers can demonstrate both these things, they cannot claim Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Paper. (paywall)Our genome is made up of 6,000 million pieces of DNA that combine four “flavors”: A, C, G and T (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine). It is our Alphabet. But to this base we must add some regulation, just like the spelling and grammar of that alphabet: this is what we call Epigenetics. “In epigenetics, there there are “accents,” called DNA methylation, which means having a C or a methyl-C. The first one usually means that a gene is expressed and active, while the second one implies that a gene is silent and inactive. Our DNA “speaks” when it produces another molecule called RNA (Ribonucleic Acid). Until very recently, it was believed that this molecule was only Read More ›

Much useful information/links/sources from Jonathan Latham at CounterPunch: As early as the death of Charles Darwin (1882) it was said that his thought (which for the most part meant Huxley’s interpretations) could be found “under a hundred disguises in works on law and history, in political speeches and religious discourses…if we try to think ourselves away from it we must think ourselves entirely away from our age” (John Morley, 1882, cited in Desmond 1998) Thus the belief system that humans are controlled by an internal master molecule has become woven into myriad areas of social thought. It is far beyond the scope of this article to describe the consequences of genetic determinism at either the personal or the societal level Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have described the 3D structure of the genome in the extremely small bacteria Mycoplasma pneumoniae. They discovered previously unknown arrangements of DNA within this tiny bacteria, which are also found in larger cells. Their findings suggest that this type of organization is a universal feature of living cells. DNA contains the instructions for life, encoded within genes. Within all cells, DNA is organised into very long lengths known as chromosomes. In animal and plant cells these are double-ended, like pieces of string or shoelaces, but in bacteria they are circular. Whether stringy or circular, these long chromosomes must be organised and packaged inside a cell so that the genes can be switched on or off when they Read More ›

Could vertebrates once have relied on a different mechanism for developing neurons in the gut? From ScienceDaily: Lamprey are slimy, parasitic eel-like fish, one of only two existing species of vertebrates that have no jaw. While many would be repulsed by these creatures, lamprey are exciting to biologists because they are so primitive, retaining many characteristics similar to their ancient ancestors and thus offering answers to some of life’s biggest evolutionary questions. … “We were interested in the origins of lamprey gut neurons because in other vertebrates they arise from a particular embryonic cell type, called neural crest cells,” says Stephen Green, postdoctoral scholar in biology and biological engineering and co-first author on the paper. “We knew that lamprey have Read More ›

We’ve yet find any dark matter, let alone dark energy, actually but Luke Barnes notes at Nautilus: Our cosmic environment is the result of a delicate balance of cosmic forces—gravity and pressure, cooling and heating, expansion and collapse. The final product, when all these pushes and pulls come into balance, is our Milky Way galaxy, where stars form in a rotating disk of gas and a diffuse halo of dark matter. … Even prior to the observational confirmation of dark energy, Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, had wrestled with the theoretical overestimate and suggested a remarkable solution. He noted that the amount of vacuum energy can vary from place to place, depending on how all the different fields in Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: When an individual cell needs to move somewhere, it manages just fine on its own. It extends protrusions from its leading edge and retracts the trailing edge to scoot itself along, without having to worry about what the other cells around it are doing. But when cells are joined together in a sheet of tissue, or epithelium, they have to coordinate their movements with their neighbors. It’s like walking by yourself versus navigating a crowded room. To push through the crowd, you have to communicate with others by talking (“Pardon me”) or tapping them on the shoulder. Cells do the same thing, but instead of verbal cues and hand gestures, they use proteins to signal to each other. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: More than a century of theory about the evolutionary history of dinosaurs has been turned on its head following the publication of new research from scientists at the University of Cambridge and Natural History Museum in London. Their work suggests that the family groupings need to be rearranged, re-defined and re-named and also that dinosaurs may have originated in the northern hemisphere rather than the southern, as current thinking goes. For 130 years palaeontologists have been working with a classification system in which dinosaur species have been placed in to two distinct categories: Ornithischia and Saurischia. But now, after careful analysis of dozens of fossil skeletons and tens of thousands of anatomical characters, the researchers have concluded that Read More ›

Darwinism has succeeded at something at last: The dead walk. Okay, in the minds of millions, they do walk. Cell biologist Jonathan Wells offers a new book, Zombie Science: In 2000, biologist Jonathan Wells took the science world by storm with Icons of Evolution, a book showing how biology textbooks routinely promote Darwinism using bogus evidence—icons of evolution like Ernst Haeckel’s faked embryo drawings and peppered moths glued to tree trunks. Critics of the book complained that Wells had merely gathered up a handful of innocent textbook errors and blown them out of proportion. Now, in Zombie Science, Wells asks a simple question: If the icons of evolution were just innocent textbook errors, why do so many of them still persist? Read More ›

Researchers suggest so based on studies of early fossil rabbit and horse types. From ScienceDaily: More than 50 million years ago, when the Earth experienced a series of extreme global warming events, early mammals responded by shrinking in size. While this mammalian dwarfism has previously been linked to the largest of these events, new research has found that this evolutionary process can happen in smaller, so-called hyperthermals, indicating an important pattern that could help shape an understanding of underlying effects of current human-caused climate change. … Researchers propose that the body change could have been an evolutionary response to create a more efficient way to reduce body heat. A smaller body size would allow the animals to cool down faster. Read More ›

Challenges fundamentals of echinoderm evolution. From ScienceDaily: Echinoderms are among the marine invertebrates that suffered the most severe losses at the end-Permian extinction. At least that was the consensus until a team of European paleontologists — Ben Thuy, Hans Hagdorn, and Andy S. Gale — cast a critical eye on some poorly studied Triassic echinoderm fossils. The fossils turned out to belong to groups that supposedly went extinct by the end of the Paleozoic. Some ancient echinoids, ophiuroids, and asteroids had slipped the bottleneck and coexisted with the ancestors of modern-day sea urchins, brittle stars, sand dollars, and relatives, for many millions of years. These echinoderm hangovers occurred almost worldwide and had spread into a wide range of paleo-environments by Read More ›

As a follow-up to my previous post: The highly engineered transition to vertebrates: an example of functional information analysis I am presenting here some results obtained by a general application, expanded to the whole human proteome, of the procedure already introduced in that post. Main assumptions. The aim of the procedure is to measure a well defined equivalent of functional information in proteins: the information that is conserved throughout long evolutionary times, in a well specified evolutionary line. The simple assumption is that  such information, which is not modified by neutral variation in a time span of hundreds of million years, is certainly highly functionally constrained, and is therefore a very good empirical approximation of the value of functional information in a protein. Read More ›

At Marchin’, marchin’: The experts are right, it’s the facts that are wrong, I responded to some comments and offer a linked version here: — johnnyb, Upright Biped, and rvb8, my principal concern is that people, including people in science, can’t better their game if they won’t address their weaknesses. The Marchin’, Marchin’ for Science movement is dangerously deluded if it thinks that the public is against science, “hates science,” etc. I’ve followed science stories for over two decades now. As so often, the answer is simpler, clearer, and less comfortable*: Most people who do not work in science or follow science news interact with it in areas like medicine. Medicine matters. Even if the Higgs boson were shown to Read More ›

Waynesburg biologist Wayne Rossiter, reviews Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight’s Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, at his blog: Part I: Venema really only has two things he wants to accomplish in his portion of the book: 1) to demonstrate that there could never have been two original progenitors of humanity and 2) that ID is wrong. I think, biologically speaking, Venema is decidedly wrong on the first point. The second point, as I’ve mentioned, is really rather irrelevant to the discussion. At no point does Venema actually engage any ID arguments for the literal Adam and Eve (if any exist). His attacks on ID have essentially nothing to do with the question of whether or not Read More ›

Further to marchin’, marchin’ for science: From law prof Glenn Reynolds at USA Today: According to Foreign Affairs magazine, Americans reject the advice of experts so as “to insulate their fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong.” That’s in support of a book by Tom Nichols called The Death of Expertise, which essentially advances that thesis. Hmmm. Sounds like Nichols is another candidate for our Blinkers Award. Reynolds touches on many topics, including some raised here, such as: By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately. As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse Read More ›