2017

Also, doubts about horizontal gene transfer persist. First, from Suzan Mazur earlier at Huffington Post on deep evolution: I recently had a three-way phone conversation with Swedish deep evolution investigators Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish about their phylogenomic Tree of Life (ToL) based on protein structure, which shows that we are descended from a “complex” ancestor — MRUCA (most recent universal common ancestor) — not a simple bacteria. Kurland and Harish think a ToL paradigm shift may be in order. What’s more, Kurland and Harish figure that MRUCA was not the first ancestor, but represents complex survivors of a now-extinct biosphere. Now, just recently from Mazur, again at Huffington Post, a report on the pushback: There has been a vigorous and somewhat Read More ›

A Wow! signal is definite evidence for extraterrestrial life. We missed this from 2013: The SETI hypothesis of an intelligent signal in the genetic code is tested. The code is shown to possess an ensemble of same-style precision-type patterns. The patterns are shown to match the criteria of an intelligent signal. It’s apparently still legal to say that. From ScienceDirect at Icarus: Abstract: It has been repeatedly proposed to expand the scope for SETI, and one of the suggested alternatives to radio is the biological media. Genomic DNA is already used on Earth to store non-biological information. Though smaller in capacity, but stronger in noise immunity is the genetic code. The code is a flexible mapping between codons and amino acids, Read More ›

Part two of my series looking at Jeffrey Koperski’s paper ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Good Ones’ is now up on my blog. This one is quite in depth, but a couple of interesting issues come up along the way. I examine the concept of soft and hard anomalies in scientific theories and how they might affect theory change. I then look at the claim that ID’s scientific core is too meagre to be considered serious science. The final objection I analyse is the claim that ID violates a metatheoretic shaping principle known as scientific conservatism. In part one of this series looking at Jeffrey Koperski’s paper, Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Read More ›

Political correctness decreed that there were no important brain differences between men and women but tests were done mainly on male animals. And, because the resulting problems didn’t help various political causes, they were dangerous to publicize. From Claire Lehmann at Commentary: The insistence that gender differences were and are immaterial to the proper functioning of a free society has been a feature of our common conversation since the 1970s. It was the key to “second-wave feminism,” the political and social movement that took women’s liberation beyond issues of suffrage and wages and employment to the question of how a just society orders itself. By the close of the 20th century, however, the insistence that gender differences be treated as Read More ›

From writer and filmmaker Paul Ratner at BigThink: Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einstein’s spiritual views as pantheism, largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes. Himself a famous atheist, Richard Dawkins calls Einstein’s pantheism a “sexed-up atheism,” but other scholars point to the fact that Einstein did seem to believe in a supernatural intelligence that’s beyond the physical world. He referred to it in his writings as “a superior spirit,” “a superior mind” and a “spirit vastly superior to men”. Einstein was possibly a deist, although he Read More ›

Reviewing Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, at Gospel Coalition: The book is well-written, informative, engaging, and relentlessly provocative. Despite these strengths, however, the book failed to convince me. It exemplifies what many Christians on the sidelines find concerning as they watch these science-theology debates unfolding. And once again—to borrow a Mark Twain misquote—rumors of Adam’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. We shouldn’t miss the deep irony. One of the authors’ main motivations for writing this book is to remove a stumbling block for young people. McKnight goes on to tell us, repeatedly and insistently, that most lay believers consider the “historical” Adam central to the faith. As we’ve seen, his main thesis is that there is Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views, on Denis Noble’s new book, Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity, Here is a new book from Oxford University biologist Denis Noble, Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity. He is one of the Third Way of Evolution folks, and no advocate of intelligent design. In the book, published by Cambridge U Press, he argues for a “fundamental revision” of neo-Darwinian theory. Noble was among the organizers and participants at the Royal Society meeting in London that we’ve talked so much about here. Evolutionary biology is in a state of ferment verging, in some quarters, on open rebellion. Don’t let Darwin apologists tell you otherwise. More. Darwin apologists can probably Read More ›

From George Johnson at Undark: In November, Judge María Alejandra Mauricio of the Third Court of Guarantees in Mendoza decreed that Cecilia is a “nonhuman person” — one that was being denied “the fundamental right” of all sentient beings “to be born, to live, grow, and die in the proper environment for their species.” Agreeing to a petition by animal rights lawyers in Argentina for a writ of habeas corpus — a demand that a court rule on whether a prisoner or inmate is being legally detained — the judge ordered that the chimpanzee be freed from the zoo and transferred to a great ape sanctuary in Brazil. In an earlier case, an appeals court in Buenos Aires upheld a Read More ›

In an interview with Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post. Mazur explains, Plug certain information into SUPERFAMILY and it can analyze a vast assortment of genomes and assist you in building a Tree of Life using superfamilies — i.e., domains with an evolutionary relationship — and the conserved part of thousands and thousands of protein structures called protein domains. … Suzan Mazur: Do protein Superfamilies represent the current limits of our ability to identify common ancestry? Julian Gough: Yes. That is exactly what their definition is. So if you want to group two protein structural domains into the same Superfamily, the question that you ask is whether there is structural sequence and functional evidence for common evolutionary ancestry. So they’re classified Read More ›

In debate after debate I’m sure we’ve all noticed that some people continually recycle the same statements over and over as if those statements represent something more than emotion-laden rhetoric that hasn’t already been factually and logically refuted or otherwise sufficiently responded to.  While this is hardly surprising, what has piqued my interest are discussions involving the election of Donald J. Trump and abortion, I suppose because those subjects carry a great deal of emotional weight for many people. I think the reaction to these subjects reveals something extremely interesting and dangerous to society. I’m not just talking about atheists/materialists here, but people in general. In every single discussion I had with anyone not supporting Trump, their reaction to Trump Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A subset of protein complexes whose role has long been thought to consist only of chemically degrading and discarding of proteins no longer needed by cells appears to also play a role in sending messages from one nerve cell to another, researchers report. … Paper. (paywall) Together, the researchers say, these findings suggest that the neuronal membrane-bound proteasome is vitally important for cell signaling. Their experiments bring up a host of new questions about what specific proteins this complex is degrading, what compounds it’s expelling and what happens when this system breaks down, Ramachandran says. He and Margolis, he says, are already discovering links between glitches in this system and neurological disease, such as neurodegeneration. “Realistically, understanding the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists at the Swedish Museum of Natural History have found fossils of 1.6 billion-year-old probable red algae. The spectacular finds, publishing on 14 March in the open access journal PLOS Biology, indicate that advanced multicellular life evolved much earlier than previously thought. … Discoveries of early multicellular eukaryotes have been sporadic and difficult to interpret, challenging scientists trying to reconstruct and date the tree of life. The oldest known red algae before the present discovery are 1.2 billion years old. The Indian fossils, 400 million years older and by far the oldest plant-like fossils ever found, suggest that the early branches of the tree of life need to be recalibrated. “The ‘time of visible life’ seems to have Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Animals with high cognitive ability also have relatively large brains, but the factors that drive evolution of big brains remain unclear. Scientists have hypothesized that ecological, social, and cultural factors could each play a role. Most of these hypotheses have not been formalized mathematically, but doing so would allow scientists to refine their tests. To address the issue, Mauricio González-Forero of University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and colleagues developed a mathematical model that predicts how large the human brain should be at different stages of an individual’s life, depending on different possible evolutionary scenarios. The model relies on the assumption that the brain expends some energy on cognitive skills that allow an individual to extract energy from the environment Read More ›

From Philip Ball at Nautilus: The hypothesis of a fifth force is, then, anything but exhausted. In fact it’s fair to say that any observations in fundamental physics or cosmology that can’t be explained by our current theories—by the Standard Model of particle physics or by general relativity—are apt to get physicists talking about new forces or new types of matter, such as dark matter and dark energy. That’s simply the way physics has always worked: When all else fails, you place a new piece on the board and see how it moves. Sure, we haven’t yet seen any convincing evidence for a fifth force, but neither have we seen a direct sign of dark matter or supersymmetry or extra Read More ›

Well, how about this: Would another hundred and fifty articles offering brand new theories of consciousness, each newer than the last, cause you to consider that possibility? Or will you just say, a decade from now, “That’s how science progresses!” From neuroscientist Henrik Jörntell at the Conversation: Understanding the human brain is arguably the greatest challenge of modern science. The leading approach for most of the past 200 years has been to link its functions to different brain regions or even individual neurons (brain cells). But recent research increasingly suggests that we may be taking completely the wrong path if we are to ever understand the human mind. … But what if we instead considered the possibility that all brain Read More ›