From ScienceDaily: Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory and the University of Maine have discovered that genetic material in the cell that was previously thought to be “junk” because of its apparent lack of function likely plays a part in regulating genetic circuits responsible for regeneration in highly regenerative animals. … The discovery of these novel long noncoding RNAs and their role in regulating regeneration may lead to an answer to the paramount question that is being examined by scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory: If highly regenerative animals such as zebrafish and salamanders can regenerate tissues and organs, why we can’t we? The answer could one day lead to the development of drugs to trigger humans’ dormant pathways for Read More ›

Surviving the Late Heavy Bombardment: We find that the “last universal common ancestor” – a hypothetical very early single cell from which all life on Earth descended – existed prior to the “late heavy bombardment”. This was a period of intense meteor bombardment sustained by our planet about 3.9 billion years ago. This is significantly earlier than the currently accepted oldest fossil evidence would suggest (estimating 3.5-3.8 billion years ago). The oldest confirmed fossils are from about 3.4 billion years ago, while the oldest potential fossils have been found on Greenland and date back to about 3.8 billion years ago. There’s also a suggestion that carbon found in a 4.1 billion-year-old mineral called zircon could be biological in nature. However, Read More ›

A story here yesterday noted the recent attempt at Exeter U to resurrect the idea that the varying prevalence of light and dark moths is a dramatic demonstration of evolution in action. Like its many predecessors, it demonstrates nothing except what we might expect: The more visible moth will be spotted and eaten sooner. But it’s the understory that matters: Schoolchildren are asked to believe that, by the same power of natural selection, cows become whales over time. Not only is the implicit claim not demonstrated by the data from nature; it isn’t even implied by the data from nature. The variable population distribution mechanism already existed in the moths’ genes, perhaps for millions of years, and did not change Read More ›

As I checked the dashboard, I just saw that the current visit-count for the “Frequently raised but weak arguments against Intelligent Design” page stands at 50,307. Worth noting, even as onlookers are again invited to ponder its remarks. END PS: Table of contents: WEAK ANTI-ID ARGUMENTS: 1] ID is “not science” 2] No Real Scientists Take Intelligent Design Seriously 3] Intelligent Design does not carry out or publish scientific research 4] ID does not make scientifically fruitful predictions 5] Intelligent Design is “Creationism in a Cheap Tuxedo” 6] Since Intelligent Design Proponents Believe in a “Designer” or “Creator” They Can Be Called “Creationists” 7] Because William Dembski once commented that the design patterns in nature are consistent with the “logos Read More ›

This time at the University of Exeter: Scientists have revisited – and confirmed – one of the most famous textbook examples of evolution in action. They showed that differences in the survival of pale and dark forms of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) are explained by how well camouflaged the moths are to birds in clean and polluted woodland. “Industrial melanism” – the prevalence of darker varieties of animals in polluted areas – and the peppered moth provided a crucial early example supporting Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and has been a battleground between evolutionary biologists and creationists for decades. The battle was over the claim that differing prevalence of the light and dark varieties is evidence of Read More ›

At Current Biology: Teleological thinking — the attribution of purpose and a final cause to natural events and entities — has long been identified as a cognitive hindrance to the acceptance of evolution, yet its association to beliefs other than creationism has not been investigated. Here, we show that conspiracism — the proneness to explain socio-historical events in terms of secret and malevolent conspiracies — is also associated to a teleological bias. Across three correlational studies (N > 2000), we found robust evidence of a teleological link between conspiracism and creationism, which was partly independent from religion, politics, age, education, agency detection, analytical thinking and perception of randomness. As a resilient ‘default’ component of early cognition, teleological thinking is thus Read More ›

Even on Earth. And that is why we don’t see them, astrophysicist suggests: For example, could the messy chemistry we see in fossil fuels on Earth – a smorgasbord of organic reactions, a seemingly tarry chaos – be simply a short-term view of a living system that functions across hundreds of millions of years? Or consider a chunk of complex rock, a mixture of minerals and carbon chemistry. It may be bathed for a billion years in cosmic rays and indigenous particle radiation. It changes over that timescale, electrons are freed and captured, slow, slow chemistry and structural variation happens. Your pet rock might be just that, except you’re living too fast to notice. Of course, rather frustratingly, to make Read More ›

In 2011, “de-roomed” computer scientists developed a way to open up access to journal papers: After being kicked out of a hotel conference room where they had participated in a three-day open-science workshop and hackathon, a group of computer scientists simply moved to an adjacent hallway. There, Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem and Cristhian Parra worked all night on software to help academics to illustrate how much of their work was freely available on the Internet. They realized how much time had passed only when they noticed hotel staff starting to prepare for breakfast.Holly Else, “How Unpaywall is transforming open science” at Nature One way open access may change science publishing is that people who are knowledgeable about a topic but Read More ›

And that is your mistake. A look at how social justice warriors have penetrated the soft underbelly of engineering: Engineering education has been infiltrated by a “phalanx of social justice warriors” who are steadily corrupting the field, according to a Michigan State University professor. “They have sought out the soft underbelly of engineering, where phrases such as ‘diversity’ and ‘different perspectives’ and ‘racial gaps’ and ‘unfairness’ and ‘unequal outcomes’ make up the daily vocabulary,” asserts Mechanical Engineering professor Indrek Wichman in an essay published Wednesday by the James G. Martin Center. “They have sought out the soft underbelly of engineering…” “Instead of calculating engine horsepower or microchip power/size ratios or aerodynamic lift and drag, the engineering educationists focus on group Read More ›

Further to kairosfocus’s thoughts yesterday on the digital empire suppressing the free flow of ideas: Buzzfeed reported August 7 that “YouTube Is Fighting Back Against Climate Misinformation.” As of July 9, “YouTube is now adding fact checks to videos that question climate change … as a part of its ongoing effort to combat the rampant misinformation and conspiratorial fodder on its platform.” … YouTube’s decision might be defensible if it were evenhanded. If, on all videos addressing climate change, from any perspective, YouTube placed a notice that climate change is the subject of vigorous ongoing debate and that equally qualified scientists hold a variety of views on the magnitude, causes, and consequences of human-induced climate change and on the best Read More ›

It’s a good thing that we don’t need bridges and buildings to be stable: Professional engineers are expressing befuddlement over unsubstantiated scholarly accusations that the field’s licensure exam is biased against women. Women are 11.6% less likely to pass. The agency that administers the exam—the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES)—also pushed back against the suggestion that the exam may be biased against women. NCEES Director of Exams Tim Miller told Campus Reform that it seems highly unlikely that the exam itself is biased against women, insofar as NCEES has been reviewing the test specifically for gender bias for nearly two decades. “Since the early 2000s, the exam items have been reviewed annually to make them gender-neutral Read More ›

Making nonsense meaningful: In such a large and diverse city, it is no surprise that the Craft is fairly accessible, if you know where to look. Nearly 80 covens and pagan organizations operate in the New York Metropolitan area, according to the pagan networking site The Witches’ Voice. Exact numbers of witches in the city are hard to come by, as there are many solitary practitioners, but coven and community leaders estimate that as many as 10,000 witches live and practice in New York. Nationally, about 734,000 Americans identify as pagan or Wiccan, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey. Nancy Guzman, a board member of New York City Pagan Pride, which stages an annual Pagan Pride Day festival Read More ›

While discussing cultural conflicts generally, foreign policy analyst Michael Dran mentioned something that intrigued one of our readers: The most important is the divide between Protestant modernists and fundamentalists, which developed in the early part of the twentieth century. It is my contention that the modernist-fundamentalist controversy did not come and go in the course of the twentieth century. It was an earthquake along a tectonic fault that continues to divide our world today. He cites the Scopes Trial, evoking a variety of culture myths about what happened at Dayton in 1925 that convinced dim and ignorant elitists that Darwin must be right about everything. Clearly, the Scopes trial was about more than the teaching of evolution. The conflict pitted Read More ›

There has been a lot of talk lately about the impending demise of liberal democracy and if anything can be done to save it.  Yes, things look bleak, and men of good will everywhere must act before it is too late.  But what should we do?  To answer that question we must first know what we are up against; for we can fight effectively only if we know what we are fighting against.  Michael Anton provides the answer.  He writes in the latest edition of the Claremont Review of Books that absent cataclysm or conquest, all regimes: are felled by the inevitable radicalization of their core principle.  Democracy, then, falls when its core principles of liberty and equality are perverted Read More ›

The old Gaia asserts that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings have evolved together as a single living system that greatly affects the chemistry and conditions of Earth’s surface. Some scientists believe that this “Gaian system” self-regulates global temperature, atmospheric content, ocean salinity, and other factors in an “automatic” manner. Earth’s living system appears to keep conditions on our planet just right for life to persist! The Gaia Theory has already inspired ideas and practical applications for economic systems, policy, scientific inquiry, and other valuable work. The future holds more of the same. More. The new Gaia is leaner, greener, and meaner. She has discovered the “selfish gene”: Doolittle has recently proposed that Gaia could have arisen through ‘selection by Read More ›