From ScienceDaily: Genetics isn’t as important as once thought for the evolution of altruistic social behavior in some organisms, a new insight into a decade-long debate. This is the first empirical evidence that suggests social behavior in eusocial species — organisms that are highly organized, with divisions of infertile workers — is only mildly attributed to how related these organisms are to each other. In evolutionary biology, fitness refers to an organism’s reproductive success and propagation of its genes. When researchers at Hokkaido University studied the foraging and nesting behaviors of the eusocial species Lasioglossum baleicum, commonly known as the sweat bee, they found that the fitness was more a result of the bees’ cooperative behaviour than it was a Read More ›

The Atlantic is asking: Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be. Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “stem,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.Olga Khazan, “The More Gender Equality, Read More ›

Here: On this episode of ID the Future, guest host Robert J. Marks talks with Dr. Winston Ewert about Ewert’s groundbreaking new hypothesis challenging Darwin’s common descent tree of life. The new model is based on the well-established technique of repurposing software code in different software projects. Ewert, a senior researcher at Biologic and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, describes the nested hierarchical pattern of life and how any credible theory of life’s origin and diversity must explain it. He then describes how Darwin’s basic theory fits, and doesn’t fit, the pattern, and the various ancillary mechanisms invoked to close the gaps. These patches include horizontal gene transfer, convergent evolution, and incomplete lineage sorting. Ewert then cues up what he argues Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have discovered a gene that appears to play a vital role in pheromone sensing. The gene is conserved across fish and mammals and over 400 million years of vertebrate evolution, indicating that the pheromone sensing system is much more ancient than previously believed. This discovery opens new avenues of research into the origin, evolution, and function of pheromone signaling. Most land-dwelling vertebrates have both an olfactory organ that detects odors and a vomeronasal organ that detects pheromones, which elicit social and sexual behaviors. It has traditionally been believed that the vomeronasal organ evolved when vertebrates transitioned from living in water to living on land. New research by Masato Nikaido and Read More ›

Doug Axe, Intro of recalls current CalTech winner Frances Arnold: In a conversation in her office one day, I said that I wanted to do work on protein evolution. She was skeptical, for pragmatic reasons. “Is that the kind of work that people will want to fund?”, she asked. I smile recalling that, but up to that point she had been trying to modify enzymes (proteins that do chemistry) by thinking carefully about the effects certain changes to their amino-acid sequences ought to have. She and the graduate students working with her soon found that it was much harder to anticipate the effects of designed changes than they had thought. That’s when she made the shift to what is known Read More ›

Careful study showed that this was not the result of contamination: In a surprise to scientists, cyanobacteria have been found thriving nearly 2,000 feet below the strange landscape, where sunlight, water, and nutrients are scarce. Researchers previously thought these microbes could survive only while basking in the sun’s rays, although they are otherwise a versatile bunch; researchers have found them alive nearly everywhere on Earth. … Control samples helped the team determine that the microbes did not come from contamination due to the drilling fluid nor from processing in the lab. And the cyanobacteria were not found in random locations, as you might expect if the samples had been doused in contaminated liquid. Instead, they were congregating along the fractures Read More ›

At her blog, Oscillations, Suzan Mazur reflects on what we have learned to date (it is only 5% excavated). One of the issues is whether there was any religion at Çatalhöyük: Suzan Mazur: I’m asking this because Templeton has come under fire for putting its fingers all over science from the investigation of the origin and evolution of life to space science. It’s perceived that the foundation is compromising the work of scientists and retarding science. Maurice Bloch, one of your own Çatal book authors has said pursuing a religion angle at Çatal is “a misleading wild goose chase” because humans only thought up religion 5,000 years ago at the earliest. Bloch says humans largely live in their reflective imagination, Read More ›

One must hope that Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, isn’t too worried about the people who criticize her: Let us leave aside for a moment that you have to skip half the book to not notice I question myself on every other page. Heck, if you ask me to sign the book, I’m afraid I’ll misspell my own name. I’m a walking-talking bag of self-doubt. Indeed that was the reason I ended up writing this book. … Needless to say, making a case against a community of some thousands of the biggest brains on the planet has not been conducive to my self-confidence. But I have tried to find a scientific reason for the Read More ›

We don’t really know what the very early Earth looked like because the landscape was always being recycled. Zircons, however, are hard enough that they may survive, containing clues about the previous environments. Using zircon oxygen isotopes, researchers previously discovered that liquid water covered parts of our planet some 4.3 billion years ago, suggesting the surface cooled just a few hundred million years after our planet’s formation. And just last year, researchers found what they believe might be hints of early life in the form of carbon-rich inclusions in 4.1-billion-year-old zircons. … Some zircons contain the chemical signatures of rocks weathered by water to form clay. Other zircons bear the signatures of dissolved minerals that crystallize to form rocks like Read More ›

They hope to be surer of that fact after a couple of years more data. From ScienceDaily: It all started with the measurements of the Planck satellite, which was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) to measure the cosmic background radiation. This radiation is, to some extent, an afterglow of the big bang. It conveys crucial information on the matter distribution in the early universe; showing the distribution as it was only 380.000 years after the big bang. According to the Planck measurements, this initial distribution was such that, over cosmic time, more galaxy clusters should have formed than we observe today. “We have measured with an X-ray satellite the number of galaxy clusters at different distances from ourselves,” Read More ›

That guy at Nature who rides “Genetic determinism rides again” was right. Now, from ScienceDaily: For the first time, locations on the human genome have been identified that can explain differences in meaning in life between individuals. This is the result of research conducted in over 220,000 individuals by Professor Meike Bartels and PhD student Bart Baselmans from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The researchers identified two genetic variants for meaning in life and six genetic variants for happiness. The results were published this week in the scientific journal Scientific Reports. The fact that genetic variants for a meaning in life have been found indicates that everyone is different and that differences between people in complex processes such as a meaning Read More ›

Also known as the “warfare thesis.” Sometimes real manuscripts are torn up to manufacture this kind of dreck for gullible tourists and museums: As I prepared to teach my class ‘Science and Islam’ last spring, I noticed something peculiar about the book I was about to assign to my students. It wasn’t the text – a wonderful translation of a medieval Arabic encyclopaedia – but the cover. Its illustration showed scholars in turbans and medieval Middle Eastern dress, examining the starry sky through telescopes. The miniature purported to be from the premodern Middle East, but something was off. Besides the colours being a bit too vivid, and the brushstrokes a little too clean, what perturbed me were the telescopes. The Read More ›

J. R. Miller offers some thoughts on the recent book, Spectacle, and the documentary, Human Zoos: The recent book, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, by Pamela Newkirk shows how Darwin’s theory of universal common descent led to the dominant scientific view that blacks were lower on the scale of evolution and a missing link between ape and humanity. In 1906, Benga was put on display in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo as a symbol of scientific progress toward proving human origins. … In addition to the book, the recent documentary, Human Zoos, illustrates the life of Benga and how these same leading scientists were instrumental in the founding of the eugenics movement which was determined to Read More ›

Youth speaker Sean McDowell interviews J. P. Moreland on his new book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology: J.P. Moreland is one of the 50 most influential living philosophers. He’s also a colleague and friend of mine at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. He has spent his career writing largely in the philosophy of mind and the intersection of science and faith. … MCDOWELL: You make the bold claim that there are some truths in theology and philosophy that we know better than scientific claims. Can you give me an example, and how would you defend such a claim? MORELAND: The truths of logic, mathematics, introspective knowledge of one’s own conscious states, moral truths (e.g., Read More ›

There’s been quite a lot of conversation about our three newest recepients of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, partially, if not principally, because one of the three was a woman, Dr. Francis Arnold. We’ve also read that Dr. Arnold, having gotten nowhere using “rational design” then turned to “evolution,” and with this switch in methodology went on to win the Nobel. Here’s the NYT’s article where we read such things. Let me quote a section which illustrates what is being implied: At first, Dr. Arnold attempted “rational design,” employing logic and knowledge of how proteins function to try to build new enzymes — proteins that act as catalysts for chemical reactions. But enzymes are large, complicated molecules — some consisting Read More ›