See also: Paleontologist Gunter Bechly live tonight on what the fossil record really tells us about common ancestry

At her blog, Suzan Mazur interviews neuroscientist Medha Pathak on the recent Mechanome in Action symposium she chaired at UC-Irvine. Pathak “is currently a professor of physiology and biophysics at UCI and heads the Pathak Lab’s investigation there into “how mechanical forces modulate neural stem cell fate in development and repair.” Suzan Mazur: If you google “mechanome,” you don’t see that many references to it. Medha Pathak: The term is catching on. The first Mechbio conference, organized by colleagues Padmini Rangamani, Juan Carlos del Alamo and Debanjan Mukherjee in 2016 at UC-San Diego, was called “Putting Together the Cell Mechanome: Finding the pieces, building the puzzle.” When organizing the 2018 conference, the second one in the series, we—Jun Allard, Albert Read More ›

A classic in devolution, actually. In Mozambique, it is estimated that 90% of the elephants have been slaughtered for ivory to finance a civil war that ended in 1992. But tuskless elephants seem more likely to survive: Hunting gave elephants that didn’t grow tusks a biological advantage in Gorongosa. Recent figures suggest that about a third of younger females—the generation born after the war ended in 1992—never developed tusks. Normally, tusklessness would occur only in about 2 to 4 percent of female African elephants. Decades ago, some 4,000 elephants lived in Gorongosa, says Joyce Poole—an elephant behavior expert and National Geographic Explorer who studies the park’s pachyderms. But those numbers dwindled to triple digits following the civil war. New, as Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: So audacious was Marcus Bray’s experiment that even he feared it would fail. In the system inside cells that translates genetic code into life, he replaced about 1,000 essential linchpins with primitive substitutes to see if the translational system would survive and function. It seemed impossible, yet it worked swimmingly, and Bray had compelling evidence that the great builder of proteins was active in the harsh conditions in which it evolved 4 billion years ago. The experiment’s success reaffirmed the translational system’s place at the earliest foundations of life on Earth. Every living thing exists because the translational system receives messages from DNA delivered to it by RNA and translates the messages into proteins. The system centers on Read More ›

A friend writes to recommend it: American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen and I have watched many hundreds of them. As the movie documents, it started with Darwin, then moved on to Galton who spent his life developing the science of eugenics, then the American eugenics movement is covered in detail. Next is many leading, Harvard and other elite school educated scientists took it up, and Congress passes laws to end over 90 percent of immigration, and it moved on to Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, noting at the Nuremberg Nazi trial the lawyers defending the Nazis cited the Bell v. Buck U.S. Supreme court case to justify their eugenics program. Read More ›

Recently, we noted that John Sanford was speaking at NIH on human health and mutations. Philip Cunningham writes to mention a 2017 paper by Sanford and S. T. Cordova, Nylonase Genes and Proteins – Distribution, Conservation, and Possible Origins on whether the ba cteria that digest nylon evolved new genes: We began this work hoping to better understanding the various claims regarding the de novo origin of certain nylonase genes. The idea that nylonases would have arisen very recently, de novo, was based upon the widely-held assumption that nylonases would have been essentially non-existent prior to the artificial manufacture of nylon. This basic assumption would not be justified if there were any nylonlike polymers in nature, or if nylonase activity Read More ›

Of course, just now, one suspects that it is mainly the editors in Frisco who have pored over it. But now, Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne  tells us,l Michael Behe, author of the intelligent-design (ID) creationist books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution, has a new book coming out next February, Darwin Devolves: The New Science about DNA that Challenges Evolution. (Let me point out here that the phrase “that challenges evolution” has an unclear antecedent, either the new science that challenges evolution—what he clearly means—or the DNA itself that challenges evolution. Bad title!) The construction that offends Dr. Coyne is a clause, not a phrase; however, why be picky and it will doubtless be Read More ›

Pure democracies are inherently unstable.  Exhibit A for why that is so: Progressive Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez The reason for the fiscal instability of a pure democracy was captured in a widely circulated quotation usually attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler: A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy . . .   Ocasio-Cortez has a list of goodies she wants the federal government to dispense, including Medicare for all, jobs guarantees, student loan forgiveness, free college, Read More ›

Hemimastigotes: Like animals, plants, fungi and ameobas — but unlike bacteria — hemimastigotes have complex cells with mini-organs called organelles, making them part of the “domain” of organisms called eukaryotes rather than bacteria or archaea. About 10 species of hemimastigotes have been described over more than 100 years. But up until now, no one had been able to do a genetic analysis to see how they were related to other living things. Emily Chung, “Rare microbes lead scientists to discover new branch on the tree of life” at CBC   Eglit watched carefully as it hunted. Hemimastix shoots little harpoons called extrusomes to attack prey such as Spumella, a relative of aquatic microbes called diatoms. It grasps its prey by Read More ›

A survey of materialist (naturalist) theories of consciousness would require you to keep an open mind on the topic. At Mind Matters, In an academic article,  Kastrup identified the available materialist options, as he sees them. Picture, if you will, you, an amoeba, and a coffee mug. How much does each of you participate in consciousness? a) physicalism (everything is a physical reality) you 0  amoeba 0  coffee mug 0 On this view, consciousness is an evolved illusion. b) bottom-up pan-psychism you 1  amoeba 1  coffee mug 0 You and the amoeba both evolved consciousness as you evolved life but the coffee cup (and, we presume, its associated electrons) did not. c) cosmopanpsychism you + amoeba + coffee mug = Read More ›

From Sir Martin Rees at NBC: AI apocalypse is certainly in the air. Elon Musk, Henry Kissinger, and the late Stephen Hawking have all predicted an AI doomsday. Industry professionals’ doubt and disparagement don’t seem to register with the media in the same way. Rees, who is former president of the Royal Society, goes further, however. He also predicts in his book that “a physics experiment could swallow up the entire universe.” When he received the Templeton Prize in 2011, he was noted for speculating that we could be living in a giant computer simulation. In 2017, he suggested that our universe may be lost in an “unbounded cosmic archipelago,” a multiverse where “we could all have avatars.” As for Read More ›

Not by adding to it. Everyone seems to be talking about devolution (“reductive evolution”) these days. From ScienceDaily: “This is the first large genome project like this that actually looks at hundreds of different eukaryotic species, not different individuals or isolates of the same species,” says Chris Todd Hittinger, a UW-Madison genetics professor and one of the senior authors of the study. “Budding yeasts, despite their phenotypic similarity, are very different from one another genetically. They’re as different from one another as all animals or all plants are from one another.” Collecting such a deep pool of yeast types gave researchers enough information to use comparisons of the shifting genetics to redraw the budding yeast family tree into a dozen Read More ›

Readers may remember Dixon from the time MIT tried building a universal moral machine. Here are some of his thoughts on one overlooked aspect of the “superintelligent AI” myth: [Google AI researcher] Francois Chollet is right to recognize that we, like all animals, come pre-wired. Young deer stand, leap, and run within hours of birth. Birds build nests without prior instruction. Squirrels bury and find nuts. We speak and juggle abstract thoughts. But basic chemistry does not create language; while speaking may require chemical bonding and signaling, language rests on something more. Vision is another “chicken and egg” problem: The best human eye in the world is worthless without a nervous system to transmit the signals and a mind to interpret Read More ›

From a study of over 200 skulls: Males suffered the bulk of harmful head knocks, whether they were Neandertals or ancient humans, the scientists report online November 14 in Nature. “Our results suggest that Neandertal lifestyles were not more dangerous than those of early modern Europeans,” Harvati says. Bruce Bower, “Skull damage suggests Neandertals led no more violent lives than humans” at Science News That’s a curious headline, Skull damage suggests Neandertals led no more violent lives than humans“,” as if Neanderthals were not humans. It makes sense that the Neanderthal was not more violent than others. Life back then was probably as violent as it could be among humans who — after all — can foresee and avoid chances of Read More ›

Jonathan Bartlett, Research and Education Director of the Blyth Institute, asks, Who needs wisdom? if We’ve got algorithms! ? In our increasingly digital society, the algorithm seems set to replace wisdom in human reasoning. While we are seeing some pushback against the movement to “algorithmicize” everything, few lay out explicitly the limitations as well as the benefits of the algorithms increasingly used to make decisions. Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the current contentions within Netflix between “the Algorithm” (Netflix’s data-driven decision-making model) and “Hollywood” (the face-to-face deal-making that dominates the movie and TV businesses). For instance, the Algorithm was in favor of canceling the GLOW series, due to the lackluster performance of the comedy featuring women’s wrestling, Read More ›