Researchers: Importantly, we show that some archaeal histone variants are ancient and have been maintained as distinct units for hundreds of millions of years. Our work suggests that complex combinatorial chromatin that uses histones as its building blocks exists outside eukaryotes and that the ancestor of eukaryotes might have already had complex chromatin.
Month: December 2020
What we don’t know about the universe, according to New Scientist
Back to Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest: A CENTURY ago, if you asked a cosmologist the universe’s age, the answer may well have been “infinite”. It was a neat way to sidestep the question of how it formed, and the idea had been enshrined in 1917 when Albert Einstein presented his model of a static Read More…
Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne continues to worry about astrology, this time at the New York Times
He seems to have started noticing recently when astrology was touted at the Guardian and the Globe and Mail: In the past couple of days we’ve seen the Guardian tout astrology twice, and now the Globe and Mail. What I’d forgotten is that the New York Times has also been doing it occasionally—certainly more often Read More…
Inexplicable Contradictions
Here’s a scenario for your consideration: Suppose there were a group of people who insisted there is absolutely no objective standard for morality and that all moral norms are based on subjective preferences that are foisted on us by material evolutionary forces. And suppose there were a group of people who are so serenely confident Read More…
So RNA world, the five-star hotel of OOL theories, isn’t panning out?
We were told it was the surest thing in origin of life theories.
So now the Neanderthals are “sophisticated”?
A very reasonable question: “Is The Flintstones a more accurate picture of Neandertals than evolutionary documentaries?”
Pumping the multiverse from dark matter
Well, from a novelist’s perspective, it sounds logical but from a science perspective, if you must invoke the “multiverse,” you are in trouble.
Can we have an honest discussion about science and God?
Even if you don’t believe in God, can you at least believe that 2+2=4? That puts you on one side of a growing cultural divide.
The Smithsonian offers us ten new lessons about human origins
At Smithsonian: Every so often the adult footprints pause and are joined by a child’s footprints. The footprints go in a straight and definite line, and pretty fast, indicating a deliberate end target; they then return in the opposite direction, this time without the child.
Why do humans live to be old when most animals don’t? Pop psychology weighs in
If it were not rigorously pounded out of you by a pop science education, you’d almost think that human intelligence has something to with longevity…
A protein informs cells that they should stick together
Move along, folks. No design to see here.
Wasn’t the thymus one of those Darwinian “vestigial” organs?
Researchers: The researchers have found that female sex hormones instruct important changes in the thymus, a central organ of the immune system, to produce specialized cells called Tregs to deal with physiological changes that arise in pregnancy.
We are the “irreducible complexity” community, they now say
Now at last, courtesy a science preprint, we have a name that makes sense to us. The “irreducible complexity community” — the ICs.
A recent black hole collision has spurred thinking about the tiniest scales
Classically, it shouldn’t have happened.
Do tax-supported school systems kill belief in God?
Hilditch: It turns out that religiosity is usually determined very early in life. All the data suggest that, by and large, kids brought up in religious households stay religious and kids who aren’t, don’t.