Dave S.

The language in the following paper is hilarious. Basically the researchers are saying “We know this looks like an engineered feedback control loop. We analyzed it and found it statistically impossible to have come about through a stochastic processs. But we will strenuously object to anyone calling it evidence of design.” ROFLMAO

“Chakrabarti and Rabitz analyzed these observations of the proteins’ behavior from a mathematical standpoint, concluding that it would be statistically impossible for this self-correcting behavior to be random, and demonstrating that the observed result is precisely that predicted by the equations of control theory. By operating only at extremes, referred to in control theory as “bang-bang extremization,” the proteins were exhibiting behavior consistent with a system managing itself optimally under evolution.

The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design, a controversial notion that posits the existence of a creator responsible for complexity in nature.

Evolution’s new wrinkle: Proteins with cruise control provide new perspective
by Kitta MacPherson · Posted November 10, 2008; 10:00 a.m.

The rest of the paper is below the fold or at the link above.

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I just read an Insights article in the July 2008 edition of Scientific American. In a nutshell, biochemist Jeremy Nicholson billed as one of the world’s foremost experts on the metabolome (the collection of chemicals in the body which are byproducts of metabolic processes) is screening thousands of individuals to establish baseline amounts of different metabolites and then compares differences between individuals looking for consistent correlations between those differences and various kinds of diseases. Seems like a good research plan to me. The noteworthy part that prompted the subject line of my article here is in the last paragraph of the first page of the SciAm article: It is kind of like doing science backward: instead making hypotheses and then Read More ›

Easy enough to do when like true things that are real problems are happening.

Nevertheless, we have a definite climate trend emerging – more and more climate scientists are admitting anthropogenic global warming is a bunch of crap. Read about some of them:

Lorne Gunter: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof

More goodies below the fold. Read More ›

Remember the big stir about Lenski’s 20 year experiment with E. coli where the bugs “evolved” the ability to digest lactose citrate and this was touted as overwhelming evidence of evolution? And remember our response that until the mechanism behind it was discovered that it might not be much “evolution” at all?

As usual, we are vindicated. In a similar case where it’s lactose instead of citrate the bug was all set up, in fact one might say front loaded, with the capacity to switch over from glucose to lactose digestion. Essentially the bug constantly samples the level of lactose in its environment and when the level reaches a tipping point a single “throw of the dice” switches it over from glucose to lactose digestion. This is contrary to Lenski’s hypothesis that a series of dice throws, each making a small change towards ability to digest lactose citrate, accumulate until lactose citrate digestion is fully switched on. Darwinian gradualism is denied once again and we see a front loaded genome switch to a new mode of operation through a saltational event.

Throw of a dice dictates a bug’s life
17:53 17 October 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Ewen Callaway

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Yeah, me too. Amazing how fast a red herring gets pushed off the front page when there’s a real problem to talk about. But just to keep you updated a little I offer these: Boise gets earliest snow on record Valley shivers as winter weather makes a premature appearance and related to the global cooling we are now experiencing is this: Spotless Sun: Blankest Year Of The Space Age ScienceDaily (Oct. 7, 2008) — Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the “blankest year” of the Space Age. As of Sept. 27, 2008, the sun had been blank, i.e., had no visible sunspots, on 200 days of the year. To find a year with more blank suns, Read More ›

Bill Maher’s “Religulous” documentary mocking religion in the United States opening weekend box office revenues were 10% higher than “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. Our atheist Darwinian friends proclaimed that Expelled was a flop. By that standard so is Religulous. Correction: That should read our atheist and theistic Darwinian friends… the common denominator is being in the tank for Darwin. Mibad.

In another venue where I participate this article published at arXiv, Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance, and previous articles from the same source published in recent months, is undergoing a lively discussion. In a nutshell, a couple of earth based research programs measuring the half lives of radioisotopes have a significant seasonal variation in the raw data values which correlate with distance from the sun. It was brought to our attention by scientific creationists who are constantly on the lookout for things which might dispute the widely accepted yardsticks used to measure geologic age. I accepted those yardsticks as much as anyone short of being dogmatic about it. Upon reading this I immediately pointed out Read More ›

A great article on the Big Bang and the Large Hadron Collider.

The big bounce vs. the big bang

Joseph Brean, National Post
Published: Friday, October 03, 2008

WATERLOO, Ont.. — Among the crushing throng of physics enthusiasts who gathered this week for a lecture by Sir Roger Penrose, who is to the University of Oxford what Stephen Hawking is to Cambridge, the very mention of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland elicited a resounding throaty chuckle.

Everyone knew that when the world’s biggest particle accelerator was switched on last month, its computers were promptly hacked and its superconducting magnets accidentally melted. And provided one is skeptical of all the press reports about how this “Big Bang machine” might create an apocalyptic black hole somewhere beneath Geneva, this is all pretty hilarious, just a few broken eggs for the omelette of discovery.

The capacity crowd of several hundred had a similarly blasé reaction to the nub of the lecture.

“The universe seems to go through cycles of some kind … Our universe is what I call an aeon in an endless sequence of aeons,” Prof. Penrose said in an address enlivened by his breezy Oxbridge banter (10 to the power of 64 years is, for example, “a jolly long time”), and illustrated by overhead transparencies so artful in their multi-coloured, hand-drawn penmanship that they would not have been out of place alongside a baking-soda volcano at a grade school science fair.

But this was top level, cutting-edge physics, hosted by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He described data he received just this week that appears to show traces of the previous aeon in the microwave background radiation that fills the universe and is regarded as the lingering “flash” of the Big Bang. If it actually does, a lot of science will have to be reconsidered.

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I posted this a week or so ago but Universal and Warner shut it down for copyright infringement of the background music. It’s about the sub-prime mortgage meltdown and those involved. View the original with the great sound track by clicking here.

Blue: Intelligent Design; Red: Darwinian Evolution; Orange: Scientific Creationism; Green: Theological Evolution Any questions? Source: Google Trends Update: Due to whiny protesters who say Darwinian evolution isn’t fair, I shortened it to evolution. And just to be fair I shortened intelligent design to design.

In yet another unexpected finding from the world of comparative genomics a gene that gives a jellyfish its sting is found all over the place. All sorts of explanations are flung at it. Horizontal gene transfer, vertical gene transfer, and convergent evolution were all run up the flagpole to see which garners more salutes. 🙄

Click the link below for a nice jellyfish picture and hotlinks in the references or just read the text below the fold.

How the jellyfish got its sting

From a bacterium, surprisingly.
Amber Dance

Jellyfish may owe thanks to a humble bacterium for their ability to sting prey. Scientists have found that one of the genes necessary for them to sting is similar to a gene in bacteria, suggesting the ancestors of jellyfish picked up the gene from microbes. The research is published this week in Current Biology[1].

“The result was a great surprise,” says developmental biologist Nicolas Rabet of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, who led the team.

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Source: Google Trends

This NYT article came out just this past January 18th. It’s worth reading the whole thing which is much longer than the choice quotes below the fold. I hadn’t been aware there was greatly increased support for the Boltzmann Brain due to the discovery of dark energy.

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?

Snippage:

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In a private forum I recently stated: “It is possible for Darwinian processes to generate life of any order of complexity.”

In response I was asked: Where is the demonstration that “It’s possible for Darwinian processes to generate life of any order of complexity”?

I composed the following in reply:

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ID is ineligible for consideration as science because theories that allow for the possibility of forces outside of nature can’t be tested or falsified. In light of that let’s look at what Ernst Mayr had to say in the introduction that appears in “Origin of Species”, Harvard University Press edition, 1964, p. xii: In Darwin’s day the prevailing explanation for organic diversity was the story of creation in Genesis. Darwin himself had subscribed to this when he shipped on the ‘Beagle,’ and he was converted to his new ideas only after he had made numerous observations that were to him quite incompatible with creation. He felt strongly that he must establish this point decisively before his readers would be willing Read More ›