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Laura Geggel interviews virologists at LiveScience, who offer arguments against the idea, for example: “Take a cat, a plant and a rock, and leave them in a room for days,” said Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and an affiliated scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. “Come back, and the cat and the plant will have changed, but the rock will essentially be the same,” he said. Like a rock, most viruses would be fine if they were left indefinitely in a room, Adalja said. In addition, he noted that living beings have self-generated and self-sustaining actions — meaning they can seek out sustenance and behave in self-preserving ways. In other words, “they’re taking actions Read More ›

Vs. tailoring science news while claiming to be a neutral arbiter. From Jon Entine at Genetic Literacy Project, on the New York Times’ Oscar-worthy protestations that it presents “the truth: Whether a journalist presents a story in good faith but wrongly can be a matter of healthy debate. But increasingly, a more troubling ethical line is being crossed: some writers choose to arrange facts, or even invent them, in ways that grey out nuances to advance a storyline arrived at before independent reporting even commences. … Two recent Times articles on the swirling farm controversy about bee health and food—one two years ago and another last week—raise serious questions about whether the paper’s editors are still wearing ideological blinders on Read More ›

From Journal of Molecular Evolution: ABSTRACT: A general framework for conventional models of the origin of life (OOL) is the specification of a ‘privileged function.’ A privileged function is an extant biological function that is excised from its biological context, elevated in importance over other functions, and transported back in time to a primitive chemical or geological environment. In RNA or Clay Worlds, the privileged function is replication. In Metabolism-First Worlds, the privileged function is metabolism. In Thermal Vent Worlds, the privileged function is energy harvesting from chemical gradients. In Membrane Worlds, the privileged function is compartmentalization. In evaluating these models, we consider the contents and properties of the Universal Gene Set of life, which is the set of orthologous Read More ›

From Sciencedaily: New research from The University of Texas at Austin reveals that the Earth’s unique iron composition isn’t linked to the formation of the planet’s core, calling into question a prevailing theory about the events that shaped our planet during its earliest years. Lin said that one of the most popular theories to explain the Earth’s iron signature is that the relatively large size of the planet (compared with other rocky bodies in the solar system) created high pressure and high temperature conditions during core formation that made different proportions of heavy and light iron isotopes accumulate in the core and mantle. This resulted in a larger share of heavy iron isotopes bonding with elements that make up the rocky Read More ›

From Andy Coghlan at New Scientist: A study has now revealed how this genetic legacy is still controlling how some people’s genes work, with possible consequences for their health. But note this: Tellingly, the Neanderthal influence has waned fastest in parts of the body that evolved most rapidly around that time, especially the brain. It suggests that once our direct human ancestors had evolved the equipment for sophisticated language and problem-solving, mating with Neanderthals – and the DNA that came with it – rapidly fell out of fashion. That’s a vast speculation based on minimal evidence about a subject on which we know very little, charitably put. The most reasonable explanation for what happened to the Neanderthals is that they Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: These new results indicate that the Asian Horned Frogs family may have originated as recently as 77 million years ago in contrast to 100-126 mya as previously estimated, and suggest that scientists might have been also overestimating the age of many other families of frogs by up to 35%. The results have completely changed our understanding of how the different Asian Horned Frog species and their species groups are related. Many of the species that look similar, and so were considered to be closely related, were found to be distant relatives of each other, and those that look different were found to be closely related. Paper. (public access) – Stephen Mahony, Nicole M. Foley, S.D. Biju, Emma C. Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Archaeologists found 16 limestone tablets dating to the Aurignacian period, named for the first known people to settle in Europe. The tablets were engraved with pictures of horses, mammoths and aurochs (extinct wild cows). Most notably, the pictures were drawn using a series of dots and lines — or as archaeologists call the technique, pointillism. Modern pointillism was invented in the 1880s by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who developed the technique by using small dots to create the illusion of a larger image. Other artists, including Camille Pissarro and Roy Lichtenstein, followed suit. More. We know we are dealing with stasis in human evolution when we now find ourselves referring to “modern” pointillism. See Read More ›

From Andrew Jenner at Atlantic: In July 2008, an American ornithologist named Bret Whitney was researching antbirds in the Brazilian Amazon when he heard a curious bird song. The sound, to his expert ear, clearly belonged a Striolated Puffbird––a big, streaky creature that looks like an owl crossed with a kingfisher. But it also had a smoother quality that struck him as “off-the-charts different” from the slightly warblier songs he knew from elsewhere in the region. He divided the Puffbird into an additional three new species, based on this information but in the ensuing dispute the American Ornithological Society was willing to recognize only one new species: Failing to see the logic behind this decision, Whitney regards it as “just Read More ›

For the crisis, go here. For the “challenges,” see Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt, and Abraham Loeb at Scientific American: The latest astrophysical measurements, combined with theoretical problems, cast doubt on the long-cherished inflationary theory of the early cosmos and suggest we need new ideas. (paywall) More. We remember when inflation was beyond dispute. It promised naturalists a multiverse. But science is now merely one expression of naturalism, so we can be sure that doubts about inflation will not cause doubts about the multiverse. See also: Crisis in cosmology: Universe expanding too fast? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From science writer Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, continuing her interview at Huffington Post with Swedish deep evolution investigators Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish regarding … their central position on deep evolution, which is that the most recent universal common ancestor (MRUCA) is complex not a simple bacteria and “is the root of eukaryote and akaryote lineages” containing “more than a thousand Superfamilies.” Kurland and Harish think MRUCA represents complex survivors from a now extinct biosphere. On horizontal gene transfer as routine: Charles Kurland: We have to remember there’s only a little background of horizontal gene transfer in bacterial populations. The simple reason is that bacteria eat DNA. So sequences are going in all the time. Most of them get Read More ›

From science writer Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, at Huffington Post: I recently had a three-way phone conversation with Swedish deep evolution investigators Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish about their phylogenomic Tree of Life (ToL) based on protein structure, which shows that we are descended from a “complex” ancestor — MRUCA (most recent universal common ancestor) — not a simple bacteria. Kurland and Harish think a ToL paradigm shift may be in order. What’s more, Kurland and Harish figure that MRUCA was not the first ancestor, but represents complex survivors of a now-extinct biosphere. The findings of Kurland and Harish challenge not only mainstream ToL perspectives, but also those of endosymbiosis hypothesis fans, as well as the “HGT industry” Read More ›

From Kelly Rae Chi at Nature: n 2004, oncologist Gideon Rechavi at Tel Aviv University in Israel and his colleagues compared all the human genomic DNA sequences then available with their corresponding messenger RNAs — the molecules that carry the information needed to make a protein from a gene. They were looking for signs that one of the nucleotide building blocks in the RNA sequence, called adenosine (A), had changed to another building block called inosine (I). This ‘A-to-I editing’ can alter a protein’s coding sequence, and, in humans, is crucial for keeping the innate immune response in check. “It sounds simple, but in real life it was really complicated,” Rechavi recalls. “Several groups had tried it before and failed” Read More ›

From Joy Pullmann at Federalist: College science classes are hostile to women and minorities because they use the scientific method, which assumes people can find reliable truths about the natural world through careful and sustained experimentation, concludes a recent dissertation by a doctoral candidate at the University of North Dakota. Laura Parson, a student in the university’s education department, reviewed eight science class syllabi at a “Midwest public university” and said she discovered in them a hidden hostility to women and minorities: … Instead of promoting the idea that knowledge is constructed by the student and dynamic, subject to change as it would in a more feminist view of knowledge, the syllabi reinforce the larger male-dominant view of knowledge as Read More ›

From Jordana Cepelewicz at Nautilus, on mathematician Harvey Friedman: The foundations of mathematics is also a field—in stark contrast to the casual and light tone of Friedman’s emails—that has been in crisis for nearly a century. In 1931, the Austrian mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel proved that any logical system adequate to develop basic arithmetic gives rise to statements that cannot be proven true or false within that system. One such statement: that the system itself is consistent. In other words, no system can ever prove itself to be free of contradiction. The result seemed to present an insurmountable problem for mathematicians, not so much because it prevented them from ever knowing whether the system their work is built on Read More ›

An unexpectedly level-headed discussion from Tom Mahony at RealClearScience: Ironically, true believers often moralize about the importance of facts and insist they’re the only ones who are “reality based.” However, in practice, they confuse facts with assumptions, beliefs, conjecture, and opinion. If you take an incorrect assumption, assume it as fact, and extrapolate from that assumption, even if the logic of the extrapolation is sound, the whole idea is wrong because the foundational assumption is wrong. Garbage in, garbage out. Yet, since true believers mistake their incorrect assumption for fact, and tout their impeccable extrapolation, you’re the kook. This is what passes for logic in the true-believer community. True believers haunt any subject: science, religion, health, history, economics, politics. The Read More ›