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Here: When performing the autopsy on the mummy, the team got a few hints as to what might have caused her untimely death. … Chagas disease, apparently. But When the researchers got to the gut of the body, they took every precaution to prevent contamination. Here they found that the gut was dominated by Clostridium species, while the paleofeces mainly consised of Turicibacter. In addition to this, they also found evidence of some strains of human papillomaviruses. But what surprised the researchers the most was the discovery of putative antibiotic resistant genes, like penicillin-binding proteins and multi-drug transporters that help shuttle compounds out of the cell. These findings suggest that the genes necessary for bacteria to resist antibiotics were already Read More ›

Darwinians must technically say no, as life is not about anything and does not progress to any purpose. But here are some predictions offered by Michael Ruse, Joseph Graves, Briana Pobiner, Stephen Stearns, and Chris Stringer: The scientists we spoke to uniformly withheld from making specific predictions, but they were all agreed that evolution hasn’t stopped. “It’s definitely happening,” asserts Professor Graves, “but as human beings, we’re not in a lab setting. There are just too many complexities to make a scientifically meaningful prediction.” So evolution is happening, they say. They also say there is no way to know. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: Ancient wild ox genome reveals complex cow ancestry The ancestry of domesticated cattle proves more complex than previously thought, reports a paper published in the open access journal Genome Biology. … The team of researchers discovered clear evidence of breeding between wild British aurochs and early domesticated cattle. David MacHugh, senior author on the study from the School of Agriculture and Food Science at University College Dublin, said: “Our results show the ancestors of modern British and Irish breeds share more genetic similarities with this ancient specimen than other European cattle. This suggests that early British farmers may have restocked their domesticated herds with wild aurochs.” More. Rob Sheldon writes, What is being done in this paper is Read More ›

From Business Insider: The 15 most compelling scientific findings that suggest aliens are real Beyond Europa is Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which scientists confirmed this month houses a giant, global ocean beneath its icy outer shell. Like Europa, Enceladus’ ocean is an ideal place where life beyond Earth could live. … The condos are going fast, we hear. Free central air. Aw shuddup. This is your own fault. You wouldn’t pay to download a good film and you are too lazy to scrummage around YouTube. Oh well, there is always this: But surely we can’t conjure an entire advanced civilization? and How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there? to pick apart. See you tomorrow. Read More ›

From Nature: Beall told Nature that he stands by his decision and that he has received dozens of e-mails from the scientific community outlining bad practices at Frontiers. Beall names some controversies that he says helped raise concerns about the Frontiers journals. These include a Frontiers in Psychology paper suggesting that conspiracy theorists do not believe in climate change and a Frontiers in Public Health paper raising questions about the link between HIV and AIDS. Both ignited Internet firestorms on publication. More. Real concerns? Backlash against open access publishing? Floor’s open. Re conspiracy theorists: It’s what they do believe in that—one would think—would be of more interest.

The last time we heard from evolutionary psychologist David Barash, he was fronting an anti-ID theory. You’d think he’d have enough trouble at home. In a world where social sciences are racing to the bottom, evolutionary psychology is leading the race. Look, there is a world of science out there, and if these guys would rather spin Tales from the Savannah, what are we supposed to do about it? Too bad if the Large Hadron Collider and the Pluto flyby got in their way. Now we learn from Barash at Aeon: Many scientific findings run counter to common sense and challenge our deepest assumptions about reality: the fact that even the most solid objects are composed at the subatomic level of mostly Read More ›

From The Scientist : Stressed male mice can pass on an abnormal stress response to their offspring via microRNAs found in sperm, a study shows. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania led by Tracy Bale have now demonstrated that an increase in a group of microRNAs (miRNAs) in sperm from stressed mice can lead to altered stress response in adult offspring. The work, published today (October 19) in PNAS, shows that simultaneously injecting nine miRNAs into mouse zygotes recapitulates the changes found in the offspring of stressed mice. “I think it’s a fine paper [and a] well-designed study,” said Michael Skinner, who studies epigenetic inheritance at Washington State University and was not involved in the study. “It shows a very Read More ›

At least, translated from Newspeak, that’s what this science PR seems to be saying: From ScienceDaily: Advances in genetic studies of birds are changing ornithology research Because high-throughput sequencing data looks at many genes instead of just a few, it makes it easier to identify very subtle genetic differences between populations, such as the genetics underlying small differences in plumage patterns between different subspecies of Wilson’s Warbler. It can also provide a fresh look at the genetic changes that occur in “hybrid zones,” where the ranges of closely related species overlap and members of the species breed freely with each other, such as where Black-capped and Carolina Chickadees meet in Pennsylvania. The process of one species splitting into two, such Read More ›

Nothing to do with the state of the evidence. Still, Ridley’s new evolution book maddens the reviewer: From a New Scientist review of science writer Matt Ridley’s new book, The Evolution of Everything: How a creationist instinct stops us seeing evolution everywhere FOR most of history, humans were instinctive creationists. Faced with the intricate perfection of an eye or a wing, they jumped to the conclusion that it was designed by an intelligent creator, aka God. Then along came Darwin and proved the obvious wrong. The appearance of design is an illusion; biological order arises by slow, undirected trial-and-error coupled with natural selection, aka evolution. Bu the evidence simply isn’t showing that Darwin’s mechanism Darwinism (natural selection acting on random Read More ›

From Reason: Epidemiology Makes Astrology Look Respectable Earlier this year, a review article in the Annals of Internal Medicine reported that among other bad outcomes found in a bunch of mostly case-control studies that sitting all day at a desk job increased your risk of dying with a hazard ratio of 1.22 and 95 percent confidence interval of 1.090 to 1.410. Time to get a desk with an attached treadmill. Well, maybe not. Last week, a new study in the International Journal of Epidemiology that took into account the sitting habits of a cohort of British subjects for 16 years reported: Sitting time was not associated with all-cause mortality risk. The results of this study suggest that policy makers and Read More ›

From PBS: Are the Laws of Physics Really Universal? As far as physicists can tell, the cosmos has been playing by the same rulebook since the time of the Big Bang. But could the laws have been different in the past, and could they change in the future? Might different laws prevail in some distant corner of the cosmos? “It’s not a completely crazy possibility,” says Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech … No, it is not. But how do we define a “completely crazy possibility”? As between “O’Leary’s late uncle Brian created the universe” all the way across the spectrum to “The theoretical particle, the Higgs boson, exists, but not where we expected to find it, ” where Read More ›

Here’s a discussion between theologian Michael Chaberek, O.P. and Joseph E. Gorra at the Evangelical Philosophical Society site, on Chaberek’s new book  Catholicism and Evolution (2015): What do you find to be the leading historical and historiographical challenges regarding the ‘story of evolution’ among Catholic leadership and theology? Immediately after Darwin presented his theory, the vast majority of Catholic scholars opposed Darwinian ideas. Today, those scholars who accept “some form of macroevolution” and think that this is theology’s way to go try to diminish that initial opposition. Moreover the private documents of the Church from that period remained virtually unknown until 1997 when the Archives of the Holy Office where opened to researchers. What was learned? We have only recently learned how Read More ›

For Premier Christian Radio’s “Unbelievable?” program. Here: Note: Maybe God is the best explanation. But the formulation of the problem begs a whole bunch of questions we need to unpack in future years. Some of us don’t see how we can get anywhere until we get rid of the superstition of Darwinism, that random changes can produce vast masses of complex information. Much believed, never demonstrated. See Data Basic And if it were true, life forms would be coming into existence from lifeless matter all over. Never happens. The only argument I ever heard against that was the lame excuse that current life forms would expunge new ones. But wait, that means Darwinism probably didn’t happen in the past either. Read More ›

Pearcey i author of Finding Truth, and these podcasts touch on its themes: Are Humans Simply Robots? Nancy Pearcey on the “Free Will Illusion” and “Freeloading” from Religion: Nancy Pearcey on Materialism and Human Rights Well, robots gotta freeload, right? But wait! CAN they?

From the Interface Focus special issue: ‘Are there limits to evolution?’, organized by Simon Conway Morris, Jennifer F. Hoyal Cuthill and Sylvain Gerber: Introduction is Open access: Abstract The 11 contributions to this thematic volume touch on a large range of issues concerning the landscape of biological possibilities and the manner by which it may be traversed by evolving life forms. The contributors also consider how this landscape might be mapped by evolutionary biologists, with an emphasis on how one might identify the limits of such maps. While some agreements emerge on the question of limits on evolution, not surprisingly few contributors look towards the same horizons. Rather than providing a potted summary of the 11 papers, our aim in Read More ›