News

Readers may recall that I (O’Leary for News) have been writing a series on how evolution can actually happen, and not the bumf people are forced to pay taxes for (Darwinism). (Evolution does not necessarily produce really big changes, but that isn’t the same thing as saying it doesn’t happen.) Anyway,here’s one theory that makes some sense: — But some entities in nature are not material at all: the number 7 comes to mind. Some philosophers have argued that we can construct a theory of items grouped by sevens without using a concept like 7. But whatever advantages these philosophers’ suggestion may offer, it does not represent what people do. We have an immaterial concept of 7 that organizes items and Read More ›

From ScienceDaily,: The virus takes the form of a roughly spherical particle, approximately 0.6 μm long, containing a genome of approximately 650,000 base pairs coding for more than 500 proteins. Most of these proteins bear no resemblance to those of its Siberian predecessor, Pithovirus sibericum. Furthermore, unlike Pithovirus, which only requires the cytoplasmic resources of its cellular host to multiply, Mollivirus sibericum uses the cell nucleus to replicate in the amoeba, which makes it as host-dependent as most “small” viruses. This strategy, and other specific traits, such as a deficiency in certain key enzymes that allow synthesis of its DNA building blocks, mean that Mollivirus sibericum is more similar to the common viral types, including human pathogens such as Adenovirus, Read More ›

First, the sensible stuff: From BioLogic Institute’s  Ann Gauger Homo naledi as Spin Detector: In reading the coverage of Homo naledi, as the species is called now, it seems clear to me that the spin put on the actual bones depends on the assumptions of the writers. What do I mean? Bones can only tell us so much. The rest is a matter of interpretation, and one’s point of view inevitably tends to color that interpretation. Let me give two examples: The first example is how writers interpret skull size. H. naledi had a small brain compared to ours, about the size of a chimpanzee’s. To some writers that seems to indicate the probable lack of high levels of cognition. Read More ›

Closing off our religion coverage for the week: Look, this is really bad news for Dawkins Enterprises : Dawkins-ism isn’t selling the way it once did. Get this, via  Nature, A curious stasis underlies Dawkins’s thought. His biomorphs are grounded in 1970s assumptions. Back then, with rare exceptions, each gene specified a protein and each protein was specified by a gene. The genome was a linear text — a parts list or computer program for making an organism —insulated from the environment, with the coding regions interspersed with “junk”. Today’s genome is much more than a script: it is a dynamic, three-dimensional structure, highly responsive to its environment and almost fractally modular. Genes may be fragmentary, with far-flung chunks of DNA Read More ›

Well, it is more or less the same subject The last time we agreed was that New York Times’s David Brooks is a dreadful novelist. His stinker was an “evolutionary psychology” novel, a description which principally guarantees ballast under the thinking person’s canoe shed. Anyway, Myers says, I must have been taking a nap a couple of years ago. I just found this interesting discussion of EP by a psychologist, and I agree very much with it. Evolutionary psychologists believe that the human mind works much like the body… that it is an information-processing system, with pre-specified psychological programs (or environmentally-triggered ones), adapted much like the rest of the body, to meet specific problems in our … More. What’s mainly Read More ›

Here’s the abstract: There is a huge variety of RNA- and DNA-containing entities that multiply within and propagate between cells across all kingdoms of life, having no cells of their own. Apart from cellular organisms these entities (viroids, plasmids, mobile elements and viruses among others) are the only ones with distinct genetic identities but which are not included in any traditional tree of life. We suggest to introduce or, rather, revive the distinct category of acellular organisms, Acytota, as an additional, undeservedly ignored full-fledged kingdom of life. Acytota are indispensable players in cellular life and its evolution. The six traditional kingdoms (Cytota) and Acytota together complete the classification of the biological world (Biota), leaving nothing beyond. But philosopher of biology Read More ›

This pdf letter to Nature journal Cell Research is free: Paternally contributed centrioles exhibit exceptional persistence in *C. elegans *embryos If you want background re centrioles. This door is for Darwin trolls. So far as we know, noise limits are not currently in force. See also: Talk to the fossils: Let’s see what they say back

From Mental Floss: 10. YOUR FIRST MICROBIOME CONTACT WAS IN UTERO. For years, science considered the uterus of a pregnant woman a sterile environment, but new research published in Science Translational Medicine revealed that placentas have a unique microbiome that is different from any other part of the body (though most similar to the microbiome of the mouth). Contact with their mothers’ placentas, and the umbilical cord that attaches them, offers babies their first exposure to the bacteria that will soon colonize and support their own small bodies. Understanding this particular microbiome may also help researchers learn more to treat in utero infections and preterm births. More. By contrast, the space alien certainly exists, according to tax-funded sources, but has Read More ›

Well, we thought so. But it wasn’t something we could really say in a world where Bimbette, looking as concerned as her current hairstyle makes possible, interviews a Darwin-in-the-schools lobbyist, knowing that no one will question the intelligence of either party as long as the bimbette appears to take her interview subjects seriously. Okay, seriously: Further to Questions re recent Naledi human evolution find (some relate to the quality and sponsorship of the work), here’s Jeffrey H. Schwartz’s view (he’s the skeptic re homo habilis): What to do? As I recently advocated in the journal Science, it’s about time paleoanthropologists acknowledged what a taxonomic and undefinable mess the genus Homo has become, and restudy the human fossil record without preconceived Read More ›

Further to the recent Homo naledi find in South Africa, just some stuff to think about: Some people wrote to ask, why Berger and his colleagues published their Homo neledi findings in an open access journal (eLIFE) rather than a staider one like Nature or Science. Well, we are not mind readers, so … one problem noted might be undated fossils. Anyway, their story is getting air via National Geographic (“Artist Gurche spent some 700 hours reconstructing the head from bone scans, using bear fur for hair”). And the concern is no surprise as Lee Berger is an NG explorer in residence. And he is no stranger to controversy with colleagues: Paleoanthropologists often take years, sometimes decades, to publish their Read More ›

It would be so much more fun. From ScienceDaily: Earth’s extremes point the way to extraterrestrial life: Exploring the limits of life in the universe NASA’s discovery last month of 500 new planets near the constellations Lyra and Cygnus, in the Milky Way Galaxy, touched off a storm of speculation about alien life. In a recent article in the journal Life, Schulze-Makuch draws upon what is known about Earth’s most extreme lifeforms and the environments of Mars and Titan, Saturn’s moon, to paint a clearer picture of what life on other planets could be like. His work was supported by the European Research Council. “If you don’t explore the various options of what life may be like in the universe, Read More ›

From O’Leary for News’s night job: Should kids fall asleep in front of the screen? It’s not good for a kid to know some screen artefact better than his own neighbours. People may betray us, AI can’t. The AI program for lonely people is a great listener. As if. Can high tech recreate destroyed treasures? Cultural treasures throughout the Middle East are in danger from Islamist fanatics. The unreal, unhealthy world kids can see online. That parents may never have heard of. No wonder Steve Jobs was low tech at home. Ashley Madison may be doomed; others not Other sites’ fate probably depends on how important users consider fidelity to be. Ashley Madison hack: Non-cheaters, listen too. Victims may also Read More ›

Friends at Pos-Darwinista (Brazil) offer all current Homo naledi papers here: – Human evolution: The many mysteries of Homo naledi Geological and taphonomic context for the new hominin species Homo naledi from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa Legacy medium New York Times: The new hominin species was announced on Thursday by an international team of more than 60 scientists led by Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist who is a professor of human evolution studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The species name, H. naledi, refers to the cave where the bones lay undisturbed for so long; “naledi” means “star” in the Read More ›

Surprised? (Maybe you need the public guardian for your affairs if you are.) Here’s the abstract of the article you must pay for: Almost 300 years ago, Linnaeus defined our genus Homo (and its species Homo sapiens) with the noncommittal words nosce te ipsum (know thyself) (1). Since then, fossil and molecular biology studies have provided insights into its evolution, yet the boundaries of both the species and the genus remain as fuzzy as ever, new fossils having been rather haphazardly assigned to species of Homo, with minimal attention to details of morphology. Here’s the lowdown for free: The limits of our genus Homo have long been controversial. One problem is that evolutionary biologists sometimes try to shoehorn un-human-like fossils Read More ›

  Further to: Life continues to ignore what evolution experts say, where we discovered that big (plausible) changes can be produced through hybridization, we also learn, from ScienceDaily: Ancient hybridization key to domestic dog’s origin, wolf conservation efforts There are four to five wild species of Canis in North America, according to the overview. In addition to the well-known grey wolf and coyote, there is a secondary wild population of the domestic dog known as the Carolina dog, plus a few populations of hybrid origin with different proportions of wolf and coyote genes. Two of these hybrid populations, the red wolf of the eastern U.S. and the Algonquin wolf–also known as the Eastern or timber wolf–of southeastern Canada, have already Read More ›