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From Quanta Magazine: Emerging data suggests the seemingly impossible — that mysterious new genes arise from “junk” DNA. Genes, like people, have families — lineages that stretch back through time, all the way to a founding member. That ancestor multiplied and spread, morphing a bit with each new iteration. For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that this was the primary way new genes were born — they simply arose from copies of existing genes. The old version went on doing its job, and the new copy became free to evolve novel functions. Certain genes, however, seem to defy that origin story. They have no known relatives, and they bear no resemblance to any other gene. They’re the Read More ›

One of biology’s most important concepts, no? From Pos-Darwinista: A lizard lineage which has evolved over the last 19 million years has helped scientists to re-think one of the most important concepts of modern biology. ‘Adaptive radiation’ is recognised as a pillar of evolutionary science. It describes the development of new biodiversity, and is triggered when a species encounters a new environment with plenty of available resources –this is called ‘ecological opportunity’. This single species then makes the most of these resources and multiplies rapidly into several new forms. When all these resources have been used up by new species, the process of biodiversity proliferation slows down dramatically. ‘Early-bursts’ of new species diversification have previously been seen as a central Read More ›

Further to Wikipedia is a reliable source. – yrs, Easter Bunny (“Controversial,” we repeatedly find, means only that some powerful lobby doesn’t like the information presented. It often has nothing to do with whether the information was accurately or adequately sourced), From ScienceDaily: On Wikipedia, politically controversial science topics vulnerable to information sabotage As society turns to Wikipedia for answers, students, educators, and citizens should understand its limitations when researching scientific topics that are politically charged. On entries subject to edit-wars, like acid rain, evolution, and global change, one can obtain — within seconds — diametrically different information on the same topic, say authors of a new report. Thank lazy students and lazier teachers. The authors note that as Wikipedia Read More ›

From RealClearScience: Wikipedia Wars: ‘Controversial’ Science Topics Are Edited More Often Than Uncontroversial Topics Blow us away again, will you? “Controversial,” we repeatedly find, means nothing more than that some powerful lobby doesn’t like the information presented. It often has nothing to do with whether the information was accurately or adequately sourced. Adam Wilson and Gene Likens, both based out of the University of Connecticut, were curious just how often this happens. So they downloaded the complete revision histories (dating from 2003 to 2012) of three politically controversial scientific topics — acid rain, global warming, and evolution — and compared them to four politically uncontroversial topics — heliocentrism, general relativity, continental drift, and the standard model in physics. They found Read More ›

As so often, we close our religion desk coverage for the week with the new atheists kindly supplying the entertainment, today via a polite atheist at Salon: Richard Dawkins’ moralizing atheism: Science, self-righteousness and militant belief – and disbelief Books by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens as well as Dawkins (they have been dubbed the ‘four horsemen of the non-apocalypse’) argued that religious faith could or should be brought to an end. Dawkins made himself the cheerleader of the ‘new atheists’ when he set up the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science to hasten the day. His book The God Delusion makes the argument at length, but it is his frequent sulphurous outbursts on Twitter that better Read More ›

A friend writes to note that in an age when skepticism of Darwinism is going mainstream, an establishment organization for Christians in science, American Scientific Affiliation, persists in acting as though design in nature is problematic. Referring to the org’s page on intelligent design, friend comments: It is ostensibly neutral, but it has some sort of quasi-Thomist quote from John Henry Newman that is supposed to demonstrate a theological failure of ID (which is totally bogus), and then some weak comparisons to William Paley, Bill Dembski, and then wraps up with two “thought” questions: the first asking for a gut reaction, the second reiterating the Newman quote; no logic required. Somehow science isn’t part of the ASA presentation, perhaps they Read More ›

We thought everyone knew that, but no matter. A reviewer for the Spectator, introducing Christophe Galfard’s The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond thinks he is surprising us by telling us that: Physicists have a nerve. I know one (I’ll call him Mark) who berates every religious person he meets, yet honestly thinks there exist parallel universes, exactly like our own, in which we all have two noses. He refuses to give any credit to Old Testament creation myths and of course sneers at the idea of transubstantiation. But, without any sense of shame, he insists in the same breath that humans are made from the fallout of exploded stars; that it is theoretically possible Read More ›

Tell Frank Tipler. 😉 Further to: Still chipping away at the sense of self (Such efforts are virtually always uninsightful. After all, they would be world news if they weren’t), Another current pop sci rave is uploading our consciousness to the Internet. We Will Never Be Able to Upload Our Consciousness says Ann Althouse, referring to this discussion between Daniel Kaufman and Massimo Pigliucci*: *Note: Pigliucci, blogging at Scientia Salon, was one of the The Altenberg 16 See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness? and What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness Follow UD News at Twitter!

From New Scientist: However, the more that is discovered about consciousness, the less obvious its role appears to be. For example, measurements of brain activity reveal that muscles and brain areas prepare for an action, such as a reaching out for an object, before we are even aware of our intention to make that movement. As noted by the psychologist Jeffrey Grey and others, consciousness simply occurs too late to affect the outcomes of the mental processes apparently linked to it. So where does this powerful sense of self come from? We suggest it is the product of our … More. (You have to pay to read the article.) Don’t pay; such efforts are virtually always uninsightful. After all, they Read More ›

Further to Origin of complex cells: Can energy create information? (Lane seems to think that energy can create or substitute for huge amounts of information. This seems wrong but it is apparently acceptable to The Scientist, Rob Sheldon, noting that reader’ thoughts were solicited, writes to say, In thermodynamics, we have the fundamental thermodynamic relation or defining equation dU = dQ + dW = TdS – PdV, where U=internal energy, Q=heat, W=work, T=temperature,S=entropy, P=pressure, V=volume, and “d” means “the change of”. In a closed system that is “reversible” , (no eddies, turbulence etc) and the volume doesn’t change much (incompressible like water), then we can eliminate the work and get the equation dQ = TdS, which is to say, the Read More ›

Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, recently interviewed Eibi Nevo (86), at Huffington Post. She notes that Nevo largely agrees with post-Darwinian James Shapiro, who, in James Barham’s words, stresses the importance of a key concept for understanding how both life and evolution work—“natural genetic engineering.” While the technical details of this phenomenon can be forbidding, the basic idea is simple enough. In a nutshell, the phrase “natural genetic engineering” refers to cells’ ability to “reprogram” their genomes as necessary—that is to say, purposefully—in order to meet changed environmental conditions. Among many other things, Nevo, Eviatar Nevo’s professional publications include 1,200 scientific articles and 24 books. He’s discovered hundreds of animal species, 77 different Dead Sea mushrooms, Read More ›

Honest.* Further to Researchers: Jumping genes make the Tree of Life a bush (For instance, a cuckoo can be more closely related to a hummingbird than a pigeon in a certain part of its genome, while the opposite holds true in another part), from Science News: Schoolroom kingdoms are taking a backseat to life’s supergroups Since a radial diagram based on 1990s genetics inspired a rush for tree-of-life tattoos, technical diagrams of life’s ancestral connections have been redrawn. And the simplified version of the tree of life memorized by schoolchildren for decades lags far behind what researchers depict today. … In the new vision — based on increasingly sophisticated genetic analyses — people and other animals are closer cousins to Read More ›

As opposed to a circle, or in the case of prokaryotes, a forest? Matchwood? From ScienceDaily: Less than a year ago, a consortium of some hundred researchers reported that the relationship between all major bird clades had been mapped out by analysing the complete genome of around 50 bird species. This included the exact order in which the various lineages had diverged. Since then, two of the members of the consortium, Alexander Suh and Hans Ellegren at the Uppsala University Evolutionary Biology Centre, have expanded upon this model by analysing the avian genome through a new method, which hinges on so-called ‘jumping genes’. Their results paint a partially contrasting picture of the kinship between the various species. … By using Read More ›

For fake reviews. Oops. Retraction Watch reports: This is officially becoming a trend: Springer is pulling another 64 articles from 10 journals after finding evidence of faked peer reviews, bringing the total number of retractions from the phenomenon north of 230. Given that there have been about 1,500 papers retracted overall since 2012, when we first reported on the phenomenon, faked reviews have been responsible for about 15% of all retractions in the past three years. This isn’t the first time Springer has faced the issue. As owner of the BioMed Central journals, it issued 43 retractions for faked reviews earlier this year. In a statement, the publisher explains how the latest round of retractions came to light:More. Is this, Read More ›

Go nuts watching that, and if you really like this sort of thing, also try: Note: We were going to do a cobra frite, but the cobra booked off sick again with tennis elbow. We then tried to get our esteemed readers another frog frite, but the frog was at the hairdressers when we called. So relax and be bewildered by the above. 😉