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From Nature: Geneticists meet to work out why the rate of change in the genome is so hard to pin down. Wouldn’t that have some effect on the believability of time scales for human evolution?: A slower molecular clock worked well to harmonize genetic and archaeological estimates for dates of key events in human evolution, such as migrations out of Africa and around the rest of the world1. But calculations using the slow clock gave nonsensical results when extended further back in time — positing, for example, that the most recent common ancestor of apes and monkeys could have encountered dinosaurs. Reluctant to abandon the older numbers completely, many researchers have started hedging their bets in papers, presenting multiple dates Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Arthropods (they of a hard outer-skeleton, like crustaceans, spiders, and insects) very often have larval phases that are completely different from the adults — such as caterpillars and butterflies. Allegedly, one of the reasons crabs have been so successful is that their larval life habits (diet, locomotion, etc.) are decoupled from their adult life habits. Most ancient fossils display a suite of “primitive” features, consistent with their early evolution and allowing them to be distinguished from their modern descendants. But the fossil described in this paper, despite its age, possesses a very modern morphology, indistinguishable from many crab larvae living today. “It’s amazing, but if we did not know this was a 150-million-year-old fossil, we might think that Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Concept of hibernation challenged: Bat species is first mammal found hibernating at constant warm temperatures (But then, as Thomas Nagel asks, What is it like to be a bat anyway?) The researchers monitored the activity of the bats during this period and found that they neither fed nor drank, even on warm nights when other bat species were active in the same caves. The researchers used heat-sensitive transmitters to measure the bats’ skin temperature in the caves. Then in the laboratory, they measured the bats’ metabolic rates and evaporative water loss at different ambient temperatures. The bats’ average skin temperature in the caves was found to be about 71.6̊F. Both bat species reached their lowest metabolic rates at Read More ›

They modulate gene expressions over cells’ lifetimes. From The Scientist : Not only do telomeres protect the ends of chromosomes, they also modulate gene expression over cells’ lifetimes. … New work led by Jerry W. Shay and Woodring Wright of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas demonstrates that telomeres are more than just buffer zones. The team found that as chromosomes fold within the nucleus, telomeres come into contact with faraway genes and alter their expression. As telomeres shorten, which happens with aging, chromosome looping and gene-expression patterns change. “I’m delighted with this evidence that the [telomere] sequence may actually be doing some regulation and that the decrease of the sequence in some cells may drastically affect Read More ›

What if it is the other way around? Just wondering, that’s all. Anyway, from New Scientist: “HOW on earth does the brain enable mind?” This line from the preface to Tales from Both Sides of the Brain by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga serves as the overarching question for his latest book. And it’s also a question that permeates The Future of the Brain, a collection of essays edited by psychologist Gary Marcus and neuroscientist Jeremy Freeman. About Future of the Brain we learn, The technologies will generate lots of data, and neuroscientists will need large-scale simulations and brain models to make sense of it. Editors Marcus and Freeman say that we had better get used to seeing the brain as an Read More ›

Here: ENV is pleased to share the following excerpt from Nancy Pearcey’s new book,Finding Truth: Five Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes. A Fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, Pearcey is a professor and scholar-in-residence at Houston Baptist University and editor-at-large of The Pearcey Report. She is author of the 2005 ECPA Gold Medallion Award winner Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity and other books. A major way to test a philosophy or worldview is to ask: Is it logically consistent? Internal contradictions are fatal to any worldview because contradictory statements are necessarily false. “This circle is square” is contradictory, so it has to be false. An especially damaging form of contradiction Read More ›

And presumably, wood-burning stoves? Which he thinks are just like religion: And yet, the reality of our situation is scientifically unambiguous: If you care about your family’s health and that of your neighbors, the sight of a glowing hearth should be about as comforting as the sight of a diesel engine idling in your living room. It is time to break the spell and burn gas—or burn nothing at all. Of course, if you are anything like my friends, you will refuse to believe this. And that should give you some sense of what we are up against whenever we confront religion. Actually, most people, religious or otherwise, just plain have more fun than we suspect the average new atheist Read More ›

Not a chance. But here hack Ben Thomas unpacks the problem it creates: The trait that distinguishes scienceyness from actual science is that it’s got nothing to do with the scientific method at all. … Sciencey headlines are pre-packaged cultural tokens that can be shared and reshared without any investment in analysis or critical thought?—?as if they were sports scores or fashion photos or poetry quotes?—?to reinforce one’s aesthetic self-identification as a “science lover.” One’s actual interest doesn’t have to extend beyond the headline itself. And that, right there, is the difference between a love of science, and a love of scienceyness. Some suggestions: First, science journalists should lose the pom poms. Covering science is no different from covering sports Read More ›

That’s the claim in this ScienceDaily piece: Recently released research on human evolution has revealed that species of early human ancestors had significant differences in facial features. Now, a University of Missouri researcher and her international team of colleagues have found that these early human species also differed throughout other parts of their skeletons and had distinct body forms. The research team found 1.9 million-year-old pelvis and femur fossils of an early human ancestor in Kenya, revealing greater diversity in the human family tree than scientists previously thought. “What these new fossils are telling us is that the early species of our genus, Homo, were more distinctive than we thought. They differed not only in their faces and jaws, but Read More ›

Yes, if devolution is a big surprise. Here: The genus name, Aenigmatinea, (along with its common name) reflects the enigmatic nature of the moth’s morphology. The moth has an odd mixture of physical characters that made it difficult to place within an evolutionary framework: its wings and genitalia showed it to be primitive -– but how primitive? The most primitive moths have jaws, with one of the first steps in the evolution of advanced moths and butterflies being the development of a tongue. Aenigmatinea has neither – its mouth parts are almost entirely reduced. The solution to the puzzle was to rely on the moth’s DNA and compare its sequence to potential relatives. The answer was intriguing -– the moth’s closest Read More ›

Further to Junk DNA hires a PR firm (by the time you can’t tell the difference between Darwin’s elite followers and his trolls, you know something is happening): Rob Sheldon writes to say, There may be some very good reasons for onions to have large genomes. Let’s start with an analogy. My son says the computer game “Starcraft” will play on just about any old piece of computer hardware in the house. However, he tells me, when you go to download the game from the website, it takes up 15 GBytes of space. Evidently, in order to be compatible with older hardware, it has to use less CPU power–since the older machines were not as powerful. Much if not most Read More ›

From The Evolution Revolution by Lee Spetner: Much has been learned in the life sciences in the last several decades about how an organism can alter its genome to enable it to adapt to new environmental conditions. Transposable genetic elements were discovered some seventy years ago by Barbara McClintock (McClintock 1941, 1950, 1955, 1956, 1983), but they were initially dismissed by mainstream geneticists as spurious phenomena. McClintock pursued her research despite it being considered a backwater area, and eventually the importance of her work was recognized by the Nobel Prize committee in awarding her the Prize in Medicine in 1983. The transposable genetic elements she discovered have been subsequently revealed to be members of a class of genetic rearrangements that do Read More ›

Further to: Where did the term irreducible complexity originate, Michael “Forbidden Archeology” Cremo writes to say, Richard Thompson and I used the term “irreducible complexity” In our 1984 publication Origins. “Looking at the complex phenomena that confront any observer of the universe, scientists have decided to try a reductionistic approach. They say, ‘Let’s try to reduce everything to measurements and try to explain them by simple universal laws.’ But there is no logical reason for ruling out in advance alternative strategies for comprehending the universe, strategies that might involve laws and principles of irreducible complexity.” (p. 4) Drutakarma Dasa (Michael A. Cremo), Bhutatma Dasa (Austin Gordon), and Sadaputa Dasa (Richard L. Thompso) 1984. Origins: Higher Dimensions in Science. Los Angeles: Read More ›

Fights back. Well, that seems to be what’s happening. Further to: New York Times science writer defends junk DNA (Old concepts die hard, especially when they are value-laden as “junk DNA” has been—it has been a key argument for Darwinism), one of the conundrums on which the junk DNA folk rely heavily is the “onion test” (why does the onion have such a large genome?). Without waiting to answer the question, the junk DNA folk assume that that’s because most of it is junk. But let’s face it, when even Francis Collins, the original Christian Nobelist for Darwin, is abandoning ship, they really need to double down on that junk. From Evolution News & Views: What’s so striking about Zimmer’s Read More ›

Suzan Mazur’s The Origin of Life Circus continues with an interview with David Deamer, a serious origin of life researcher. One gets the sense that previous interviewee chemist Harry Lonsdale, founder and funder of the eponymous origin of life prize, was wedded to the idea that life must come about via Darwinian means. And that the second interviewee, physicist Larry Krauss— the go-to man for the Lonsdale origin of life prize—is something of a showman, though Darwin’s man at heart. In Mazur’s third chapter, we meet a genuine origin of life research scientist in UCal Santa Cruz David Deamer, president of ISSOL (origin of life society): Suzan Mazur: Freeman Dyson told me that the garbage bag world scenario probably went Read More ›