Denyse O'Leary

From: David Coppedge Message: Get your own sun Recently fired NASA mission specialist Dave Coppedge* wonders whether, given the constraints, the idea of a circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ), the region where life might be possible, is too simplistic. Before listing the many constraints, he quotes lead researcher Rene Heller: “If you want to find a second Earth, it seems that you need to look for a second Sun.” * Fired mainly for being a Christian, it seems, that is, a member of a community famous worldwide for abandoning its own to persecution. Oh, by the way, here is an interesting Kepler find: Two planets sharing an orbit. Me, I’m waiting for the video footage of a planetary traffic jam.

JonathanM recently noted that Francis Collins appears to have changed his mind on junk DNA in his new book, The Language of Life , from what he said in The Language of God. I looked up what Francis Collins had to say re junk DNA in The Language of God, in his own right, and here it is: Darwin’s theory predicts that mutations that do not affect function, (namely, those located in “junk DNA” ) will accumulate steadily over time. Mutations in the coding region of genes, however, are expected to be observed less frequently, and only a rare such event will provide a selective advantage and be retained during the evolutionary process.” That is exactly what is observed.” (pp. Read More ›

If this isn’t a hoax, it is a rarely sighted genuine effort to “teach creationism in the schools”, as opposed to an attempt to replace the Beard Almighty with some/any kind of science thinking about evolution:

Still, when asked about adding creationism to the curriculum, Lake Zurich School Board candidate Doug Goldberg said to the Daily Herald interviewers, “I’m a good, God-fearing American and the answer is ‘Yes.'”- “Suburban School District Candidates Believe Creationism Should Be Taught” (HuffPo, 2 28 11)

Well, does Mr. Goldberg think that Francis “junk DNA yes?/no?” Collins and the infinite variety of folk over at Biologos (= anything but evident design) are not God-fearing?

Heck, more “God” yatters out of those guys than ever did out of little old Catholic me. The trouble with the Christian Darwinists is that they have way more God than evidence.

And aren’t most of the Thumbsmen and Darwinoid trolls Americans*, while not God-fearing (and I am no judge of whether they are “good”)? Read More ›

First Things first thunkit? No, but is among the first to catch on. I see where, at their “First Thoughts,” blog, Joe Carter has picked up on Raymond Tallis’ outing of “Darwinitis”of the mind, in New Statesman. Tallis’s punctures into the balloons of neuro-this and neuro-that and “evolutionary psychology” resulted in interesting comments. It also got picked up at Arts and Letters Daily, billed as

Brain-science enthusiasts promise a more peaceful and prosperous world. Great, right? Maybe not. Raymond Tallis punctures neuromania…

Since the recent death of its point man, Denis “literary Darwinism” Dutton, it may now be possible to name nonsense as such and get picked up there much more readily.

If you want to see the type of thing Tallis is skewering:

Neuro-this (How evolution and neurology explain why people voted for Sarah Palin … ) Read More ›

tjm, here, comments on crickets’ 100 million years of stability:

Interesting isn’t it? Evolution can explain any result at all. It explains stasis over 100 million of years and it explains change over 100 million years. As they say, a theory that explains anything, explains nothing. Living fossils should falsify evolution. Unchanged fossils, like this one, that are supposedly ancient, should falsify evolution, but no, it gets twisted into evidence for evolution.

Hmmm. Not sure if that’s quite fair.

Stasis, where demonstrated, shows that there is no consistent “force” driving evolution.* Evolution happens where there is pressure for it and it is possible; where there is no pressure, the result is stasis, and where there is pressure but evolution is not possible, the result is extinction.

In this respect, evolution can be contrasted with the rise of warmer molecules in the atmosphere over colder ones. We can explain many things, even about as uncertain a process as the weather, just by knowing that this process will always be observed, anywhere that it is not hindered. Evolution is not like that. It need not happen and usually does not happen.

However, many literary artists whom students will (should) study in school, like playwright George Bernard Shaw, believed in Evolution, a driving force, ever onward and upward, etc. These beliefs can be inspirational, but can also do considerable harm, especially when people conclude (as they do) that they have now found science evidence for their own superiority to their neighbours. Teaching evolution based on the general picture of the evidence would help counter that tendency.

It ought to be obvious to everyone who is not Read More ›

A friend writes to say that he has a “very anti-Christian friend” who seems to have gotten herself high on “evolution” (= a fool for Dawkins). She wanted to know if any of my books would help. I recommended this one and this one, but ended by saying Re evolution: Do reassure your friend that it is okay to be an atheist and doubt current accounts of evolution. Many now do. Reviewing current accounts of evolution is like watching sausages get made, and hearing the details spelled out. It could throw you off meat altogether or else cause you to be much more selective in what you consume.

From New Scientist, we learn “Meteorite cargo could solve origin-of-life riddle” (01 March 2011) Andy Coghlan because A chemical vital for life on Earth may have arrived ready-made from space. Unexpectedly, a chondritic meteorite has been found to contain large amounts of ammonia, a nitrogen-rich chemical needed to form the basic building blocks of life, including proteins, DNA and RNA. Just how early Earth acquired sufficient ammonia for life processes has been a puzzle because the gas is destroyed by sunlight, and the assumed early environment didn’t favour ammonia production. However, some enterprising researchers exposed chondritic meteorite dust to water at 300 ̊C, and then compressed it beneath 100 megapascals of pressure, to mimic early Earth conditions. The ammonia, they Read More ›

Yes, apparently, the cricket has carved out new territory in sheer conservatism:

A fossil found in northeastern Brazil confirmed that the splay-footed cricket of today has at least a 100-million-year-old pedigree.Researchers have discovered the 100 million-year-old ancestor of a group of large, carnivorous, cricket-like insects that still live today in southern Asia, northern Indochina and Africa. The new find, in a limestone fossil bed in northeastern Brazil, corrects the mistaken classification of another fossil of this type and reveals that the genus has undergone very little evolutionary change since the Early Cretaceous Period, a time of dinosaurs just before the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana.

[ … ]

Although the fossil is distinct from today’s splay-footed crickets, its general features differ very little, Heads said, revealing that the genus has been in a period of “evolutionary stasis” for at least the last 100 million years.

– (ScienceDaily, Feb. 4, 2011)

The paper is free online at open access journal ZooKeys. While we don’t know for sure, the explanation seems to be that the cricket could always find a habitat that let it just go on being what it is. If I were a teacher, I’d love a recent find like this, to demonstrate that evolution doesn’t necessarily just happen; something pushes it.

But apparently, findings like this are not to be taught to students in Texas. According to the local Darwin lobby, Read More ›

We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how evolution can act…on evolution, yielding mechanisms that allow both adaptation and heritability within the course of a lifetime. And such paradigm shifts almost always have societal consequences. Manel Esteller shows that epigenetics also impacts the “dark genome” in a way that may improve cancer diagnostics. So says Andrew D. Ellington in “Epigenetics and Society: Did Erasmus Darwin foreshadow the tweaking of his grandson’s paradigm?”(The Scientist, Volume 25 | Issue 3 | Page 14). He means, roughly, a revival of Lamarckism, the idea that life forms can acquire genetic information from their environment as well as through Darwin’s natural selection acting on random mutation. Why that was Read More ›

We learned recently that “Clay-Armored Bubbles May Have Formed First Protocells: Minerals Could Have Played a Key Role in the Origins of Life” (ScienceDaily, Feb. 7, 2011): A team of applied physicists at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Princeton, and Brandeis have demonstrated the formation of semipermeable vesicles from inorganic clay.The research, published online in the journal Soft Matter, shows that clay vesicles provide an ideal container for the compartmentalization of complex organic molecules. The authors say the discovery opens the possibility that primitive cells might have formed inside inorganic clay microcompartments. They expand, “The conclusion here is that small fatty acid molecules go in and self-assemble into larger structures, and then they can’t come out,” says Read More ›

Raymond Tallis, nearly thirty years in clinical neuroscience, diagnoses the problem here (“A mind of one’s own”, 24 February 2011): The republic of letters is in thrall to an unprecedented scientism. The word is out that human consciousness – from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self – is identical with neural activity in the human brain and that this extraordinary metaphysical discovery is underpinned by the latest findings in neuroscience. Given that the brain is an evolved organ, and, as the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, the neural explanation of human consciousness demands a Darwinian interpretation of our behaviour. The differences between Read More ›

Ardi is a 4.4-million-year-old fossil female, considered a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, was bipedal but reported to have lived in woodlands. That threw into doubt the great savannah myth of human origins. Not long after, came the “backlash”, as writer Jill Neimark puts it, when other authorities contended that she did live on the savannah, but in the meantime, Terry Harrison, a paleoanthropologist at New York University, questioned in Nature whether Ardi was even a member of the human lineage or just an ape “among the tangled branches” of a much larger bush. And University of Toronto paleoanthropologist David Begun also had doubts. “Ardi may be an early side branch of hominids that is not directly related to humans,” Read More ›

Scientists Steer Car With the Power of Thought ScienceDaily (Feb. 21, 2011) — You need to keep your thoughts from wandering, if you drive using the new technology from the AutoNOMOS innovation labs of Freie Universität Berlin. The computer scientists have developed a system making it possible to steer a car with your thoughts. Using new commercially available sensors to measure brain waves — sensors for recording electroencephalograms (EEG) — the scientists were able to distinguish the bioelectrical wave patterns for control commands such as “left,” “right,” “accelerate” or “brake” in a test subject. More here. Here’s the vid. We are, no kidding, advised not to try it at home. A friend comments, “Additional support for field theories of consciousness: Read More ›

Here’s the abstract of a just-published paper: Nature 470, 438 (24 February 2011) doi:10.1038/470438b NASA’s Kepler mission to find habitable planets orbiting Sun-like stars has turned up its first rocky planet. The project uses the Kepler space telescope to identify extrasolar planets by watching for dips in the intensity of light from up to 170,000 target stars. Natalie Batalha of San Jose State University in California and her group spotted Kepler 10b, which is about 4.56 times the mass of Earth. Although similar in size to Earth, its orbit lasts just 0.84 days, making it likely that the planet is a scorched, waterless world with a sea of lava on its starlit side. Despite the pop science media’s tendency to Read More ›

As Globe & Mail medical reporter Carolyn Abraham tells it (February 25, 2011):

Since James Van Gundia Neel proposed it almost 50 years ago, the thrifty-gene hypothesis has reigned as the dominant explanation for soaring rates of obesity and diabetes among many aboriginal groups. Native communities where diabetes didn’t exist in the first half of the 20th century had, by the end of it, the world’s highest prevalence, with Arizona’s Pima Indians in first place, followed by the Nauru islanders of Micronesia and the Oji-Cree at Sandy Lake.Dr. Neel, an influential geneticist at the University of Michigan, felt that genes were partly to blame. He speculated that genetic traits among the world’s prehistoric hunter-gatherers enabled them to store calories during times of feast in order to survive in times of famine.

But with “the blessings of civilization,” he wrote, these thrifty genes had become hazardous baggage in a sedentary world of all feast and no famine, predisposing carriers to obesity and the diseases it brings.

His idea spread like an epidemic, embraced by everyone from public-health officials and policy-makers to the media and many aboriginal people themselves. Although never billed as more than a hypothesis, it came to be seen as fact – “a scientific axiom,” Dr. Hegele says, “dogma almost.”

But now, with obesity and diabetes shaping up to be a global pandemic, the theory appears to be dying – raising the prospect that prejudice more than proof gave it such a long life.

Why you should always be suspicious when you hear … what? Here’s what: When you hear any medical thesis whatever that is based on what “prehistoric hunter-gatherers” supposedly did.

You need to monitor three simple devices to track the growth of diabetes: Read More ›