PaV

I recently read a news summary at Science 2.0. The same summary was also published by ScienceDaily. After reading the Science 2.0 article, I left a comment. I was interested in how others would react to my analysis of the news summary. Well, I went back to the site, and couldn’t find this news summary. It’s now almost two weeks since I posted my reaction, and it has simply disappeared from the site (you can still google and find it, but with no comment shown). The comment I left behind was along these lines: if, indeed, lakes are warming, then why—as the study indicates—do “ice-covered” lakes show the MOST warming?? You would think it would be the opposite, right. That’s Read More ›

New news summary out at Phys.Org about ant colonies and their castes. Seems as if this is all being controlled via epigenetic means. This is not good news if you’re a population geneticist: you know, phenotype changes because of changed allele frequencies (unless, of course, it doesn’t; and then you call it “phenotypic plasticity.” There’s nothing in life that a label can’t explain!!). Well, I guess not. A snippet: In the new findings, an interdisciplinary research team led by senior author Shelley Berger, PhD, from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with teams led by Juergen Liebig from Arizona State University and Danny Reinberg from New York University, found that caste-specific foraging behavior can Read More ›

I finished reading Provine’s last book a few weeks ago, and have meant to post something about it ever since.

In his book, The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy, Provine hammers his main thesis over and over: that is, that genetic changes in small populations occur not because of “random genetic drift,” but because of “inbreeding.”

The entire book is meant to show that the entirety of population genetics is based on a basic misunderstanding by Sewell Wright of what was happening in populations, a misunderstanding that allowed R.A. Fisher’s analysis to prevail, a model of alleles mutating around a specific gene location, or locus, which, IIRC, he called F.
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It is simply a matter of time before the Darwinists (I know they prefer “evolutionary biologists,” but evolution is not evolution without “Origin of Species”) will have to give up. Every day in labs around the world, more and more function is being found for “junk” DNA. This is a two-fold problem for the Darwinists. The first problem is that this is NOT what they predicted, even though, quite cavalierly, they say then never said any such thing. But, of course, we know better. Second, there’s the problem of “de novo” genes, and the solution for this is to look to so-called “junk” DNA as a potential template for these ‘new’ genes. If “junk” DNA is ‘neutral,’ then no problem; Read More ›

A new study is out here. They were studying epigenetic effects in planaria flatworms. Same planaria, three different “species”-level “heads” were regenerated. Of course, everything must have an “evoltuion-did-it” explanation; so, for the record, here it is: The ease with which a particular shape could be coaxed from a G. dorotocephala worm was proportional to the proximity of the target worm on the evolutionary timeline. The closer the two species were related, the easier it was to effect the change. This observation strengthens the connection to evolutionary history, suggesting that modulation of physiological circuits may be one more tool exploited by evolution to alter animal body plans. However, there is more to mull over: Working with Girardia dorotocephala – free-living Read More ›

Phys.Org has a new summary about a new finding regarding heterochromatin repair in the nucleus which involves the nuclear membrane. In their discussion, they make some interesting points: Previously, the nuclear membrane was thought to be mostly just a protective bubble around the nuclear material, with pores acting as channels to transport molecules in and out. But in a study published on October 26 in Nature Cell Biology, a research team led by Irene Chiolo documents how broken strands of a portion of DNA known as heterochromatin are dragged to the nuclear membrane for repair. The reason why we don’t experience thousands of cancers every day in our body is because we have incredibly efficient molecular mechanisms that repair the Read More ›

Here’s a news article about 400,000 antelopes dying off in a short period of time. Looks like it’s due to some sort of bacterial attack, though they’re not fully sure what caused this massive die-off. There’s lots of questions that come to mind. Here’s one or two: (1) How do we define the “fittest”? Are they the “strongest”, the “fastest”, the most “aggressive”? What are they? Maybe they’re the “weakest.” Maybe they were so weak that they couldn’t forage with the rest of the herds, and so stayed behind and didn’t get infected. So, how do we define “fitness” here? (2) In the annals of NS, no one has likely ever seen anything like this. The selection factor is 0.5 Read More ›

Here’s todays headscratcher from Phys.Org. It appears that to contrive a “mature” micro-RNA (mi-RNA), involved in gene regulation, the cell requires hundreds of kilobases of sequence. How odd. “Mature” mi-RNA’s are ~22 bases in length, and hundreds of thousand of nucleotide bases are needed (of primary-mi-RNA) to effect this ~22-nucleotide regulatory element? Here’s what they say: MicroRNAs are short noncoding RNAs that play critical roles in regulating gene expression in normal physiology and disease. . . . Although mature miRNAs are only ~22 nucleotides, their transcripts are up to hundreds of kilobases long. Primary miRNA transcripts, or pri-miRNAs, are quickly processed into mature miRNAs from hairpin structures located in the exons or introns of pri-miRNA transcripts. One remarkable feature of Read More ›

Here’s this snippet from a Phys.Org entry. The most remarkable part of it is that they link “cell-type” evolution to the repression of genes, making one wonder if all the necessary genes needed for all of life was somehow present in an original genome. Obviously there are problems with this thesis in terms of genome length and type, bacterial genomes being ciruclar, while animals generally have discrete chromosomes, but, it’s entirely possible that multi-cellular life represents a complete break with bacteria, and that what we’re seeing here is the ultimate in “front-loading,” where everything is in place, yet, per Behe’s first law of adaptation, we see “loss of function” leading to novelties. And, it should be a little troubling, if Read More ›

I recommend the entire article from the Heartland organization (www.heartland.org), but the below is very powerful stuff: Climate change has become a powerful political force for many reasons. First, it is universal; we are told everything on Earth is threatened. Second, it invokes the two most powerful human motivators: fear and guilt. We fear driving our car will kill our grandchildren, and we feel guilty for doing it. Third, there is a powerful convergence of interests among key elites that support the climate “narrative.” Environmentalists spread fear and raise donations; politicians appear to be saving the Earth from doom; the media has a field day with sensation and conflict; science institutions raise billions in grants, create whole new departments, and Read More ›

I don’t know if someone has seen this item on Phys.Org, or not. One of my most strident objections to global warming is the failure of climate models to actually ‘model’ what temperature has done over the last twenty years. Here’s this simple program that gets it right. As one of the authors put it: Dr Matt Briggs, “Statistician to the Stars”, said: “A high-school student with a pocket scientific calculator can now use this remarkable model and obtain credible estimates of global warming simply and quickly, as well as acquiring a better understanding of how climate sensitivity is determined. As a statistician, I know the value of keeping things simple and the dangers in thinking that more complex models Read More ›

I was reading an exchange of emails that took place between noted physcist (and skeptical warmer) Freeman Dyson and his interlocutor, Steve Conner, of the Independent of London. To my eye, Dyson is spot on in his critical thinking. But what most caught my eye was his analysis between the ‘experts’ and the general public that seems to have occurred. I think it serves as a good understanding of where Darwinism/neo-Darwinism now stands in academia. When I was in high-school in England in the 1930s, we learned that continents had been drifting according to the evidence collected by Wegener. It was a great mystery to understand how this happened, but not much doubt that it happened. So it came as Read More ›

Here’s an abstract from the Journal of Physics tackling the issue of “knottiness” in polymeric chains. Notice that the authors were able to “design” sequences which either knotted up all the time or did not knot, using polymer lengths of 500. Now, I wonder what the odds of arriving at a sequence which does “not knot” randomly? (1 in 20^500) And, if you couldn’t get beyond the knotting up of a protein molecule, then how could life continue? Everyday experience shows that strings easily knot. Preventing this requires careful folding or winding when stowing away. Molecular ropes, like polymer chains, can suffer the same fate, but that is not true for biopolymers like proteins and DNA; despite their complex folded Read More ›

This is from a new study published in Nature Communications, and talked about at Phys.Org. Oh, how difficult it is these days to be an “intellectually fulfilled” neo-Darwinian: Humans don’t like being alone, and their genes are no different. Together we are stronger, and the two versions of a gene – one from each parent – need each other. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin have analysed the genetic makeup of several hundred people and decoded the genetic information on the two sets of chromosomes separately. In this relatively small group alone they found millions of different gene forms. The results also show that genetic mutations do not occur randomly in the two parental chromosome Read More ›

I’m reading Jim Baggott’s book, Farewell to Reality, which criticizes the direction that modern science is now taking. He wants to demonstrate what “real” science should look like, and what is instead catching the attention of modern physicists. I wrote about this sort of stuff over two years ago, at about the same time as Baggott’s book was coming out, but coming from a physicist himself, it is better said in his words. He writes: In 2003, theorists Shamir Kachru, Renata Kallosh, Andrei Linde and Sandip Trivedi worked out the number of different Calabi-Yau shapes that are theoretically possible. This number is determined by the number of ‘holes’ each shape can possess, up to a theoretical maximum of about five Read More ›