Biology

Staff writer Lesley Ciarula Taylor explains for Toronto Star readers “Why female red squirrels aren’t choosy about their mates”:

Guelph scientists have solved the puzzling question of why female squirrels are rampantly promiscuous, sleeping with an average of 10 males in one day.

It almost entirely depends on how many guys show up.

That’s the finding reported by University of Guelph researchers from their study of 85 female North American red squirrels. Female squirrels do not pass any specific mating tendencies (one, some, or many guys) on to their daughters.

“A lot of folks who have looked at this before looked at whether it’s good or bad for a squirrel to be promiscuous,” [lead investigator Eryn] McFarlane told the Star on Wednesday. “I wanted to look at whether it was genetic, regardless of whether it was good or bad.”

What she found is that risks and benefits don’t have much to do with how females behave.

[ … ]

This is the first study that says genetics or heredity have little to do with a female squirrel’s sex life.

Goodbye, selfish gene. Or, to put it in the vernacular, none of the ladies are chaste, but some are more chased than others. It depends on how many guy squirrels are around to chase them.

For the tale of how the Washington Post thought it had discovered natural selection among squirrels, go here.

Look, squirrels are, well, squirrelly, but anyway here’s the Abstract:

Read More ›

And look who’s talking, too:

Our theory of evolution has become one . . . which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it. It is thus `outside of empirical science’ but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. Ideas, either without basis or based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely simplified systems, have attained currency far beyond their validity. They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of us as part of our training. The cure seems to us not to be a discarding of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, but more scepticism about many of its tenets.

– L.C. Birch and P. Ehrlich Nature 214 (1967) 349-352

As usual, the abstract makes clear that we must not suppose that the authors mean the plain sense of their words: Read More ›

A friend of mine referred me to this article at superscholar.org about the recent 30th anniversary conference that The Center For Inquiry held in Los Angeles this past October. There seems to be a lot of disagreement among the influential in the movement advocating secular humanism.

Despite calls for unity at the conference, a significant amount of disagreement about where secular humanism needs to go was evident. During the last session, a sharp exchange occurred between the founder of The Center for Inquiry and The Counsel for Secular Humanism, Paul Kurtz, and Ron Lindsay, the current CEO and President of these organizations.

Kurtz, using the microphone set up for the audience, cited at length a recent LA Times article exposing a “rift within the Center for Inquiry.” “That rift” Kurtz said, quoting the article, “cracked open recently when Paul Kurtz, a founder of the secular humanist movement in America, was ousted as chairman of the Center for Inquiry, an organization of the Counsel for Secular Humanism.  One factor leading to this ouster, was the perception that Kurtz was on the — and this is quoting Thomas Flynn — was on the mellowing side of the movement.” Unlike some secular humanists who envision the destruction of religion, Kurtz advocates for accommodation with religion.

Kurtz stated that he had been censored for the first time in his life, and that this was through the CFI, an organization he founded, in that they refused to publish his letter of resignation as well as his neo-humanist statement of secular principles and values. He said that his ouster resulted in the “worst two years of my life.” Toni Van Pelt, who had opened the Office of Public Policy for the CFI, defended Kurtz and lamented his censorship and forced resignation by Lindsay. This was followed with simultaneous booing and applause from the audience. Several panelists, including Jennifer Michael Hecht and Sean Faircloth, left the stage during this exchange.

Read More ›

Education Week has this article expounding on the fruitfulness of campaigns designed to educate our youth in the theory of evolution.

When a federal court in 2005 rejected an attempt by the Dover, Pa., school board to introduce intelligent design as an alternative to evolution to explain the development of life on Earth, it sparked a renaissance in involvement among scientists in K-12 science instruction.

Now, some of those teaching programs, studies, and research centers are starting to bear fruit.

The National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and other groups have increased research investment on identifying essential concepts for teaching evolution, including creating the Evolution Education Research Centre, a partnership of Harvard, McGill, and Chapman universities, and launching the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the subject, Journal of Evolution: Education and Outreach.

Read More ›

Dr. William Dembski will be debating Christopher Hitchens at the Prestonwood Baptist Church Nov. 18th, 2010. “Does a Good God Exist?” will be the topic debated. The debate will be held from 8:40 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. There will be a live webcast of the debate. Dr. William Dembski, Research Professor in Philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is a leader in the Intelligent Design community and is a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. His most comprehensive treatment of intelligent design to date, coauthored with Jonathan Wells, is titled The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems. In November of 2009, he published a book on theodicy titled The End of Christianity: Read More ›

This from the Beeb: How cats lap water:

… cats use their tongues to delicately draw up water without breaking the surface of the liquid.

The scientists, who published their study in the journal Science, say this differs from dogs, who employ a messy scooping action to quench their thirst.

[ … ]

While humans and animals such as sheep or horses use suction to draw liquid upwards, and dogs curl their tongue into a cup-like shape to ladle liquid in, the footage revealed that cats use a more subtle mechanism to drink.

The study was inspired by Cutta Cutta the cat The scientists found that the tip of the cat’s tongue curls backwards, not forwards, as it darts down towards its bowl.

Then, instead of penetrating the surface of the liquid, the tongue just lightly touches it.

Dr Stocker explains: “The fluid comes in contact with the tongue and sticks to it, then the action of the tongue being drawn upwards very rapidly creates a liquid column.

“I would say cats know more about fluid mechanics than dogs.” – Roman Stocker, MIT

[ … ]

The team thinks cats may have adopted this more complex but neater approach because it means they are less likely to be splashed with water as they drink.

– Rebecca Morelle, “Mystery of how cats lap is revealed” (BBC 11 November 2010)

A cat graciously demonstrates:

Here is the method for faucets:

More catnip? Read More ›

I’m writing to tell people about a paper of mine that was published in Synthese last month, titled:  “Self-organisation in dynamical systems: a limiting result”.  While the paper doesn’t address intelligent design as such, it indirectly establishes strict limits to what such evolutionary mechanisms as natural selection can accomplish.  In particular, it shows that physical laws, operating on an initially random arrangement of matter, cannot produce complex objects with any reasonable chance in any reasonable time.

The published version may be downloaded (payment or subscription needed) from Springer at:

         http://www.springerlink.com/content/74316rt8373k560x/

Alternatively, a pre-published version is freely available at:

         http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/rjohns/spontaneous_4.pdf

The argument is based on a number of original mathematical theorems that are proved in the paper.  A less technical presentation of the argument is however given below.

Read More ›

SCIENCE: “Now THAT’s a genome. A rare Japanese flower named Paris japonica sports an astonishing 149 billion base pairs, making it 50 times the size of a human genome—and the largest genome ever found. Until now, the biggest genome belonged to the marbled lungfish, whose 130 billion base pairs weighed in at an impressive 132.83 picograms. (A picogram is one-trillionth of a gram). The genome of the new record-holder, revealed in a paper in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, would be taller than Big Ben if stretched out end to end. (The smallest genome known among organisms with nuclei is that of a mammalian parasite known as Encephalitozoon intestinalis, with a relatively paltry 2.25 million base pairs). The Read More ›

Casey Luskin, Program Officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs for the Discovery Institute, has recently published an article entitled ZEAL FOR DARWIN’S HOUSE CONSUMES THEM: HOW SUPPORTERS OF EVOLUTION ENCOURAGE VIOLATIONS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE in the Liberty University Law Review. Luskin continues to be a favorite target of the anti-ID crowd over at The Panda’s Thumb, and this article is no exception. The task of misrepresenting Luskin fell to attorney Timothy Sandefur, who frequently contributes to the Panda’s Thumb blog site.

Luskin clearly lays out the intent of the article in the very first paragraph and writes:

The common stereotype in the controversy over teaching evolution holds that it is the opponents of evolution who are constantly trying to “sneak religious dogma back into science education.”1 While perhaps in some
instances this caricature is not entirely undeserved,2 the mainstream media and legal community pay scant attention to incidents where proponents of Darwinian evolution transgress the boundary between church and state erected by the Establishment Clause. By documenting ways that evolution advocates encourage violations of the Establishment Clause—in some instances, explicitly advocating state endorsement of pro-evolution religious viewpoints in the science classroom—this Article will show the impropriety of the common “Inherit the Wind stereotype.”3

Apparently this clear of a statement isn’t good enough for Sandefur who sniffs:

It will come as no surprise to anyone that Luskin’s argument is flimsy, his evidence illusory, his readings of the case law distorted, and the overall effect essentially a fun-house mirror version of First Amendment law.

Bioethicist Gregory Kaebnick, Ph.D., has an interesting take on the recently announced synthetic cell created by a team of researchers led by J. Craig Venter at the J. Craig Venter Instititute (JVCI). In a recent article in The Scientist entitled Is the “Synthetic Cell” about Life?, Kaebnick writes:

…the technical accomplishment is not quite what the JCVI press release claimed. It’s hard to see this as a synthetic species, or a synthetic organism, or a synthetic cell; it’s a synthetic genome of Mycoplasma mycoides, which is familiar enough. David Baltimore was closer to the truth when he told the New York Times that the researchers had not created life so much as mimicked it. It might be still more accurate to say that the researchers mimicked one part and borrowed the rest.

The explanation from the Venter camp is that the genome took over the cell, and since the genome is synthetic, therefore the cell is synthetic. But this assumes a strictly top-down control structure that some biologists now question. Why not say instead that the genome and the cell managed to work out their differences and collaborate, or even that the cell adopted the genome (and its identity)? Do we know enough to say which metaphor is most accurate?

Read More ›

A friend directed me to this fun little article from the Jewish World Review. I’m not a regular reader of JWR, so missed this wonderful little piece from Paul Greenberg, in which he recalls the Sokal Hoax of 1996. For those not familiar with it, the Sokal Hoax was an article written by Professor Alan Sokal, a professor of Physics at New York University and submitted to a not too widely followed academic journal called Social Text as part of a series on Science wars. The article was entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,( Social Text, Spring/Summer 1996), and was, according to Greenberg, Read More ›

“I think this will come to be a classic story of orthodoxy derailing objective analysis of the facts, in this case for a quarter of a century…The failure to recognize the full implications of this-particularly the possibility that the intervening noncoding sequences may be transmitting parallel information in the form of RNA molecules-may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” —John Mattick, Molecular biologist, University of Queensland, quoted in Scientific American Steve Matheson, a teacher and Darwinist promoter at a religious school, repeats the biggest mistake in molecular biology. In contrast, Richard Sternberg, an evolutionary biologist at the Biologic Institute, defends objective analysis of the facts. See Sternberg’s defense of the facts Read More ›

Formation of “irreducibly complex systems” via purported scaffolding has been an ongoing debate amongst evolution and intelligent design theorists. Now a natural scaffolding has been discovered – and it may itself be part of another “irreducibly complex system”.

Sharma et al., discovered that natural fat works as a biological scaffold for “cells to grow and mature”. Then fascinatingly, “when the cells have matured into the desired tissue, they secrete another substance that breaks down and destroys the scaffold.”

Could the formation of this natural biological scaffold AND its subsequent removal form an irreducibly complex system? E.g. is such scaffolding essential or necessary to achieve a minimum growth rate? Could the secretion removing the scaffolding also be essential to trim function rather than being “bloated”? I expect this fat scaffolding/removal system will be found to be another irreducibly complex system which very efficiently reuses its materials.

See: Body fat may help us heal Read More ›

Judge Robert W. Sweet has turned the biotech patent industry into turmoil.

See: After Patent on Genes Is Invalidated, Taking Stock By ANDREW POLLACK, March 30, 2010

Although patents are not granted on things found in nature, the DNA being patented had long been considered a chemical that was isolated from, and different from, what was found in nature.

But Judge Sweet ruled that the distinguishing feature of DNA is its information content, its conveyance of the genetic code. And in that regard, he wrote, the isolated DNA “is not markedly different from native DNA as it exists in nature.” . . . Read More ›