Biology

Were one to design the encoded DNA “blueprint” of life, would not one incorporate ways to preserve that “blueprint”? The Nobel prize in medicine has just been awarded for discovery of features that look amazingly like design to preserve chromosomes. See:

3 Americans win medicine Nobel for chromosome research

Three U.S. researchers were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on how chromosomes are protected against degradation, the Nobel Foundation reported Monday. Read More ›

Is this politically correct? Hmmm… [youtube d4KcRMTKImQ]

So how did these nitric oxide-producing enzymes arise? By Darwinian processes? …Nudler’s team found that many antibiotics kill bacteria through the production of harmful charged particles known as reactive oxygen species, otherwise called oxidative stress. “Antibiotics cause bacteria to produce a lot of reactive oxygen species. Those damage DNA, and bacteria cannot survive. They eventually die,” Nudler said in a telephone interview. “We found nitric oxide can protect bacteria against oxidative stress.” He said bacteria produce nitric oxide to resist antibiotics. The defense mechanism appears to apply broadly to many different types of antibiotics, he said. Nudler said many companies are testing various nitric oxide-lowering compounds called nitric oxide synthase inhibitors for use as anti-inflammatory drugs. He thinks a compound Read More ›

Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann (1903 – 1957) was one of the more powerful scientific mind of the 20th century. His works span from functional and numerical analysis to quantum mechanics, from set theory to game theory, as well as many other fields of pure and applied mathematics. He was a pioneer in computer science, the first real computers were developed according to a basic model that takes his name (“von Neumann architecture”). Read More ›

I learned about this bug back in 2001 and fell in love with it.  Here is partly why: Painting in the infrared colors Olga Glazunov – Chaskor, August 27, 2009  The bacterial protein has the capacity for absorption and emission in the infrared spectral region, was successful (put into action) in mammalian cells.  This protein can be used as a nontoxic dye, which will improve the image of the human body, obtained on CT scanners, and thushelp in the diagnosis and treatment of many diseases. Of the spectrum, which emits a glow derived protein—infrared region, i.e., with a wavelength longer 700nm, It is located outside the visible spectrum, and therefore not perceived by the eye, but can be recorded by special devices, Read More ›

Every time human DNA is passed from one generation to the next it accumulates 100–200 new mutations, according to a DNA-sequencing analysis of the Y chromosome.

This number — the first direct measurement of the human mutation rate — is equivalent to one mutation in every 30 million base pairs, and matches previous estimates from species comparisons and rare disease screens.

The British-Chinese research team that came up with the estimate sequenced ten million base pairs on the Y chromosome from two men living in rural China who were distant relatives. These men had inherited the same ancestral male-only chromosome from a common relative who was born more than 200 years ago. Over the subsequent 13 generations, this Y chromosome was passed faithfully from father to son, albeit with rare DNA copying mistakes. Read More ›

Semiotix – Stephen Pain The distinction between “theorising” and “belief” is extremely important because our attitude differs towards them. In a theory the reified concept of the sign does not have an ontological status but an epistemological one. While in belief, the concept has often a clear ontological one. Uexküll believed in his concept of the Bauplan in the same way as Bergson believed in the vital force. The concept of a plan is of course no different from the creationist’s concept of “intelligent design”. Any usage of the Bauplan is further complicated by its ideological usage in The Biological State, Uexküll‘s template for the German State, one that was anti-democratic and in many instances attractive to the Nazi of Read More ›

Hypothesis Nature 460, 967-971 (20 August 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08183 James A. Lake Endosymbioses have dramatically altered eukaryotic life, but are thought to have negligibly affected prokaryotic evolution. Here, by analysing the flows of protein families, I present evidence that the double-membrane, Gram-negative prokaryotes were formed as the result of a symbiosis between an ancient actinobacterium and an ancient clostridium. The resulting taxon has been extraordinarily successful, and has profoundly altered the evolution of life by providing endosymbionts necessary for the emergence of eukaryotes and by generating Earth’s oxygen atmosphere. Their double-membrane architecture and the observed genome flows into them suggest a common evolutionary mechanism for their origin: an endosymbiosis between a clostridium and actinobacterium. You’ll have to pay for this Read More ›

Investor’s Business Daily posted an article relating Obama’s Healthcare Bill to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the technocrats responsible for the U.K.’s health care.  The article states:

This administration, pledging to cut medical costs and for which “cost-effectiveness” is a new mantra, knows that a quarter of Medicare spending is made in a patient’s final year of life. Certainly the British were aware when they nationalized their medical system.

The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror movie script.

The U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.”

One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.

The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.

The British are praised for spending half as much per capita on medical care. How they do it is another matter. The NICE people say that Britain cannot afford to spend $20,000 to extend a life by six months. So if care will cost $1 more, you get to curl up in a corner and die.

These NICE people bring to mind another technocratic group I’ve read about called the “National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE)” in C. S. Lewis’s 1945 novel That Hideous Strength: a Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups.  Those NICE folks in Lewis’s novel were an institution which would decide who lived and who died in accordance to their agenda of control and advancement of the remaining people into a Utopian, omni-competent and global scientific technocracy. That Hideous Strength was the fictional representation of the governmental materialism and scientism philosophy of social control Lewis described in The Abolition of Man, in which Lewis explains:

It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere `natural object’ and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one’s first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners.

The Investor’s Business Daily article continues: Read More ›

I’ve heard geneticists say we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift, and that no one really understands what’s going on. I even read an article the other day showing how at least one creature DELETES portions of its own DNA during certain stages of development. Basically, the long-held ideas from even a couple years ago are being modified. Until scientists can look at an arbitrary line of code and say “this does this or that” I would not say any idea is “certain”.

Lamarck’s specific hypothesis had been rejected once Mendel found a mechanism for inheritance. Lamarckism was so obviously wrong. Darwin came up with something that was just the opposite. It was obviously true and easily understandable. It is easy and true within a certain scope, although it’s inadequate to explain certain biological features. Hence the modern synthesis and the current attempt to formulate a new synthesis of ideas, which may or may not succeed. Read More ›

In this year of Darwin, I guess its only fitting that Darwin’s theory should be celebrated in song. So, Darwin scholar Richard Milner has done just that. Milner is now the official Darwin singin scholar. Where most scholars look for intellectual insights in their research, according to Milner, he looks for musical cues. Kinda makes you wonder what other popular scientific theories could be set to music. Could Einstein be set to hip hop? Hmmm….

 Before I announce the winner, I should note that Harper One San Francisco has announced that 5 hardback copies of both Steve Meyer’s Signature of the Cell, ( 2009) and Beauregard and O’Leary’s The Spiritual Brain (2007 ) are available free to contest winners. Like, win and add them to your library for free.

Okay, now to Question 5:

Winner VJ Torley writes, Read More ›

A friend alerted me to this piece by Lawrence Krauss from the Wall Street Journal.

Krauss writes:

“J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a “god, angel, or devil” will interfere with one’s experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science.

Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.”

No surprise here. But he concludes with

“Finally, it is worth pointing out that these issues are not purely academic. The current crisis in Iran has laid bare the striking inconsistency between a world built on reason and a world built on religious dogma.”

Perhaps the most important contribution an honest assessment of the incompatibility between science and religious doctrine can provide is to make it starkly clear that in human affairs — as well as in the rest of the physical world — reason is the better guide.”

Reason is a better guide than what? Religion? Which religion? All religions? What empircal data does Read More ›