Biology

You know for many years I’ve been taking care to avoid saying men evolved from apes because the pedant dominated science establishment is quick to point out that we and apes descend from a common ancestor and anyone who thinks we evolved from apes clearly doesn’t understand evolution. So now we have arguably the most recognized living name in paleontology, Richard Leakey, blurting out the proverbial “I’m so stupid I don’t know what common ancestry means”. What are we to make of that? I’m sure our good pedant friends in the science establishment, through Panda’s Thumb or some member blog, will let us know upon reading this. HT to Larry at I’m From Missouri.

Edmonton Global News television report on dichloroacetate cancer cure and interview with discoverer Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, Department of Medicine, University of Alberta. Click here to watch.

In case anyone was wondering, the international patent application for DCA as a cancer cure is available for anyone to read. DCA is an inexpensive, uncontrolled chemical hailed as a potential cure for cancer that anyone can buy. This is not an endorsement or encouragement for anyone to self-medicate. It is intended solely to get the attention of established clinicians with experience in orphan drug testing.

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Get this from Orac (a.k.a. DH Gorski) at Respectful Insolence. Here’s a cutter/researcher who makes a living from cancer. A respectable number of research papers in chemotherapy and radiation bear his name and he’s a surgeon. He is, in other words, a fully vested member in the multi-billion dollar cancer treatment industry. If there’s a big breakthrough cure for cancer that consists of a $2 teaspoonful of a common chemical in a glass of water the good Doctor Gorski becomes like unto a horse drawn carriage maker when Ford started mass producing automobiles. He’ll be reduced to lancing boils for a living.

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Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers

New Scientist has received an unprecedented amount of interest in this story from readers. If you would like up-to-date information on any plans for clinical trials of DCA in patients with cancer, or would like to donate towards a fund for such trials, please visit the site set up by the University of Alberta and the Alberta Cancer Board. We will also follow events closely and will report any progress as it happens.

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

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I read this Huffington post which notes that the U.S. leads Europe by quite a margin in those who reject orthodox evolution as scientific fact. They go on to an unsupported conclusion that this means the U.S. must be trailing in scientific and engineering accomplishments. Au contraire, mon ami, au contraire! Read More ›

Over at Respectful Insolence, Dr. David H. Gorski (a.k.a. Orac), goes off on a rant about how medical doctors, in this case Uncommon Descent contributor and surgeon Dr. David A. Cook, aren’t qualified to evaluate claims made by evolutionary biologists. Yet Dr. Gorski, also a surgeon, somehow believes himself qualified to evaluate evolutionary claims made by other medical doctors. Spare me. Practice what you preach, Dr. Gorski. If medical doctors aren’t qualifed to evaluate evolution claims then YOU should STFU too. Got that? Write that down. 🙄

Truth in advertising would have random mutation and natural selection renamed to reflect what’s really happening. Read More ›

I just watched Cracking the Ocean Code on the Discovery Science Channel last night. It’s on again at 3pm Eastern Time today and tomorrow. Really amazing. Venter basically circumnavigated the globe stopping every 200 miles to sample the microscopic life in the ocean which he is now shotgun sequencing back at his lab. In the shakedown cruise to the Sargasso Sea hundreds of new species and over a million unique new genes were discovered upon analysis. We’ve only catalogued about 1% of all species on the planet and have sequenced just a tiny fraction of those catalogued. As sequencing methods improve and prices plummet saying this is just the tip of the iceberg is a vast understatement.

There’s a bigger genetic jump between humans and chimps than previously believed

A lot more genes may separate humans from their chimp relatives than earlier studies let on. Researchers studying changes in the number of copies of genes in the two species found that their mix of genes is only 94 percent identical. The 6 percent difference is considerably larger than the commonly cited figure of 1.5 percent.

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When it comes to discussing open systems aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves here? There are still some very basic problems to solve before getting into hand-waving over the evolution of computers and human minds.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0605863103v1

Solutions with as little as 1% enantiomeric excess (ee) of D- or L-phenylalanine are amplified to 90% ee (a 95/5 ratio) by two successive evaporations to precipitate the racemate [mixture]. Such a process on the prebiotic earth could lead to a mechanism by which meteoritic chiral {alpha}-alkyl amino acids could form solutions with high ee values that were needed for the beginning of biology.

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http://www.ffame.org/sbenner/cochembiol8.672-689.pdf

The opening discussion:

To decide whether life has a common chemical plan, we must decide what life is. A panel assembled by NASA in 1994 was one of many groups to ponder this question. The panel defined life as a ‘chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution’ [16]. This definition, which follows an earlier definition by Sagan [17], will be used here. Read More ›

Excuse the bad pun.

http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2006/060914DeWoodyVole.html

As for genetic evidence…unfortunately it appears our knowledge is fairly limited.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060918202123.htm

Applying techniques derived from classical and quantum physics calculations may radically reduce the time it takes to simulate the way that proteins fold.
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Scientist: Dolphins are stupid
Thursday 17 August 2006 12:29 PM GMT

Dolphins are not as clever as previously thought. Dolphins may have big brains, but a South African-based scientist says laboratory rats and even goldfish can outwit them.

Paul Manger of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand says the super-sized brains of dolphins are a function of being warm-blooded in a cold water environment and not a sign of intelligence.

“We equate our big brain with intelligence. Over the years we have looked at these kinds of things and said the dolphins must be intelligent,” he said.

“The real flaw in this logic is that it suggests all brains are built the same… When you look at the structure of the dolphin brain, you see it is not built for complex information processing,” he said. Read More ›