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Biology

The entire protein household of yeast: 257 machines that had never been observed

And now for another amazing example of what natural selection can accomplish (or not):

Press Release
Heidelberg, 22 January 2006
http://www.embl.org/aboutus/news/press/2006/press22jan06.html

The closest look ever at the cell’s machines: The first genome-wide screen for protein complexes is completed

“To carry out their tasks, most proteins work in dynamic complexes that may contain dozens of molecules,” says Giulio Superti-Furga, who launched the large-scale project at Cellzome four years ago. “If you think of the cell as a factory floor, up to now, we’ve known some of the components of a fraction of the machines. That has seriously limited what we know about how cells work. This study gives us a nearly complete parts list of all the machines, and it goes beyond that to tell us how they populate the cell and partition tasks among themselves.” The study combined a method of extracting complete protein complexes from cells [tandem affinity purification, developed in 2001 by Bertrand Séraphin at EMBL], mass spectrometry and bioinformatics to investigate the entire protein household of yeast, turning up 257 machines that had never been observed. It also revealed new components of nearly every complex already known. Read More ›

Elephants Never Forget – Spite in the Animal Kingdom

How much do most of us really know about the other mammals we have so much in common with? Or perhaps I should ask how little do most of us really know. Here’s a thought provoking article from naturalist Dr. Daphne Sheldrick who spent 30 years working with elephants in the wild and in captivity.

Elephant Emotion By Daphne Sheldrick Read More ›

Woese: Life could have started “millions of times”

In Ron Kotulak’s article below, he interviews Carl Woese about the latter’s skepticism concerning the monophyly of life on Earth. “Woese next went after a big stumbling block in classical evolution,” writes Kotulak. “Darwin’s doctrine postulated that all living things eventually could be traced back to a single founding cell.” Woese says No — life could have started “millions of times,” and no single cell was ancestral to all organisms on Earth.

THE COSMIC CONVERSATION
How can lifeless particles evolve into living things? They basically
talk themselves into it, a group of scientists say.

By Ronald Kotulak
Chicago Tribune Read More ›

A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis

John A Davison

A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis

1. Introduction
2. The Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis
3. The Indirect Evidence
4. The Direct Evidence
5. Conclusion

Abstract. I propose that phylogeny took place in a manner similar to that of ontogeny by the derepression of preformed genomic information which was expressed through release from latency (derepression) by the restructuring of existing chromosomal information (position effects). Both indirect and direct evidence is presented in support of the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis.

Read More ›

Darwinism: Adultery Rationalized

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/2006-01-03-infidelity-study_x.htm

Some men cheat on their partners. So do some women. Now researchers say it is more than a wandering eye that might cause a woman to stray.

This conclusion was based on two studies of college men and women using questionnaires where the test group was asked how they felt (how scientific) about other men/women outside of their steady relationships. Read More ›

Will The Missing Pages Be Burned?

Broward County will be selecting a new biology book soon. One has a few paragraphs on Intelligent Design in it. We can have none of that! Critics say they don’t want intelligent design in schools because it’s based on faith, not science. So publishers of the second book, Biology: The Dynamics of Life, have offered to remove the page containing the passages. And Superintendent Frank Till has said he would cut the page to eliminate the controversy if teachers pick the book. Read The Whole Article Here

Discovery of the Aerodynamic Principles of Bee Flight Prove ID Wrong…Huh?

http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060110_bee_fight.html

Proponents of intelligent design, which holds that a supreme being rather than evolution is responsible for life’s complexities, have long criticized science for not being able to explain some natural phenomena, such as how bees fly.
……….
Proponents of intelligent design, or ID, have tried in recent years to promote the idea of a supreme being by discounting science because it can’t explain everything in nature.

“People in the ID community have said that we don’t even know how bees fly,” Altshuler said. “We were finally able to put this one to rest. We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us.”

Read More ›

“Smart by Nature”

[Excerpt:] In nature, shape is cheaper than material. This has been shown a number of times and is manifested in the remarkably high performance, both absolute and specific, of biological materials (wood is one of the most efficient of materials; antler bone is tougher than any man-made ceramic composite) which is achieved not by the use of high performance components but by the degree of detail and competence in their design and construction. Read More ›

High-Speed Microscopic Engine Found

I reported on this fascinating bit of nanotechnology earlier (go here). Here’s another article on it.

High-Speed Microscopic Engine Found
By Ker Than
LiveScience

In 1702, the famous Dutch scientist Anton van Leeuwenhoek made an interesting discovery while gazing at some pond water through a hand-made microscope: He observed a bell-shaped organism that used a long, rapidly contracting stalk to attach itself to objects in its environment.

More than 300 years after Leeuwenhoek first observed Vorticella convallaria, as the microscopic pond organism is now called, scientists are finding that its spring-like stalk is one of the fastest cellular engines ever discovered. Read More ›

Fitness among Competitive Agents

Fitness among Competitive Agents: A Brief Note By William A. Dembski The upshot of the No Free Lunch theorems is that averaged over all fitness functions, evolutionary computation does no better than blind search (see Dembski 2002, ch 4 as well as Dembski 2005 for an overview). But this raises a question: How does evolutionary computation obtain its power since, clearly, it is capable of doing better than blind search? One approach is to limit the fitness functions (see Igel and Toussaint 2001). Another, illustrated in David Fogel’s work on automated checker and chess playing (see, for instance, Chellapilla and Fogel 1999 and Fogel et al. 2004) and, more recently, given a theoretical underpinning by David Wolpert and William Macready Read More ›

[Off Topic:] Total Fertility Rate (TFR)

The single most important factor in determining future population is the total fertility rate (TFR). The TFR is defined as the average number of babies born to women during their reproductive years. A TFR of 2.1 is considered the replacement rate; once a TFR of a population reaches 2.1 the population will remain stable assuming no immigration or emigration takes place. When the TFR is greater than 2.1 a population will increase and when it is less than 2.1 a population will eventually decrease, although due to the age structure of a population it will take years before a low TFR is translated into lower population. [For the TFRs of all countries, click here and scroll down for the relevant Read More ›