Biology

From Fuz Rana at Poached Egg: Generally speaking, the reaction to my book The Cell’s Design has been positive. But there have been a few reviews that were less than stellar. Perhaps the most critical of all was a review written by microbiologist Frank Steiner for the Reports of the National Center for Science Education. After careful reflection, I have come to conclude that many of the issues Steiner has with The Cell’s Design are unsubstantial and largely unfounded. Nevertheless, one point he raised has some merit. Fortunately, a recent discovery by researchers from Germany about the structure of the enzyme F1-F0-ATPase helps address Steiner’s point—and in doing so, actually strengthens my argument for the intelligent design of biochemical systems. Read More ›

In the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference, Paul Nelson gave a great talk on Design Triangulation – the inference from system-level functional necessity.
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But can’t, for psychological reasons. First, why the divorce? From Philip Ball at Nautilus: [Ernst] Mayr made perhaps the most concerted attempt by any biologist to draw clear disciplinary boundaries around his subject, smartly isolating it from other fields of science. In doing so, he supplies one of the clearest demonstrations of the folly of that endeavor. His characterization of physics as rigid, notes Ball, was “thoroughly flawed, as a passing familiarity with quantum theory, chaos, and complexity would reveal.” Of course, that defect deepens the mystery of why his view dominated, largely unchallenged. Most people with even a passing interest in science are aware of quantum effects. Again, from Ball, But Mayr’s argument gets more interesting—if not actually more Read More ›

This is philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze’s view: I have just finished my fifth reading of Robert J. Spitzer’s book, New Proofs for the Existence of God. In this book Spitzer set himself the task of exploring how far natural theology can take us towards understanding God. The first part of the book deals purely with science, particularly cosmology. In it he discusses the Big Bang; the extreme fine tuning of the of the universe which makes possible the existence of stars, planets, and life; General Relativity; string theory; and quantum physics. This part of the book reads like a science text. In the second part of the book he takes a purely philosophical approach using only the tools of Read More ›

The documentary explores the mystery of non-adaptive order in biology and the unique challenge it presents to Darwinian evolution. More re documentary: here.

Like Murphy said, Mother Nature is a bitch. With your coffee … From Nature: Biologists lose out in post-PhD earnings analysis … One year after graduating, doctorates in mathematics, computer sciences and engineering raked in the highest amounts — US$65,000 a year on average, with the 60% of engineers who took industry jobs earning around $80,000 a year. Those with biology PhDs earned the least, around $36,000 per year, perhaps because of the effect of many taking postdoctoral fellowships — only 26% of biology graduates went straight into industry jobs. More. Some biologists go into wildlife management which is said to be awful pay-wise because wild animals don’t lobby or co-operate. See also: Tales from a wildlife biologist: Bears have Read More ›

The remarkable “powers” of evolution are now shown to degrade (aka “mutate”) the human genes essential to intelligence.

Remarkably, they found that some of the same genes that influence human intelligence in healthy people were also the same genes that cause impaired cognitive ability and epilepsy when mutated, networks which they called M1 and M3.

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From University of Oxford: As many as 50% of all natural history specimens held in the world’s museums could be wrongly named, according to a new study by researchers from Oxford University and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Researchers … scoured the records of Ipomoea – a large and diverse genus which includes the sweet potato – on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility database. Examining the names found on 49,500 specimens from the Americas, they found that 40% of these were outdated synonyms rather than the current name, and 16% of the names were unrecognisable or invalid. In addition, 11% of the specimens weren’t identified, being given only the name of the genus. The team thinks there are three main Read More ›

From bFast, appended to Baffling but undead physics results: Physicists always seem to end up with puzzles: what is dark energy, what is dark matter, what caused the big bang, how big is a proton. I love the honest puzzles that physicists bring to the table. Evolutionary biologists, however, never seem to be puzzled about nuthin’. First life? Don’t know how yet, but its not a problem. Cambrian explosion, wasn’t mutch,a and it had millions of years. Irreducible complexity? No deal, we did this experiment that produced two mutations to produce a single function — after 1/2 million years worth of evolving. HAR1F pulls off 18 mutations, no problem, millions of years. No issues, not problems, no puzzles. Its as Read More ›

At Huffington Post, Suzan Mazur interviews neuroscientist David Edelman on Paradigm shift “YES)”and origin of 3D organismal form”: Neuroscientist David Edelman, who’s currently on the faculties of the University of San Diego and the University of California, San Diego, and is the son of late Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman, says he agrees that an evolution paradigm shift needs to happen. Driver, this is our stop. Can we get out now? Anyway, Suzan Mazur:  … From your perspective as a neuroscientist, is there a paradigm shift underway in evolutionary thinking? David Edelman: I think there should be a shift. . . . The Modern Synthesis was a scientific reckoning — or coming to terms — among great thinkers: George Gaylord Simpson, Read More ›

A series of articles by philosopher of biology James Barham on key new thinkers, collected together on his blog: Part I: The Machine Metaphor Part II: James A. Shapiro Part III: Mary Jane West-Eberhard Part IV: Some Experiments Part V: Life and Emergence Part VI: F.E. Yates’s Homeodynamics Seeing Past Darwin VII: Some Physical Properties of Life Dr. Barham is glad to hear from commenters. So are we. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Says Cosmos Magazine here: National Geographic’s senior editor Christopher Sloan had seen a feathered dinosaur fossil or two. But the specimen he described in the magazine’s November 1999 issue, dubbed Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, took his breath away. … Archaeoraptor would later be dubbed “Piltdown chicken”. Cut n’ paste job. But even smart folks have been taken in. The problem of faked fossils in China is serious and growing. Rather than being excavated by palaeontologists on fossil digs, most of the region’s fossils are pulled from the ground by desperately poor farmers and then sold on to dealers and museums. More. Gotta have one? Don’t pay more than you would for some other souvenir. How about a stuffed gotta-have-one toy dressed as Read More ›

In case you didn’t know it was free, here’s Denis Noble: The ‘Modern Synthesis’ (Neo-Darwinism) is a mid-20th century gene-centric view of evolution, based on random mutations accumulating to produce gradual change through natural selection. Any role of physiological function in influencing genetic inheritance was excluded. The organism became a mere carrier of the real objects of selection, its genes. We now know that genetic change is far from random and often not gradual. Molecular genetics and genome sequencing have deconstructed this unnecessarily restrictive view of evolution in a way that reintroduces physiological function and interactions with the environment as factors influencing the speed and nature of inherited change. Acquired characteristics can be inherited, and in a few but growing Read More ›

Sorry if this post is a bit for computer programmers, anyway I trust that also the others can grasp the overall picture. Evolutionists claim that what it takes to evolution to work is simply “a populations of replicators, random variations on them, and a competition for survival or resources”. Today we will try to partially layout how to simulate on computer such process. First off, we need the replicators, i.e. digital programs able to self-reproduce. In informatics jargon, a computer program able to self-reproduce, i.e. to produce as output a copy of its source code is called a “quine”. Therefore in a sense a quine is a little, minimal digital “bio-cell”. You can write the code of a quine in Read More ›