If even the splitting of mammalian germ cells is not certain… maybe the 21st century would be better suited to questions in science than answers. It’s easier to get good answers when we have enough knowledge to get the questions right.
Cell biology
A striking admission that Michael Behe was right
What he is saying is precisely Behe’s point in Darwin Devolves. Cell evolution is mostly about destroying complex equipment that hinders immediate survival. (The question of how the equipment came to be so complex beforehand is separate from the question of what life forms actually do when they evolve.)
Some remarkable admissions in a Current Biology editorial
So cellular evolution is not the assured result of settled science, as we’ve all been told. Well, it certainly did sound more like a catfight over there. With a similar respect for facts.
Sea creature challenges our conception of life
Is it one life form or many? Does it age or does it just die when something happens? What about apparent communal information processing in some colony organisms like the Paris Blob? The questions that seemed easy for an ant colony aren’t quite that way here.
Archaea discoverer Carl Woese’s theological reflections in old age
It’s a good question whether Woese would have recognized the Archaea for what they were, had he not been in the habit of thinking for himself. Maybe he would have just been satisfied to shoehorn them into the conventional scheme somewhere.
Here’s a question that new ambigram viruses raise
“Not a random boo-boo on evolution’s part”? If the field of biology had not organized itself around Darwinian evolution (insert preferred terminology for the same sort of thing here) in the mid-twentieth century, would anyone think that up just now to account for all this?
Claim: The tree of life may have only two major branches
The slingshot of life? According to this version of the tale, the eukaryotes are descended from the Asgard archaea.
Drug developers try producing chirality
But when they do it, it doesn’t sound very random at all.
What? Harmful bacteria “masquerade” as red blood cells?
She explains: “Once we kind of came to that idea, it all sort of fell into place.” Indeed, Madam Professor! You follow brilliantly in the footsteps of Miss Marple. We need intelligence to uncover this because intelligence underlies it.
“Paraspeckles” are another complex system recently discovered in the cell, responding to stress
Of course, paraspeckles just happened randomly (“There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.” Darwin, “Life and Letters,” i, p. 278). Even though they somehow work seamlessly with everything else.
The bacterial flagellar hook as a universal joint
A friend points out that the paper just describes the intricate machinery of the hook, adding to what we know, without any resort to Darwinspeak. It seems to be getting safer all the time to just not talk that way any more.
Cilia are more complex than thought
“Before this work, everyone assumed these proteins inside cilia just stabilize the structure, which is true for a subset of the proteins, especially when you consider the forces produced by the continuous beating of the cilia,” Zhang said. “But based on how they are arranged inside this structure, we believe these proteins are doing many more things.”
Cellular recycling system gets put on hold while cells divide
Clever little accidents, aren’t they?
Natural biomolecule measured while acting like a quantum wave
From the Abstract: The successful realization of quantum optics with this polypeptide as a prototypical biomolecule paves the way for quantum-assisted molecule metrology and in particular the optical spectroscopy of a large class of biologically relevant molecules.
How do liquid organelles coexist without merging?
They know what they are without a membrane, just by being gelatinous.