It’s a protist? “Protists are a group of loosely connected, mostly unicellular eukaryotic organisms that are not plants, animals or fungi. There is no single feature such as evolutionary history or morphology common to all these organisms and they are unofficially placed under a separate kingdom called Protista.” In short, just the sort of life form that might be doing something really different. Because nature is full of intelligence, there are probably many alternative programs out there. It all didn’t just somehow happen randomly once.
Cell biology
How cells signal that they should be killed
Again, a complex signalling system that supposedly just so happened and in this case it doesn’t function for the protection of the cell but for it’s elimination.
Some cells increase gene expression after death
This cell activity, involving study of brain tissue removed during operations, is an exercise in futility. Maybe those genes are kind of like a school bureaucracy happily presiding over a school with no students or teachers.
Researchers: Human immune system does not “recognize” deep sea microbes
They might be useful, as the researchers say. But now that they are starting to work with them, we’d better hope that none of them turn on us, for lack of something more familiar to them that they can infect.
At Nautilus: A bioelectric theory of consciousness
The hypothesis that consciousness is a function of bioelectric fields includes the notion that our individual cells are conscious. Levin and Dennett are willing to think of parts of the body as agents too. But from what we can tell, whole persons are not agents in Dennett’s view.
Archaea microbes have genes like flexible slinkies
They were only discovered in 1977 and they get more unusual all the time: Microbes called archaea package their genetic material into flexible shapes that flop open in unusual ways, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Karolin Luger reports March 2, 2021, in the journal eLife. “Very much to our surprise, we found that these Read More…
Science discovery: The non-existence of harmful proteins
Researchers: “More than one-fourth of human proteins are one substitution away from containing a significant MAW, with the majority of replacements being predicted harmful.” Just above that, they say “This suggests that their absence is due to negative selection.” That’s a lot of negative selection going on. It feels somewhat like saying “The plagiarism checker provided considerable negative selection for the inappropriate use of others’ work.” Sure it did but that’s what it was designed to do.
BBC cell film pays tribute to design in nature without knowing it
To think it all just happened requires more faith than to think there is an intelligence underlying nature that enables it.
How do giant slime molds remember things without a brain or nervous system?
Is it fair to say that not all life forms need a brain or a nervous system but all must have some method of managing (immaterial) information?
At Scientific American: How some bacteria have achieved “immortality”
At Scientific American: In this experiment, cells awoke and multiplied that settled to the bottom when pterosaurs and plesiosaurs drifted overhead. Four geologic periods had ground by, but these microbes, protected from radiation and cosmic rays by a thick coat of ocean and sediment, quietly persisted. And now, when offered a bite, they awoke and carried on as if nothing unusual had happened.
We can now add some sharks to the list of bioluminescent animals
The Guardian: The kitefin, which can grow to 180cm, is now the largest-known luminous vertebrate: what researchers referred to as a “giant luminous shark” …
Of 70,000 hitherto unknown viruses in the human gut, over 40% of proteins had no clear function
The reader comments that viruses cannot afford to carry around much non-functioning nucleic acid. More likely, the 43% that are mystery proteins do have a function. If even viruses are much more complex than we expect, what chance that all these complex systems arose by natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism)?
And now — the four-dimensional genome
The presenters provide revealing information about how our understanding of genetics has changed in the last seven decades. Very easy to follow.
Some sperm win the race by poisoning their competitors
Not “pure luck,” they say. Nature is full of intelligence, some of it nasty.
At ScienceDaily: Cell defenses have evolved to turn the tables on viral attacks by using bait and sounding an alarm
Sometimes Darwinians are a parody of themselves.