Researchers: “The historical record of a big bang describing the evolutionary patchwork of proteins provides new tools to understand protein makeup. “
Cell biology
Ten (or so) Anti-Intelligent Design Books You Should Read
I have posted the second video in my two part book recommendation series on the YouTube channel. In the previous video I highlighted many books that argue for intelligent design. My view is that proponents of design should face the strongest criticisms possible, and not be afraid of doing so. In line with this philosophy, Read More…
Ten (or so) Pro-Intelligent Design Books You Should Read
On the Design Disquisitions YouTube channel, I’ve posted a new video where I recommend several books of interest, specifically pro-ID literature. Most of the suggestions may be familiar to you, but hopefully there are a few that you’ve not read before. I also give a brief summary of the content of each book. I don’t Read More…
Cells compared across species — expected to be similar — prove strikingly different
At SciTechDaily: “I was struck by how stark the differences are between them,” said Tarashansky, who was lead author of the paper and is a Stanford Bio-X Interdisciplinary Fellow. “We thought that they should have similar cell types, but when we try analyzing them using standard techniques, the method doesn’t recognize them as being similar.”
How exactly do one-celled life forms learn?
Where do they store memories? New thinking is, changes in the state of the life form, resulting in changed behavior — which amounts to learning — need not “be someplace” or weigh something, for the same reasons as a full USB stick doesn’t weigh any more than an empty one.
Forget what you thought you knew about eukaryote evolution…
The last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) seems to have been pretty complex. So when and where does all that random assembly of vital equipment for life from free-floating chemicals actually happen?
Researchers: The last bacterial common ancestor had a flagellum
Question: If the last common ancestor of the bacterium had a flagellum, what do we really know about the evolution of the flagellum? Isn’t that a bit like finding a stone laptop in a Neanderthal cave? That said, it’s nice to see horizontal gene transfer getting proper recognition.
Researchers report strange life form from a billion years ago
At Gizmodo: “it now seems possible that more than one evolutionary pathway led to the first multicellular lifeforms.” That’s dangerously close to saying that all life didn’t begin with a single cell. But weren’t we all ordered to believe that because the origin of life is so fantastically unlikely that it could only have happened once?
At New Scientist: “single-celled organism that lacks most of the molecular equipment needed to kick-start DNA replication”
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.
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.