Design inference

From ScienceDaily: In one video, you can see a hungry caterpillar, first working around a leaf’s edges, approaching the base of the leaf and, with one last bite, severing it from the rest of the plant. Within seconds, a blaze of fluorescent light washes over the other leaves, a signal that they should prepare for future attacks by the caterpillar or its kin. That fluorescent light tracks calcium as it zips across the plant’s tissues, providing an electrical and chemical signal of a threat. In more than a dozen videos like this, University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Botany Simon Gilroy and his lab reveal how glutamate — an abundant neurotransmitter in animals — activates this wave of calcium when the Read More ›

He is the author of a “bad design” book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes: Earlier this year writers for Evolution News posted responses to Dr. Lents, who teaches at John Jay College and wrote a recent book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. He argues that our bodies demonstrate “poor design” or “suboptimal design” which is best explained by evolution. Lents wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal summarizing his case. He argues in his book that the fact that the openings to the maxillary sinuses (called “ostia”) are situated near the top of the sinuses would prevent gravity drainage of mucus. This, he Read More ›

From researchers at Princeton: The seemingly random digits known as prime numbers are not nearly as scattershot as previously thought. A new analysis by Princeton University researchers has uncovered patterns in primes that are similar to those found in the positions of atoms inside certain crystal-like materials. The researchers found a surprising similarity between the sequence of primes over long stretches of the number line and the pattern that results from shining X-rays on a material to reveal the inner arrangement of its atoms. The analysis could lead to predicting primes with high accuracy, said the researchers. The study was published Sept. 5 in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment. “There is much more order in prime numbers than ever Read More ›

From David Nguyen: Why Tumor Biologists Should Never See Randomness But Only Degrees of Disorder See also: What is Randomness? Part 1, with David Nguyen

An interesting new paper on how the genetic code minimizes the impact of mistranslations: Statistical and biochemical studies of the standard genetic code (SGC) have found evidence that the impact of mistranslations is minimized in a way that erroneous codes are either synonymous or code for an amino acid with similar polarity as the originally coded amino acid. It could be quantified that the SGC is optimized to protect this specific chemical property as good as possible. In recent work, it has been speculated that the multilevel optimization of the genetic code stands in the wider context of overlapping codes. This work tries to follow the systematic approach on mistranslations and to extend those analyses to the general effect of Read More ›

Philip Cunningham writes to note for us such moments in the literature: Abstract: (open access) Why life persists at the edge of chaos is a question at the very heart of evolution. Here we show that molecules taking part in biochemical processes from small molecules to proteins are critical quantum mechanically. Electronic Hamiltonians of biomolecules are tuned exactly to the critical point of the metal-insulator transition separating the Anderson localized insulator phase from the conducting disordered metal phase. Using tools from Random Matrix Theory we confirm that the energy level statistics of these biomolecules show the universal transitional distribution of the metal-insulator critical point and the wave functions are multifractals in accordance with the theory of Anderson transitions. The findings Read More ›

What? Doug Axe draws attention to a new paper at Evolution News and Science Today which suggests that “the genetic program for limb development predates limbs.” Abstract: Cephalopod mollusks evolved numerous anatomical innovations, including specialized arms and tentacles, but little is known about the developmental mechanisms underlying the evolution of cephalopod limbs. Here we report that all three axes of cuttlefish limbs are patterned by the same signaling networks that act in vertebrates and arthropods, although they evolved limbs independently. In cuttlefish limb buds, Hedgehog is expressed anteriorly. Posterior transplantation of Hedgehog-expressing cells induced mirror-image limb duplications. Bmp and Wnt signaling, which establishes dorsoventral polarity in vertebrate and arthropod limbs, is similarly polarized in cuttlefish. Inhibition of the dorsal Bmp signal Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have developed new techniques to track the mobilization of jumping genes. They found that during a particular period of egg development, a group of jumping-genes called retrotransposons hijacks special cells called nurse cells that nurture the developing eggs. These jumping genes use nurse cells to produce invasive material (copies of themselves called virus-like particles) that move into a nearby egg and then mobilize into the egg’s DNA driving evolution, and causing disease. … Carnegie co-author Zhao Zhang explained: “We were very surprised that the these jumping genes barely moved in stem cells that produce developing egg cells, possibly because the stem cells would only have two copies of the genome for these jumping genes to use. Instead, Read More ›

Instead of meaningless? How exactly did we get from “Alone” to “Meaningless” via eloquence from tenured pundits? Where do we buy return tickets? A blogging neurologist asks this obvious question. From Steven Novella at The Ness: Until, however, we detect actual aliens or their signals, the rest of the factors in the equation are likely to remain a mystery. Put simply – we have a sample size of one. We don’t know how likely life is to develop intelligence, and intelligence technology, and how long such civilizations tend to last. We won’t know until we encounter evidence of aliens. And, if there are few or no other aliens out there, we will never know the full answer. We would only Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Salvo, a look at Matti Leisola’s book, Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design Matti Leisola, a gifted Finnish bioengineer, started out as a good Darwinist. But he could not avoid the massive pushback from the evidence of design he found in nature. A specialist in enzymes and rare sugars, he noticed that high-school students in his own country were being taught hoary Darwinian legends rather than a more nuanced view of biology that sees each individual cell as a complex city of life. Over a long career, which included serving as dean (now emeritus) of Chemistry and Material Sciences at Helsinki University of Technology and as research director for Cultor, a global biotech company, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Wnt is ancient pathway, whose evolutionary appearance dates back to the emergence of multicellular animals. It plays pivotal roles in cell to cell communication and governs several aspects of embryonic development and tissue homeostasis. When dysfunctional, Wnt signaling can be at the origin of many diseases, in particular several cancers. With 10 receptors and 19 ligands, recognizing each other, the complexity of the pathway seemed dizzying. How do vertebrate cells manage to interpret the many Wnt signals they encounter and trigger an adequate response? It is such an interpretation mechanism that ULB researchers have just discovered. Previous findings had shown that two proteins expressed by cerebral endothelial cells, Gpr124 and Reck, are required for cerebrovascular development in response Read More ›

From Clay Routledge at National Review: As I discuss in my new book, Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of Invisible World, the decline of any particular religion does not reflect a decline in people’s orientation toward supernatural questions, curiosities, and beliefs. Most people still believe in God or a universal spirit. The majority of religious “nones” believe in God, a higher power, or a spiritual force. Even those who reject supernatural ideas can be influenced by them. For instance, researchers in Finland found that theists and atheists exhibited similar levels of physiological stress when reading aloud statements daring God to cause harm. Other studies indicate that even atheists have a tendency to believe in fate at least somewhat and Read More ›

Some things can’t change. From a piece at ENST, A Classic Evolutionist’s Error, Berra’s Blunder Revs Up Again Tim Berra had tried to compare biological evolution to the evolution of the Corvette. In his book Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, Johnson aptly pointed out the intuitively obvious difference: Of course, every one of those Corvettes was designed by engineers. The Corvette sequence — like the sequence of Beethoven’s symphonies to the opinions of the United States Supreme Court — does not illustrate naturalistic evolution at all. It illustrates how intelligent designers will typically achieve their purposes by adding variations to a basic design plan. Even if comparisons can be made, one cannot logically use designed things to explain un-designed things. Read More ›

Explanations of the dramatic Cambrian explosion of life forms (540 million years ago) are a cottage industry, with arguments about oxygen a staple of the discussion. See, for example, Maverick theory: Cambrian animals remade the environment by generating oxygen Did a low oxygen level delay complex life on Earth? There was only a small oxygen jump Animals didn’t “arise” from oxygenation, they created it, researchers say Theory on how animals evolved challenged: Some need almost no oxygen New study: Oxygenic photosynthesis goes back three billion years Enough O2 long before animals? Life exploded after slow O2 rise? So the Cambrian really WAS an explosion then? and finally, Researchers: Cambrian explosion was not an explosion after all (When in doubt, insist that nothing happened.) And this Read More ›

From Philip Lieberman at The Scientist: In On the Origin of Species, Darwin noted “the strange fact that every particle of food and drink which we swallow has to pass over the orifice of the trachea, with some risk of falling into the lungs.” Because of this odd anatomy, which differs from that of all other mammals, choking on food remains the fourth leading cause of accidental death in the United States. This species-specific problem is a consequence of the mutations that crafted the human face, pharynx, and tongue so as to make it easier to speak and to correctly interpret the acoustic speech signals that we hear. In humans, however, a developmental process that spans the first 8 to Read More ›