The implications for finding fossil remnants of life on Mars are addressed in the article. The researchers acknowledge that survival of microorganisms over geological timescales is “not fully understood.”
Intelligent Design
At Mind Matters News: Claim: Honeybees, “like humans” can tell odd vs. even numbers
Bees are not six-legged humans. They are incorporating the mathematical structure of the universe into their survival strategies. The researchers mainly demonstrated that we can use operant conditioning on bees.
Researchers: Eukaryotes got started from a merger between bacteria and archaea, without oxygen
On the whole, it might be easier to conclude that the timing is somewhat off than that complex life started without oxygen. But symbiosis is an intriguing theory nonetheless.
At Mind Matters News: Must we be able to reason to be thought of as human persons?
Reason is a natural quality of the human being but, like everything in nature, it develops in stages. One can’t say it doesn’t exist when undeveloped.
At Nautilus, a science writer muses on efforts to grapple with time — the universe’s odd dimension
Annaka Harris: “I think the flow of time is not part of the fundamental structure of reality,” theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli tells me. He is currently working on a theory of quantum gravity in which the variable of time plays no part.”
Michael Egnor muses on some shaky arguments for abortion
Egnor: “if the fetus is a part of the mother’s body, then all pregnant women are chromosomal mosaics. That is, they are organisms that have two sets of genomes. Chromosome mosaicism is a rare disorder and is not synonymous with pregnancy.”
Studies of co-evolution biased toward “striking and exaggerated phenotypes”, researchers say
The authors seem to suspect that “the widespread impression that coevolution is a rare and quirky sideshow to the day-to-day grind of ecology and evolution” is wrong and that new tools for uncovering it will show it to be more common. Co-evolution must require a fair amount of cooperation between utterly different life forms. If natural selection is the model, one failure would end a multi-stage process.
Rebranding some junk DNA as spam DNA
Perhaps science is a bit more like business than we think. In business, products get rebranded when vice presidents outnumber customers for the old brand.
At Mind Matters News: Among 5000 known exoplanets, there are some really strange ones
To sum up, whatever we see or read about planets in science fiction, something out there is likely stranger still. It will be most interesting to see how many of the more conventional exoplanets have life and if there is in fact a reliable formula for predicting it. Those who claim that Earth is just an ordinary planet are certainly wrong — but is Earth unique? The universe is fine-tuned, as is Earth, and that would be an argument for life on exoplanets.
Denton’s prior fitness argument: Everything seems to have come together to produce humans
But didn’t Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) say, “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.” The idea isn’t new; there’s just much more evidence for it.
“Lost” coral species found “inside” another species
Of course, the story raises the question of just how important saving “species” (see speciation) is. A shift in an ecology can be critical but the disappearance, reappearance, or brand new development of a hard-to-distinguish species may not have much environment impact.
Researchers: Cells organize themselves in our organs by increasing in volume when tissues bend
“The fact that this increase in volume is staggered in time and transient also shows that it is an active and living system,” adds a researcher. Once again, we are expected to believe that such a system can just develop in a gradual Darwinian fashion.
Casey Luskin: ID as fruitful approach to science
The trouble is, many people would just as soon that research into evolutionary computation anatomy and physiology, and bioinformatics, however fruitful, not be done if it undermines a comfortable Darwinism.
Researchers see one particle on two paths, say it shows quantum physics is right
Researchers: “A single neutron is measured at a specific position—and due to the sophisticated measurement setup, this single measurement proofs already that the particle moved along two different paths at the same time. It is even possible to determine the ratio in which the neutron was distributed between the two paths. Thus, the phenomenon of quantum superposition can be proven without having to resort to statistical arguments.” Albert, check your mail.
Researchers: A key cell division protein is still a puzzle
In other words, contrary to expectation, the system is even more complex than supposed. At this point, unguided evolution becomes overwhelmingly implausible because it would take only one misstep to end the process. But people believe what they believe.