Intelligent Design

  We are so informed, at ScienceDaily: Evolution moulds the shapes of living creatures according to the benefits they offer. At the microscopic level, do the various shapes of bacteria also contribute to their survival? Does a spherical bacterium (coccus) have a better chance of infecting its host than its stick-shaped neighbour (bacillus)? Analysis of the evolution of the pathogenic bacteria that live in the nasopharynx suggests that the shape of these bacteria has changed over time, shifting from bacillus to coccus. In an article published in the journal PLOS Genetics, Professor Frédéric Veyrier, of INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier Research Centre, and his colleagues demonstrate that this change may have occurred to make the bacteria better at slipping through the defences of Read More ›

Well, get this: Far from being selfish organisms whose sole purpose is to maximize their own reproduction, bacteria in large communities work for the greater good by resolving a social conflict among individuals to enhance the survival of their entire community. This part is rubbish, of course: “It’s an example of what we call ’emergent phenomena’,” explained Gürol Süel, an associate professor of molecular biology at UC San Diego who headed the research effort. “Emergent phenomena” is an elegant of saying “We don’t know what we are talking about.” That’s fine, just admit it. Meanwhile: The conflict is essentially this: Bacteria at the outer edges of the biofilm are the most vulnerable within their community to chemical and antibiotic attacks. Read More ›

From the Edge: Ubiquitous computing, or the Internet of things, is all supposed to disappear. The problem is, is it going to disappear into us? What could possibly go wrong? There is an argument that these machines are going to replace us, but I only think that’s relevant to you or me in the sense that it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t happen in our lifetime. The Kurzweil crowd argues this is happening faster and faster, and things are just running amok. In fact, things are slowing down. In 2045, it’s going to look more like it looks today than you think. Readers? But see also: Will robots really take over? That depends. It depends on what people can do that Read More ›

So they say, 125 mya. Velociraptor, from the BBC: The 6ft 6in (2m) creature was almost perfectly preserved in limestone, thanks to a volcanic eruption that had buried it in north-east China. And the 125-million year-old fossil suggests many other dinosaurs, including velociraptors, would have looked like “big, fluffy killer birds”. But it is unlikely that it could fly. note also: There are [museum] storerooms full of new dinosaur fossils that have never been studied before. And not on the open market as well? See also: A newly identified species of feathered dinosaur is the largest ever discovered to have a well-preserved set of bird-like wings, a study suggests. Palaeontologists working in China unearthed the fossil remains of the winged Read More ›

Would it be best to get Darwinism out of the discussion? Mathematician Peter Saunders on Darwinism and epigenetics, Part II, Following on Part I (see especially Mae Wan-Ho): Here: Peter Saunders: The idea is that if you have an organism, say maize, and you want it to be resistant to a certain herbicide — then what you do, consistent with the Modern Synthesis, is you find the “gene” that the herbicide resists in something else and you transfer it to maize. There you are. The only thing is that too depends on the 1960s thinking about the “gene.” What is that piece of DNA actually doing? Remember what they transfer isn’t the “gene.” It’s a piece of DNA, which is Read More ›

From The Verge, re Neil Tyson, heir apparent to Carl Sagan (Cosmos II) on the Pluto flyby. After calling Pluto a malted milk ball left in the rain (ice cream is a theme in the video), Colbert introduces Tyson as one of the biggest Pluto demoters and proceeds to berate the astrophysicist for his lack of love for the dwarf planet. “It’s even got a heart, unlike you,” Colbert says. Tyson defends himself saying that he was only an “accessory” to Pluto’s demotion — an oft repeated claim of his. Yet he’s not backing down on the status change. Hmmm. Was Tyson’s opinion overrated, the way Carl Sagan’s always was? Would make sense. Would make sense. Hot vs. what? Wow! vs how? Cheat sheet Read More ›

I (O’Leary for News ) must have first met Bill Dembski (who started this blog in 2005) at some  Christian meet in the Toronto area, Canada, roughly 2002. You know, the usual Templeton-funded stuff, aimed at sedating and anaesthetizing Christians in science while their hands are conveniently chopped off. They are more useful that way. Bill struck a chord with me because his main point was, information theory cannot be incorporated into this so-easy-victory-for-materialism agenda. I’d never before heard anyone offer evidence as to why the unbelievable just isn’t true. As opposed to the usual rubbish: We should quiet our concerns by  developing two lives, one in which we assent that the unbelievable is true (and get good jobs). Otherwise, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Carrying around a spare tire is a good thing — you never know when you’ll get a flat. Turns out we’re all carrying around “spare tires” in our genomes, too. Today, in ACS Central Science, researchers report that an extra set of guanines (or “G”s) in our DNA may function just like a “spare” to help prevent many cancers from developing. More. The researchers scanned the sequences of known human oncogenes associated with cancer, and found that many contain the four G-stretches necessary for quadruplex formation and a fifth G-stretch one or more bases downstream. The team showed that these extra Gs could act like a “spare tire,” getting swapped in as needed to allow damage removal by Read More ›

But Darwinism, the ultimate in scienceyness, gets a pass? Legal enforcement? From The Guardian: Lots of real scientific terms – such as “neuro” or “nano” – get borrowed for a spot of buzzword scienceyness. Epigenetics is a real and important part of biology, but due to predictable quackery, it is threatening to become the new quantum. All of your cells contain all of your 22,000 genes, but not all of them need to be active all the time. They need to be turned on or off, in the right tissue, at the right moment, and so we have incredible networks of control systems in our genomes – circuits, programmes, hierarchies. Epigenetics literally means “in addition to genetics” and is one Read More ›

Lee Smolin, a cosmologist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, informs us via PBS, I believe in time. I haven’t always believed in it. Like many physicists and philosophers, I had once concluded from general relativity and quantum gravity that time is not a fundamental aspect of nature, but instead emerges from another, deeper description. Then, starting in the 1990s and accelerated by an eight year collaboration with the Brazilian philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, I came to believe instead that time is fundamental. (How I came to this is another story.) Now, I believe that by taking time to be fundamental, we might be able to understand how general relativity and the standard model emerge from a deeper theory, Read More ›

John Paul Pagano, geek on Twitter, asks, Can someone finally take conservatorship of Richard Dawkin’s Internet access? Please? in relation to Dawkins’ tweet: A pleasure to be invited to @JulianAssange_’s birthday party in the Ecuadorian Embassy where he is confined. Julian Assange? WikiLeaks founder. I (O’Leary for News) would like to know what is so wrong with WikiLeaks? Why shouldn’t there be more transparency in government? I await the day someone starts shovelling through the steaming pile here in Ontario (province, Canada). Maybe our modest investment here in getting Dawkins set up with a Twitter account is paying off.  Like, for actual results, it beats the elevator shoo! story. 😉 Thoughts? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Butt heads like deer? Further to Oldest animal sperm to date, from ScienceDaily: “It is incredible to think that features found in deer such as the water deer, musk deer and muntjacs today were already represented 270 million years ago,” says Cisneros. The researchers found the Tiarajudens’ marginal teeth are also located in a bone from the palate called epipterygoid. “This is an extraordinary condition as no other animal in the lineage leading to mammals show marginal dentition in a bone from the palate,” says Abdala. In another group of mammal fossil relatives, dinocephalians — that lived at the same time as anomodonts, some of the bones in their foreheads were massively thickened. This can be interpreted as being used Read More ›

A friend writes re a 2014 Johns Hopkins book, Creationism in Europe, “It’s nice to know you’re wanted:” For decades, the creationist movement was primarily fixed in the United States. Then, in the 1970s, American creationists found their ideas welcomed abroad, first in Australia and New Zealand, then in Korea, India, South Africa, Brazil, and elsewhere—including Europe, where creationism plays an expanding role in public debates about science policy and school curricula. In this, the first comprehensive history of creationism in Europe, leading historians, philosophers, and scientists narrate the rise of—and response to—scientific creationism, creation science, intelligent design, and organized anti-evolutionism in countries and religions throughout Europe. The book provides a unique map of creationism in Europe, plotting the surprising Read More ›

In the age of on-line entertainment and instant information it was, perhaps, possible to live without knowing about the carnage going on around us, but the video of evolutionist Deborah Nucatola casually and callously explaining the crushing of innocent babies and harvesting their young bodies leaves us forever without excuse. Between gulps of red wine and bites of salad we learn that “a lot of people want liver” and that “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver …” We are also told how to play games with the law so the harvesting of human body parts can proceed efficiently:  Read more

… here, I (O’Leary for News) would have just hit Delete except for one thing: I’d heard from the Dark Enlightenment* before when they were promoting science writer Nicholas Wade’s apparent defense of Darwinian evolution-based racial theories in Troublesome Inheritance Well, their latest is The cuckservative is often fanatically in favor of transracial adoption. He sees it as some divine calling. In a sense, this is cuckoldry at its essence, since these whites are usually forgoing their own inclusive fitness to adopt someone from another race. As Heartiste notes, they’re race-cucking their own families. Although the cuckservative is eager to show his PC bona fides by openness to other races, he really doesn’t want to know about other races. Human biodiversity Read More ›