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Well, that’s how The Scientist describes it: How one generation’s experience can affect the next Caution! The article begins by denouncing the crackpot theories of Lysenko along these lines, and piously informs us that “science” has since discovered that there is something in epigenetics after all. Any history that leaves out the ridicule to which Lamarck was routinely subjected, without justification, by Darwin’s followers is revisionism, pure and simple. But then, the people responsible have some butt to cover, right? Meanwhile, Not only is epigenetic information inherited during cellular division, but it can also be passed from one generation to the next in multicellular organisms, a phenomenon known as transgenerational epigenetics. This requires that epigenetic information be carried in the Read More ›

From Washington Post: Tardigrades — otherwise known as water bears or (gasp) moss piglets — are weird. They can survive in the vacuum of space, for starters. So when researchers at the University of North Carolina announced on Nov. 23 that the minuscule animal had hitherto unheard of ratios of DNA borrowed from plants, fungi and bacteria, many in the scientific community were more than happy to believe the strange findings. Now, a lab at the University of Edinburgh claims the results must be an error. … “We just hadn’t seen evidence of that at all,” Blaxter said. The fact that tardigrades have genes they’ve acquired through horizontal gene transfer isn’t up for dispute. But the record-breaking volume didn’t line Read More ›

See here (“Single jaw find shows three “species” to be one”), for example, and here (Science journalist discovers she is part Neanderthal). Oh and, Vince Torley notes “No debate about macroevolution? Surely you’re joking, Professor Coyne!” Surely, he isn’t joking. Darwin’s tenured flock have got on fine for many years without ever taking seriously the mess the whole concept is in. They can hardly take it seriouly anyway because it is central to the most influential academic book, Dawin;’s On the Origin of Species, which supposedly enshrines the single greatest idea anyone ever had, the foundation of their discipline. What’s mere plodding science compared to all that. And yet the concept is just one big mess right now. So big Read More ›

No, apparently. Lifestyle choices matter too, especially exercise. From Gretchen Reynolds at the New York Times: As I frequently have written in this column, exercise may cause robust improvements in brain health and slow age-related declines in memory and thinking. Study after study has shown correlations between physical activity, muscular health and mental acuity, even among people who are quite old. But these studies have limitations and one of them is that some people may be luckier than others. They may have been born to have a more robust brain than someone else. Their genes and early home environment might have influenced their brain health as much as or more than their exercise habits. Their genes and early home environment Read More ›

From Science: Controversial experiment sees no evidence that the universe is a hologram Working in a disused tunnel with a couple of lasers and a few mirrors, a plucky band of physicists dreamed up a way to test one of the wildest ideas in theoretical physics—a notion from the nearly inscrutable realm of “string theory” that our universe may be like an enormous hologram. However, science doesn’t indulge sentimental favorites. After years of probing the fabric of spacetime for a signal of the “holographic principle,” researchers at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, have come up empty, as they will report tomorrow at the lab. Experiments  won’t change anything. String theory is one of those theories that has Read More ›

Further to Lee Spetner’s comments on the (correct) wiring of the vertebrate eye* (sometimes used as a claim for “poor design”), over at Creation-Evolution Headlines, there are some recent articles on the subject, with lots of links: Two Evolutionary Evidences Debunked (7/23/14) This evolutionary argument began to unravel in 2007 when researchers found that Müller cells, penetrating the thicket of blood vessels in the human retina, actually provide near-ideal vision by acting as wave guides to the individual photoreceptors—providing better performance than could be had if the rods and cones were in front of the blood vessels (see 5/02/2007 and subsequent research reported 5/07/2010 about additional vision enhancements provided by the Müller cells) and Backward Wiring of Eye Retina Confirmed Read More ›

Alternet to the rescue! (We didn’t know it was this bad, by the way): We Can Save Atheism From the New Atheists Like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris There must be another way for nonbelievers than to transform into toxic know-it-alls. … As a philosophical tendency, the New Atheists were popularisers rather than innovators, using advances in biology and neuroscience to illustrate pretty well-worn arguments against religion. Indeed, in some crucial ways, they represent an intellectual step backward from a left that had recognised atheism as necessary but scarcely sufficient. As early as 1842, Marx dismissed those who trumpeted their disbelief to children as “assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the Read More ›

Who often know something about logical reasoning. From Gary Gutting at Salon: Atheists sometimes argue the case against God is the same as the case against Santa Claus. Let’s test the logic Our first concern will be Richard Dawkins’s efforts to refute standard arguments for theism. These efforts suffer from a variety of logical mistakes. His critique of the cosmological argument confuses an implication with a presupposition, while his critique of the ontological argument makes an illegitimate move from distaste for a conclusion to its invalidity. His critique of arguments from religious experience ignores the distinction between when we can explain an experience as illusory and when we should explain an experience as illusory. [Snippet:] Dawkins’s critique of religious experience goes Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Among other findings, a bonobo was observed for the first time making and using spears in a social setting for the purpose of attack and defense. “I believe that the current study will break down our cultural hang-up as humans concerning the inherent capabilities and potential of bonobos and chimpanzees,” says Itai Roffman of the Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa, who undertook the study … Interestingly, the bonobos are considered less sophisticated than their chimpanzee siblings. Chimpanzees have been observed in nature using branches to dig for tubers in the ground and to break into termite nests and beehives. As part of their cultural diversity, they have also been documented breaking nuts with hammer and Read More ›

Not the comb jellies? From ScienceDaily: Who came first – sponges or comb jellies? A new study reaffirms that sponges are the oldest animal phylum – and restores the classical view of early animal evolution, which recent molecular analyses had challenged. Sponges (Porifera), comb jellies (Ctenophora), the true jellyfish and corals (Cnidaria) and plate animals (Placozoa) together make up the so-called non-bilaterian animals. All four phyla are evolutionarily ancient, and were already in existence more than 600 million years ago. However, unraveling the interrelationships between them — and how they relate to the Bilateria, to which all other animals, including humans, belong — has turned out to be one of the most challenging problems in evolutionary biology. “If we are Read More ›

So whose dictation is it taking? From ScienceDaily: Looking Back 3.8 Billion Years Into the Root of the ‘Tree of Life’ … NASA-funded researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are tapping information found in the cells of all life on Earth, and using it to trace life’s evolution. They have learned that life is a master stenographer — writing, rewriting and recording its history in elaborate biological structures. Nw her is an interesting admission: “The ribosome recorded its history,” said Williams. “It accreted and got bigger and bigger over time. But the older parts were continually frozen after they accreted, just like the rings of a tree. As long as that tree lives, the inner rings will not change. Read More ›

… is like trusting five-year-olds to edit the Constitution From International Conference on Human Gene Editing (A Global Summit): It would be irresponsible to proceed with any clinical use of germline editing unless and until (i) the relevant safety and efficacy issues have been resolved, based on appropriate understanding and balancing of risks, potential benefits, and alternatives, and (ii) there is broad societal consensus about the appropriateness of the proposed application. Moreover, any clinical use should proceed only under appropriate regulatory oversight. At present, these criteria have not been met for any proposed clinical use: the safety issues have not yet been adequately explored; the cases of most compelling benefit are limited; and many nations have legislative or regulatory bans Read More ›

Despite evolutionary distance, researchers say. From ScienceDaily: Ever wonder how animals see the world? New research suggests that animals, or mammals at least, see the world the same way humans do. In a study published in the Nov. 25th issue of Biology Letters, researchers from Japan and France report that the eye view of ponies, dolphins, chimps, and humans are surprisingly similar despite having evolved in different environments. … In the study, the researchers used touchscreens to test the visual perception of three ponies: Ponyo, Nemo, and Thomas. The ponies were shown two shapes on the touchscreen, one of which the researchers arbitrarily decided was correct. The ponies received a carrot piece as a reward when they tapped their muzzle Read More ›

So reports Ethan Siegel at Forbes: Yesterday, results were released from an international team led by Alexandre Santerne from Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, where they measured 129 objects-of-interest identified by Kepler for a period of five years. They did spectroscopic analysis, which means they studied the individual wavelengths of light coming from the star, and expected a false positive rate of about 10-to-20%, which is what most scientists estimated. But they found, instead, that over half (52%) of the planetary candidates were, in fact, eclipsing binaries, with another three candidates turning out to be brown dwarfs. … But perhaps the biggest surprise is that the majority of these thought-to-be planets aren’t planets at all, but are massive Read More ›

Six new kind of brain cells discovered, maybe don’t form until later in life From Popular Mechanics: “Just asking ‘what types of cells make up the brain’ is such a basic question… that establishing a complete census of all neuron cell types is of great importance in moving the field of neuroscience forward,” says Tolias, at Baylor College of Medicine. Most previous studies investigating the odd menagerie of brain cells have used juvenile mice, mostly because it’s easier to get high-resolution pictures of their brains. But there’s a problem: Brains keep maturing and complicating as they get older, and Jiang’s team believes that their new-found neurons might not form until adulthood. More. But stop, wait, the brain is a machine, Read More ›