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From ScienceDaily: The crucibles that bore out building blocks of life may have been, in many cases, not fiery cataclysms, but modest puddles. Researchers working with that hypothesis have achieved a significant advancement toward understanding the evolutionary mystery of how components of RNA and DNA formed from chemicals present on early Earth before life existed. In surprisingly simple reactions they have produced good candidates for their precursors that even spontaneously joined up to look like RNA. Paper. (public access) – Brian J. Cafferty, David M. Fialho, Jaheda Khanam, Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, Nicholas V. Hud. Spontaneous formation and base pairing of plausible prebiotic nucleotides in water. Nature Communications, 2016; 7: 11328 DOI: 10.1038/NCOMMS11328 More. The wheels come off later, one suspects. Otherwise, Read More ›

From Nature: Today, with the debate about the future of peer review more fraught than ever, it is crucial to understand the youth of this institution. What’s more, its workings and its imagined goals have evolved continually, and its current tensions bear the marks of this. The referee system has become a mishmash of practices, functions and values. But one thing stands out: pivotal moments in the history of peer review have occurred when the public status of science was being renegotiated. … Current attempts to reimagine peer review rightly debate the psychology of bias, the problem of objectivity, and the ability to gauge reliability and importance, but they rarely consider the multilayered history of this institution. Peer review did Read More ›

Why do people who think math is just something humans evolved to relate to our world (and has only an accidental relationship with correctness) think it is important if statistics are just made up? Clearly they do care (language warning), as is evident from an interview with stats critic Tim Harford More or Less at Vice: All of this is more relevant now than ever before, because most news operations are 24-hour rolling cycles, where press releases, particularly those from official-sounding bodies, may be posted unchecked. The shared parental-leave story ended up being analyzed by politicians and comment writers, and everything they were saying was based on utter, utter bullshit. And that’s just traditional news sources. Increasingly, we are getting Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Early humans may have been food for carnivores 500,000 years ago Tooth-marks on a 500,000-year-old hominin femur bone found in a Moroccan cave indicate that it was consumed by large carnivores, likely hyenas, according to a study published April 27, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Camille Daujeard from the Muséum National D’Histoire Naturelle, France, and colleagues. … While the appearance of the marks indicated that they were most likely made by hyenas shortly after death, it was not possible to conclude whether the bone had been eaten as a result of predation on the hominin or had been scavenged soon after death. Nonetheless, this is the first evidence that humans were a resource for carnivores Read More ›

From Paul Driessen at Townhall: I saw Climate Hustle April 14, at its U.S. premiere on Capitol Hill in Washington. The film is informative and entertaining, pointed and humorous. As meteorologist Anthony Watts says, it is wickedly effective in its using slapstick humor and the words and deeds of climate alarmists to make you laugh at them. It examines the science on both sides of the issue … presents often hilarious planetary Armageddon prophecies of Al Gore, Leonard Nimoy and other doomsayers … and lets 30 scientists and other experts expose the climate scares and scams, explain Real World climate science, and delve deeply into the politics and media hype that have surrounded this issue since it was first concocted Read More ›

Here: Dozens of genes found in humans today have been traced to Neanderthals and Denisovans. They made their way into the human species when some of our direct ancestors mated with ancient lineages that are now extinct. Interbreeding like this happened in Africa and in Eurasia, producing many human hybrids – you can read more about them here. Recent genetic decoding has revealed that it partly accounts for differences in our physical appearance – things like skin and hair colour – and affects our health. More. One must pay to read anything significant, and one senses that we’re not going to hear why, exactly, those other groups are somehow classified as not “the human species.” Because if they are, the Read More ›

From Michael Denton, in Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016): Incongruous thought it might seem (in the context of the evolutionary propaganda machine and especially to a reader outside of academia), it remains true, as I point out in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), that the vast majority of all taxa are indeed defined by novelties without any antecedent in any presumed ancestral forms. The empirical facts make it possible—to paraphrase Dawkins—to be an intellectually satisfied typologist. (p. 56) The vast majority of Westerners are educated under the loving guidance of pressure groups for Darwin and, as with so many other things, they would be very surprised to know the extent to which it hangs together but just Read More ›

Take two of these: 4) We cannot appeal to the singularity as the cause of the universe. If the big bang singularity is precisely nothing, we are left with the question of how the universe then came into existence out of nothing. Others have argued that a big bang singularity would be a real physical state; but if so it would still just exist at the time t=0. In that case we have to ask “how did the singularity come into existence out of nothing?” 5) Some speculate that future scientific research will provide strong evidence in favour of cosmologies that avoid a beginning of the universe. For example, in the oscillating universe model the universe expands, then collapses back Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Bacteria possess the ability to take up DNA from their environment, a skill that enables them to acquire new genes for antibiotic resistance or to escape the immune response. Scientists have now mapped the core set of genes that are consistently controlled during DNA uptake in strep bacteria, and they hope the finding will allow them to cut off the microbes’ ability to survive what doctors and nature can throw at them. It’ll be interesting to see who wins this one, man or bug. HGT gives bacteria a vast library of existing solutions. Earlier studies of competence had pointed to more than 300 active genes. The new study identifies only 83 genes in 29 regions of the strep Read More ›

Possibly because naturalists will be there ahead of it: At CNBC, futurist Michio Kaku explains that we are still the cavemen of 100,000 years ago (his “caveman principle”), so we just aren’t comfortable with brain implants and machines as persons. He goes on to say, “I think the ‘Terminator’ idea is a reasonable one — that is that one day the internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way,” he said. “After all, if you meet an ant hill and you’re making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It’s not that you don’t like the ants, it’s not that you hate ants, they are just in the way.” More. Kaku’s conflicting pronouncements, Read More ›

From UK Independent: Insects have a form of consciousness, according to a new paper that might show us how our own began. Brain scans of insects appear to indicate that they have the capacity to be conscious and show egocentric behaviour, apparently indicating that they have such a thing as subjective experience. … Clearly, the specific make-up of the insect brain means that their experience of consciousness is going to be different from that of a human. “Their experience of the world is not as rich or as detailed as our experience – our big neocortex adds something to life!” the scientists wrote recently. “But it still feels like something to be a bee.” More. Modern evolutionary theory has reached Read More ›

Via Jonathan McLatchie, ID theorist Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box and Edge of Evolution is going to be presenting an interactive online webinar on May 7th (8pm GMT / 3pm Eastern / 2pm Central / 12noon Pacific) to my group, the Apologetics Academy (http://www.apologetics-academy.org). Behe will present on the biochemical evidence for design for approximately 1 hour and then field questions from the floor. YouTube to be posted later. More info here. Your time? Global clock face. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: A new study suggests that ravens can be as clever as chimpanzees, despite having much smaller brains, indicating that rather than the size of the brain, the neuronal density and the structure of the birds’ brains play an important role in terms of their intelligence. … The large-scale study concluded that great apes performed the best, and that absolute brain size appeared to be key when it comes to intelligence. However, they didn’t conduct the cylinder test on corvid birds. (For some reason, humans were not tested for the ability to get food out of the end of a tube instead of striking at the middle… ) Can Kabadayi, together with researchers from the University of Oxford, UK Read More ›

From Joseph Bottum, a review of David Wootton’s The Invention of Science at Weekly Standard, David Wootton has written a long book to save science from something, even if he’s not quite sure what that something is. The demystification, deconstruction, and doubt of post-modernity, maybe. Or revitalized religious faith, from Radical Islam to Protestant Fundamentalism. Certainly, Wootton wants to rescue modern science from its historians. He calls this a new history, and he means it: The text would be a third shorter if Wootton could keep himself from diatribe, from savaging nearly every author who has had the temerity to write about the history of science before David Wootton came along to save the day. … Wootton knows the wonder-working Read More ›

From Deborah Berry at The Conversation: In 2012, the biopharmaceutical company Amgen reported that it had been unable to reproduce 47 of 53 “landmark” cancer papers. For confidentiality reasons, however, the company did not release which papers it could not replicate and thus did not provide details about how it repeated the experiments. As with the psychology studies, this leaves the possibility that Amgen got different results because the experiments were not performed the same way as the original study. It opens the door to doubt about which result – the first or the repeat test – was correct. Several initiatives are addressing this problem in multiple disciplines. Science Exchange; the Center for Open Science, a group dedicated to “openness, integrity Read More ›