From Mashable: The geometric wonders are by Kerby Rosanes, an illustrator from the Philippines, who wields an ink pen and plastic compass like a straight-edge wizard. More of Rosanes’ work can be found on his Society6 page and Instagram. See also: At PBS: Puzzle of mathematics is more complex than we sometimes think Follow UD News at Twitter! More of Rosanes’ work can be found on his Society6 page and Instagram.
Latest improbable scenario for the origin of life, from New Scientist: Did life begin in the freezer? Early Earth may not have been as hot and hellish as we thought. In fact, it may have become a snowball around the time life first emerged. This is according to a fresh analysis of rocks from South Africa that formed about 3.5 billion years ago, during the Archaean period. Previous research suggested that the ocean in which these rocks formed was warm – perhaps around 85̊C. But Maarten de Wit at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, now says the ocean temperature was similar to today’s – and that there is even evidence that ice was present. The Read More ›
From BBC: Mystery ancient hobbit ‘was not human’ Researchers Balzeau and Charlier: “The shape of its skull is definitely not the shape of a modern human skull… Even a human with pathologies [disease].” Taken together, the results of his study, soon to be published in the Journal of Human Evolution, suggest that there is nothing about the skull that fits with any known population of modern human. In other words, the hobbit is not a small and diseased member of our species, Homo sapiens. It’s something much more exotic. Well, that tidies things up, right? Its eyes are very small and its shape is slightly different from H. erectus Crucially, the hobbit also lacked a chin. And as we have Read More ›
Depending on how we define species, extinction, as well as hybridization and evolution. From ScienceDaily: New research from UBC shows that when humans speed up the usually slow process of evolution by introducing new species, it can result in a lasting impact on the ecosystem. The phenomenon is known as reverse speciation and researchers witnessed it in Enos Lake on Vancouver Island where two similar species of threespine stickleback fish disappeared within three years.”When two similar species are in one environment, they often perform different ecological roles,” said Seth Rudman, a PhD student in zoology at UBC. “When they go extinct, it has strong consequences for the ecosystem.” Two species of endangered threespine stickleback fish lived in the lake. One Read More ›
What else to make of this, from New Scientist?: A lot of problems in today’s world are too big for our brains. An algorithm that identifies how cause and effect are linked could lead us to better solutions … Finding solutions means doing what Newton did with gravity: asking the right questions, teasing out causes and effects, and so building an intellectual framework to explain the puzzle. But how do we do that with the sheer quantity of data sloshing around in today’s world? It’s this problem that has led some to think we need to think seriously about the way we think. Only by rebooting our powers of logic and going beyond what nature has hardwired into our brain Read More ›
Swarmbots: Apparently, it takes ingenuity to get a life form to fail, but the trick may come in handy. From Duke University: Duke University bioengineers design cells that die if they leave the confines of their capsule Duke University researchers have engineered microbes that can’t run away from home; those that do will quickly die without protective proteins produced by their peers. Dubbed “swarmbots” for their ability to survive in a crowd, the system could be used as a safeguard to stop genetically modified organisms from escaping into the surrounding environment. The approach could also be used to reliably program colonies of bacteria to respond to changes in their surrounding environment, such as releasing specific molecules on cue. The system Read More ›
From science writer Neel S. Patel at Inverse: “Survival of the fittest” is bigger than just evolutionary biology. You bet. The selfish gene even gives us medical advice. The word Darwinism has become a synecdoche for all the mechanisms implied by the Malthusian concept of “survival of the fittest” — the notion that the strongest members of a system survive to reproduce and pass their genetics on to progeny. But natural selection needn’t be limited to Darwin’s finches. When applying this idea to physics we get quantum Darwinism, the theory that the governing laws of biology apply to particles. It used to be the other way around (physics and chemistry govern biology), but on the eve of its extinction, there Read More ›
If you have a cold. From ScienceDaily: Research suggests that our selfish genes are behind the aches, fever The symptoms that accompany illness appear to negatively affect one’s chance of survival and reproduction. So why would this phenomenon persist? Symptoms, say the scientists, are not an adaptation that works on the level of the individual. Rather, they suggest, evolution is functioning on the level of the “selfish gene.” Even though the individual organism may not survive the illness, isolating itself from its social environment will reduce the overall rate of infection in the group. “From the point of view of the individual, this behavior may seem overly altruistic,” says Dr. Keren Shakhar, “but from the perspective of the gene, its Read More ›
From stalwart of science New York Mag: But scientists are coming to realize that this might not be quite right. A pair of new studies challenge many of the popular assumptions about the psychological effects of wintertime, suggesting that we should look at the season in a new, brighter light. The weather might be gray and chilly, but the latest science says we humans are better at dealing with this than we usually give ourselves credit for, both in terms of our mood and the basic functioning of our brains. The first study is a massive investigation published recently in Clinical Psychological Science involving 34,294 U.S. adults. It casts doubt on the very notion that depression symptoms are worse in Read More ›
Abstract from Nature: Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality Since the origins of agriculture, the scale of human cooperation and societal complexity has dramatically expanded. This fact challenges standard evolutionary explanations of prosociality because well-studied mechanisms of cooperation based on genetic relatedness, reciprocity and partner choice falter as people increasingly engage in fleeting transactions with genetically unrelated strangers in large anonymous groups. To explain this rapid expansion of prosociality, researchers have proposed several mechanisms. Here we focus on one key hypothesis: cognitive representations of gods as increasingly knowledgeable and punitive, and who sanction violators of interpersonal social norms, foster and sustain the expansion of cooperation, trust and fairness towards co-religionist strangers. We tested this hypothesis using Read More ›
This is philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze’s view: I have just finished my fifth reading of Robert J. Spitzer’s book, New Proofs for the Existence of God. In this book Spitzer set himself the task of exploring how far natural theology can take us towards understanding God. The first part of the book deals purely with science, particularly cosmology. In it he discusses the Big Bang; the extreme fine tuning of the of the universe which makes possible the existence of stars, planets, and life; General Relativity; string theory; and quantum physics. This part of the book reads like a science text. In the second part of the book he takes a purely philosophical approach using only the tools of Read More ›
From Sean Pitman (2016): Late last year there was an interesting debate on Premier Christian Radio, “Unbelievable” with Justin Brierley between Stephen Meyer and Charles Marshall over Meyer’s latest book,Darwin’s Doubt. Marshall, a UC Berkeley paleontologist, had published a review of the book in the journal Science a few months earlier and this was Meyer’s chance to respond to Marshall’s less than positive critique. For those interested, the radio debate is available by clicking on the following: (Link) What follows here is my own summery, followed by my own personal take, on the debate: More. See also: Listener’s guide and video series on the book Follow UD News at Twitter!
“One of the world’s most important biological thinkers.” From Scientific American: Excerpted from A Brief History of Creation by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves III. Copyright © 2016 by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves III. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. The year is 3,500,000,000 BC. The place is a rocky outcropping that juts out into a shallow, wave-lapped inlet on a landmass that will one day be called Australia. … atmosphere is filled with toxic gases, and almost completely devoid of oxygen. That will come much later, the product of photosynthesis by tiny organisms that will one day churn away in the primitive oceans. But the ancestor of those Read More ›
An earlier story here today mentioned Dan Graur: Plagiarism in science texts, not just journals? (Maybe, with enough publicity, a public explanation will be forthcoming…) From Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True blog, we learn the twelve truths of Darwinian evolutionary biology, and some other stuff as well: Dan Graur, who is Professor of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston, describes himself on Tw*tter as “A Very Angry Evolutionary Biologist, a Very Angry Liberal, and an Even Angrier Art Lover”. His Tumblr says he ‘has a very low threshold for hooey, hype, hypocrisy, postmodernism, bad statistics, ignorance of population genetics and evolutionary biology masquerading as -omics, and hatred of any kind.’ Anyway, yesterday he tw**eted a link to Read More ›
From Trends in Genetics: Evolutionary theory predicts that factors such as a small population size or low recombination rate can limit the action of natural selection. The emerging field of comparative population genomics offers an opportunity to evaluate these hypotheses. However, classical theoretical predictions assume that populations are at demographic equilibrium. This assumption is likely to be violated in the very populations researchers use to evaluate selection’s limits: populations that have experienced a recent shift in population size and/or effective recombination rates. Here we highlight theory and data analyses concerning limitations on the action of natural selection in nonequilibrial populations and argue that substantial care is needed to appropriately test whether species and populations show meaningful differences in selection efficacy. Read More ›