A tulip-shaped feeder. From ScienceDaily: “This was the earliest specimen of a stalked filter feeder that has been found in North America,” said lead author Julien Kimmig, collections manager for Invertebrate Paleontology at the Biodiversity Institute. “This animal lived in soft sediment and anchored into the sediment. The upper part of the tulip was the organism itself. It had a stem attached to the ground and an upper part, called the calyx, that had everything from the digestive tract to the feeding mechanism. It was fairly primitive and weird.” … “The Spence Shale gives us soft-tissue preservation, so we get a much more complete biota in these environments,” he said. “This gives us a better idea of what the early Read More ›

So much for Darwinism. Joshua B. Plotkin writes at Nature: Ecological interactions emerge spontaneously in an experimental study of bacterial populations cultured for 60,000 generations, and sustain rapid evolution by natural selection. (paywall) Yes, that’s the abstract. It’s a model of economy. This is from the article: The authors’ most profound discovery is the spontaneous emergence of ecological interactions that fuel ongoing evolution (Fig. 1). Persistent subgroups have previously been identified in one of Lenski’s populations, but Good et al. reveal that at least 9 of the populations divide into two separate clades (genetic groups). These clades co-exist for tens of thousands of generations, and so must be maintained by some form of interdependence. These emergent ecologies sustain ongoing adaptation Read More ›

From Michael Denton, in Wonder of Water: Whether the remarkable instances in which various properties of water work together to serve a vital end—such as the suite of properties involved in eroding rocks, or the suite of thermal properties involved in temperature regulation—are actually the result of design or not, there is no doubt that they convey a compelling impression of design. Every bit as remarkable, and also highly suggestive of design—perhaps even more so—are those instances where one vital property of water or set of properties is only useful because of another property or set of properties. We have seen many such instances in the previous chapters, and I have referred to them variously as a teleological sequence or Read More ›

From Cardiff University: Fossils from a 374-million-year-old tree found in north-west China have revealed an interconnected web of woody strands within the trunk of the tree that is much more intricate than that of the trees we see around us today. The strands, known as xylem, are responsible for conducting water from a tree’s roots to its branches and leaves. In the most familiar trees the xylem forms a single cylinder to which new growth is added in rings year by year just under the bark. In other trees, notably palms, xylem is formed in strands embedded in softer tissues throughout the trunk. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists have shown that the Read More ›

From commenter Otangelo Grasso, some thoughts:  The irreducible process of phototransduction, 11 cis retinal synthesis, and the visual cycle, essential for vertebrate vision http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1638-origin-of-phototransduction-the-visual-cycle-photoreceptors-and-retina#5753 William Bialek: More Perfect Than We Imagined – March 23, 2013 Excerpt: photoreceptor cells that carpet the retinal tissue of the eye and respond to light, are not just good or great or phabulous at their job. They are not merely exceptionally impressive by the standards of biology, with whatever slop and wiggle room the animate category implies. Photoreceptors operate at the outermost boundary allowed by the laws of physics, which means they are as good as they can be, period. Each one is designed to detect and respond to single photons of light — the Read More ›

From Toni Airaksinen at Campus Reform: “On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” Gutierrez argued. Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.” Math also helps actively perpetuate white privilege too, since the way our economy places a premium on math skills gives math a form of “unearned privilege” for math professors, who are disproportionately white. … Further, she also worries that evaluations of math skills can Read More ›

Because it’s stuffed with unexamined evidence. From Christopher Kemp at New Scientist: As he read the beetle’s yellowed, handwritten label, he realised the specimen had been collected in 1832 in Argentina by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle. Somehow it had never been described. It was stored away unnamed, then disappeared into the museum’s vast beetle collection. Finally, after 180 years in limbo, Chatzimanolis gave it a name: Darwinilus sedarisi, in honour of Darwin and the writer David Sedaris, whose audiobooks he listened to while writing the description in his office at the University of Tennessee. Yes, this reads like a novel (film option?) but it isn’t. The rediscovery of Darwin’s long-lost beetle was a remarkable stroke of Read More ›

From Hossain Derakhshan at Wired: Wikipedia has never been as wealthy or well-organized. American liberals, worried that Trump’s rise threatened the country’s foundational Enlightenment ideals, kicked in a significant flow of funds that has stabilized the nonprofit’s balance sheet. That happy news masks a more concerning problem—a flattening growth rate in the number of contributors to the website. It is another troubling sign of a general trend around the world: The very idea of knowledge itself is in danger. … Now the challenge is to save Wikipedia and its promise of a free and open collection of all human knowledge amid the conquest of new and old television—how to collect and preserve knowledge when nobody cares to know. Television has Read More ›

Mazur is an American journalist who has been covering the antics of the Darwinian establishment for most of a decade. As she tells it at HuffPost: I was initially invited to attend the Dutch event as an independent journalist by one of its organizers—-University of Amsterdam computational biologist Jaap Kaandorp—-during an interview we did a couple of weeks ago about his research on corals. However, after I made all necessary travel arrangements, Kaandorp—-who thinks natural selection “is still kind of a major event in the evolution of organisms”—-emailed saying Konrad Lorentz Institute protested my attendance and that my invitation was cancelled. Furthermore, KLI had so poisoned the waters, that Kaandorp asked me not to run the interview we did. More. The Read More ›

Abstract: Transposable Elements are biologically important components of eukaryote genomes. In particular, non-LTR retrotransposons (N-LTRrs) extensively shaped the human genome throughout evolution. In this study, we compared retrotransposon insertions differentially present in the genomes of Anatomically Modern Humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and Chimpanzees, in order to assess the possible impact of retrotransposition in the differentiation of the human lineage. Briefly, we first identified species-specific N-LTRrs and established their distribution in present day human populations. These analyses shortlisted a group of N-LTRr insertions that were found exclusively in Anatomically Modern Humans. Notably, these insertions targeted genes more frequently than randomly expected and are associated with an increase in the number of transcriptional/splicing variants of those genes they inserted in. The analysis of Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: We reported here the other day that distinguished German paleontologist Günter Bechly was erased by Wikipedia. The editors, claiming it had nothing to do with his having come out for intelligent design, explained that they decided he wasn’t “notable” enough. Now along comes another ID proponent, Walter Bradley of Baylor University. Dr. Bradley is of interest to us as a Fellow with the Center for Science & Culture and as co-author of a pioneering book that helped to set the course of the future ID movement, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories (1984). But apart from that, he also has an extremely impressive history of research, publishing, teaching, and related Read More ›

From Allen Downey at Scientific American: Since 1990, the fraction of Americans with no religious affiliation has nearly tripled, from about 8 percent to 22 percent. Over the next 20 years, this trend will accelerate: by 2020, there will be more of these “Nones” than Catholics, and by 2035, they will outnumber Protestants. More. As Pew notes (2016), however, it’s partly a matter of labelling: Indeed, our Religious Landscape Study finds a clear generational pattern: Young people who are not particularly religious seem to be much more comfortable identifying as “nones” than are older people who display a similar level of religious observance. Nearly eight-in-ten Millennials with low levels of religious commitment describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in Read More ›

Whodathunkit? From Yasmin Tayag at Inverse: Those long-held racist assumptions based on skin color have been scientifically proven wrong, according to a groundbreaking new study in the journal Science published on Thursday. With their observations, the team of geneticists led by the University of Pennsylvania’s Sarah Tishkoff, Ph.D., tear down that notion by discrediting the idea that race has any biological roots. (The paper is titled “Loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations.”) The researchers identified the genes linked to the diversity of human skin color and when and where those genes emerged. More. That the light-skin genes originated in Africa is useful to know. But it’s worth keeping in mind that racism only came to seem “scientific” Read More ›

The piece is notable for apparent incoherence on the subject: From philosopher Joseph Laporte at Big Questions Online: As we learn from Augustine’s Confessions, he felt the crushing burden of his vices and of his own helplessness to lift himself without God’s grace. That fits with many people’s experience. Besides, it’s Christian orthodoxy: without grace, there is no action toward spiritual flourishing. Here it’s helpful to invoke freedom-for-excellence. Without God’s help, we lack freedom-for-excellence, freedom to be virtuous. In my insecurity, I go shopping for clothes; later I look in my closet with buyer’s remorse. Or, I’m late again and ask myself what went wrong with my time management. Or, my memory of adolescence is no longer fresh, so I Read More ›

Our new word for the weekend. From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Most thinkers, including famed astrophysicist Carl Sagan, agree that mathematics could serve as the foundation for our discussions. With that in mind, British scientist Lancelot Thomas Hogben rafted a language system called Astraglossa. Communicated over radio signals, short pulses called “dashes” would represent numbers, and longer batteries of pulses called “flashes” would represent mathematical symbols like addition or subtraction. Once the basics of arithmetic are established between our species, Hogben imagined moving the discussion on to astronomy, a hobby we would obviously both have in common. After all, two aliens species talking about space would probably be like two Earthlings talking about the weather. But maybe not. What if Read More ›