Further to Will the shooting stars please rise? Rob Sheldon writes to say Just to set the record straight. The meteorite they showed in the article, was not a piece of iron, it was a “framboid” from an extinct comet made up of Fe3O4 “magnetite”. The reason it looks all lumpy, is that it is a ball made up of ball bearings, each one small enough to be spontaneously magnetized. These ball bearings are not random crystallization of iron, rather they are biominerals, made by living organisms, and far from equilibrium. The closest analog is a Fe3S4 mineral “goethite” found in deep gold mines in South Africa. We don’t know much about the organisms that make them–they look to be Read More ›

As Carl Woese explained in 2004: Read more

From The Scientist: Harvard Medical School’s George Church and his collaborators invited some 130 scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and government officials to Boston last week (May 10) to discuss the feasibility and implementation of a project to synthesize entire large genomes in vitro. … Church told STAT News that the original intention was to make the meeting open, but in anticipation of an imminent, high-profile publication on this project, he and his collaborators had to respect the journal’s embargo. However, Endy tweeted a photo of what appeared to be a message from the meeting organizers stating that they chose not to invite media “because we want everyone to speak freely and candidly without concerns about being misquoted or misinterpreted.” If genomes Read More ›

The following story is excerpted from chapter 2 of my new book Christianity for Doubters. As the title indicates, much of this book is explicitly theological, but the first two chapters are about intelligent design. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. In the current debate between Darwinism and intelligent design, the strongest argument made by Darwinists is this: in every other field of science, naturalism has been spectacularly successful, why should evolutionary biology be so different? Joseph Le Conte, professor of Geology and Natural History at the University of California, and (later) president of the Geological Society of America, provides an insight into the way most scientists think about evolution, in his 1888 book Evolution. In reviewing the Read More ›

A reader sent this link to a free 2013 paper in Genome Biol Evol wherein we read: Although once said to be “junk,” or “parasitic,” DNA (Doolittle and Sapienza 1980; Orgel and Crick 1980), a recent large and rapid accumulation of evidence indicates that transposable elements (TEs) have been a significant factor in the evolution of a wide range of eukaryotic taxa (Bennetzen 2000; Kazazian 2004; Biémont and Vieira 2006; Feschotte and Pritham 2007; Bohne et al. 2008; Hua-Van et al. 2011). We have proposed TEs as powerful facilitators of evolution (Oliver and Greene 2009), formalized this proposal into the TE-Thrust hypothesis (Oliver and Greene 2011), and more recently, expanded and strengthened this hypothesis (Oliver and Greene 2012). More. But Read More ›

From Aeon: I had just finished giving a talk about severe brain injury, and told the story of Terry Wallis, a man in Arkansas who’d had a car accident in 1984. He survived but was left in a vegetative state, and his doctors and family thought he would be unconscious forever. Then in 2003 he began to speak. Tentatively at first, he said ‘Mom’ and then ‘Pepsi’. It was a stunning development almost two decades after he was injured. Terry’s words became the stuff of international headlines, baffling commentators who thought that recovery from the vegetative state was impossible. Why? Because the vegetative state had gained an almost iconic status in the United States, in law and in medicine, following Read More ›

Even with sci-fi tech, not as far as we might hope, apparently: What’s really unlimited is the human imagination. We can even think up other universes; we just can’t make them exist. See also: Cosmology, the skinny Follow UD News at Twitter!

Transgenderism is when a person considers themselves to internally be the opposite sex of their physical body. They mentally “self-identify” in contradiction to the physical fact of their body sex. Transgender law advocates insist that self-identified “transgenders” be given legal right to have unfettered access to all public facilities currently reserved for one sex or the other (male and female restrooms, lockers, showers, women’s shelters, etc.) Obama has recently decreed that all schools that do not fully adopt transgender protections and policies will face the revocation of federal funding. Usually, when a person believes they are something in contradiction to the physical facts (such as believing one is Napoleon, or believing one is a horse), we call that view delusional, Read More ›

One almost doesn’t expect to see a hedder like this: How Consciousness Explains Ventriloquists and Religion But there it is. Were I writing a parody of pop science writing today, I would put that in my sketch notes, then erase it, saying no, no, too obvious. Even cheerleaders for “science” don’t write like that. But there it is… and the rest follows: From neuroscientist Michael Graziano at the Atlantic: One of the more surreal examples of social perception is ventriloquism, which pits perception against cognition. Everyone in the audience knows cognitively that there’s no mind in the puppet’s wooden head, but we still can’t help falling for the illusion. The ultimate example may be our attribution of consciousness to ourselves. Read More ›

As we continue to look at the issue of wedges used at watersheds to trigger slides down mutually polarised slippery slopes to ruin, D reminds us on the lesson of the White Rose martyrs . . . a movement that is now pivotal in some key ways to the modern self-understanding of the German people. We tread holy ground here, lessons literally bought with blood and tears. Here is D, reporting on a recent tour of pivotal sites and linked reflections: >>Regarding your clear warnings about the inescapable consequences of disregarding the lessons from history, there are a few interesting things I noticed during my recent first visit to the Polish cities of Wroclaw and Krakow a week ago. However, Read More ›

Carl Woese (1928-2012), the discoverer of the third kingdom of life, the archaea, told Suzan Mazur that he felt Darwin had grabbed the spotlight, unearned: I’ve maintained for a long time up until the end of the 20th century that the problem of the evolutionary process is a problem before its time. Darwin was trying to get personal credit by barging in. Conceptual thought about evolution was laid down first by people like Buffon and Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin — whom Darwin never mentions in the Origin of Species, except in a footnote when he was forced in the third edition to add it to the footer of the preface. He named him in a dismissive way. He basically said, oh Read More ›

  From Clara Moskowitz, reviewing Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture at Scientific American, and interviewing Carroll: Naturalism is the viewpoint that everything arises from natural causes and that there is no supernatural realm. You coin the term “poetic naturalism” for your own particular brand of this guiding philosophy. Why the need for a new term? Naturalism has been certainly been around for a very long time, but as more people become naturalists and talk to each other, their disagreements within naturalism are interesting. I thought there was a judicious middle ground, which I call poetic, between “the world is just a bunch of particles,” and “science can be used to discover meaning and morality.” To me the connotations of “poetic” Read More ›

Learned scholars shout into the wind frequently re science writer myths about how stupid people were in the Middle Ages, etc. Such myths would include the odd claim that mediaeval Europeans believed that Earth is flat. Hint: They could not have believed that, due to other things they believed. Tales of an ignorant past give people today, who pay billions for bunk nutrition science and whole foods, several free virtue points for “science”without any need to think clearly. It’s no help but they feel much better. Just recently, I (O’Leary for News) dredged up something I’d written (2007) on a different myth, worth recapping in the religion story deck: Your local new atheist Twitter feed may tell you that traditional theologians Read More ›

As discussion continues on the march of folly watershed and slippery slopes of wedging apart, polarisation and ruin, it is time to expose mass manipulation tactics. Aka, “brainwashing.” Here, I clip comment 771: ______________ >>>Can “mind control” techniques really rob us of ability to think, decide and act for ourselves? Are we really responsible, free, rational creatures? (Or, are we more like computers that just need to be purged of old programming and loaded with new software?) After the Korean War (1950 – 53), there were major studies on brainwashing of prisoners of war, but in the end it became clear that the techniques in use were similar to much more familiar processes of persuasion and change. Though, perhaps, at Read More ›

From Michael Eisen: Epigenetics is used as shorthand in the popular press for any of a loosely connected set of phenomenon purported to result in experience being imprinted in DNA and transmitted across time and generations. Its place in our lexicon has grown as biochemical discoveries have given ideas of extra-genetic inheritance an air of molecular plausibility. Biologists now invoke epigenetics to explain all manner of observations that lie outside their current ken. Epigenetics pops up frequently among non-scientists in all manner of discussions about heredity. And all manner of crackpots slap “epigenetics” on their fringy ideas to give them a veneer of credibility. But epigenetics has achieved buzzword status far faster and to a far larger extent than current Read More ›