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 ›

Cells are the fundamental units of life. The genome sequence of a cell may be thought of as its operating system. It carries the code that specifies all of the genetic functions of the cell, which in turn determine the cellular chemistry, structure, replication, and other characteristics. Each genome contains instructions for universal functions that are common to all forms of life, as well as instructions that are specific to the particular species. The genome is dependent on the functions of the cell cytoplasm for its expression. In turn, the properties of the cytoplasm are determined by the instructions encoded in the genome.  – Venter Institute, 2016 Sixty-three years ago Francis Crick wrote a letter to his 12 year-old son, 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 ›

Here’s a link to an article from American Thinker that details how, in Ohio, the Univ. of Cincinnati did a three year study on the effects of oil-well “fracking,” the results of which demonstrate no contamination of ground water had occurred because of “fracking.” And then the study was quashed. 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 ›

From ScienceDaily: Long-snouted crocodylians in South America, India evolved separately to adopt river-dwelling lifestyle, protruding eyes The 13-million-year-old fossils of an extinct crocodylian, named ‘the storyteller,’ suggest that South American and Indian species evolved separately to acquire protruding, ‘telescoped’ eyes for river-dwelling, according to a study published April 20, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi from the University de Montpellier, France, and colleagues. Paper. (public access) More. Parallel evolution from ScienceDaily: One of the most spectacular examples of parallel evolution is provided by the two main branches of the mammals, the placentals and marsupials, which have followed independent evolutionary pathways following the break-up of land-masses such as Gondwanaland roughly 100 million years ago. … While some Read More ›

Scientists have discovered that the tiny, single cells show the hallmarks of intelligence. At Phys.Org they report on a study conducted by a Belgian and French team. Here’s a snippet from Phys.Org: A slime made up of independent, single cells, they found, can “learn” to avoid irritants despite having no central nervous system. “Tantalizing results suggest that the hallmarks for learning can occur at the level of single cells,” the team wrote in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Further: The team wanted to see whether an organism without a nervous system could similarly “learn” from experience and change its behaviour accordingly. They chose a very humble life form indeed—Physarum polycephalum, also known as 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!