From Science News: New calculations suggest roughly equal populations, not 10-to-1 ratio A “standard man” weighing 70 kilograms has roughly the same number of bacteria and human cells in his body, researchers report online January 6 at bioRxiv.org. This average guy would be composed of about 40 trillion bacteria and 30 trillion human cells, calculate researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. That’s a ratio of 1.3 bacteria to every one human cell. More. In case anyone wondered why they didn’t just take over… See also: Evolution: Cells “hiring” functions they can’t do (endosymbiosis) Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Nature: Dogic’s team created a new kind of liquid crystal. Unlike the molecules in standard liquid-crystal displays, which passively form patterns in response to electric fields, Dogic’s components were active. They propelled themselves, taking energy from their environment — in this case, from ATP. And they formed patterns spontaneously, thanks to the collective behaviour of thousands of units moving independently. These are the hallmarks of systems that physicists call active matter, which have become a major subject of research in the past few years. Examples abound in the natural world — among them the leaderless but coherent flocking of birds and the flowing, structure-forming cytoskeletons of cells. Based on laboratory work, Experimentalists are only beginning to gain control of Read More ›

Yes, in certain ways, says mathematician at the University of Adelaide. From Science Daily: The old adage that says ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is’ has finally been put to the test — mathematically. A team of researchers has found that overwhelming evidence without a dissenting opinion can in fact weaken the credibility of a case, or point to a failure of the system. … The team put three different scenarios to the test based on mathematical probability: the use of witnesses to confirm the identity of a criminal suspect; the accurate identification of an archaeological find; and the reliability of a cryptographic system. They found in each case that there was a point at Read More ›

In a recent article in the Guardian, Nick Cohen defends “the freedom to argue for your own ideas without being forced to comply by authoritarians,” but goes on to argue (incorrectly) that this freedom owes everything to Enlightenment skeptics, and nothing to Judaism and Christianity. For him, ISIS and the Judaeo-Christian tradition are morally equivalent: Cultural conservatives do not want to be reminded that there is no Islamist crime so great the Judaeo-Christian tradition did not once authorise it. The Iranian judiciary murders gays and Islamic State throws them from tall buildings to delight the faithful. The Book of Leviticus would approve. It says that men who have sex with each other “shall surely be put to death”. Assad, Iran Read More ›

From Lee Spetner at Evolution News & Views: Reviewing The Evolution Revolution, the NCSE Offers Uninformed Criticism that Misses the Point No surprise, the Darwin-in-the-schools lobby (NCSE) did a hit job on physicist Spetner’s book, and did not acknowledge his request for an opportunity to reply in their publication (last we heard). No matter, here’s his response: Unfortunately, the points Levin raises are the results of his misunderstandings or distortions of what I wrote, or his failure to read the relevant portion of the text he was commenting on. Indeed, he missed the most important point of the book. I show that current evolutionary theory, and any derivative of it that relies on random mutations, is invalid. A scientific theory Read More ›

Bad news for scuba shops: To adapt to a ‘water world’, Dr Skinner expects humans would develop webbed hands and eyes like those of cats to help us see in the poor lighting conditions underwater. We would also retain a layer of baby fat into adulthood as an insulator for spending long periods submerged. Regular foraging in shallow waters could lead us to develop artificial ‘gills’ to help us breathe, extracting oxygen from the water and delivering it to the bloodstream. This would also lead to our lung capacity becoming greatly reduced, and our rib cages shrinking. An additional layer in the retina – like cat’s eyes – could develop to help us see in poor light under water. We Read More ›

A student kindly writes to comment on the textbook, Evolutionary Analysis, by Jon C. Herron and Scott Freeman of which, he says, I was suprised to find “ID creationism” mentioned in my evolutionary analysis textbook. While talking about biochemical designs, the book states “creationist Michael Behe believes he has found a profusion of cases”. They mention the cilium is not irreducibly complex in an evolutionary or a mechanical sense and that IC systems can evolve by natural selection. Also, “we predict that in the coming decades, all of Behe’s examples of IC will yield to evolutionary analysis”. Have they yielded any? Also, the objections they cite that ID makes are: violation of the 2nd law and speciation has never been Read More ›

From Nature: Gravitational-wave rumours in overdrive … What is the gossip? Has giant LIGO experiment seen gravitational waves? The rumours suggest that the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a US laboratory with detectors in Washington and Louisiana, has spotted a signal of gravitational waves. These are ripples in the fabric of space-time that, according to Einstein’s theory, are produced by cataclysmic events such as the merging of two black holes or two neutron stars. Whispers of a possible detection were first tweeted in September by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, at Arizona State University in Tempe. The most specific rumour now comes in a blog post by theoretical physicist Luboš Motl: it’s speculated that the two detectors, which began to collect Read More ›

Ran across this clip at Christian Post: Atheist author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says the best argument for God he’s ever hard has to do with a deistic God as the fine-tuner of the universe . . . . Dawkins prefaced his answer by making it clear that he is not “in any sense admitting that there is a good argument,” and insisted that “there is no decent argument for the existence of deities.” . . . . “It’s still a very, very bad argument, but it’s the best one going,” he added, noting that a major problem with the argument is that it leaves unexplained where the fine tuner came from. As for evolution, however, he said there Read More ›

From an interview in The Atlantic on why people fall for frauds: Can You Spot a Liar? Khazan: You talk about how it’s hard to spot a fraudster or liar in person, but also that microexpressions might be a clue. Why is it so hard to detect lying, and is there anything you can do to make yourself better at rooting it out? Konnikova: It’s really difficult to do it because it’s actually not evolutionarily adaptive. We are better placed if we trust people than if we don’t trust anyone. I talk about infants and young children who need to trust that adults are going to take care of them. It makes us feel better when we accept people’s little Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: The seminars are primarily designed for upper-division undergraduates and graduate students, but each year we try to reserve a few spaces for a special cohort of professors, scientists, teachers, pastors, and other professionals. If that sounds right for you, consider applying. … The seminar will explore cutting-edge ID work in fields such as molecular biology, biochemistry, embryology, developmental biology, paleontology, computational biology, ID-theoretic mathematics, cosmology, physics, and the history and philosophy of science. Past seminars have included such speakers as Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson, Jay Richards, Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger, Richard Sternberg, Robert Marks, Scott Minnich, and Bruce Gordon. This seminar is open to students who intend to pursue Read More ›

Over at her BackReAction blog, Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist based at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Frankfurt, Germany, has written an article titled, Free will is dead, let’s bury it. However, her arguments against free will are both scientifically unsound and philosophically dated. She writes: There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. One type is deterministic, which means that the past entirely predicts the future. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no freedom. The other type of law we know appears in quantum mechanics and has an indeterministic component which is random. This randomness cannot be influenced by anything, and in particular it Read More ›

TPeeler brings this oldie but goody back to our attention: Darwin’s theory of evolution offers a sweeping explanation of the history of life, from the earliest microscopic organisms billions of years ago to all the plants and animals around us today. Much of the evidence that might have established the theory on an unshakable empirical foundation, however, remains lost in the distant past. For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since then we have found many ancient fossils – even exquisitely preserved soft-bodied creatures – but none are credible ancestors to the Cambrian animals. Despite this and other difficulties, the modern form of Darwin’s theory has been Read More ›

Hmmm. Last circus that blew through town was hollering about the Right’s war on science. So far as we can see, there is no war. it’s more that some sciences are running out of feet to shoot themselves in. Not an easy job to recruit for even in hard times. 😉 Meanwhile, from the UK Spectator: The witch hunt against Napoleon Chagnon shows us what happens if scientists challenge the core beliefs of ‘progressives’ You don’t say. How much longer can the liberal left survive in the face of growing scientific evidence that many of its core beliefs are false? … Chagnon is a key figure in a new book by Alice Dreger, an American academic who has spent the Read More ›

From The Scientist: Of 441 randomly selected biomedical research papers analyzed in a new study, none provided access to all the authors’ data. And only one of these papers shared a complete protocol. The results of this analysis, which could shed light on science’s reproducibility problem, were published today (January 4) in PLOS Biology. “What was most surprising to me was the complete lack of data-sharing and protocol availability,” said study coauthor John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and health research and policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “That was worse than I would have predicted.” “This study confirms what most of us already know—that the current clinical research enterprise is set up in a way that researchers Read More ›