From the Guardian: Prehistoric rat-like mammal fossil is earliest showing fur, skin and organs The remains, unearthed in a quarry near Cuenca in central Spain, are more than 60m years older than other fossils that record the soft tissues of prehistoric mammals. The animal’s ear lobe, lung and liver are all fossilised, along with its furry pelt and tiny hedgehog-like spines on its lower back that likely protected it from predators. Researchers even found evidence of a fungal skin infection in the remains. Named Spinolestes xenarthrosus, the insect-eating furball was discovered in 2011 when fossil hunters at the Autonomous University of Madrid, were prising apart thin leaves of fine limestone sediment in the Las Hoyas Quarry. “The preservation of its Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Environmental memories transmitted from a father to his grandchildren … in recent years, scientists have shown that, before his offspring are even conceived, a father’s life experiences involving food, drugs, exposure to toxic products and even stress can affect the development and health not only of his children, but even of his grandchildren. This group, whose paper was just published in Science, has been studying the role of histones (proteins) in the process. So, to test their theory about the possible role of histones in guiding embryo development the researchers created mice in which they slightly altered the biochemical information on the histones during sperm cell formation and then measured the results. (It’s a bit like putting a Read More ›

If we go by the fact that they survive tens or hundreds of millions of years pretty much unchanged: That wasn’t what Darwin told us to expect. Darwin explained clearly and eloquently the pattern we should find in the fossil record if his theory was correct, let alone the juggernaut that his present day supporters insist: It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. However, it hasn’t turned out Read More ›

From Nature: Epigenetic ‘tags’ linked to homosexuality in men The researchers collected DNA samples in saliva from 37 pairs of identical twins in which only one twin was gay, and 10 pairs in which both were gay. By scanning the twins’ epigenomes, the researchers found five epi-marks that were more common among the gay men than in their genetically identical straight brothers. An algorithm they developed based on the five epi-marks could correctly predict the sexual orientation of men in the study 67% of the time. UCLA computational geneticist Tuck Ngun will present the work on 8 October at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Vilain is not surprised to find that epigenetics is associated with Read More ›

From obit: Inherent in the idea of gene regulatory networks was the concept that genome sequences that provided information about how genes should be expressed would be as important as the genome sequences that coded for the proteins themselves. Although non-protein-coding DNA was long considered to be “junk,” Davidson recognized that the key regulatory code resided in this genetic material. In 2006, Davidson co-led a group of 240 researchers from more than 70 institutions that sequenced the purple sea urchin’s genome. In 2008, a consortium of institutions led by Davidson’s lab characterized the 23,000 genes of that genome. In parallel, the Davidson group systematically created a comprehensive functional testing strategy to detect all of the control connections between the genes Read More ›

Rats. From ScienceDaily: Can the passage of time be measured precisely, always and everywhere? The answer will upset many watchmakers. A team of physicists have just shown that when we are dealing with very large accelerations, no clock will actually be able to show the real passage of time, known as ‘proper time.’ “Our calculations showed that above certain very large accelerations there simply must be time disorders in the decay of elementary particles. And if the disturbances affect fundamental clocks such as muons, then any other device built on the principles of quantum field theory will also be disrupted. Therefore, perfectly precise measurements of proper time are no longer possible. This fact has further consequences, because losing the ability Read More ›

From New York mag: In a new paper, “Humans As Superorganisms,” Peter Kramer and Paola Bressan of the University of Padua describe a typical human body as a teeming mass of what they call “selfish entities.” Picture a tree warped by fungus, wrapped with vines, dotted at the base with mushrooms and flowers, and marked, midway up, by what the tree thought the whole time was just a knot but turns out to be a parasitic twin. This is the human superorganism — not the tree, not the tangled mess of things doing battle with it, but the whole chunk of forest — and Kramer and Bressan would like to place it at the very center of the way we Read More ›

From the Weekly Standard: The behavioral sciences scandal On this August morning Science magazine had published a scandalous article. The subject was the practice of behavioral psychology. Behavioral psychology is a wellspring of modern journalism. It is the source for most of those thrilling studies that keep reporters like Vedantam in business. Over 270 researchers, working as the Reproducibility Project, had gathered 100 studies from three of the most prestigious journals in the field of social psychology. Then they set about to redo the experiments and see if they could get the same results. Mostly they used the materials and methods the original researchers had used. Direct replications are seldom attempted in the social sciences, even though the ability to Read More ›

A couple of weeks ago a friend forwarded me a link to this recent article about “ongoing research to record the interaction of environment and evolution” by University of California, Riverside biologist David Reznick. Reznick’s team has been studying adaptive changes in guppies. Reznick’s work focuses on tracking what happens in real-world situations in the wild, rather than the somewhat artificial environments in the lab. As a result, Reznick has gathered some of the more trustworthy and definitive data about changes over time in a real-world environment, largely free from the intervention and interference of the coated lab worker. The article states: The new work is part of research that Reznick has been doing since 1978. It involved transplanting guppies Read More ›

Some Aristotelian Neo-Thomists (E. Feser call them “A-T philosophers”) accuse intelligent design (ID) of being an expression of the modern mechanistic reductionist quantificationist mindset, and of denying an immanent teleology in nature. I would argue that the difference between internal and external teleology shouldn’t divide ID and A-T. ID doesn’t deny immanent teleology in nature, and has no specific commitment to external teleology or mechanistic thinking. Teleology is synonymous with function, end, purpose, or goal. Design means conceiving hierarchies of functions. Therefore design and teleology are but the two faces of the same coin. So why can one say with confidence that a living being has internal teleology and a machine has only external teleology? Because the living, manifested beings Read More ›

Here. A reader writes to draw our attention to the Third Way of evolution: The vast majority of people believe that there are only two alternative ways to explain the origins of biological diversity. One way is Creationism that depends upon intervention by a divine Creator. That is clearly unscientific because it brings an arbitrary supernatural force into the evolution process. The commonly accepted alternative is Neo-Darwinism, which is clearly naturalistic science but ignores much contemporary molecular evidence and invokes a set of unsupported assumptions about the accidental nature of hereditary variation. Neo-Darwinism ignores important rapid evolutionary processes such as symbiogenesis, horizontal DNA transfer, action of mobile DNA and epigenetic modifications. Moreover, some Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a Read More ›

When you just have to say something, but don’t want to be slow-roasted alive by desperate and unprincipled colleagues: So you want to be a whistleblower? A lawyer explains the process One obvious way to report research misconduct is to follow internal institutional procedures. Most research institutions have a genuine interest in promoting good science and addressing misconduct. In some instances, however, a potential whistleblower may have legitimate reasons to believe that the institution will not address his/her concerns. This may be for a number of reasons, including institutional apathy, the professional standing of the individuals involved, or a desire to avoid bad publicity. In such cases, a whistleblower may need to consider other ways to report the research misconduct. Read More ›

In response to a commenter on the post “Suzan Mazur’s new book: The Paradigm Shifters” (When you see who is listed on the cover, you will definitely want this book), a reader writes, Science, like living things, changes over time. Who’da thunk it? The “paradigm” is still not shifting towards Christian or any other kind of creationism, though. Well, first, the changes anticipated were toward ever more Darwinism, Darwinizing everything. See evolutionary psychology and cosmic Darwinism. Darwinism was the single greatest idea anyone ever had, remember? And so now … I have no idea what will happen, only that a long-awaited change is underway. Nature permitted a dismissive review of Dawkins’ second instalment on himself, when they might have permitted Read More ›

Further to: What’s happened since Icons of Evolution (2002)?, anticipating a 2016 edition, Not only that, but long-exploded Icons were still in 22 taxpayer-funded textbooks in 2011. Probably still are. Part of the reason is certainly the efforts of the Darwin-in-the-schools lobby. But there is an economic issue as well. I used to be a textbook editor, among other things. It takes a long time and a lot of work to develop rigorous new teaching materials. One must, for one thing, recruit up-to-date teachers who can write. By contrast, just regurgitating the same old same old onto the printing press, in conformity to guidelines, is easy and profitable. And if the textbook committees are not asking for any changes, it Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne’s credibility as a New Atheist is now in tatters, after the publication of yesterday’s devastating rebuttal by philosopher Edward Feser, on top of the one he wrote last week. Additionally, Coyne has undermined his scientific credibility by declaring that “it’s simply wrong to suggest that there’s any real scientific ‘debate’ about macroevolution.” (Coyne made this comment in a post which took a gratuitous swipe at a Canadian science text titled, Human Biology, Anatomy and Physiology for the Health Sciences by Wendi Roscoe, Professor in the Health Science department at Fanshawe College, London, Ontario. Professor Roscoe’s ratings are stellar and as far as I can ascertain, she is a convinced evolutionist. Roscoe’s “crime,” in Coyne’s eyes, was to Read More ›