Monthly Archives: October 2012
From BBC Two, “Secret Universe: The Hidden Life of the Cell”
| October 22, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
Check out this spectacular cellular visualization featured on BBC Two last night. The hour-long documentary offers an accessible description of the internal conflict that occurs regularly in our bodies between viral pathogens and our immune defense mechanisms. Although the program is given an evolutionary spin (it features Steve Jones and Nick Lane), the design and… more
Pseudogenes: Newly Discovered Players in Human Cancer
| October 19, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
A recent paper in Science offers an excellent review of the “broad and multifaceted spectrum of activities in human cancer” played by pseudogenes. I intend to review the paper for Evolution News & Views so I will reserve my more detailed comments for there. Here, I offer a couple of highlights. From the abstract: Because… more
On Forming Our Moon
| October 18, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
Two new papers (here and here) have just been released in Science entitled “Making the Moon from a Fast-Spinning Earth: A Giant Impact Followed by Resonant Despinning” and “Forming a Moon with an Earth-Like Composition via a Giant Impact.” For popular science press releases on the story, see New Scientist and Space.com. As the Space.com report explains, The moon… more
Ask Richard Dawkins About Evolution, Religion, and Science Education
| October 18, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
From Slashdot: Richard Dawkins is an author and an evolutionary biologist. For 13 years, he held the Simonyi Professorship at the University of Oxford. His 1976 book The Selfish Gene helped popularize the gene-centric view of evolution and coined the word “meme.” Several other of his books, including Climbing Mount Improbable, River Out of Eden,… more
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50 Years On
| October 17, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences are producing a Kuhn-and-revolutions-themed special edition. The articles from this issue will be available for free on the journal’s website until the end of November… more
New research points to a 40 million-year-old split between the ancestors of humans and orangutans
| October 16, 2012 | Posted by vjtorley under Intelligent Design |
Human prehistory has descended into a state of chaos which can only be described as farcical. New research, summarized in an October 2012 review by Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin (“Revising the human mutation rate: implications for the understanding human evolution” in Nature Reviews Genetics 13:745-753, doi:10.1038/nrg3295) suggests that the molecular clock used to date… more
Douglas Axe: “Tar Pit Study Shows Complete Absence of Evolutionary Change”
| October 16, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
Over at the website of the Biologic Institute, Douglas Axe reflects on a new paper in Quaternary Science Reviews by Donald Prothero and colleagues. The paper reports, The data show that birds and mammals at Rancho La Brea show complete stasis and were unresponsive to the major climate change that occurred at 20 ka, consistent with… more
Biologist Douglas Axe on evolution’s ability to produce new functions
| October 16, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
Science, Religion and the Big Bang: The Search for Common Ground
| October 15, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
From BBC News: Some of Europe’s most prominent scientists have opened a debate with philosophers and theologians over the origins of everything. The event, in Geneva, Switzerland, is described as a search for “common ground” between religion and science over how the Universe began. It will focus on the Big Bang theory. The conference was… more
Stephen Meyer and Ravi Zacharias On Moody Radio
| October 15, 2012 | Posted by Jonathan M under News |
On Friday, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer joined Dr. Ravi Zacharias in a discussion on Moody Radio’s In The Market with Janet Parshall. You can read the details here. Hour 1, which you can download here, features Ravi Zacharias. The website’s description states, Respected apologist Ravi Zacharias was once sharing his faith with a Hindu who… more
Birds of Paradise, and “the miracle of evolution”.
| October 15, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
Determinism: an idea that just won’t fly
| October 12, 2012 | Posted by vjtorley under Intelligent Design |
I have just been listening to a talk on the subject of free will, by the British philosopher Jonathan M. S. Pearce, who contributes to the blog, Debunking Christianity. The talk was given to a meeting of Portsmouth Skeptics in a Pub on 14th June 2012, which was attended by about 50 people. A podcast… more
The Molecular “Clutch” of the Dynein Motor Protein
| October 12, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
Over at Evolution News & Views, I have just published a blog post on the recent paper in the journal Cell regarding the molecular clutch of the dynein motor protein: Here at ENV, I have previously described the molecular flagellar clutch of Bacillus subtilis, the grass or hay bacillus, which allows the bacterium to cease… more
PNAS Reports: “Conserved epigenetic sensitivity to early life experience in the rat and human hippocampus.”
| October 11, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Suderman et al. reports on the discovery of the ability of early life experiences to influence DNA methylation patterns in the hippocampal region of the brain. The researchers examined the methylation patterns of the hippocampus in humans who have been victimised by abuse.… more
PLoS ONE Reports on the “Ancient Origin of the Modern Deep-Sea Fauna”
| October 11, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
An interesting new paper has just been published in PLoS One, describing the discovery of fossilised sea creatures off the coast of Florida, which purportedly shows that modern deep sea creatures (e.g. sea urchins, starfish) may have appeared far earlier than previously believed. The abstract reports, The origin and possible antiquity of the spectacularly diverse… more
Priapulids challenge the cone of increasing diversity concept
| October 11, 2012 | Posted by David Tyler under Intelligent Design |
Darwin’s solitary illustration of evolutionary branching has left a lasting impression in the minds of readers. From an ancestral form, speciation occurs and the diversity of descendants increases. This can be visualised as a cone of morphological variation, extending from the source. However, the Cambrian Explosion provides empirical evidence against this concept, as a large… more
Mohamed Noor: Evolution is True Because We Say So
| October 11, 2012 | Posted by Cornelius Hunter under Intelligent Design |
Today’s first set of lectures in Mohamed Noor’s Introduction to Genetics and Evolutioncourse would seem downright bizarre to anyone not familiar with evolutionary thinking. Noor is teaching this course via through the coursera on-line service and the Earl D. McLean Professor and Associate Chair of Biology at Duke University is maximizing accessibility to his material by… more
Another Day, Another Surprise for Darwinists
| October 10, 2012 | Posted by PaV under Intelligent Design |
Over at PhysOrg.com, there’s a study being reported highlighting a 520 million year old fossil arthropod with a highly-developed brain. So soon in evolutionary time, and an already developed brain??? (To go beside the very complex eye of the Trilobites) Here’s what one scientist said: “No one expected such an advanced brain would have evolved… more
Casey Luskin Reviews Karl Giberson and Francis Collins On The Language of Science and Faith
| October 10, 2012 | Posted by News under News |
In Touchstone Magazine, Casey Luskin offers a scathing review of Giberson and Collins’s book The Language of Science and Faith: Each chapter of Language addresses a particular question; thus, the first chapter is titled, “Do I Have to Believe in Evolution?” The very framing of this question is telling. Why not title the chapter “Is… more
Opposition to Fetal Stem Cell Experimentation Encouraged Nobel-quality Science
| October 9, 2012 | Posted by nullasalus under Science |
One of the common complaints about Intelligent Design is that it’s a science stopper. Something about how the idea that the conviction that intelligent agents are have produced extraordinarily advanced technology will discourage intelligent agents from producing extraordinarily advanced technology. With that in mind, I thought it’d be worth focusing on a recent, if not… more