Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Origin of life: Horizontal gene transfer “negligible” and endosymbiosis “wrong” as factors in earliest known life?

From science writer Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, continuing her interview at Huffington Post with Swedish deep evolution investigators Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish regarding … their central position on deep evolution, which is that the most recent universal common ancestor (MRUCA) is complex not a simple bacteria and “is the root of eukaryote and akaryote lineages” containing “more than a thousand Superfamilies.” Kurland and Harish think MRUCA represents complex survivors from a now extinct biosphere. On horizontal gene transfer as routine: Charles Kurland: We have to remember there’s only a little background of horizontal gene transfer in bacterial populations. The simple reason is that bacteria eat DNA. So sequences are going in all the time. Most of them get Read More ›

Origin of life: We are all descended from a “complex” ancestor?

From science writer Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, at Huffington Post: I recently had a three-way phone conversation with Swedish deep evolution investigators Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish about their phylogenomic Tree of Life (ToL) based on protein structure, which shows that we are descended from a “complex” ancestor — MRUCA (most recent universal common ancestor) — not a simple bacteria. Kurland and Harish think a ToL paradigm shift may be in order. What’s more, Kurland and Harish figure that MRUCA was not the first ancestor, but represents complex survivors of a now-extinct biosphere. The findings of Kurland and Harish challenge not only mainstream ToL perspectives, but also those of endosymbiosis hypothesis fans, as well as the “HGT industry” Read More ›

RNA self-editing: “It sounds simple, but in real life it was really complicated”

From Kelly Rae Chi at Nature: n 2004, oncologist Gideon Rechavi at Tel Aviv University in Israel and his colleagues compared all the human genomic DNA sequences then available with their corresponding messenger RNAs — the molecules that carry the information needed to make a protein from a gene. They were looking for signs that one of the nucleotide building blocks in the RNA sequence, called adenosine (A), had changed to another building block called inosine (I). This ‘A-to-I editing’ can alter a protein’s coding sequence, and, in humans, is crucial for keeping the innate immune response in check. “It sounds simple, but in real life it was really complicated,” Rechavi recalls. “Several groups had tried it before and failed” Read More ›

Education PhD candidate: Objectivity in science is sexist.

From Joy Pullmann at Federalist: College science classes are hostile to women and minorities because they use the scientific method, which assumes people can find reliable truths about the natural world through careful and sustained experimentation, concludes a recent dissertation by a doctoral candidate at the University of North Dakota. Laura Parson, a student in the university’s education department, reviewed eight science class syllabi at a “Midwest public university” and said she discovered in them a hidden hostility to women and minorities: … Instead of promoting the idea that knowledge is constructed by the student and dynamic, subject to change as it would in a more feminist view of knowledge, the syllabi reinforce the larger male-dominant view of knowledge as Read More ›

Blowing up mathematics

From Jordana Cepelewicz at Nautilus, on mathematician Harvey Friedman: The foundations of mathematics is also a field—in stark contrast to the casual and light tone of Friedman’s emails—that has been in crisis for nearly a century. In 1931, the Austrian mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel proved that any logical system adequate to develop basic arithmetic gives rise to statements that cannot be proven true or false within that system. One such statement: that the system itself is consistent. In other words, no system can ever prove itself to be free of contradiction. The result seemed to present an insurmountable problem for mathematicians, not so much because it prevented them from ever knowing whether the system their work is built on Read More ›

Do true believers hold back society?

An unexpectedly level-headed discussion from Tom Mahony at RealClearScience: Ironically, true believers often moralize about the importance of facts and insist they’re the only ones who are “reality based.” However, in practice, they confuse facts with assumptions, beliefs, conjecture, and opinion. If you take an incorrect assumption, assume it as fact, and extrapolate from that assumption, even if the logic of the extrapolation is sound, the whole idea is wrong because the foundational assumption is wrong. Garbage in, garbage out. Yet, since true believers mistake their incorrect assumption for fact, and tout their impeccable extrapolation, you’re the kook. This is what passes for logic in the true-believer community. True believers haunt any subject: science, religion, health, history, economics, politics. The Read More ›

Health sciences: But just what IS a medical myth?

From Robin Nixon, Elizabeth Peterson and Karen Rowan (October 2016) at LiveScience: 25 Medical Myths that Just Won’t Go Away Despite what you may have heard, drinking eight glasses of water a day isn’t the key to good health. Also, neglecting to wear a coat on a cold day won’t make you sick. And — you might want to sit down for this — pregnancy doesn’t last nine months. Health-related myths are often repeated as fact, even though any diligent Google search will reveal the truth behind these fallacies. Here are 26 of the most common medical myths, debunked.More. Hmmm. Some women distinctly recall pregnancy lasting a year and a half. 😉 No, but seriously, while it’s good to read Read More ›

Sociologist Steve Fuller on the significance of the Dover Trial

Dover cleared the decks for critical discussion of Darwinism and design by getting school board micro-politics out of it. Fuller studies ID as a social movement in science. We hear some colleagues don’t like his views much. See also: Dover all over White cliffs. Dover: Creationism invades Europe The Dover case, John West, and intelligent design Steve Fuller: Humans will merge with AI and Steve Fuller’s Dissent over Descent Follow UD News at Twitter!

New Scientist: EU green energy policies making global warming worse

We didn’t realize it was still legal to say so. From Michael Le Page at New Scientist: Countries in the EU, including the UK, are throwing away money by subsidising the burning of wood for energy, according to an independent report. While burning some forms of wood waste can indeed reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in practice the growing use of wood energy in the EU is increasing rather than reducing emissions, the new report concludes. Overall, burning wood for energy is much worse in climate terms than burning gas or even coal, but loopholes in the way emissions are counted are concealing the damage being done. More. Report.* The Times was going on about this too: Chopping down trees and transporting Read More ›

What Copernicus really thought… not your usual lecture room platitude

From astrophysicist Paul Sutter at LiveScience: 1) What we now call science, philosophy and theology were all mixed up together. 2) Early (proto-)scientists made claims and arguments that would sound totally bananas today. I’ll leave Copernicus’ motivations to another article, but he did indeed publish a book in 1543 detailing his new cosmology with the sun at the center of the universe. While it did have some advantages over the en vogue geocentric model (like neatly explaining the precession of planetary orbits and requiring fewer circles-within-circles), it did have weaknesses (how, exactly, does something like the Earth move?), and the reaction among the literate community — including the Catholic clergy — was neither hostile nor supportive. At the time, the Read More ›

Large Hadron Collider disproves the existence of ghosts?

From Ross Pomeroy at at RealClearScience: On a recent broadcast of BBC Radio Four’s The Infinite Monkey Cage centered around science and the paranormal, Cox had this to say on the topic: “Before we ask the first question, I want to make a statement: We are not here to debate the existence of ghosts because they don’t exist.” He continued: “If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made. We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection Read More ›

Design Disquisitions: Jeffrey Koperski on Two Bad Ways and Two Good Ways to Attack ID (Part 1): Two Bad Ways

Here’s my new article at Design Disquisitions. Enjoy: In the next two (potentially three) articles I’ll be taking an in-depth look at an excellent paper written by Jeffrey Koperski, a philosopher of science at Saginaw Valley State University. Koperski has written about ID in several publications (1), which I highly recommend, and he takes a balanced and sensible approach to this topic. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t accept ID, but takes a constructively critical stance, so his work is well worth engaging with. As one can tell from the title of the paper, Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Goods Ones(2), Koperski critically analyses two common criticisms of ID, suggesting that they are highly dubious lines of argument. He then Read More ›

New controls found for gene expression – an epigenetic “gold rush”?

From Cassandra Willyard at Nature: At the time, biologists were getting excited about the epigenome — the broad array of chemical marks that decorate DNA and its protein scaffold. These marks act like a chemical notation, telling the cell which genes to express and which to keep silent. As such, the epigenome helps to explain how cells with identical DNA can develop into the multitude of specialized types that make up different tissues. The marks help cells in the heart, for example, maintain their identity and not turn into neurons or fat cells. Misplaced epigenetic marks are often found in cancerous cells. Why didn’t it happen sooner?: The governing rule of molecular biology – the central dogma – holds that Read More ›

Human evolution: Climate change made us smart

From Adrian Barnett at New Scientist, reviewing Mark Maslin’s All this allows Maslin to buttress his central contention, that human evolution as we know it wouldn’t have occurred without the uplift of the Tibetan plateau and the formation of the Great Rift valley. These events, and the cycling between salt flats and shallow sea that mark the history of the Mediterranean, are the great drivers of human evolution – the climatic starting gun that set off the human race. Maslin also provides a fine overview of the evolution of evolutionary thinking over the past 150 years, to the point where we now see it less as an orderly march towards an inevitable Homo sapiens and more of a random stumble Read More ›