Science & Technology

For Dreams of Darwinian Evolution, First Rule of Adaptive Evolution Is an Insuperable Problem

Michael Behe
Evolution News
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 17:04 UTC

Boy with interactive sculpture of Tiktaalik

This is the second in a series of posts responding to the extended critique of Darwin Devolves by Richard Lenski at his blog, Telliamed Revisited. Professor Lenski is perhaps the most qualified scientist in the world to analyze the arguments of my book. He is the Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, a MacArthur ("Genius Award") Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. With hundreds of publications, he also has a strong interest in the history and philosophy of science. His own laboratory evolution work is a central focus of the book. I am very grateful to Professor Lenski for taking time to assess Darwin Devolves. His comments will allow interested readers to quickly gauge the relative strength of arguments against the book's thesis.

In my first post I responded (out of order) to Professor Lenski's second post, which discussed the polar bear genome. I showed that, regarding my argument that the polar bear's more efficient lipid metabolism (compared to the brown bear) arose by degradative mutations, his skepticism was unfounded. Briefly, the APOB gene of polar bears is mutated with changes that were predicted by computer methods to be damaging. A 1995 study showed that a mouse model that had one copy of the APOB gene knocked out actually had lower plasma cholesterol levels and increased resistance to hypercholesterolemia from a high fat diet. If the polar bear mutations acted to lower the activity of its own APOB, a result similar to that for the mouse might be expected. Thus there is no good reason to speculate about new functions, as Professor Lenski and others did.

CRISPR scientists want a moratorium after China's gene-edited baby debacle

Julia Belluz
Vox.com
Wed, 13 Mar 2019 14:09 UTC

© Getty Images/iStockphoto
As CRISPR-Cas9 technology has made gene editing more accessible in recent years, scientists have been grappling with how best to proceed.

A new paper in the journal Nature reads like a veiled message to China.

Several of the world's leading CRISPR scientists and bioethicists are calling for a global moratorium on editing human genes that can be passed on from parents to children.

In a new Nature commentary, published Wednesday, Feng Zhang and Emmanuelle Charpentier - two discoverers of the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system - along with MIT biologist Eric Lander and 15 other researchers from around the world, outlined the urgent need to put a pause on the editing of sperm, eggs, and embryos - known as the human germline - to create genetically modified babies until countries agree on the best way forward.

Earth is a less volatile version of the sun, say Australian researchers

Blake Foden
The Canberra Times
Sun, 17 Mar 2019 02:00 UTC

Earth is a less volatile version of the sun, according to Canberra scientists who are working to address one of the most important missing pieces of information in determining whether other planets could be habitable.

The Australian National University team found Earth was made of the same elements as the sun, but compared to the star at the centre of the solar system, our planet had less of the volatile elements like hydrogen, helium, oxygen and nitrogen.

Dr Haiyang Wang led the study, which made the most comprehensive estimate yet of the composition of Earth and the sun.

He said the researchers carried out the work as part of their aim to create a new tool that could measure the elemental composition of other stars and the rocky planets that orbit them.

"The composition of a rocky planet is one of the most important missing pieces in our efforts to find out whether a planet is habitable or not," Dr Wang said.

Other rocky planets in the universe, like Earth, are de-volatised pieces of their host stars.

MIT neuroscientists find brain wave stimulation may improve Alzheimer's symptoms

Anne Trafton
MIT News
Sat, 16 Mar 2019 10:46 UTC

© Gabrielle Drummond
By exposing mice to a unique combination of light and sound, MIT neuroscientists have shown that they can improve cognitive and memory impairments similar to those seen in Alzheimer’s patients. At left, the mouse cortex shows a reduction in amyloid plaques following visual and auditory stimulation, compared to the untreated mouse at right.

By exposing mice to a unique combination of light and sound, MIT neuroscientists have shown that they can improve cognitive and memory impairments similar to those seen in Alzheimer's patients.

This noninvasive treatment, which works by inducing brain waves known as gamma oscillations, also greatly reduced the number of amyloid plaques found in the brains of these mice. Plaques were cleared in large swaths of the brain, including areas critical for cognitive functions such as learning and memory.

"When we combine visual and auditory stimulation for a week, we see the engagement of the prefrontal cortex and a very dramatic reduction of amyloid," says Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the senior author of the study.

Comment: Also see:

YDB team publishes evidence from Chile for global climate cataclysm

Cosmic Tusk
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 06:15 UTC

The main objective of this study was to test the YDB impact hypothesis by analyzing a wide range of data from the Pilauco site in southern Chile. The following conclusions show that our data and interpretations are consistent with the YDB impact hypothesis and we found no evidence that refutes the hypothesis.

(1) At Pilauco, ~12,800-year-old peaks in high-temperature Pt-rich and native-Fe spherules are comparable to similar impact-related evidence found at more than 50 YDB sites in North America, Europe, and western Asia. It appears that the YDB layer at Pilauco is coeval with similar layers found at these sites on several continents and is also possibly related to the proposed YDB impact event.

(2) Identification of the YDB layer at Pilauco greatly expands the proposed YDB proxy feld ~6,000 km farther south of the closest well-studied YDB site in Venezuela, and ~12,000 km south of the northernmost YDB site in Canada, a distance equaling ~30% of Earth's circumference.

(3) Cr-rich spherules are found in the YDB layer at Pilauco, but not found at the ~50 other sites on four continents, suggesting that one or more local impacts/airbursts occurred in the Cr-rich basaltic terrain
circa Pilauco.

New celestial phenomenon, STEVE, closely correlated with violent disturbances in Earth's magnetosphere says study

Terri Cook
Earth & Space Science News
Fri, 15 Mar 2019 19:59 UTC

© Alan Dyer
Researchers find a violent potential origin for the aurora-like phenomenon dubbed STEVE events, pictured here in southern Alberta.

Earlier this year, researchers announced that long, narrow streaks of purple light occasionally observed in the nighttime sky are not a new type of aurora, as first suspected, but a novel upper atmospheric phenomenon. Dubbed Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE) because of their association with fast-moving ions and hot electrons in Earth's ionosphere, these celestial lights are often visible at lower latitudes than most auroras and appear to be caused by a different, and still undetermined, mechanism.

To better characterize STEVE, Gallardo-Lacourt et al. conducted the first statistical analysis of this optical phenomenon. Using NASA's Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) ground-based All-Sky Imager array and the Canadian Space Agency's Redline Geospace Observatory (REGO) databases, the team identified and analyzed optical data from 28 STEVE events that occurred between December 2007 and December 2017.

Time reversal achieved by physicists using quantum computer

Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Wed, 13 Mar 2019 13:00 UTC

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study comes out March 13 in Scientific Reports.

"This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time: from the past to the future," commented the study's lead author Gordey Lesovik, who heads the Laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information Technology at MIPT.

"We began by describing a so-called local perpetual motion machine of the second kind. Then, in December, we published a paper that discusses the violation of the second law via a device called a Maxwell's demon," Lesovik said. "The most recent paper approaches the same problem from a third angle: We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time."

What the world's oldest eggs are revealing about dinosaur evolution

PhysOrg
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 18:18 UTC

A study of the world's earliest known dinosaur eggs reveals new information about the evolution of dinosaur reproduction.

An international team of researchers led by Robert Reisz of the Department of Biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga studied the fossilized remains of eggs and eggshells discovered at sites in Argentina, China and South Africa-widely separated regions of the supercontinent Pangea. At 195 million years old, they are the earliest known eggs in the fossil record, and they were all laid by a group of stem sauropods-long-necked herbivores that ranged in size from four to eight metres in length and were the most common and widely spread dinosaurs of their time.

Reisz is puzzled by the fact that "reptile and mammal precursors appear as skeletons in the fossil record starting 316 million years ago, yet we know nothing of their eggs and eggshells until 120 million years later. It's a great mystery that eggs suddenly show up at this point, but not earlier."

Horseshoe crab throws theory of arachnid evolution into disarray

Kelly April Tyrrell
Phys.org
Sat, 09 Mar 2019 12:00 UTC

© Jesús Ballesteros
University of Wisconsin-Madison postdoctoral researcher Jesús Ballesteros holds a small horseshoe crab. A study he led with Integrative Biology Professor Prashant Sharma used robust genetic analysis to demonstrate that horseshoe crabs are arachnids like spiders, scorpions and ticks.

Blue-blooded and armored with 10 spindly legs, horseshoe crabs have perhaps always seemed a bit out of place.

First thought to be closely related to crabs, lobsters and other crustaceans, in 1881 evolutionary biologist E. Ray Lankester placed them solidly in a group more similar to spiders and scorpions. Horseshoe crabs have since been thought to be ancestors of the arachnids, but molecular sequence data have always been sparse enough to cast doubt.

University of Wisconsin-Madison evolutionary biologists Jesús Ballesteros and Prashant Sharma hope, then, that their recent study published in the journal Systematic Biology helps firmly plant ancient horseshoe crabs within the arachnid family tree.

By analyzing troves of genetic data and considering a vast number of possible ways to examine it, the scientists now have a high degree of confidence that horseshoe crabs do indeed belong within the arachnids.

Comment: It seems that were these evolutionary biologists to question their foundational theory for evolution, things may become a little less 'complicated': Why Darwinism Is Wrong, Dead Wrong - Part 1: Intelligent Design and Information

See also:

And check out SOTT radio's:

More research shows that sound waves could carry mass

Phys.org
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 11:43 UTC

A trio of researchers at Columbia University has found more evidence showing that sound waves carry mass. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Angelo Esposito, Rafael Krichevsky and Alberto Nicolis describe using effective field theory techniques to confirm the results found by a team last year attempting to measure mass carried by sound waves.

For many years physicists have felt confident that sound waves carry energy-but there was no evidence to suggest they also carry mass. There seemed to be no reason to believe that they would generate a gravitational field. But that changed last year when Nicolis and another physicist Riccardo Penco found evidence that suggested conventional thinking was wrong. They had used quantum field theory to show that sound waves moving through superfluid helium carried a small amount of mass with them. More specifically, they found that phonons interacted with a gravitational field in a way that forced them to carry mass along as they moved through the material. In this new effort, the researchers report evidence that suggests the same results hold true for most materials.

Comment: See also:

Quote of the Day

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim: nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.

- Carroll Quigley

.. .. Clinto-Nulando body count? or, World Heritage Site

Jibrish

Yeah that's nice. Remember to ALWAYS use your smartphone for communication so that you can get categorized and easily tracked (as well as targeted...

Qafsiel

"guys ... when you were a kid, if you have ever stuck your palm into some recently poured sidewalk cement ... then go ahead and hit that subscribe...

life

...suffered an engine malfunction midair while departing from a Los Angeles airport: a malfunction. really. kinda like cnn describing a "mostly...

life

Wonderful bit of the Queen's English there! But, you know... Leicester....

PDX

Science & Technology

For Dreams of Darwinian Evolution, First Rule of Adaptive Evolution Is an Insuperable Problem

CRISPR scientists want a moratorium after China's gene-edited baby debacle

Earth is a less volatile version of the sun, say Australian researchers

MIT neuroscientists find brain wave stimulation may improve Alzheimer's symptoms

YDB team publishes evidence from Chile for global climate cataclysm

New celestial phenomenon, STEVE, closely correlated with violent disturbances in Earth's magnetosphere says study

Time reversal achieved by physicists using quantum computer

What the world's oldest eggs are revealing about dinosaur evolution

Horseshoe crab throws theory of arachnid evolution into disarray

More research shows that sound waves could carry mass

Latest News

Picture of the Day

Quote of the Day

Recent Comments

Quantum Quirk

Contact Us