Charles Darwin's Descent of Man is full of unexpected delights — such as the trio of hard drinking, chain-smoking koalas that appear within its first few pages to illustrate our affinity to animals.

Yet Darwin's great treatise on human origins is also, in parts, deeply disturbing.

Published a century and a half ago — as of February, 2021 — many of the opinions expressed in this seminal text (koalas aside) are still pertinent today. Indeed, despite (or rather, because of) the recent revolution in our understanding of genetics, the Descent is more relevant than ever.

Darwin's wider musings on mankind have had an immense and lasting influence on our beliefs about human nature and behavior, not just scientifically, but socially and politically as well. And while the more reprehensible later applications of evolutionary theory to human society were not truly Darwinian at all, many troubling arguments about race, class, eugenics and the like can nonetheless be discerned within his Descent of Man.

Background

In France, the combination hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and azithromycin (AZ) is used in the treatment of COVID-19.

Methods

We retrospectively report on 1061 SARS-CoV-2 positive tested patients treated for at least three days with the following regimen: HCQ (200 mg three times daily for ten days) + AZ (500 mg on day 1 followed by 250 mg daily for the next four days). Outcomes were death, clinical worsening (transfer to ICU, and >10 day hospitalization) and viral shedding persistence (>10 days).

I greatly appreciated the opportunity to interact with physicist Jeremy England in the journal Inference. See my earlier article on the subject here. England is a very talented researcher, and embodies the highest ideals of the academy. He also addresses himself in other contexts to the general public. I note that he has a new book due to be published in September, Every Life Is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things, which the publisher, Basic Books, offers as being "in the tradition of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning." Clearly, the questions he and I have discussed are not only of scientific or academic interest, but instead go to the root of life's meaning and purpose.

His response to my article is both collegial and thoughtful. He acknowledges my understanding of his work and of the underlying fluctuation theorems, and he respectfully expresses his disagreement with my conclusion. In reality, the difference in our views stems less from our understanding of the science than from the different contexts in which we analyze the theory and the experimental data.

England rightly states that the fluctuation theorems allow for the possibility that some mechanism could drive matter to both lower entropy and higher energy (higher free energy), thus potentially solving the problem of the origin of life, at least in theory. In contrast, I addressed the likelihood that, given the practical constraints, realistic natural processes on the early earth could generate a minimally complex cell. In that context, England indirectly affirmed the main points of my argument and thus reinforced the conclusion that an undirected origin of life might be possible in principle, but it is completely implausible in practice.

A team of Australian scientists has produced new evidence that the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is optimized for penetration into human cells rather than animal cells, undermining the theory that the virus randomly evolved in an animal subject before passing into human beings, and suggesting instead that it was developed in a laboratory.

The study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, provides new but not yet conclusive evidence favoring the theory that the novel coronavirus originated not in a food market as has been claimed, but rather in a laboratory, presumably one operated by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, the city in which the first outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in December of 2019.

The lead researcher on the team says that the results represent either "a remarkable coincidence or a sign of human intervention" in the creation of the virus.

The authors of the study, led by vaccine researcher Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University in Australia, used a version of the novel coronavirus collected in the earliest days of the outbreak and applied computer models to test its capacity to bind to certain cell receptor enzymes, called "ACE2," that allow the virus to infect human and animal cells to varying degrees of efficacy.

SETI Institute astronomer Peter Jenniskens reports an unexpected detection of the Delta Mensids (IAU shower 130) by low-light video cameras of the Namibia branch of the global CAMS network on March 13.

The shower was much stronger than in previous years also in southern hemisphere. Radar observations were also led by Diego Janches of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Both teams report their observations to the astronomical community via the IAU Central Bureau on Electronic Telegrams.

Normally, meteor showers are caused by bits of rocky matter ejected by comets, but this meteor shower appears to originate from an asteroid. In an upcoming paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Diego Janches and colleagues report that the parent body of this shower is asteroid number 248590, also known as "2006 CS".

A paper published on 30 January in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about the first four people in Germany infected with a novel coronavirus made many headlines because it seemed to confirm what public health experts feared: that someone who has no symptoms from infection with the virus, named 2019-nCoV, can still transmit it to others. That might make controlling the virus much harder.

Chinese researchers had previously suggested asymptomatic people might transmit the virus but had not presented clear-cut evidence. "There's no doubt after reading [the NEJM] paper that asymptomatic transmission is occurring," Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told journalists. "This study lays the question to rest."

But now, it turns out that information was wrong. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German government's public health agency, has written a letter to NEJM to set the record straight, even though it was not involved in the paper.

The letter in NEJM described a cluster of infections that began after a businesswoman from Shanghai visited a company near Munich on 20 and 21 January, where she had a meeting with the first of four people who later fell ill. Crucially, she wasn't sick at the time: "During her stay, she had been well with no sign or symptoms of infection but had become ill on her flight back to China," the authors wrote. "The fact that asymptomatic persons are potential sources of 2019-nCoV infection may warrant a reassessment of transmission dynamics of the current outbreak."

But the researchers didn't actually speak to the woman before they published the paper. The last author, Michael Hoelscher of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Medical Center, says the paper relied on information from the four other patients: "They told us that the patient from China did not appear to have any symptoms." Afterward, however, RKI and the Health and Food Safety Authority of the state of Bavaria did talk to the Shanghai patient on the phone, and it turned out she did have symptoms while in Germany. According to people familiar with the call, she felt tired, suffered from muscle pain, and took paracetamol, a fever-lowering medication. (An RKI spokesperson would only confirm to Science that the woman had symptoms.)

For most adults who lose their vision, blindness results from damage to the eyes or optic nerve while the brain remains intact. For decades, researchers have proposed developing a device that could restore sight by bypassing damaged eyes and delivering visual information from a camera directly to the brain. In a paper publishing in the journal Cell on May 14, a team of investigators at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston report that they are one step closer to this goal. They describe an approach in which implanted electrodes are stimulated in a dynamic sequence, essentially "tracing" shapes on the surface of the visual cortex that participants were able to "see."

"When we used electrical stimulation to dynamically trace letters directly on patients' brains, they were able to 'see' the intended letter shapes and could correctly identify different letters," senior author Daniel Yoshor says. "They described seeing glowing spots or lines forming the letters, like skywriting."

It was March 20, 2020, seven days after the U.S. Federal Government declared a national emergency over COVID-19. That was just one day after the country hit the dark milestone of 10,000 verified cases. Most people were focused on coping with new lockdown regulations, social distancing, and radical changes to everyday life. What the White House or the CDC could or should do to counter the virus was a subject of debate. Some scientists, however, had identified a surprising object of needed government action.

Biologists at the prominent science journal BioEssays issued an urgent call. What was it, you ask? Try new experimental drugs? Rush a vaccine into development? Shut the schools? Open the schools? No — censor Evolution News!

Triple board-certified M.D., Dr. Zach, joins Del in an evolutionary discussion on why Coronavirus is here, what it's trying to tell us, and how we emerge from the darkness. Dr. Zach brings his knowledge of viruses, environmental toxicity and diseases to bear on the Covid-19 pandemic, in the process exposing the entire edifice of false assumptions it is built on.

Literally everything the authorities and the media have told you about Covid-19 is wrong. From the death numbers to what this particular virus is to what viruses generally do to why some places saw higher death tolls to what people should do to protect their health to what it all means spiritually... this interview has it all!

CBET 4775 & MPEC 2020-J68, issued on 2020, May 14, announce that an apparently asteroidal object discovered on images taken at Palomar on 2019 June 4 and 7 with the 1.2-m f/2.4 Schmidt telescope (and given the minor-planet designation 2019 LM_4 when published on MPS 1001527, along with observations made elsewhere on June 8) has been re-discovered showing cometary appearance at two other observatories. The new comet has been designated P/2019 LM4 (Palomar).

According to the CBET 4775: B. Li reported the discovery by G. Zhaori of an extended object on images taken by L. F. Hu with the 1.04-m f/1.8 Schmidt telescope at the XuYi Station of Purple Mountain Observatory on May 11 UT in the course of the "Chinese Near Earth Object Survey" (discovery observations tabulated below). Before the object was posted on the Minor Planet Center's NEOCP webpage, it wasdiscovered independently in images obtained with the Pan-STARRS1 1.8-m Ritchey-Chretien reflector at Haleakala on May 12, with Y. Ramanjooloo (University of Hawaii) reporting that the full-width-at-half-maximum size was 3".6 compared to 1".2 for nearby stars. Observations were subsequently identified at the Minor Planet of yet another apparent independent discovery of the comet from 2020 May 9.5 at mag 16.4-17.0 with a 0.5-m f/2 Schmidt reflector at Haleakala, Hawaii, in the course of the "Asteroid Terrestrial- Impact Last Alert System" (ATLAS) search program, though it appears that the ATLAS team did not report it as a comet.