The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

"Children, Not Chimps, Prefer Collaboration: Humans Like to Work Together in Solving Tasks -- Chimps Don't" (ScienceDaily, Oct. 13, 2011), we learn:
He said it: On origin of life, we now have an inkling of the magnitude of the problem

In one sense the origin of life problem today remains what it was in the time of Darwin -- one of the great unsolved riddles of science. Yet we have made progress. Through theoretical scrutiny and experimental effort since the nineteen-twenties many of the early naive assumptions have fallen or are falling aside -- and there now exist alternative theories. In short, while we do not have a solution, we now have an inkling of the magnitude of the problem.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code" (New York Times, October 24, 2011), John Markoff reports on the world's toughest codes and the design inferences used to crack them, most notably the 18th-century German Copiale cipher:

Uncertain of the original language, the researchers went down several blind alleys before following their hunches. First, they assumed the Roman characters and not the abstract symbols contained all of the information.

Eventually they concluded that the Roman letters were so-called nulls, meant to mislead the code breaker, and that the letters represented spaces between words made up of elaborate symbols. Another crucial discovery was that a colon indicated the doubling of the previous consonant.

Some codes have never been cracked.

But the white whale of the code-breaking world is the Voynich manuscript. Comprising 240 lavishly illustrated vellum pages, it has defied the world's best code breakers. Though cryptographers have long wondered if it is a hoax, it was recently dated to the early 1400s.

But maybe not. What makes code-breaking so difficult is that the guy who wrote it may be smarter than the cryptographers.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "From the Cave to the Kennel" (Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2011, Mark Derr offers a somewhat contrarian history of the dog:

But it was never clear, in this old account, just how we got from the scavenging wolf to the remarkable spectrum of dogs who have existed over time, from fell beasts trained to terrorize and kill people to creatures so timid that they flee their own shadows. The standard explanation was that once the dump-diver became a dog, humans took charge of its evolution through selective breeding, choosing those with desired traits and culling those who came up short.

The DNA evidence remained controversial for years, even as most major studies placed the genetic separation of wolf and dog at earlier dates than those favored by archaeologists. Hard proof was slow to appear

This account is now falling apart in the face of new genetic analyses and recently discovered fossils. The emerging story sees humans and proto-dogs evolving together: We chose them, to be sure, but they chose us too, and our shared characteristics may well account for our seemingly unshakable mutual intimacy./blockquote>

All of this suggests that it was common for highly socialized wolves and people to form alliances. It also leads logically to the conclusion that the first dogs were born on the move with bands of hunter-gatherers—not around semi-permanent pre-agricultural settlements. This may explain why it has proven so difficult to identify a time and place of domestication.

Born on the move? Some of us have seen old film footage from the 1930s of Canadian Eskimo dogs born while their moms were in harness, and picked by children, deposited on the sledge.

The new account has the real advantage that it doesn't try to explain why people started out by putting up with vicious curs. They didn't.

This guy's book might be a great Christmas present.

Hat tip Creation-Evolution Headlines.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Culture in Humans and Apes Has the Same Evolutionary Roots, Researchers Show"
(ScienceDaily, Oct. 20, 2011), we learn: something that no one would have imagined, that orangs have culture just like people.

About ten years ago, biologists who had been observing great apes in the wild reported a geographic variation of behavior patterns that could only have come about through the cultural transmission of innovations, much like in humans. The observation triggered an intense debate among scientists that is still ongoing. To this day, it is still disputed whether the geographical variation in behavior is culturally driven or the result of genetic factors and environmental influences.

There is probably about as much difference between the behaviour of urban and rural squirrels, that offspring learn from their dams, but you wouldn't get away with calling it culture.

See also: Great apes think ahead: Conclusive evidence of advanced planning capacities Then why doesn't it ever amount to much? And here we thought one Marc Hauser was enough.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From "Land Animals, Ecosystems Walloped After Permian Dieoff" ( ScienceDaily, Oct. 25, 2011), we learn:

The researchers examined nearly 8,600 specimens, from near the end of the Permian to the middle Triassic, roughly 260 million to 242 million years ago. The fossils came from sites in the southern Ural Mountains of Russia and from the Karoo Basin in South Africa. The specimen count and analysis indicated that approximately 78 percent of land-based vertebrate genera perished in the end-Permian mass extinction. Out of the rubble emerged just a few species, the disaster taxa. One of these was Lystrosaurus, a dicynodont synapsid (related to mammals) about the size of a German shepherd. This creature barely registered during the Permian but dominated the ecosystem following the end-Permian extinction, the fossil record showed.

Why Lystrosaurus survived the cataclysm when most others did not is a mystery, perhaps a combination of luck and not being picky about what it ate or where it lived. Similarly, a reptilian taxon, procolophonids, were mostly absent leading to the end-Permian extinction, yet exploded onto the scene afterward.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here Klinghoffer muses,

I will never forget my personal experience with a journalist who often writes for The New Republic. In an email exchange he chastised me for thinking the universe was created a mere 6,000 years ago. He assumed that was the main issue for intelligent design advocates. I explained to him that wasn't the case and that I'm not a YEC, that intelligent design assumes a universe more than 13 billion years old and a history of life going back more than 3 billion.

Not long after, he criticized me again on the very same point, for believing in a 6,000-year-old world. I don't think he believed that I was lying in my previous email to him. He just could not surrender a plank in the platform of his own ignorance: The belief that this is all fight about whether in riding around on dinosaurs, cavemen went bareback or opted for more of a western saddle. He had that audio loop playing over and over in his head. He couldn't hear a thing I said.

No, David, and he won't, and his publication will go under before he does.

Here's what 40 years in the field have taught me: The journalist doesn't want to know things, he wants to know better than you. Let's say, for example, you can't understand why the school taxes are so high and rising, when standardized testing shows that math and science performance numbers (best indicators of later jobs) are in the toilet - internationally. Slovakia is better'n you.

The journalist doesn't care about that. What he cares about is that the head of admin is shacked up with the mayor, and enjoying a $300,000 salary for helping others rip off. His paper won't let him write about it because they are supporting the mayor for re-election, and generally support the head of admin's no-tests, no homework policy. They can always find scantily clad high school girls to pose in favour of no effort at school, and an earnest social worker to back them up.

You take the journalist out and buy him a few, and he will admit all this. But then nothing follows.

So the only useful information he could provide you is, generally, stuff you could have figured out for yourself - if it mattered. For example, if the mayor and the head of school board admin aren't shacked up, they may as well be for all the difference it makes that your district performs worse than Peru, spending twenty times as much and planning to spend more.

Okay, how does it relate to ID? David, what on earth would cause a fellow like that to actually think that facts mattered? (Other than who's sleeping with whom, the only fact he knows that you probably didn't.) A lightning bolt? A heart attack? Armageddon? I'm out of ideas here, and have to go back to my day job real soon.

We are the new media. He isn't.

Note:: Christian journalists are no better, but that is a horrible story for another day: The betrayal of civil rights in English-speaking democracies.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Remember that dude from over 5000 years ago found encased in ice in the Austrian Alps? The Iceman melts here, an apparent murder victim:

The autopsy results have also rewritten the story of the Iceman's final moments. The neuroscientists determined that blood had indeed accumulated at the back of the Iceman's brain, suggesting some sort of trauma—either from falling on his face from the force of the arrow, Zink speculated, or perhaps from a coup de grâce administered by his assailant. DNA analysis of the final meal is ongoing, but one thing is already clear: It was greasy. Initial tests indicate the presence of fatty, baconlike meat of a kind of wild goat called an alpine ibex. "He really must have had a heavy meal at the end," Zink said—a fact that undermines the notion that he was fleeing in fear. Instead, it appears he was resting in a spot protected from the wind, tranquilly digesting his meal, unaware of the danger he was in.

And of course, unaware of the intense attention awaiting him far in the future. The Iceman might be the most exposed and invaded person who ever walked the planet. "There were moments yesterday," Zink said in a soft, almost surprised voice, "when you felt sorry for him. He was so … explored. All his secrets—inside him, outside him, all around him—were open to exploration." He paused and added, "Only the arrowhead remains inside him, as if he's saying, This is my last secret."

Maybe. They said that before they found the arrowhead.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Evidence of earliest oxygen-breathing life on land found" (MSNBC, October 25, 2011), Wynne Parry reports on those bacteria who process stuff from mine wastewater , "Analysis indicates earliest estimate to date for Great Oxidation Event — 2.48 billion years ago" Of course, it's probably not the "earliest" evidence, just the earliest we've found. From Parrym we learn,

For this study, the researchers performed more than 2,000 analyses on samples from more than 100 rock formations, including those called banded iron formations, located around the world, from Canada to South Africa.

Life did exist at the point when chromium levels increased, but it was simple; single cells had yet to come together and begin cooperating as multicellular life forms.

There probably wasn't much to cooperate about: They were all doing the same thing. Today, we would describe it as eating mine tailings. Great photo of a banded iron formation.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "X-Men Ethics Class: Why Help the Weak If It Thwarts Evolution?" (Salvo 18 (Autumn 2011), Cameron Wybrow teases out the struggle over Darwinian morality that provides an underlying theme for the series, including this summer's "cream of the crop" instalment, X-Men First Class:

For our purposes here, it is more important to focus on what the X-Men stories get right about Darwinian evolution. While they grossly exaggerate its power and its speed, they portray its general character bang-on. And this is where they lead us to clarity in discussions of "evolutionary ethics."

According to Darwinian theory, new species emerge when mutations produce individuals who can outperform the stock they came from, with the result that, eventually, the mutant stock replaces the original. Thus, the intermediate creatures between the bat and the primitive insectivores are all extinct, because the modern bat is more fit for its flying environment than were any of them.

The bat has no pity for the failed creatures from the earlier stages of its evolution that were not good enough to survive. Nor, on Darwinian premises, should it. Nature decides, in its cold and pitiless way, who will live and who will die, and which species will thrive and which become extinct. It is pointless and ethically irrelevant to question nature's decisions.

Ironically, when we come to analyze the positions of Professor X, the hero, and of Magneto, the villain, we are led to the curious conclusion that Magneto is philosophically the more coherent of the two, because he is actually more in tune with the pure logic of Darwinism. This becomes clear if we consider the positions of two real-life writers on evolution and ethics, Richard Dawkins and Larry Arnhart. ...

More.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Planet-forming disk could create thousands of oceans" (TG Daily October 21, 2011), Kate Taylor reports,

Astronomers have discovered an embryonic solar system surrounded by a cloud of water vapor that could eventually form comets and deliver oceans to dry worlds.

The star TW Hydrae, 176 light years away in the constellation Hydra, is surrounded by enough water to fill Earth's oceans thousands of times over.

Which means:

"This tells us that the key materials that life needs are present in a system before planets are born," says University of Michigan astronomy professor Ted Bergin, a HIFI co-investigator.

One wonders, if many phenomena like this turn up, but life is not detected, would that set of circumstances be taken to mean anything?

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "New Evidence for the Oldest Oxygen-Breathing Life On Land"
(ScienceDaily, Oct. 19, 2011), we learn:

New University of Alberta research shows the first evidence that the first oxygen-breathing bacteria occupied and thrived on land 100 million years earlier than previously thought. The researchers show that the most primitive form of aerobic-respiring life on land came into existence 2.48 billion years ago.

"We suggest that the jump in chromium levels was triggered by the oxidation of the mineral pyrite (fool's gold) on land," said Konhauser.

The researchers say the modern analogue for that first primitive oxygen-dependent life form on Earth is still with us.

"The same bacterial life forms are alive and well today, living off pyrite and settling in the highly acidic waste waters of mining sites the world over," said Konhauser.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Chatbots fail to convince judges that they're human," (New Scientist, 20 October 2011), Paul Marks recounts his experiences as a judge in Turing tests:

A chatbot called Rosette won the $4000 annual Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Exeter yesterday - but once again none of the four chatbots that were competing managed to convince any of the judges that they were human.

After computer pioneer Alan Turing in 1950 posited the notion that machines might one day be thought of as "thinking", the competition attempts to find a computer program whose chat responses are indistinguishable from a human's. They are nowhere near it.

Not what was confidently predicted by consensus science two decades ago.

Every year since 1991, the prize's founder, Hugh Loebner, has asked four judges to sit at computer terminals where they can talk to a both a human (who's hiding in another room) and a chatbot - but they are not told which is which. It's up to the judges to decide which is the person and which is the software and then rate the chatbots on how good they are at human mimicry. A chatbot has only seemed more human than a human once in the competition's history - but that, says Loebner, only occured when one human volunteer decided to behave like an early chatbot, skewing the results.

So not only can't machines stand in for humans, but - it gets worse - humans can mess up things trying to stand in for machines.

The trouble with machines is, they can't sound brainless enough to stand in for a certain type of seat-beside-you bus passenger who wants you to know all what's wrong with her hair, her clothes, her landlord, her dog, her job, and her boyfriend. And leaves you wondering, "Is the brain really an illusion?"

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Bridging the Gap" (Caltech, 10/10/11), we learn: "Caltech Neuroscientists Find Normal Brain Communication in People Who Lack Connections Between Right and Left Hemispheres." Not in itself a new find, by any means.

PASADENA, Calif.—Like a bridge that spans a river to connect two major metropolises, the corpus callosum is the main conduit for information flowing between the left and right hemispheres of our brains. Now, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have found that people who are born without that link—a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum, or AgCC—still show remarkably normal communication across the gap between the two halves of their brains.

Many have heard about Roger Sperry's work with people whose brains were split to control life-threatening epilepsy, whose left hand really didn't know that their right hand was doing. But the Caltech researchers studied people who had never had a functional corpus callosum, from the time of embryogenesis:

"This was a real surprise," says Tyszka. "We expected to see a lot less coupling between the left and right brain in this group—after all, they are missing about 200 million connections that would normally be there. How do they manage to have normal communication between the left and right sides of the brain without the corpus callosum?"

What may have happened is that, never having been able to connect via the CC, the two halves of the brain simply use existing communication channels more intensely, to stay connected. By contrast, Sperry's split-brain subjects brains had adapted to communicating through the CC, but then it was severed. Thre is a practical side to this research:

"We are now examining AgCC subjects who are also on the autism spectrum, in order to gain insights about the role of brain connectivity in autism, as well as in healthy social interactions," says Tyszka. "About a third of people with AgCC also have autism, and altered connectivity in the corpus callosum has been found in autism. The remarkable compensation in brain functional networks that we found here may thus have important implications also for understanding the function of the brains of people with autism."

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "New Genes, New Brain" (The Scientist , October 19, 2011), Cristina Luiggi reports,

The evolution of the human brain may have been driven by a group of novel genes that arose fairly recently in primate evolution.

A bevy of genes known to be active during human fetal and infant development first appeared at the same time that the prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain associated with human intelligence and personality—took shape in primates, a new study published yesterday (October 18) in PLoS Biology found. The timing suggests that the new genes may have been intimately tied to the evolution of the human brain.

Previous research focused on older genes conserved across the animal kingdom, looking at new genes is hoped to provide insight. Like:

"We were very shocked that there were that many new genes that were upregulated in this part of the brain," said Long, who added that he was also taken aback by synchronicity of the origin of the genes and the development of novel brain structures. It seems that around the same time that the neocortex and the prefrontal cortex arose, and then expanded in humans, a large collection of genes also popped up.

That's something the old genes were never going to tell researchers.

It feels like a rollout of some kind, no?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Bridging the Gap" (Caltech, 10/10/11), we learn: "Caltech Neuroscientists Find Normal Brain Communication in People Who Lack Connections Between Right and Left Hemispheres." Not in itself a new find, by any means.

PASADENA, Calif.—Like a bridge that spans a river to connect two major metropolises, the corpus callosum is the main conduit for information flowing between the left and right hemispheres of our brains. Now, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have found that people who are born without that link—a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum, or AgCC—still show remarkably normal communication across the gap between the two halves of their brains.

Many have heard about Roger Sperry's work with people whose brains were split to control life-threatening epilepsy, whose left hand really didn't know that their right hand was doing. But the Caltech researchers studied people who had never had a functional corpus callosum, from the time of embryogenesis:

"This was a real surprise," says Tyszka. "We expected to see a lot less coupling between the left and right brain in this group—after all, they are missing about 200 million connections that would normally be there. How do they manage to have normal communication between the left and right sides of the brain without the corpus callosum?”

What may have happened is that, never having been able to connect via the CC, the two halves of the brain simply use existing communication channels more intensely, to stay connected. By contrast, Sperry's split-brain subjects brains had adapted to communicating through the CC, but then it was severed. There is a practical side to this research:

"We are now examining AgCC subjects who are also on the autism spectrum, in order to gain insights about the role of brain connectivity in autism, as well as in healthy social interactions," says Tyszka. "About a third of people with AgCC also have autism, and altered connectivity in the corpus callosum has been found in autism. The remarkable compensation in brain functional networks that we found here may thus have important implications also for understanding the function of the brains of people with autism."

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Neutrino watch: Speed claim baffles CERN theoryfest" ( New Scientist, October 2011), Lisa Grossman reports,

Even a meeting of elite minds at Europe's top particle physics lab couldn't do it: reconciling neutrinos that appear to break the cosmic speed limit with the laws of physics is still beyond us. However, a paper on the speeding neutrinos has been accepted for publication and the first preliminary results from a comparable experiment are out.

"For the moment, there is no explanation that works," says physicist Ignatios Antoniadis, who helped to organise the meeting at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, last Friday.

Papers are in progress, offering various perspectives.

Relax guys. It just means physics is a science. After all, Unlike Darwin, Einstein can be wrong. We have confidence in you because you are not trying to claim that the old egghead had foreseen and allowed for stuff he wouldn't have imagined.

Can we say that any discipline whose iconic figure can’t be wrong should be reclassified as a religion? Thoughts?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

And the implications for our view of life and its origins

You can watch Don Johnson's Programming of Life vid here free. Here's a synopsis.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Perfect fossil could be most complete dinosaur ever"(New Scientist, 13 October 2011). Jeff Hecht tells us,

Although Chinese bird and dinosaur fossils are famed for delicate details such as their feathers, they don't match this 72-centimetre-long theropod in terms of clarity and completeness of preservation.

98% of the skeleton has been preserved.

A friend of Uncommon Descent offers a detail gleaned from the German report (fossil wasfound in Bavaria): "This one comes complete with skin. Actually discovered two years ago, but kept quiet to avoid thievery."* You’ll see why.

Here's the dino under UV light.

* The wily researchers may have been thinking of a curious incident in the afterlife of famous fossil Flores Man. (Search on "suitcase"), as in: the container in which the fossil left the site one day ....

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Yeah, one of those types. Alfalfa Sprouts Man. Still extant, unfortunately, in any caf infested by health nuts.

From "New Technologies Challenge Old Ideas About Early Hominid Diets" (ScienceDaily, Oct. 14, 2011), we learn:

By analyzing microscopic pits and scratches on hominid teeth, as well as stable isotopes of carbon found in teeth, researchers are getting a very different picture of the diet habitats of early hominids than that painted by the physical structure of the skull, jawbones and teeth. While some early hominids sported powerful jaws and large molars -- including Paranthropus boisei, dubbed "Nutcracker Man" -- they may have cracked nuts rarely if at all, said CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Matt Sponheimer, study co-author.

Well, it's awful hard on the teeth, and there were no dentists back then.

The results for teeth from Paranthropus boisei, published earlier this year, indicated they were eating foods from the so-called C4 photosynthetic pathway, which points to consumption of grasses and sedges.

Like we said.

The analysis stands in contrast to our closest human relatives like chimpanzees and gorillas that eat foods from the so-called C3 synthetic pathway pointing to a diet that included trees, shrubs and bushes.

Crikey! Can we see the grass menu again?

"The bottom line is that our old answers about hominid diets are no longer sufficient, and we really need to start looking in directions that would have been considered crazy even a decade ago," Sponheimer said. "We also see much more evidence of dietary variability among our hominid kin than was previously appreciated. Consequently, the whole notion of hominid diet is really problematic, as different species may have consumed fundamentally different things."

Some of us have wondered why so little attention is given to eating fish. Fish can often be trapped quite simply, and shellfish can merely be gathered. And it's equal opportunity, as between men, women, and children.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Dwarfs the Lascaux caves (30,000 mya) for antiquity.

In "Ancient 'paint factory' unearthed" (BBC News, October 13, 2011), Jonathan Amos reports

The kits used by humans 100,000 years ago to make paint have been found at the famous archaeological site of Blombos Cave in South Africa.

The hoard includes red and yellow pigments, shell containers, and the grinding cobbles and bone spatulas to work up a paste - everything an ancient artist might need in their workshop.

It is proof, say researchers, of our early ancestors' complexity of thought.

And at Nature, Zoe Corbyn tells us of "African cave's ancient ochre lab: Find suggests that Stone Age sophistication extends further back than thought." (13 October 2011):

Previous evidence, such as shell beads, ochre engravings and ancient glue from various middle Stone Age sites, indicates that humans had evolved complex cognition by between 80,000 and 70,000 years ago. Henshilwood's finding stretches that further.

It also provides the earliest evidence for the use of containers, pre-dating previous examples by 40,000 years, says Henshilwood. The abalone shells' respiratory holes would probably have been plugged to contain the liquid mixture.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "From Blue Whales to Earthworms, a Common Mechanism Gives Shape to Living Beings" (ScienceDaily, (Oct. 13, 2011), we learn how the embryo gets organized, hourby hour, in two days:

Very specific genes, known as "Hox," are involved in this process. Responsible for the formation of limbs and the spinal column, they have a remarkable characteristic. "Hox genes are situated one exactly after the other on the DNA strand, in four groups. First the neck, then the thorax, then the lumbar, and so on," explains Duboule. "This unique arrangement inevitably had to play a role."

The process is astonishingly simple. In the embryo's first moments, the Hox genes are dormant, packaged like a spool of wound yarn on the DNA. When the time is right, the strand begins to unwind. When the embryo begins to form the upper levels, the genes encoding the formation of cervical vertebrae come off the spool and become activated. Then it is the thoracic vertebrae's turn, and so on down to the tailbone. The DNA strand acts a bit like an old-fashioned computer punchcard, delivering specific instructions as it progressively goes through the machine.

"A new gene comes out of the spool every ninety minutes, which corresponds to the time needed for a new layer of the embryo to be built," explains Duboule. "It takes two days for the strand to completely unwind; this is the same time that's needed for all the layers of the embryo to be completed."
This system is the first "mechanical" clock ever discovered in genetics. And it explains why the system is so remarkably precise.

And just think, it all happened by natural selection acting on random mutations, ... Well, let's just say it would be illegal to introduce, in American or British schools, any kind of doubt that that's the origin of the mechanism.

Also:

The Hox clock is a demonstration of the extraordinary complexity of evolution. One notable property of the mechanism is its extreme stability, explains Duboule. "Circadian or menstrual clocks involve complex chemistry. They can thus adapt to changing contexts, but in a general sense are fairly imprecise. The mechanism that we have discovered must be infinitely more stable and precise. Even the smallest change would end up leading to the emergence of a new species."

Ah yes, there's the ritual kowtow to Darwin ("who changed everything, greater than Copernicus" - E.O. Wilson), although in this case, the PR writers daren't be explicit.

In reality, "Even the smallest change would end up leading to the ... " death of the embryo.

The real lesson here is the importance of model. Embryo development must be precise, like a clock, and not randomly mutated due to the chances of chemistry.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Megavirus May Be Stripped-Down Version of Normal Cell" (Wired,
October 11, 2011), John Timmer/Ars Technica discusses the view that the recently discovered megavirus is a former cell:

Giant viruses, its authors argue, have all these genes normally associated with cells because, in their distant evolutionary past, they were once cells.

Mimivirus was discovered in an amoeba, so the authors of the new paper used a simple technique to look for its relatives: take three different species of amoeba, expose them to a variety of environmental samples, and see if anything big starts growing in them. They hit pay dirt with a sample obtained from an ocean monitoring station just off the coast of Chile. Despite the oceanic source, the virus grew nicely in fresh water amoebae. The site also gave the virus its name: Megavirus chilensis.

The authors followed its lifestyle, showing that it behaved much like Mimivirus, forming similar structures within its host cell that could only be distinguished using electron microscopy. They also sequenced its entire genome, which turned out to be the largest virus genome yet completed: 1.26 million base pairs of DNA (Megabases). For decades, viruses were not regarded as a form of life, but that may need revisiting.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Tiny fossil teeth re-write rodent record" (BBC News , 12 October 2011), Jonathan Amos reports on the oldest fossil rodents found so far (at 41 mya), pushing back rodents by 10 million years. The curious thing is that while the rodent was found in Peru,

the shape of the teeth and other factors point to the ancient animals being most closely related to African rodents.

"That maybe sounds like a fantastic tale, but in fact we do see things like this happening today. You can get big logjams of vegetation that get pushed out of rivers during storms, and often you will see mammals on them.

Okay, now all we need is to see that these raft do not break up before they cross the Atlantic about half the distance between continents as today. Wait:

"The odds of them making this crossing are obviously very low, but after millions and millions of years the odds of some animals making it go up considerably.

But this is magic numbers thinking. If, for example, you look hard among Indian yogi, you may find someone who can hold his breath for 15 minutes. You wont find someone who can hold it for 24 hours. Big numbers cannot conjure a way through a brick wall.

The raft idea is worth airing, if only for the creative thinking value. But consider:

Pumice rafts "floating laboratories" for early life.

Crocodiles swam to North America?

If it's aired too often, many will come to believe, in the notorious phrase, that it "must have" happened.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "A Tight Fit — Evolution and the Armadillo's Shell" (Wired, October 7, 2011),
Brian Switek reports,

Naturalists are still learning evolutionary lessons from armadillos. In a paper recently published in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution, biologists Mariella Superina and W. J. Loughry considered the ways in which the evolution of a tough carapace among armadillos shaped their evolution and lifestyle. What are the consequences, Superina and Loughry wonder, of being an armored mammal?

The armor which covers the 21 known species of extant armadillos is a combination of bone plates with tough, overlapping scutes. (Among the modern species is the pink fairy armadillo — Chlamyphorus truncatus — simultaneously one of the strangest and cutest mammals I have ever seen.) Contrary to what you might expect, though, we don't really know whether the armor provides any benefit as a defense against predators. The armor probably protects armadillos from abrasion by vegetation and their burrowing activities, and parasites have fewer spots to latch on to (they most often cling to the unprotected undersides of the mammals), but there is a dearth of research about whether or not armadillos suffer less predation compared to similar-sized mammals. This is an important bit of overlooked research. If the carapace of armadillos truly does provide a protective benefit, this fact may help partially explain why they are slow and have low metabolic rates. If you're always carrying a shield, you don't need to be very fast to protect yourself from attackers.

Given that the first three paragraphs of Switek's article are devoted to Darwin worship, he creates the impression that a key burden of research in the area is the time spent on litanies to Darwin, time that is presumably believed to be time well spent.

Some say that worship is not a method of learning, unless we are studying God.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Lungfish Provides Insight to Life On Land: 'Humans Are Just Modified Fish'" ScienceDaily (October 7, 2011), we learn:

"We examined the way the different fish species generated the muscles of their pelvic fins, which are the evolutionary forerunners of the hind limbs," said Professor Currie, a developmental biologist. Currie and his team genetically engineered the fish to trace the migration of precursor muscle cells in early developmental stages as the animal's body took shape. These cells in the engineered fish were made to emit a red or green light, allowing the team to track the development of specific muscle groups. They found that the bony fish had a different mechanism of pelvic fin muscle formation from that of the cartilaginous fish, a mechanism that was a stepping stone to the evolution of tetrapod physiology.

Neat experiment, demonstrating the generally held position that bony fish are closer to tetrapods. But note the conclusion: "Humans are just modified fish," said Professor Currie. "The genome of fish is not vastly different from our own. We have shown that the mechanism of pelvic muscle formation in bony fish is transitional between that in sharks and in our tetrapod ancestors." Yeah, that explains mermaids.

We're waiting for the paper that uses this data to show why guys are more likely to be attracted to mermaids than sharks.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From Thomas Hayden, "How to Hatch a Dinosaur" (Wired September 26, 2011):

Human beings are almost indistinguishable, genetically speaking, from chimpanzees, but at that scale we're also pretty hard to tell apart from, say, bats.

Yeah, it figures. Batman.

Hints of long-extinct creatures, echoes of evolution past, occasionally emerge in real life—they're called atavisms, rare cases of individuals born with characteristic features of their evolutionary antecedents. Whales are sometimes born with appendages reminiscent of hind limbs. Human babies sometimes enter the world with fur, extra nipples, or, very rarely, a true tail. Horner's plan, in essence, is to start off by creating experimental atavisms in the lab. Activate enough ancestral characteristics in a single chicken, he reasons, and you'll end up with something close enough to the ancestor to be a "saurus." At least, that's what he pitched at this year's TED conference, the annual technology, entertainment, and design gathering held in Long Beach, Calif

Key theorist Jack Horner explains,

Now all he needed to make it happen, he told his TED audience, was a few breakthroughs in developmental biology and genetics and all the chicken eggs he could get his hands on. "What we're trying to do is take our chicken, modify it, and make," he said, "a chickenosaurus."

The skeletons of a chicken and a T. Rex re quite similar, he says.

He has some seed money and is looking for a developmental biology postdoc to help.

Here's his TED talk.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The Higgs "God particle" boson has been in the news a lot lately, principally because it doesn't seem to exist ... not so far, anyway. Some panicked, and as a no-show at the opening of a glitzy new cosmology centre named after Stephen Hawking, it cast a pall over the festivities.

Now, from "Higgs boson real? We may know in a year" (MSNBC, October 6, 2011),we learn:

The long-sought Higgs boson, believed to have given shape to the universe after the Big Bang, will be found in the next 12 months or shown to be a chimera, heads of the three top physics research centers said on Thursday.

"I think by this time next year I will be able to bring you either the Higgs boson or the message that it doesn't exist," declared Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN whose Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is at the focus of the search.

He was echoed by KEK's Atsuto Suzuki and Pier Oddone of Fermilab, which last weekend shut off after 26 years its Tevatron accelerator, which has also been seeking the Higgs in the debris of billions of particle collisions.

Good for them. Making it definite like that encourages confidence that physics is a discipline. In essence, that means physics could tell us something wee didn't want to hear and we would accept it.

So it will be really interesting to see is whether, in a year or so, some sources are rewriting history to show that they never really thought there was a Higgs boson, in just the way that Darwinists insist they never thought junk DNA was just junk and conclusive evidence for their position, when in fact there is very considerable documentary evidence that that is exactly what they did think.

Incidentally, they doubt the faster-than-light neutrinos.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

target="another">Forrest Mims, according Discover one of the best brains in science, offers a glimpse into the earliest days of personal computing, when nerds hung around in garages with them newfangled machines, instead of cars (which most people thought they should have been doing instead):

One day in 1975 Ed Roberts (my MITS [Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems] co-founder) called and said he wanted me to meet his new programming genius. I hopped on the bike and was at MITS in a few minutes. After visiting with Ed a while, he took me to a room where a very young looking Bill Gates was giving a black board talk to three guys sitting or lying on the floor. Ed and I stood in the door waiting for Gates to acknowledge us, but he merely looked annoyed and ignored us. Finally, Ed said let's go and we left. As we walked away, Ed said, in essence, that Gates was a really smart kid, but he was also a smart alec.

Ed and Gates had a royal split up after Ed sold MITS to Pertec. In later years they reconciled, and Gates even visited Ed when he was dying in the hospital. His son David, who was present, described this remarkable visit to me at Ed's funeral. Gates didn't promote his visit, which made it all the more significant to the family.

I didn't know Paul Allen back then. I first met Allen at the opening of "StartUp," the museum gallery he founded at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. This gallery is dedicated to the earliest days of the PC era and includes some of my artifacts from early MITS days, including a photo of Minnie [Forrest's wife] typing the operating manual for the first MITS rocket transmitter. Next to her photo is the actual rocket I built to test the transmitter. I met Allen again at a rededication of the exhibit to Ed after Ed died. That's when he told me that Gates had not yet read his soon-to-be published memoir "Idea Man," the book that raised a controversy over its candid description of Gate's temper outbursts that Ed used to tell me about, which I target="another">reviewed.

Aside from co-founding MITS, my only direct connection with the Altair 8800 computer was writing the first operator's manual and developing the kit assembly manual style that I used for the MITS calculator kits. Ed gave me an Altair in exchange for writing the manual, and it's been on display at the Smithsonian for many years.

I've read that Steve Wozniak designed the Apple 1 because he could not afford the MITS Altair that he saw demonstrated at the Homebrew Computer Club.

Some Macintosh fans are just too numb to write about it.
Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here Philip Ball offers us "10 Unsolved Mysteries: Many of the most profound scientific questions—and some of humanity's most urgent problems—pertain to the science of atoms and molecules" (Scientific American, October 10, 2011): For example, #1:

How Did Life Begin?

The moment when the first living beings arose from inanimate matter almost four billion years ago is still shrouded in mystery. How did relatively simple molecules in the primordial broth give rise to more and more complex compounds? And how did some of those compounds begin to process energy and replicate (two of the defining characteristics of life)? At the molecular level, all of those steps are, of course, chemical reactions, which makes the question of how life began one of chemistry.

You'd think that, having gotten precisely nowhere for well over a century with assuming that how life began is a question of chemistry, people might want to consider alternatives. How about, life isn't principally chemistry, but information in motion. Now, how did that happen?

Probably easier to just plough the same old furrows fruitlessly.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Last Universal Common Ancestor More Complex Than Previously Thought," ScienceDaily (Oct. 5, 2011), we learn:

Scientists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, but they don't know much about this great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical soup out of which evolution gradually constructed more complex forms. Some scientists still debate whether it was even a cell.

New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism after all, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell, researchers report. Their study appears in the journal Biology Direct.

And they still have a job? Amazing?

"You can't assume that the whole story of life is just building and assembling things," Whitfield said. "Some have argued that the reason that bacteria are so simple is because they have to live in extreme environments and they have to reproduce extremely quickly. So they may actually be reduced versions of what was there originally. According to this view, they've become streamlined genetically and structurally from what they originally were like. We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was."

No argument here. There are many no-speculation examples of life forms
shedding complex parts for survival - the way one might abandon a grand piano in the wilderness.

We'll leave the giant, gaping question for later.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Well, after all, it explains everything, right. So here's a claim that natural selection explains the lowering of the age of first births to women in Quebec during a 140 year period. (In PNAS , October, 2011).

Before you read it, here is a potted history of Quebec: At the close of the Seven Years' War, France (the loser) had to decide between giving Britain (the winner) Quebec or Louisiana. The French king preferred the jazz and jambalaya (so to speak) to the "few thousand acres of snow" up north So it was worse, you see than Quebec losing the war - the Quebecois, so consciously French it hurt, were actually dumped by France. The British did not interfere with their religion (Catholic), their language (French), their culture (les habitants), or - within reason - their laws (civil code). But the Quebecois realized that they were at risk of becoming an endangered minority anyway. Up until about the 1960s, they were devout Catholics, and by a confluence of choices and events, they simply had more children than others. Some called it "revenge of the cradle." Of course, bigger families meant earlier marriage for women.

Now that Catholicism has collapsed in Quebec as a serious cultural force, the birthrate is very low, even for Canada, and the language and culture are in danger from that cause, despite sometimes extreme legislation to protect them, including outright paying people to have kids. In the light of this history, why would anyone be looking for a role that "natural selection" played in early marriage ages for Quebecois women, apart from the need to demonstrate Darwinism?

Evidence for evolution in response to natural selection in a contemporary human population

Emmanuel Milota,1, Francine M. Mayera, Daniel H. Nusseyb, Mireille Boisverta, Fanie Pelletierc, and Denis Réalea

Abstract

It is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection. In contrast, recent studies show that selection can be strong in contemporary populations. However, detecting a response to selection is particularly challenging; previous evidence from wild animals has been criticized for both applying anticonservative statistical tests and failing to consider random genetic drift. Here we study life-history variation in an insular preindustrial French-Canadian population and apply a recently pro posed conservative approach to testing microevolutionary responses to selection. As reported for other such societies, natural selection favored an earlier age at first reproduction (AFR) among women. AFR was also highly heritable and genetically correlated to fitness, predicting a microevolutionary change toward earlier reproduction. In agreement with this prediction, AFR declined from about 26–22 y over a 140-y period. Crucially, we uncovered a substantial change in the breeding values for this trait, indicating that the change in AFR largely occurred at the genetic level. Moreover, the genetic trend was higher than expected under the effect of random genetic drift alone. Our results show that microevolution can be detectable over relatively few generations in humans and underscore the need for studies of human demography and reproductive ecology to consider the role of evolutionary processes.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's an article about some really silly theologians MSNBC (Clara Moskowitz, October 2, 2011): "If intelligent extraterrestrials exist, what about God?: Experts say encountering E.T. would pose religious dilemmas, especially for Christians":

Christians, in particular, might take the news hardest, because the Christian belief system does not easily allow for other intelligent beings in the universe, Christian thinkers said at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to discuss issues surrounding traveling to other stars.

Right. Not like angels, devils, or the mysterious "sheep that are not of this flock." Or the extinct race of giants, mentioned in Genesis. Naw. Christians could never have believed anything like that ...

If the whole of creation includes 125 billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each, as astronomers think, then what if some of these stars have planets with advanced civilizations, too? Why would Jesus Christ have come to Earth, of all the inhabited planets in the universe, to save Earthlings and abandon the rest of God's creatures?

Abandon? These people watch too many Star Trek movies. Curiously, during the age of exploration, when we were first beginning to learn about the lands and peoples of our planet, many early explorers had explicit Christian missionary intentions. They didn't think God had abandoned peoples, but that he had made them responsible for telling those peoples the Gospel. Serious Christians react that way today. But that would just plain end the discussion, which professional thinkers never like to do.

All this said, traditional Christians are less likely than others to credit space alien tales.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Fish Uses Tool to Dig Up and Crush Clams" (ScienceDaily Sep. 28, 2011), we learn:

n the video, an orange-dotted tuskfish digs a clam out of the sand, carries it over to a rock, and repeatedly throws the clam against the rock to crush it. Bernardi shot the video in Palau in 2009.

"What the movie shows is very interesting. The animal excavates sand to get the shell out, then swims for a long time to find an appropriate area where it can crack the shell," Bernardi said. "It requires a lot of forward thinking, because there are a number of steps involved. For a fish, it's a pretty big deal."

Yes, it is a pretty big deal, but what it mainly shows is how "tree of life" theories, now in ruins, have caused us to underestimate the intelligence of exothermic animals. Why was it sacrosanct that fish were too stupid to do this.

Smashing something against a rock is enterprising, but does not constitute using a tool. For one thing, implicit in the idea of a "tool" is that it is made for a purpose. That includes the assumption of some entity somewhere that the world could be different from what it is (as a result of using the tool). A stretch for most animals, including fish.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From Wendy Zukerman, "Domestic violence gets evolutionary explanation" (New Scientist September 2011):

Each year more than 500,000 women in the US alone report to the police violent attacks by current or former male partners. There is a reason why domestic violence is so widespread, says David Buss, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas in Austin: it carries a selective advantage, tied with reproductive success. In other words, men who are violent are trying to make sure that their partner has his child and not another man's.

Does that also explain men who violently force their wives to abort their own children that they know are theirs?

Sure! Darwinism explains everything.

By the way, where are the Christian Darwinists when these things surface? We still got the legal right to wonder why the sandals-off types are never around when we face these problems..

For some people, it is not an abstract issue.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From “The flawed multiverse,” Alastair I M Rae’s Physicsworld (Sep 22, 2011) review of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World:

According to the quantum-information theorist David Deutsch, our modern understanding of how the world works has provided us with "good explanations" that open up essentially infinite possibilities for future progress. One of these explanations is the idea of the quantum multiverse, which Deutsch discussed in the May issue of Physics World (pp34–38, print version only) and to which he devotes a chapter in his book The Beginning of Infinity.

I believe the many-worlds theory is open to criticism for reasons other than extravagence. One of these concerns probabilities in a situation where both outcomes occur in parallel. If both options are happening, how can it be meaningful to say that one is more probable than the other – as is experimentally the case if the reflector is not exactly 50/50?

As he described in his Physics World article, Deutsch's response is to propose that before the measurement, the photon is not just a single particle but is actually an (uncountable) infinity of identical or "fungible" particles. After interacting with the reflector, an infinite number of fungible photons exist in both output channels, but the ratio of these numbers is finite, so that each has a "measure" proportional to the squared modulus of the wavefunction. Even though an observer knows they are going to evolve into two copies of themself, they can apparently assign relative probabilities to which copy they expect to become. These probabilities are given by the Born rule. [Registration required.]

Rae isn’t convinced that this Deutsch fixes - or others - resolve the problem, and is put off by the book’s dogmatic tone. He comments,

Deutsch willingly accepts that much of his inspiration comes from the work of Karl Popper, whose mantra "we have a duty to be optimistic" clearly underlies his thinking. However, he would have done well to remember that Popper was often dogmatic, to the point where some wags said that his book The Open Society and its Enemies should have been called "The Open Society by one of its Enemies"!

See also: Information as real and irreducible to physics? – David Deutsch’s surprising response

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, we covered Baylor philosopher of law Frank Beckwith in the Synthese affair, but there was an older dustup involving Baylor that got covered in debris from later conflicts, and we just now remembered:

Twenty-nine members of the J.M. Dawson family have called on Baylor University to remove the associate director of the institute that bears Dawson's name.

In an open letter dated Sept. 11, Dawson family members question the appointment of Francis Beckwith as associate director of Baylor's J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies.

However, two of Beckwith's key colleagues have claimed the protest is misguided, affirmed Beckwith's qualifications and championed Baylor's right to select a diverse faculty.- from Marv Knox, “Dawson family protests Beckwith's appointment to Baylor institute,” Baptist Standard , 9/19/2003

In short, the Dawsons were taking the position that, because they had been generous with the university - and old J. M. Dawson held certain opinions re separation of church and state - they could dictate who sat at the desk named after him.

It was clearly a position that any university would have to reject. What would prompt such a public display of ignorance of the principle of academic freedom among otherwise worthy citizens?

"The Discovery Institute works to get the concept called 'intelligent design' into the science curriculum of public school textbooks, claiming that intelligent design is a scientific, not a religious, concept. In our judgment and in the judgment of the scientific community, this is a ruse for getting a religious notion into the public schools--clearly a violation of the separation of church and state."

Surprisingly, despite the hype, the Discovery Institute does not do that, and didn’t then. It presses for the right of students and teachers to examine the evidence for Darwinism as the supposed key mechanism of evolutionary change.

Of course, to a Darwinist, all doubt amounts to heresy. And the Dawsons were possibly assisted in looking like back country hicks by a Darwin pressure group. All blown over now, thankfully, but we’ve been saying for years that the Darwin lobby are bad people to know.

It’s okay for them to engage in censorship and career muggings of decent people. But if you try it at their urging, at best you’ll come off looking foolish. At worst, facing legal fees and settlements, if anyone takes you seriously and the victims follow up.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!