Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 429

Researcher: Evidence for early man in Asia half a million years earlier than thought

The hypothesis is based on a 2013 find in Jordan:

Scardia and his colleagues, having analyzed these artifacts, argue that they are rudimentary tools used by early humans, crafted and discarded around 2.5 million years ago. If they are right, we may need to rethink which hominin species made the first forays out of the African cradle—and when.

The general consensus for decades has been that Homo erectus—an upright, long-legged species—was among the first hominins (or species closely related to modern humans) to leave Africa. Scientists presume members of this species traveled through the natural corridor of the Levant, a region along the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, around 2 million years ago.

Scardia’s study, published in the September issue of Quaternary Science Reviews, suggests a far earlier exit. It proposes that hominins capable of tool creation may have been on the doorstep of Asia some 500,000 years earlier. That claim helps explain the puzzling evolution of a hominin species found in Indonesia, as well as a contentious group of skulls found in Georgia.

Richard Kemeny, “Should the Story of Homo’s Dispersal Out of Africa Be Rewritten?” at Sapiens

One question mark is whether the stones are really tools. It’s hard to tell, especially because there are so few. A classic design inference problem.

Paper. (paywall)

See also: Ancient human group as a cold case nearly half a million years ago

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Plant gene involved in reproduction conserved for 450 million years

From ScienceDaily:

Since they first arrived on land, plants have likely been using the same genetic tools to regulate whether they grow bigger or reproduce. The discovery was made using liverwort, one descendant of the first plants to move out of the ancient oceans and onto land…

The liverwort genome is structurally simple compared to the flowering plants that are commonly used in research laboratories, like tobacco and thale cress (Arabidopsis). Flowering plants are evolutionarily “younger” plants than liverworts, with gene duplications and redundancies that make studying their genomes more complicated.

Despite that simplicity, the liverwort genome appears to have all the same life-cycle stages and powers to regulate them.
The entire genome of the liverwort species Marchantia polymorpha was first sequenced in 2017 by an international team, which included several researchers who also participated in the recently published gene analysis.

When they examined the full genome, researchers discovered that even the simple liverwort has about 100 different types of a small molecule, called microRNA, which regulate the activity of other genes.

About eight of the liverwort microRNAs were nearly identical to known thale cress microRNAs. These eight microRNAs fascinated researchers because the ancestral plants that evolved into modern liverworts and modern thale cress split over 450 million years ago.

“So, why keep them? We want to know what those shared microRNAs are doing, and liverworts are now a convenient model for us to investigate,” said Watanabe.
Paper. (open access) – Masayuki Tsuzuki, Kazutaka Futagami, Masaki Shimamura, Chikako Inoue, Kan Kunimoto, Takashi Oogami, Yuki Tomita, Keisuke Inoue, Takayuki Kohchi, Shohei Yamaoka, Takashi Araki, Takahiro Hamada, Yuichiro Watanabe. An Early Arising Role of the MicroRNA156/529-SPL Module in Reproductive Development Revealed by the Liverwort Marchantia polymorpha. Current Biology, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.07.084
More.

It turned out that one of the conserved microRNAs from 450 million years go was involved in plant reproduction. It’s almost like the land plants were given a kit when they started out or something. But nah…

Now what? The Atlantic fails to show proper respect to the Darwin lobby

In reporting on the recent article in the Atlantic on Darwin in the schools, David Klinghoffer, a nicer person than News (we reported yesterday), says,

Usually these articles obediently quote Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education, swallowing everything he says, and fail to interview anyone from Discovery Institute. I have seen this so many times. But you know what? This piece by Ms. Khazan is a cut above. She quotes Discovery Institute’s John West and Sarah Chaffee, accurately. This could be because they conducted the interview by email. (See below for the full text.)

And while she naturally also talked with Glenn Branch, she notes that she is a “little skeptical” of something he says (about how not learning about human evolution “might make it harder for, say, doctors to understand superbugs, or for farmers to understand the nuances of agriculture,” as she paraphrases him).

David Klinghoffer, “From The Atlantic on Teaching Human Evolution, a Bit of Rare Honesty in Reporting” at Evolution News and Science Today

What? She actually thinks that Darwinian claims should be subject to skepticism like any other? Something’s changing for sure.

Of course Branch’s claim is bullocks but imagine someone writing for a traditional medium actually considering that possibility… wow.

Meanwhile,

Hint: Yes, while the fallout falls out, Chaffee should stick to e-mail.

Hint 2: Khazan should look into horizontal gene transfer, a swift but non-Darwinian mechanism for rapid changes in virulent bugs.

See also: A cry from grievance culture: She never learned Darwinism in school. If Darwinists had been in charge of Khazan’s education, she would mainly have a bunch of stuff to unlearn. As it is, she can start with Suzan Mazur’s Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology and Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves. Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt is good on the Cambrian explosion…

Follow UD News at Twitter

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Hybridization—long considered a “dead end”—may be key to rapid speciation

Some researchers pursued the idea, researching a transcontinental fly pest of apples:

Many genetic variants tied to the reproductive isolation of species are older than the species themselves. These old variants are often injected into lineages through hybridization with distant relatives.

A recent review in Trends in Ecology & Evolution argues that this phenomenon reveals something fundamental about how new species form. Old variants recast in new roles may sometimes be more important role in the origin of species than new mutations are. And hybridization — long considered an evolutionary dead end — instead acts as a catalyst for combining old gene variants in new ways, fueling rapid diversification.

The evolutionary biologists David Marques and Ole Seehausen at the University of Bern and Joana Meier at the University of Cambridge call this new view of the origin of species combinatorial speciation.

Jonathan Lambert, “New Hybrid Species Remix Old Genes Creatively” at Quanta

Paper. (open access)

Surely, it was long considered a dead end because Darwinism was supposed to account for these changes.

See also: Hybridization boosts evolution in cichlids

and

Another dismissed form of evolution shows at least some viability

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

A cry from grievance culture: She never learned Darwinism in school

An Atlantic staff writer is concerned that, as a result, the story of how we got here will “remain opaque”:

Most scientists believe that the beings that would become humans branched off from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, about 6 million years ago. We did not learn this part—the monkey part. That is, our shared ancestry with other primates. Because this was nearly 20 years ago, and memories tend to fade with time, I checked with several friends who went to the same high school at the same time. None of them recalled learning anything about human evolution, either …

My experience was far from unusual. While only 13 percent of teachers said they advocate creationism or intelligent design in the classroom, based on a survey of 926 public-high-school biology teachers done in 2007, the most recent data available, the majority do not explicitly advocate either creationism or evolutionary biology. This “cautious 60 percent,” write the Penn State political scientists Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer in their 2011 article on the topic, “are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives.” (Plutzer is in the process of conducting a new survey now; he told me preliminary data suggest little has changed since 2007).

Olga Khazan, “I Was Never Taught Where Humans Came From” at The Atlantic

Actually, it is all pretty opaque. Some of us can remember when there was no Neanderthal art, which was a good thing because someone had to be the subhuman to make Darwin’s story work. Then they found Neanderthal art.
But the story is still opaque. We don’t know why or how the Neanderthals or a lot of other people did most of what they did. And we don’t know much of what they did.

If Darwinists had been in charge of Khazan’s education, she would mainly have a bunch of stuff to unlearn. As it is, she can start with Suzan Mazur’s Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology and Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves. Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt is good on the Cambrian explosion…

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Does Darwinism not matter the way it used to?

Remember Brit journo Melanie Phillips, weighing in on David Gelernter dumping Darwin?

She points out that, like so many leftists, Darwinists tend to be angry:

Darwinism, said Gelernter, had passed beyond a scientific argument. Although his Yale colleagues had treated him in a courteous and collegiate manner, people took their life in their hands to question Darwinian evolution.

David Klinghoffer, “Melanie Phillips, Pro-Sanity Journalist, on David Gelernter’s Darwin Apostasy” at Evolution News & Views

David Klinghoffer goes on to ask,

Modern Darwinists, unlike some other leftists, haven’t as yet resorted to violence against opponents. Yet their talk seethes with anger. Ask Darwinian biologist P.Z. Myers about a rational person such as William Lane Craig, who has very effectively debated a range of the smartest atheists. Seething, Professor Myers will tell you that instead of debating Craig and other “creationists,” “I should be spitting in their face, throwing them out of the lecture hall, and presenting the honest truth to the audience, because creationists won’t.” (Craig is not a “creationist,” in any fair definition, but leave that aside.) It’s no doubt a fantasy on the part of Myers, said to be a mild individual in person, but it is a violent fantasy nevertheless.

Would Myers also wish he could spit in David Gelernter’s face and physically assault him by throwing him out of the lecture hall? And if not, why not?

David Klinghoffer, “Melanie Phillips, Pro-Sanity Journalist, on David Gelernter’s Darwin Apostasy” at Evolution News & Views

Actually, how many people much care now what P.Z. Myers thinks? Is ultra-Darwinism past its sell-by date?

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Alarm! Galaxies are being “killed”!

Just for fun, here is a pop sci headline we might not have expected:

Distant galaxies are dying. Stripped of their ability to produce new stars, the unfortunate galaxies are stuck in time, slowly vanishing as their existing stars fade away or die in violent supernovas.

Dan Robitzski, “Astrophysicists Warn That Entire Galaxies “Are Being Killed”” at Futurism

Better them than us. If you ask us.

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

OOL Researchers Channel Steve Martin

The UD News Desk recently reported on obviously desperate origin of life researchers’ attempts to give themselves a leg up on the whole “how did life begin” issue.  I had to chuckle when I read the article, because it reminded me of my second favorite* Steve Martin routine, “You can be millionaire and never pay taxes!”  The routine starts with this:

You can be a millionaire and never pay taxes!  You can have one million dollars and never pay taxes! You say  “Steve how can I be a millionaire and never pay taxes?”  First, get a million dollars.  Now you say, “Steve what do I say to the tax man when he comes to my door and says, ‘You have never paid taxes’?”  Two simple words.  Two simple words in the English language: “I forgot!”

The routine is a classic setup and takedown.  Martin sets the scenario up by promising the audience he will show them two things, first how to make a million dollars and second how to avoid paying taxes on the income.  Hilarity ensues when he takes down the first expectation with a simple “First, get a million dollars,” and then takes down the second with the lamest tax-avoidance scheme in the history of the world, “I forgot.”

The similarity between the “research” reported in the UD
News story and the Martin routine is obvious. 
It is as if the researches said:

You can account for the staggering complexity of life with one simple explanation!  You say, “Mr. Researcher, how can I account for the staggering complexity of life with one simple explanation?” First, start with the complexity.  Now you say, “Mr. Researcher, what do I say to the academic community when they come to my door and say ‘You never actually accounted for the origin of the staggering complexity of life.’?”  Three simple words.  Three simple words in the English language: “I assumed it!”

_______________________

*Like any reasonable person, my favorite is “Cruel Shoes.”

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Far from disproving that meditators can change their metabolism, science is proving it

An interesting outcome of the scientific method is when it verifies something like this:

In a startling development, the brain wave tracings indicated that instead of being in a slow calm alpha state, which had been observed in meditators in the West, this monk showed marked asymmetry in alpha and beta wave activity between hemispheres. That’s to say, one part of his brain was in calm meditation while the other hemisphere showed a more active beta state, a state of high mental stimulation. What’s more, measurements of his oxygen consumption were cause for concern. After ruling out air leaks in the system or defective equipment, attention turned to the monk himself. It soon became apparent that this monk was breathing at an extremely low rate, 6 to 7 breaths per minute. It was established that during his stabilization meditation, it was a decrease in metabolism of 64 percent from rest. Never before had such a decrease been documented. Decreases of metabolism during sleep have been seen from a range of 10 to 15%, during simple meditation 17%. 64% was truly remarkable.

“Tibetan monks CAN change their metabolism” at Mind Matters News

See also: Further reading: Yes, the placebo effect is real, not a trick. But the fact that the mind acts on the body troubles materialists. Such facts, they say, require revision.

and

Do we actually remember everything? Neuroscience evidence suggests that our real problem isn’t with remembering things but finding our memories when we need them. One of a pioneer neurosurgeon’s cases featured a patient who could, unaccountably, speak ancient Greek. The explanation was not occult but it was surely remarkable for what it shows about memory.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Far from disproving that mediators can change their metabolism, science is proving it

An interesting outcome of the scientific method is when it verifies something like this:

In a startling development, the brain wave tracings indicated that instead of being in a slow calm alpha state, which had been observed in meditators in the West, this monk showed marked asymmetry in alpha and beta wave activity between hemispheres. That’s to say, one part of his brain was in calm meditation while the other hemisphere showed a more active beta state, a state of high mental stimulation. What’s more, measurements of his oxygen consumption were cause for concern. After ruling out air leaks in the system or defective equipment, attention turned to the monk himself. It soon became apparent that this monk was breathing at an extremely low rate, 6 to 7 breaths per minute. It was established that during his stabilization meditation, it was a decrease in metabolism of 64 percent from rest. Never before had such a decrease been documented. Decreases of metabolism during sleep have been seen from a range of 10 to 15%, during simple meditation 17%. 64% was truly remarkable.

“Tibetan monks CAN change their metabolism” at Mind Matters News

See also: Further reading: Yes, the placebo effect is real, not a trick. But the fact that the mind acts on the body troubles materialists. Such facts, they say, require revision.

and

Do we actually remember everything? Neuroscience evidence suggests that our real problem isn’t with remembering things but finding our memories when we need them. One of a pioneer neurosurgeon’s cases featured a patient who could, unaccountably, speak ancient Greek. The explanation was not occult but it was surely remarkable for what it shows about memory.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Copyright © 2019 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana