Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 501

The amazing energy efficiency of cells

structure of an animal cell/royroydeb (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A strong case can be made that hecell, the most basic unit of life, is the most energy efficient thing on Earth. They store energy as ATP (adenosine triphosphate):

He compares the cell to human inventions and finds that it is indeed amazingly energy-efficient.

How much energy can ATP store? Biochemists calculate that for every 686 Calories provided by glucose, ATP can capture about 262 Calories, for an energy efficiency of 38%. According to the popular textbook Human Anatomy & Physiology by Marieb and Hoehn, cells are “far more efficient than any man-made machines, which capture only 10-30% of the energy available to them.”Alex Berezow, “The Cell: Most Energy Efficient Thing On Earth?” at American Council on Science and health

Before you go: In addition to DNA, our cells have an instruction language written in sugar Of course it all just tumbled into existence and “natural selection” somehow organized everything. As if.

Cells find optimal solutions. Not just good ones.

Researchers build “public library” to help understand photosynthesis

Wait. “The part of the plant responsible for photosynthesis is like a complex machine made up of many parts, … ” And machines just happen all by themselves, right? There is no information load to account for; it just evolved by natural selection acting on random mutation the way your Android did! Follow UD News at Twitter!

In Nature: Cells have “secret conversations” We say this a lot: That’s a lot of information to have simply come into being by natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism). It’s getting not only ridiculous but obviously ridiculous.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Researchers: Helpful gut microbes send messages to their hosts If the strategy is clearly identified, they should look for non-helpful microbes that have found a way to copy it (horizontal gene transfer?)

Cells and proteins use sugars to talk to one another Cells are like Neanderthal man. They get smarter every time we run into them. And just think, it all just tumbled into existence by natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism) too…

Researchers: First animal cell was not simple; it could “transdifferentiate” From the paper: “… these analyses offer no support for the homology of sponge choanocytes and choanoflagellates, nor for the view that the first multicellular animals were simple balls of cells with limited capacity to differentiate.”

“Interspecies communication” strategy between gut bacteria and mammalian hosts’ genes described

Researchers: Cells Have A Repair Crew That Fixes Local Leaks

Researchers: How The Immune System “Thinks”Follow UD News at Twitter!

Researcher: Mathematics Sheds Light On “Unfathomably Complex” Cellular Thinking

How do cells in the body know where they are supposed to be?

Researchers A Kill Cancer Code Is Embedded in Every Cell

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

In addition to DNA, our cells have an instruction language written in sugar

structure of an animal cell/royroydeb (CC BY-SA 4.0)

That tells them what they are supposed to be:

It turns out that every type of cell in our bodies has a unique sugar coating. And whenever anything interacts with a cell, it must recognise that sugar code and use the appropriate secret handshake. It happens when bacteria and viruses infect us, when a growing brain cell feels its way past its neighbours, and when our stem cells receive the marching orders that will define what type of tissue they will develop into.Hayley Bennett, “Move over, DNA. Life’s other code is more subtle and far more powerful” at New Scientist (paywall)

Of course it all just tumbled into existence and “natural selection” somehow organized all this. As if.

Before you go: Cells find optimal solutions. Not just good ones.

Researchers build “public library” to help understand photosynthesis

Wait. “The part of the plant responsible for photosynthesis is like a complex machine made up of many parts, … ” And machines just happen all by themselves, right? There is no information load to account for; it just evolved by natural selection acting on random mutation the way your Android did!

In Nature: Cells have “secret conversations” We say this a lot: That’s a lot of information to have simply come into being by natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism). It’s getting not only ridiculous but obviously ridiculous.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Researchers: Helpful gut microbes send messages to their hosts If the strategy is clearly identified, they should look for non-helpful microbes that have found a way to copy it (horizontal gene transfer?)

Cells and proteins use sugars to talk to one another Cells are like Neanderthal man. They get smarter every time we run into them. And just think, it all just tumbled into existence by natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism) too…

Researchers: First animal cell was not simple; it could “transdifferentiate” From the paper: “… these analyses offer no support for the homology of sponge choanocytes and choanoflagellates, nor for the view that the first multicellular animals were simple balls of cells with limited capacity to differentiate.”

“Interspecies communication” strategy between gut bacteria and mammalian hosts’ genes described

Researchers: Cells Have A Repair Crew That Fixes Local Leaks

Researchers: How The Immune System “Thinks”

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Researcher: Mathematics Sheds Light On “Unfathomably Complex” Cellular Thinking

How do cells in the body know where they are supposed to be?

Researchers A Kill Cancer Code Is Embedded in Every Cell

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 “liberal bias” deepen replication crisis in psychology?

What’s hot? What’s not?/Niklas Bildhauer, Wikimedia

Liberals outnumber conservatives in psychology 14 to 1. Studies claim that that does not produce a bias effect but then there’s this:

Here’s where the “no liberal bias” takeaway becomes slightly more complicated. With this technique, the researchers found that the more highly ideological a paper was, whether to the left or the right, the less likely it was to replicate – what they called an “ideological extremity effect”. For instance, a strongly liberal-rated study, which showed how subtle cues could make African-American professionals feel unwelcome, failed to replicate, as did the aforementioned, conservative-rated study on centerfold erotica. Overall, “more ideologically slanted research (regardless of liberal vs. conservative ideological slant) was between 34% (Study 1) and 6% (Study 2) less likely to replicate.”

“Taken together our results are a starting point for a richer conversation about the role and influence of politics in science,” the researchers concluded. “Our work suggests that politics may play a role in scientific replicability but not in the way many scholars have thought, as we did not find evidence of a liberal bias and instead found preliminary evidence of an ideological extremity effect.” It suggests that yes, there’s a link between ideology and replication-woes, but one that operates in a significantly more complicated way than some replication-crisis-theorists have posited.Jesse Singal, “Has the liberal bias in psychology contributed to the replication crisis?” at BPS Research Digest

Aw come on, it’s actually not all that complicated when you see it in action. One way you can know that liberal bias deepens the replication crisis is this: Consider the sheer number of ridiculous Sokal hoaxes that have played psychology journals. That would only be possible in an environment that is so overwhelmingly of one persuasion that few academics step back and say things like “What? ‘Misgendering’ dogs? This is ridiculous! Someone is trying to snooker us!” Because, you see, feelings within the group matter and someone who deeply cares might be offended. Better if we all look like fools together in the world’s eyes…

Things can only improve if the psychologists open a window but perhaps they would rather sink into discontented oblivion than open a window. It’s always easier to blame outsiders anyway.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: So many studies cannot be reproduced that it is a crisis in science

Pushback against abandoning “statistical significance” in science

and

Abandon statistical significance, learn to live with uncertainty, scientists demand

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

Plants turn out to have a “nervous system”

It’s constructed differently from an animal one.

Summary and Abstract:

Rapid, long-distance signaling in plants: A plant injured on one leaf by a nibbling insect can alert its other leaves to begin anticipatory defense responses. Working in the model plant Arabidopsis, Toyota et al. show that this systemic signal begins with the release of glutamate, which is perceived by glutamate receptor–like ion channels (see the Perspective by Muday and Brown-Harding). The ion channels then set off a cascade of changes in calcium ion concentration that propagate through the phloem vasculature and through intercellular channels called plasmodesmata. This glutamate-based long-distance signaling is rapid: Within minutes, an undamaged leaf can respond to the fate of a distant leaf.

Abstract
Animals require rapid, long-range molecular signaling networks to integrate sensing and response throughout their bodies. The amino acid glutamate acts as an excitatory neurotransmitter in the vertebrate central nervous system, facilitating long-range information exchange via activation of glutamate receptor channels. Similarly, plants sense local signals, such as herbivore attack, and transmit this information throughout the plant body to rapidly activate defense responses in undamaged parts. Here we show that glutamate is a wound signal in plants. Ion channels of the GLUTAMATE RECEPTOR–LIKE family act as sensors that convert this signal into an increase in intracellular calcium ion concentration that propagates to distant organs, where defense responses are then induced. Masatsugu Toyota, Dirk Spencer, Satoe Sawai-Toyota, Wang Jiaqi, Tong Zhang, Abraham J. Koo, Gregg A. Howe … , “Glutamate triggers long-distance, calcium-based plant defense signaling” at Science (paywall)

and

Summary:

The ability to initiate a rapid defense against biotic attacks and mechanical damage is critical for all organisms. Multicellular organisms have developed mechanisms to systemically communicate the occurrence of a wound to help them escape or defend themselves from predators. Because plants are stationary and cannot escape herbivory, they must respond with chemical defenses to deter herbivores and repair damaged tissue. On page 1112 of this issue, Toyota et al. (1) report long-distance calcium ion signaling in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana in response to caterpillar herbivory or mechanical wounding (see the image). They uncover long-distance calcium signals that require glutamate-like receptor (GLR) channels for signal propagation. These channels are activated by extracellular glutamate, a well-known mammalian neurotransmitter and a more recently uncovered developmental signal in plants (2). In mammals, glutamate receptors are central to fast excitatory neurotransmission, which is an intriguing parallel to their role as long-distance signals in wounding and defense in plants. Gloria K. Muday, Heather Brown-Harding, “Nervous system-like signaling in plant defense” at Science

How long ago did plants and animals diverge?

According to a piece in ScienceDaily (2006), “In 1998 scientists discovered that fungi split from animals about 1.538 billion years ago, whereas plants split from animals about 1.547 billion years ago..” If animals and plants developed these very detailed information-gathering systems independently (convergent evolution), it seems like the unrolling of a project rather than natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism). Darwinism doesn’t think ahead like that.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Can plants be as smart as animals? Seeking to thrive and grow, plants communicate extensively, without a mind or a brain

and

Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible?

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

Evolution of kneecaps a bit of a mystery

Though something like kneecaps can be traced back 400 million years, to the Devonian period in frogs.

He offers a Darwinian explanation that “individuals who just happen to have sesamoid bones at their knees” happened to run better and thus left more offspring.

“We know almost nothing about what the kneecap did when it first evolved, when both the tendons that held the bone and the bone itself were thinner and not as well developed,” paleontologist Brian Switek wrote in his recent book Skeleton Keys.Ross Pomeroy, “Four Fascinating Facts About Kneecaps.” at RealClearScience

More and more, that sort of explanation begins to sound like what we say when we don’t really have more specific information. Especially now that we are starting to get more specific information. That said, Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone sounds like an interesting read.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

See also: Cartilaginous Skeleton Not Necessarily More “Primitive”

and

Complex Skeletons From 550 Mya (“Earlier Than Realized”)

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

Researchers: Warm weather made cannibals of Neanderthals

Neanderthal/Photaro

A group of six butchered corpses from 120,000 years ago in what is now the south of France (and cannibalized corpses from other areas) are said to “coincide with climate change.” But what’s the connection?

During the warmer period when the Neanderthals lived, the area was devoid of large mammals, instead inhabited by rodents and tortoises and snakes that migrated up from the Mediterranean. …

Open grasslands gave way to temperate forests and the Neanderthals, accustomed to hunting large prey such as bison and mammoth, apparently struggled with this rapid change.

Analysis of tooth enamel from the Baume Moula-Guercy remains revealed stress lines typical of periods of stress, such as illness or malnutrition.Dyani Lewis, “Warm weather pushed Neanderthals into cannibalism” at Cosmos Magazine

The researchers see it as a desperate measure. They don’t (and, of course, shouldn’t) rule out ritual cannibalism, which could also be a response to stress (= if we eat this person, we will absorb his ability to spot big game). Slowly the picture comes in and we are still looking for that subhuman Darwin promised us.

Paper. (paywall)

See also: The Neanderthals are undergoing a renaissance Smarter every time we look at them!

and

Was Neanderthal man fully human? The role racism played in assessing the evidence

Follow UD News at Twitter!

An earlier story about Neanderthal cannibalism (a great view of the cave dwellings)

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

When Earth’s magnetic field nearly disappeared

Earth’s magnetic field

Just before the Cambrian explosion. Is it a possible sign of maturity — in the light of so much more information today — that a researcher does not rush to insist that the near disappearance must be the cause of the Cambrian explosion?

Shortly after this time, the Cambrian explosion occurred and complex animals emerged across the planet. “One can speculate — and there have been some speculations — that a weaker magnetic field may have some relationship to these evolutionary events,” Tarduno said. That is because a weaker field might allow more radiation to get through, which could cause DNA damage and higher mutation rates, which in turn, might have lead to more species evolving.

But this is mere speculation, Tarduno said. When Earth’s magnetic field weakens a bit during events such as magnetic reversals (where the north and south poles flip), for instance, there’s no evidence that species are affected, he added.Yasemin Saplakoglu, “Earth’s Magnetic Field Nearly Disappeared 565 Million Years Ago” at LiveScience

It certainly is mere speculation when we consider that, generally speaking, radiation is much more likely to produce damaging mutations than helpful ones. It would be interesting to know if some Ediacaran species disappeared at this point.

Hallucinogenia/ Matt Martyniuk
(CC BY-SA 3.0)

Just a few of the alternative plotlines for the causes of the Cambrian explosion: Researchers: Extreme fluctuations in oxygen levels, not gradual rise, sparked Cambrian explosion

Maverick theory: Cambrian animals remade the environment by generating oxygen

Did a low oxygen level delay complex life on Earth?

There was only a small oxygen jump

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Animals didn’t “arise” from oxygenation, they created it, researchers say

Theory on how animals evolved challenged: Some need almost no oxygen

New study: Oxygenic photosynthesis goes back three billion years

Enough O2 long before animals?

Life exploded after slow O2 rise?

So the Cambrian really WAS an explosion then?

and finally,

Researchers: Cambrian explosion was not an explosion after all (When in doubt, insist that nothing happened.)

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

Walter Bradley: Tell people about AI, not sci-fi

His struggle to bring reality to“sci-fi” origin of life research is Intro of the Walter Bradley Center’s inspiration for our work on AI:

The Bradley Center hopes to have a similar effect by promoting more general knowledge of fundamental issues around “thinking computers and questions around the real effects of technology on human well-being.

A friend sought to involve him in evolution issues in the mid-Seventies. He didn’t see how he could help; his specialty was materials science, where the subjects are interesting, “but they’re also dead.” He offered to evaluate research into the origin of life instead because he could better evaluate claims for the chemistry of non-living materials. There, he encountered a surprise: “It was very clear to me that they were absolutely like science fiction. They had so many claims and so little basis. And I was appalled that you had refereed journals that seemed to talk about these things as if they had real merit and real explanations.””Mind Matters”

And he resolved to do something about it.

See also: A philosopher muses on why machines are not creative: Creativity does not follow computational rules He worries about something quite different from the usual robots-are-coming concern, “It is entirely possible that we will come to treat artificially intelligent machines as so vastly superior to us that we will naturally attribute creativity to them. Should that happen, it will not be because machines have outstripped us. It will be because we will have denigrated ourselves.”

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

Science editor: Dark matter is real! The crisis is the words we use!

3-D impression of dark matter via Hubble

When we can’t deal with a situation, we sometimes change the words we use to describe it:

I know just said that the name is not important, but I’m going to take that back. The name is quite important, actually, in the sense that saying “dark matter” creates specific and misleading assumptions about what we are looking for. The word “dark” evokes black, meaning something that absorbs light, but that’s not right. What we are seeking is something that does not interact at all with light. Physicist Lisa Randall therefore prefers the term transparent matter.

Even that is still not right, though, because strictly speaking we are not certain that we are looking for matter at all. What we are really seeking is something invisible that generates an anomalous gravitational pull. I’m under no illusions that I am going to displace “dark matter” as the go-to term, but “hidden gravity” is a far superior description…

… The results keep coming: nothing, nothing, more nothing.Corey S. Powell, “Dark Matter is Real. “Dark Matter” is a Terrible Name for It” at Discover Magazine

What if the true state of things is something one is not supposed to discuss? That situation is very common and leads to similar conundrums.

Consider earlier notes on the situation: Discover: Even the best dark matter theories are crumbling

Researcher: The search for dark matter has become a “quagmire of confirmation bias” So many research areas in science today are hitting hard barriers that it is reasonable to think that we are missing something.

Physicists devise test to find out if dark matter really exists

Largest particle detector draws a blank on dark matter

What if dark matter just doesn’t stick to the rules?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

A proposed dark matter solution makes gravity an illusion

and

Proposed dark matter solution: “Gravity is not a fundamental governance of our universe, but a reaction to the makeup of a given environment.”

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

Gunter Bechly: Ediacaran fossil paper is “junk science”

Dickinsonia/Australian National University

Dickinsonia, he says, is not an animal. We had covered the researchers’ contention (here); essentially, they think that weird Dickinsonia might have had animal parts that did not survive the fossilization process. Bechly thinks otherwise, enumerating three detailed reasons and ending with

4) Finally, if Dickinsonia fossils were just casts of an endoskeleton, they would be even more “alien” than previously believed. We know of not a single group of fossil or living organisms with such an endoskeleton that has glide-symmetry and a serial growth pattern with addition of segments. This feature would contradict all of the many suggested affinities of Dickinsonia, and it has certainly never been suggested to be a ground plan character of animals by any evolutionary biologist ever.

In brief: This new study is a ridiculous piece of junk science that should never have been published in a serious journal. My previous conclusion concerning Dickinsonia and its Ediacaran relatives still stands: they are most likely not animals and they lack any animal features not because they were no preserved, but because they were not there. Gunter Bechly, ““Ice Cube” Study of Ediacaran Fossils Is Junk Science” at Evolution News and Science Today

On the other hand, when it comes to evolution, never bet against weirdness in principle.