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December 21, 2018

Millipedes found in 100 mya amber comprise 13 of 16 known groups

[image error]
A millipede fossilized in Cretaceous amber/Thomas Wesener (CC-BY 4.0)

Over 450 millipedes, fossilized in 100-million-year-old Burmese amber, were recently discovered by a research team. Using micro-CT technology, the scientists identified 13 out of the 16 main groups of modern millipedes amongst them. For half of these groups, the findings also represent the oldest known fossils.

…

According to the scientists, most of the Cretaceous millipedes found in the amber do not differ significantly from the species found in Southeast Asia nowadays, which is an indication of the old age of the extant millipede lineages.

On the other hand, the diversity of the different orders seems to have changed drastically. For example, during the Age of the Dinosaurs, the group Colobognatha — millipedes characterised by their unusual elongated heads which have evolved to suck in liquid food — used to be very common. In contrast, with over 12,000 millipede species living today, there are only 500 colobognaths.

Another curious finding was the discovery of freshly hatched, eight-legged juveniles, which indicated that the animals lived and reproduced in the resin-producing trees.

“Even before the arachnids and insects, and far ahead of the first vertebrates, the leaf litter-eating millipedes were the first animals to leave their mark on land more than 400-million-years ago,” explain the scientists. “These early millipedes differed quite strongly from the ones living today — they would often be much larger and many had very large eyes.”

The larger species in the genus Arthropleura, for example, would grow up to 2 m (6.5 ft) long and 50-80 cm (2-3 ft) wide — the largest arthropods to have ever crawled on Earth. Why these giants became extinct and those other orders survived remains unknown, partly because only a handful of usually badly preserved fossils from the whole Mesozoic era (252-66-million years ago) has been retrieved. Similarly, although it had long been suspected that the 16 modern millipede orders must be very old, a fossil record to support this assumption was missing. Paper. (open access) – Thomas Wesener, Leif Moritz. Checklist of the Myriapoda in Cretaceous Burmese amber and a correction of the Myriapoda identified by Zhang (2017). Check List, 2018; 14 (6): 1131 DOI: 10.15560/14.6.1131 More.

We can guess one reason the two-metre millipede might not have survived: There were getting to be lots of large animals around and a two-metre millipede might have a hard time finding rocks to hide under.

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See also: Researchers: Flowers bloomed in early Jurassic, 50 million years earlier than thought “Researchers were not certain where and how flowers came into existence because it seems that many flowers just popped up in the Cretaceous from nowhere,” explains lead author Qiang Fu” It now looks as though they just popped into the Jurassic from nowhere.

Feathers originated 70 million years earlier than thought It certainly is “amazing,” as Professor Benton says, that a complex array of features appeared 250 million years ago, rather abruptly, just as life was recovering from the Permian extinction. Would anyone have predicted that? Talk about “fossil rabbits in the Cambrian.”

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Published on December 21, 2018 09:58

Researchers: Ediacaran to Cambrian transition took “less than 410,000 years”

Uranium-lead dating shows that the Cambrian explosion is younger than previously thought

Ediacara life form Pteridinium simplex/Senckenberg, Linnemann

It’s amazing how clear a picture of the history of life these days:

Using uranium-lead dating, Senckenberg scientists, in cooperation with an international team, were able to date the onset of the “Cambrian explosion” to precisely 538.8 million years ago. During the “Cambrian explosion,” all currently known “blueprints” in the animal kingdom appeared within a few million years, while at the same time the so-called “Ediacara biota” – a group of unique, specialized life forms – became extinct. The study was recently published in the scientific journal Terra Nova.

The ancestors of today’s snails, insects, worms, bivalves, crustaceans, sea stars, vertebrates, and ultimately even humans – they all began with the “Cambrian explosion,” which served as the starting point of modern life on earth.

…

Moreover, the scientists’ data series reveal that the development of the fauna took place within a very short period. The transition from the “Ediacara biota” – multi-celled but very simply organisms – to the diverse Cambrian life forms occurred over less than 410,000 years. “From a geological point of view, this represents a veritable sprint,” according to the research team. Based on the current study, this rapid faunal change may be best explained as a kind of “biological arms race”: New fundamental traits accelerated the subsequent evolution and fueled the next “adaptive breakthrough.” “For example, if an organisms became increasingly mobile and fed on prey, previously even less mobile animals had to come up with new ways to protect themselves – which may have led to the rapid development of shells or skeletons. One achievement thus engendered the next – and, by necessity, within a shortened period of time,” says Linnemann in summary.
“Uranium-lead dating shows that the Cambrian explosion is younger than previously thought” at Phys.org

Even if these researchers are a teensy bit optimistic about their pinpoint accuracy, the pattern is clear: The history of life is becoming a field markedly less favorable to hand-waving. And note, in 410,000 years, the transition from the multicellular but simple Ediacara

nlife forms to the diverse Cambrian life forms is supposed to have taken place purely by natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism). Aw, come on.

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See also: Bringing the Cambrian mysteries to life

and

Gunter Bechly: Dickinsonia is NOT likely an animal

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Published on December 21, 2018 05:36

Is salad murder?

A Darwinian biologist wrestles with the significance of plant intelligence:

But despite his reservations about interpreting plants as intelligent beings with dignity, Kutschera thinks that “plants should be considered, with respect to humans, as valuable and equal organisms – current end-points of organismic evolution,”, which started some 3.8 billion years ago. They should be protected and not destroyed, because they are our “evolved cousins”, and, moreover, photosynthetic organisms.”

Indeed, he holds to a Darwinian explanation of plant intelligence and of the living world generally and sees the main danger of plant rights as arising from “an invasion of uncritical thinking, in tandem with the emergence of pseudoscientific claims, similar to those made by creationists, adherents of homeopathy, etc.” It takes considerable mental gymnastics to link creationism, in which human uniqueness is a key assumption, with plants rights, which seems to be an offshoot of radical animal rights, which denounces the idea of human uniqueness.

If we think plants are “equal organisms” with respect to humans, it’s not clear whether salad is or isn’t murder. Or whether murder is even a serious ethical problem. One may have the right precepts but defending them is awkward. More at Mind Matters

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

and

That plant is not a cyborg

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Published on December 21, 2018 05:35

10. Is AI really becoming “human-like”?

AI help, not hype: Here’s #10 of Mind Matters’s Top Ten AI hypes, flops, and spins of 2018

A headline from the UK Telegraph reads “DeepMind’s AlphaZero now showing human-like intuition in historical ‘turning point’ for AI”. Subsequent text reads,

Washington, July 7 (UPI) Deep Mind revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.

Let me quickly confess. I just lied to you. The subsequent text is actually the words from a July 8, 1958, article from The New York Times titled NEW NAVY DEVICE LEARNS BY DOING. Replace “Deep Mind” by “The Navy” in the text you get the original … More.

The world has changed. You’ve changed. This trick (the machine that thinks like a man) goes back to the ancient world and never dies out.

#9 to follow soon.

See also: Deep learning won’t solve AI AlphaGo pioneer: We need “another dozen or half-a-dozen breakthroughs”

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Published on December 21, 2018 05:34

December 20, 2018

Update 2: Springer has forwarded Jerry Coyne’s concern re creationist paper

to the editors of the journal:

Please be informed that I have forwarded this concern to our Journal Contact. Rest assured that I will contact you once we receive a response from them.

If you have questions, please let me know. Jerry Coyne, “Springer writes me again about the creationist paper they published; perhaps the firm’s response in the works” at Why Evolution Is True

Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, promises to “ rest assured—for the time being.”

Our scout will doubtless keep us abreast of developments. He also sends the following, which he encountered at the same time:

I never thought that I’d be on the same side as biologist Ken Miller when it comes to issues of science and religion. But we are this time, in an article by Kimberly Leonard in The Washington Examiner (click on screenshot below). It’s about Right-wing religionists calling for Dr. Francis Collins to be fired as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—on the grounds that he favors the use of research employing fetal tissue. He also favored research using embryonic stem cells, which got him into hot water with believers some years ago.

The curious thing is that Collins, as you probably know, is an evangelical Christian, and wrote a book, The Language of God: A Scientists Presents Evidence for Belief, full of religious superstition and frankly risible statements about why the Path of Jesus was the right one, as well as allusions to frozen tripartite waterfalls that prompted Collins’s conversion (he was an atheist when younger)…

Now I, along with Ken MIller and others, are defending Collins, for on the matter of research using otherwise to-be-discarded material from aborted fetuses and frozen embryos, he’s right, and his religious critics are, well, totally irrational. Jerry Coyne, “In which Ken Miller and I defend Francis Collins against the religious Right” at Why Evolution Is True

See also: Update: Springer defends publication of creationist paper to Jerry Coyne He got a reply within 24 hours, one which he considers “lame and evasive.”

and

A Springer journal has published a creationist paper. And Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, is, needless to say, upset. It’s a good question, though, if we end universalism in science (and that’s all the rage), why creationism in an anthropology and ethnology journal doesn’t follow. Who is Jerry Coyne to say they can’t do that?

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Published on December 20, 2018 12:38

Proposed black hole information paradox solution: They become white holes

black hole/Alain r

According to a new paper, white holes, the theoretical opposite of black holes, may account for dark matter, and may even predate the universe. They may even, according to Carlo Rovelli, explain the direction of time:

A black hole is one prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Another is known as a white hole, which is like a black hole in reverse: Whereas nothing can escape from a black hole’s event horizon, nothing can enter a white hole’s event horizon.

…

In the 2014 study, Rovelli and his team suggested that, once a black hole evaporated to a degree where it could not shrink any further because space-time could not be squeezed into anything smaller, the dying black hole would then rebound to form a white hole.

…

These white holes would not emit any radiation, and because they are far smaller than a wavelength of light, they would be invisible. If a proton did happen to impact one of these white holes, the white hole “would simply bounce away,” Rovelli said. Charles Q. Choi, “‘White Holes’ May Be the Secret Ingredient in Mysterious Dark Matter” at Charles Q. Choi

If white holes predated the universe, Rovelli suggests, future research might show that they explain the direction of time. Here’s the paper (open access):

White Holes as Remnants: A Surprising Scenario for the End of a Black Hole

Eugenio Bianchi, Marios Christodoulou, Fabio D’Ambrosio, Hal M. Haggard, Carlo Rovelli

(Submitted on 12 Feb 2018 (v1), last revised 17 Mar 2018 (this version, v2))

Quantum tunneling of a black hole into a white hole provides a model for the full life cycle of a black hole. The white hole acts as a long-lived remnant, solving the black-hole information paradox. The remnant solution of the paradox has long been viewed with suspicion, mostly because remnants seemed to be such exotic objects. We point out that (i) established physics includes objects with precisely the required properties for remnants: white holes with small masses but large finite interiors; (ii) non-perturbative quantum-gravity indicates that a black hole tunnels precisely into such a white hole, at the end of its evaporation. We address the objections to the existence of white-hole remnants, discuss their stability, and show how the notions of entropy relevant in this context allow them to evade several no-go arguments. A black hole’s formation, evaporation, tunneling to a white hole, and final slow decay, form a unitary process that does not violate any known physics.

It’s an interesting premise for science fiction:

When black holes devour massive amounts of matter and energy, it is thought that everything which appears to vanish forever actually emerges from a white hole. Exactly where the victims of a black hole come out could be anywhere from another place in this universe to another universe entirely. Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli theorized something even stranger linking the two. Black holes result from collapsed stars, but when these astral corpses die, they may actually turn into white holes. Elizabeth Rayne, “Bye, Black Holes: White Holes Are Even Weirder” at SyFyWire

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See also: Black holes do not behave as string theorists say they should

and

And now, black holes can be ghosts

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Published on December 20, 2018 08:53

Fish turn into fluids, which enables embryo development

And, it turns out, they must:

Zebrafish aren’t just surrounded by liquid, but turn liquid – in part – during their development. As the zebrafish embryo develops from a ball of cells to a fully-formed fish, a region of the embryo switches its phase from viscous to liquid in a process known as fluidity transition. Such fluidity transition has long been speculated to exist in living matter, but is described for the first time to occur in a living organism in a study published today in Nature Cell Biology. The study was carried out by the group of Carl-Philipp Heisenberg at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, with first author and Postdoc Nicoletta Petridou, and together with the group of Guillaume Salbreux at The Francis Crick Institute and Edouard Hannezo, also at IST Austria…

Why and how does zebrafish tissue become liquid? In “normal” viscous tissue, the cells are in close contact with each other. The authors found that the fluidity transition happens because cells keep on dividing during development. During division, the cells become round and detach from their neighbors. The more the cells divide, the more connections are lost between them, until they eventually lose so many contacts that the tissue turns liquid. “This is a mechanical and not biochemical change”, explains Petridou, “The embryo is programmed to divide, it cannot escape it.”“When a fish becomes fluid” at Institute of Science and Technology Austria

Funny how this kind of thing happens and chaos does not usually ensue. “The embryo is programmed to divide, it cannot escape it.” Pure randomness, right?

Abstract: Tissue morphogenesis is driven by mechanical forces that elicit changes in cell size, shape and motion. The extent by which forces deform tissues critically depends on the rheological properties of the recipient tissue. Yet, whether and how dynamic changes in tissue rheology affect tissue morphogenesis and how they are regulated within the developing organism remain unclear. Here, we show that blastoderm spreading at the onset of zebrafish morphogenesis relies on a rapid, pronounced and spatially patterned tissue fluidization. Blastoderm fluidization is temporally controlled by mitotic cell rounding-dependent cell–cell contact disassembly during the last rounds of cell cleavages. Moreover, fluidization is spatially restricted to the central blastoderm by local activation of non-canonical Wnt signalling within the blastoderm margin, increasing cell cohesion and thereby counteracting the effect of mitotic rounding on contact disassembly. Overall, our results identify a fluidity transition mediated by loss of cell cohesion as a critical regulator of embryo morphogenesis. (paywall) More. – ‘Fluidization-mediated tissue spreading by mitotic cell rounding and non-canonical Wnt signalling’, Nicoletta I. Petridou, Silvia Grigolon, Guillaume Salbreux, Edouard Hannezo, and Carl-Philipp Heisenberg. DOI: 10.1038/s41556-018-0247-4

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See also: Remarkable vid of a mouse embryo developing

Breaking: A “junk DNA” jumping gene is critical for embryo cell development

and

Embryonic Development Reveals Staggering Complexity

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Published on December 20, 2018 07:43

Could “negative masses” revolutionize cosmology?

From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, more straight talk about what is and isn’t cooking in theoretical physics, in this case about a recent open access paper by J.S. Farnes in Astronomy and Astrophysics, A unifying theory of dark energy and dark matter: Negative masses and matter creation within a modified ΛCDM framework. She thinks that negative masses is “a nice idea” that “works really badly”:

The primary reason that we use dark matter and dark energy to explain cosmological observations is that they are simple. Occam’s razor vetoes any explanation you can come up with that is more complicated than that, and Farnes’ approach certainly is not a simple explanation. Furthermore, while it is okay to introduce negative gravitational masses, it’s highly problematic to introduce negative inertial masses because this means the vacuum becomes unstable. If you do this, you can produce particle pairs from a net energy of zero in infinitely large amounts. This fits badly with our observations…

In summary, the solution proposed by Farnes creates more problems than it solves.Sabine Hossenfelder, “No, negative masses have not revolutionized cosmology” at BackRe(Action)

See also: Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder shares her self-doubts about exposing nonsense in cosmology

and

Nature editor’s five best 2018 books include two of our favs (Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray was one.)

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Published on December 20, 2018 06:04

What is the “Platonic Realm”?

In an ongoing discussion with hazel and others in another thread, some agreement has been reached that conceptual elements of mathematics (and in a related relationship, geometry) are things we discover rather than invent, such as circles and their mathematical properties.

That discussion, IMO, could benefit by discussing what is meant by the term “Platonic Realm”. It seems to me that this issue turns on a very simple question; do we live in a universe that is matter-centric or consciousness-centric? What is the primary, driving force of the physical universe – mind or matter?

IMO, quantum experimentation over the past 150 or so years makes the case that consciousness/mind is at least one of the fundamental aspects of even material existence. When we peer down into the subatomic realm, we do not find indivisible bits of matter; we don’t even find motes of “energy” that have objective characteristics. What we find are potentials that seem to be directly connected to and affected by consciousness and observation.

It seems rather simple to me to understand this in terms of the Platonic Realm being, in fact, the substrate upon which the physical world is built, and that is the reason the physical world reveals logical principles and mathematical behaviors wherever we look. If our minds/consciousness exist independent of matter within and as part of that platonic substrate, we have access to all sorts of Platonic Realm information, some of which we may not even know how it is applicable to or manifests in our physical world experience yet.

I don’t know of any “matter-centric” perspectives that can model-explain these discoveries and relationships. Perhaps someone would like to try?

[Again – I have zero tolerance for mocking, insinuations, examining motivations, etc. in my threads. I don’t claim to be fair about my moderation practices, so complaints about it will be deleted. Tread lightly, be FRIENDLY, if you can’t respond without sniping then don’t, show respect. We are discussing a topic, not trying to find out what’s wrong with the participants. – WJM]

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Published on December 20, 2018 06:03

December 19, 2018

Researchers: Flowers bloomed in early Jurassic, 50 million years earlier than thought

Nanjinganthus fossil, showing ovary (bottom centre), sepals and petals (on the sides) and a tree-shaped top//Fu et al., 2018

From ScienceDaily:

Before now, angiosperms (flowering plants) were thought to have a history of no more than 130 million years. The discovery of the novel flower species, which the study authors named Nanjinganthus dendrostyla, throws widely accepted theories of plant evolution into question, by suggesting that they existed around 50 million years earlier. Nanjinganthus also has a variety of ‘unexpected’ characteristics according to almost all of these theories.

…

“Researchers were not certain where and how flowers came into existence because it seems that many flowers just popped up in the Cretaceous from nowhere,” explains lead author Qiang Fu, Associate Research Professor at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, China. “Studying fossil flowers, especially those from earlier geologic periods, is the only reliable way to get an answer to these questions.” Paper. (open access) – Qiang Fu, Jose Bienvenido Diez, Mike Pole, Manuel García Ávila, Zhong-Jian Liu, Hang Chu, Yemao Hou, Pengfei Yin, Guo-Qiang Zhang, Kaihe Du, Xin Wang. An unexpected noncarpellate epigynous flower from the Jurassic of China. eLife, 2018; 7 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.38827 More.

“Researchers were not certain where and how flowers came into existence because it seems that many flowers just popped up in the Cretaceous from nowhere,” explains lead author Qiang Fu” It now looks as though they just popped into the Jurassic from nowhere.

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See also: Feathers originated 70 million years earlier than thought It certainly is “amazing,” as Professor Benton says, that a complex array of features appeared 250 million years ago, rather abruptly, just as life was recovering from the Permian extinction. Would anyone have predicted that? Talk about “fossil rabbits in the Cambrian.”

and

Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen

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Published on December 19, 2018 15:51

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