Origins – Page 274

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In the Beginning, Hydrogen: Was It Miller Time?

April 22, 2005

A press release from University of Colorado says that the spark-discharge experiments of Stanley Miller in the 1950s (see 05/02/2003 entry) might be relevant again. Why? Researchers used new models to estimate the amount of hydrogen in the early earth’s atmosphere, and came up with numbers 100 times higher than before. If hydrogen did not […]

Intelligent Design

Whose Side Is Unenlightened?

April 12, 2005

Here’s an opportunity for readers to compare arguments on both sides of the debate about origins and the nature of science. Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief of Science, wrote an editorial last week that claims the sunrise of the intelligent design movement threatens “twilight for the Enlightenment.”1 He wrote that the “retrogression to the pre-Darwinian zoologist William […]

Origin of Life

Astrobiology: Much Ado About Nothing So Far

April 11, 2005

The mood at a NASA Astrobiology Institute conference is very upbeat, according to Leonard David at Space.com, reporting from the meetings in Boulder, Colorado. The participants have set their goals high: Consider it nothing short of the cosmic quest for all time: Understanding the origin, evolution, distribution, and fate of life on Earth and in […]

Cell Biology

Flagellum Described in High-Performance Lingo

April 4, 2005

The bacterial flagellum, a virtual icon of the intelligent design movement, has been studied by many researchers, notably Howard Berg of Harvard, an expert on chemotaxis (the attraction of bacteria to chemical stimuli). Berg was interviewed in Current Biology1 and talked like a race car mechanic when discussing this molecular machine, though he is not […]

Origin of Life

You Can Help Find Life on Mars

April 2, 2005

Astronomy Picture of the Day pulled a fast one for April Fool’s Day, humorously suggesting viewers might help scientists find water on Mars. (The Mars in the picture was the candy kind.) The joke was on them, because they got baloney all over their faces with this line: “Finding water on different regions on Mars […]

Education

ID in the News

March 30, 2005

PBS aired a segment on the anti-Darwinism controversy in the schools Monday (see PBS transcript). Ken Ham and Stephen Meyer presented arguments for criticizing Darwin, while Eugenie Scott and others defended exclusive evolutionary teaching. The Discovery Institute blog Evolution News analyzed the 14:32 minute segment, complaining that 90 minutes of Meyer’s interview received only 30 […]

Bible and Theology

Easter Essay

March 27, 2005

Accompanied by a picture of a cross and a sunset, captioned “The Sun and the Son,” a somber-looking Brian Walden wrote an essay in the BBC News expressing his reaction to Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees’ “chilling” comment that “It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; […]

Education

NAS President Calls on Scientists to Defend Darwinism

March 24, 2005

The man who described a cell as “a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines” (see 02/10/2003 entry) now wants his fellow scientists to oppose efforts to attribute this factory to design. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of […]

Early Man

How to Get Something from Nothing: Genetic Code, Syntax Explained?

March 23, 2005

Two articles in recent science literature attempt to show that complex entities, like the genetic code and the syntax of human language, are no big deal. They can emerge from precursors by chance. In PNAS recently,1 veteran researcher Harold J. Morowitz (George Mason U) and two colleagues proposed a new theory for the […]

Education

Agnosticism Loses: Arkansas Science Must Be Atheistic

March 18, 2005

Updated 05/08/2005: “What I’m trying to do here is not to deal directly with the existence or non-existence of God, but restore to science the agnostic viewpoint that there could be or could not be rather than the dogmatism that actually currently exists… that absolutely precludes the existence of God.” These were the words of […]

Cosmology

Baloney Detecting Exercise for Students

March 17, 2005

Jeff Barbour’s brief history of everything was published on Universe Today. His essay, entitled “Where does intelligent life come from?” paints a short but sweeping panorama from the Big Bang to humans. Its style is somewhat like watered-down Carl Sagan or gilded Neil deGrasse Tyson (see 09/29/2004 entry). Here’s a sample about the origin of […]

Origin of Life

Mars Makeover Underway

March 16, 2005

Amazing claims about Mars are coming in almost too fast to fathom, reports Space.Com, especially from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. These include evidence for recently active volcanos, frozen ice beds, methane and vestiges of glaciers and waterfalls. Activity is “only yesterday” in the standard geological timescale. One said, “it could start up […]

Darwin and Evolution

Will Darwinian Law Protect the Unfit?

March 15, 2005

Eggheads at Vanderbilt import evolutionary ideas into legal policies that could negatively affect individual rights in devastating ways.

Cell Biology

The Future of Biology: Reverse Engineering

March 14, 2005

Just as an engineer can model the feedback controls required in an autopilot system for an aircraft, the biologist can construct models of cellular networks to try to understand how they work. “The hallmark of a good feedback control design is a resulting closed loop system that is stable and robust to modeling errors and […]

Cell Biology

Bacterial Engineering On Par With Higher Life

March 11, 2005

Bacteria aren’t the simple life-forms microbiologists used to envision, writes Zemer Gitai in Cell.1 Recent advances have demonstrated that bacterial cells have an exquisitely organized and dynamic subcellular architecture. Like their eukaryotic counterparts, bacteria employ a full complement of cytoskeletal proteins, localize proteins and DNA to specific subcellular addresses at specific times, and use intercellular […]

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