Life Sciences
pharyngula | April 9, 2014There's a common tactic used by creationists, and I've encountered it over and over again. It's a form of the Gish Gallop: present the wicked evolutionist with a long list of assertions, questions, and non sequiturs, and if they answer with "I don't know" to any of them, declare victory. It's easy. We say "I don't know" a lot.
Jack Chick's Big Daddy tract is a version of the creationist list, and contains a fair amount of fantasy as well. You know what they believe will happen: they'll ask that one question that the scientist can't answer, and then they'll have an epiphany, a revelation, and…
milhayser | April 6, 2014Perovskite solar cells can not only emit light, they can also emit up to 70% of absorbed sunlight as lasers.
Critical signaling molecules can be used to convert stem cells to neural progenitor cells, increasing the yield of healthy motor neurons and decreasing the time required to grow them.
Mexican blind cavefish are so close to their sighted kin that they are considered the same species, but they use pressure waves (from opening and closing their mouths) to navigate in the dark.
Electrostatic assembly allows luminescent elements (like Europium) to be embedded in nanodiamonds; these glowing…
gregladen | March 27, 2014Salamanders can be a proxyindicator for climate change. Changes in salamanders have been linked to climate changes during ancient times, and in a very recent study, salamanders in the US Appalachians seem to have changed in relation to anthropogenic global warming. In fact, the changes observed in these Appalachian salamanders is quite large, very rapid, and thus, alarming. I’m going to describe this study in some detail, and as a bonus for sticking with me on this, I’ll throw in some entertaining Climate Science Denialism near the end. As an additional bonus prize, you’ll get a nice new…
pharyngula | March 24, 2014
Yes, it surely does. It reeks.
I completely missed this article -- no surprise, it seems everyone did -- titled "Fossils Evidences (Paleontology) Opposite to Darwin’s Theory," by Md. Abdul Ahad and Charles D. Michener, in the Journal of Biology and Life Science, and now you can't read it because the journal retracted it and deleted it.
The first sign that something might be off in this paper is the title. "Fossils Evidences (Paleontology) Opposite to Darwin’s Theory"? Seriously? No one even stopped to notice how ungrammatical it was?
And then there's the abstract.
Darwin‟s Theory is a…
pharyngula | March 13, 2014I was looking over the Discovery Institute's Evolution News and Views site, prior to forgetting about it. I mentioned that I am forced to revamp my email handling and was going to be blocking a lot of noise from my work address, and as I was reviewing what domains I needed to allow through, I noticed that boy-howdy, I get a lot of crappy spam from the Discovery Institute (all of which is now getting blocked). So I actually bothered to go through one of their links and see what they're babbling about now.
General impression: the Discovery Institute is really obsessed with Cosmos: A Spacetime…
pharyngula | February 3, 2014Larry Moran has been given a quiz to test our comprehension of Intelligent Design creationism. Unfortunately, it was composed by someone who doesn't understand ID creationism but merely wants everyone to regurgitate their propaganda, so it's a major mess, and you can also tell that the person writing it was smugly thinking they were laying some real traps to catch us out in our ignorance.
Larry has posted his answers. I've put mine below the fold (I sorta subtly disagree with him on #2). If you want to take a stab at it untainted by our answers, here's the original quiz, untainted by logic or…
gregladen | January 13, 2014UPDATE (March 27 2015): US gives Texan rhino hunter an import permit
A Texan who won an auction to shoot an endangered black rhino in Namibia has been given a US permit to import the trophy if he kills one.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service said hunting an old rhino bull helps to increase the population.
There was an outcry when Corey Knowlton won the auction last year, with animal rights activists decrying it. It's not yet clear when the hunt will happen.
Namibia is home to some 1,500 black rhino, a third of the world's total.
The US agency issuing the permit said that importing the carcass…
oracknows | January 3, 2014One of the more bizarre bits of cancer quackery that I've come across is that of an Italian doctor (who, like many cancer quacks, appears not to be a board-certified oncologist) named Tullio Simoncini, who claims that cancer is really a fungus and has even written a book about it, entitled, appropriately enough for this particular quackery, Cancer Is A Fungus. The first time I encountered Simoncini, about five years ago, I was floored by his arguments, not because of how bizarre they were (although that was part of it) because of their sheer stupidity. Seriously, Simoncini's reasoning—if "…
tsmith | January 1, 2014Guest post by Tim Fothergill, Ph.D.
In January of this year the British Chief Medical Officer urged her government to add threat posed by superbugs to the official list of "Apocalypses to Worry About" along with catastrophic terrorist attacks and massive flooding. With typical British understatement, its actual name is the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies but a very stark picture was painted of a post-antibiotic world in which routine operations, such as hip replacements, could prove fatal. In September, The Centers for Disease Control in the US issued a similar statement which…
jrosenhouse | December 2, 2013Over at Uncommon Descent, Vincent Torley serves up a long post about the problem of evil. He was responding to this post by John Loftus, but Torley's post can mostly be read independently of what Loftus wrote.
I devote a chapter of Among the Creationists to the problem of evil. I open the chapter like this:
Pride of place among theological problems must surely go to the problem of evil. That there is something incongruous in the picture of a just and loving God presiding over a world of extravagant cruelty and suffering is obvious to even the most unreflective person.
Indeed. I've…
gregladen | December 1, 2013Somebody tipped over a bag full of a white powdery substance. Most of what fell out splayed across the dirty wooden table, but about a cup poured onto the dirt floor of the open-air Baraza at our research site in a remote part of the Congo’s Ituri Forest. Embarrassed about tipping onto the ground more of this valuable substance than most people living within 50 kilometers would ever see in one day, the tipper started to push loose dirt onto the powder to cover it up. But the spill had been noticed by two children lounging nearby; in what seemed like a fraction of a second, the boys were face…
pharyngula | November 3, 2013I've had, off and on, a minor obsession with a particular number. That number is 210. Look for it in any review of evolutionary complexity; some number in the 200+ range will get trotted out as the estimated number of cell types in a chordate/vertebrate/mammal/human, and it will typically be touted as the peak number of cell types in any organism. We have the most cellular diversity! Yay for us! We are sooo complicated!
It's an aspect of the Deflated Ego problem, in which scientists exercise a little confirmation bias to find some metric that puts humans at the top of the complexity heap.…
pharyngula | November 2, 2013I prepared for the Carnival of Evolution late at night over the last several days, bracketing the Halloween holiday, and coupled them with my traditional custom of watching horror movies. It wasn't a good match. The evolutionary stories were far more frightening!
Terrifying complexity!
psynetresearch
Let us consider the mind-blasting madness of dealing with tens of thousands of genes interacting epistatically with one another.
The second problem is that while it may in theory be possible to assign fitnesses to individual alleles at individual loci, there are some 25,000 loci in humans,…
oracknows | October 23, 2013One of the things that I've noticed over the last (nearly) nine years blogging about pseudocience, quackery, and conspiracy theories is that a person who believes in one form of woo has a tendency to believe in other forms of woo. You've probably noticed it too. I've lost count of the examples that I've seen of antivaccinationists who are into other forms of quackery, of quacks who are 9/11 Truthers, of HIV/AIDS denialists who are anthropogenic global warming denialists, and nearly every combination of these and many other forms of pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and denialism. Several years…
oracknows | October 17, 2013Over the years, I've not infrequently noted that there is a serious disconnect between what most people would think of as "natural" and what is considered "natural" in the world of "complementary and alternative medicine," or, as I like to call it, CAMworld. I started thinking about this again after yesterday's post about Jessica Ainscough's decision to treat her rare sarcoma with the quackery that is the Gerson therapy and how her mother's decision to use the same quackery, instead of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, resulted in her untimely demise. Reading over Jessica Ainscough's blog…
pharyngula | October 4, 2013John Bohannon of Science magazine has developed a fake science paper generator. He wrote a little, simple program, pushes a button, and gets hundreds of phony papers, each unique with different authors and different molecules and different cancers, in a format that's painfully familiar to anyone who has read any cancer journals recently.
The goal was to create a credible but mundane scientific paper, one with such grave errors that a competent peer reviewer should easily identify it as flawed and unpublishable. Submitting identical papers to hundreds of journals would be asking for trouble.…
dr. dolittle | September 17, 2013 Image from www.123rf.com
A new study published in the American Journal of Physiology presents data suggesting that birds do not carry a specific anti-inflammatory protein critical for keeping inflammation under control in mammals, reptiles and amphibians.
The specific protein is tristetraprolin (TTP). It functions mainly by inhibiting key mediators of inflammation in the body, such as tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFa). In fact, mice that are missing this protein have chronic systemic inflammation from unchecked TNFa. Moreover, mice missing the protein specifically in myeloid cells develop…
dr. dolittle | September 3, 2013 Image of Indian Flying Fox from Wikipedia, Fritz Geller-Grimm
An ambititous project seeks to identify all unknown viruses in mammals to determine the relative risk of infection to humans and to develop strategies to prevent and treat infections before they become pandemics. The pioneering research team is led by Dr. Simon Anthony at Columbia University and Dr. Peter Daszak from EcoHealth Alliance.
The team started by looking for viral infections in the Indian flying fox (Pteropus giganteus), a species with pathogens known to transfer to humans (Nipah and Hendra viruses). Over five years,…
dr. dolittle | August 23, 2013 Image of velvet worm from: Oliveira et al / Zoologischer Anzeiger
A new species of velvet worm (Eoperipatus totoros) is the first to be described from Vietnam after its discovery in 2010. This 2.5 inch long worm is distinguished from other velvet worms by hairs with unique shapes that cover its body. These animals are difficult to find and study because they are usually hiding in the moist soil to prevent dehydration. However, during the rainy season, they exit the soil and can be spotted. What is neat about these worms is that they hunt by spraying a glue-like substance from two…
milhayser | August 14, 2013Life has been growing on Earth for about 4 billion years, and during that time there have been a handful of mass extinctions that have wiped out a large percentage of complex lifeforms. Asteroid impact, volcanic eruption, climate change, anoxia, and poison have dispatched untold numbers of once-successful species to total oblivion or a few lucky fossils. Species also die off regularly for much less spectacular reasons, and altogether about 98% of documented species no longer exist.
Cry me a river, you say, without all that death there would have been no gap for vertebrates, for mammals, for…