A prediction of front-loading is genes required for multicellularity being discovered in unicellular organisms, and I have previously suggested looking at amoebae, one of the oldest eukaryotes. Over at Uncommon Descent, DaveScot mentions that the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum has had its genome sequenced. And that is good news for front-loading fans.
We here at TT often make light of the outlandish 'emo' [emotive] gloom and doom prophesies of the many erstwhile spokespersons of big-s Science in their attempts to sell failed or highly debatable theories to the public for ideological or political reasons. We focus primarily on the stalwart defenders of Neodarwinian Orthodoxy, but the tendency for groups of like-minded scientists to propagandize in favor of their pet theories and projects as if there were no alternatives - or simple facts - to get in the way, crosses all the disciplinary borders.
This blog is intended to highlight how this propagandizing - a.k.a. "spin" - works in other areas of science, engineering and government, on an issue I am familiar with. It's a bit of a departure from the usual biological focus, but the information herein may serve to promote a little skepticism of "authority" in the perennial science wars that Telic Thoughts so often challenges.
As the new century's propaganda push to re-invest in "clean, safe, too-cheap-to-meter" nuclear energy kicks into high gear, a new PR effort to address issues related to the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island has also taken flight. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology held a 2-day seminar on January 22-23 entitled Three Mile Island - failure of science or spin?
Richard Fortey, President Of The Geological Society Of London, lashes out at Intelligent Design, rationalizing why it is that this concept has him getting so emotional:
So that is why biologists get so mad at the propagation of ID. It wastes time. It suppresses research rather than encouraging it. It's not really a theory, it's a story. It deflects the young from asking the important questions. It serves to kill curiosity rather than encourage it. Sometimes it is right to get angry in the face of unreason. Darwinists are readily labelled. There should be an equivalent term for the proponents of Intelligent Design. May I suggest IDiots?
ID…IDiots. IDiots? 
My, now that is clever. It’s a wonder that nobody else has thought of this before!
From here:
It's a mystery why the speed and complexity of evolution appear to increase with time. For example, the fossil record indicates that single-celled life first appeared about 3.5 billion years ago, and it then took about 2.5 billion more years for multi-cellular life to evolve. That leaves just a billion years or so for the evolution of the diverse menagerie of plants, mammals, insects, birds and other species that populate the earth.
New studies by Rice University scientists suggest a possible answer; the speed of evolution has increased over time because bacteria and viruses constantly exchange transposable chunks of DNA between species, thus making it possible for life forms to evolve faster than they would if they relied only on sexual selection or random genetic mutations.
No, horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has always been present with life from the beginning. The increased “speed and complexity of evolution appear to increase with time,” to the extent that it exists, is more likely due to the fact that HGT can exploit a more complex biotic substrate and evolution travels shorter distances.
"Life clearly evolved to store genetic information in a modular form, and to accept useful modules of genetic information from other species," Deem said.
Almost. Life was designed to store genetic information in a modular form, and to accept useful modules of genetic information from other species
Throughout the years, we have seen many people try to frighten others about the status of science here in the United States. They tend to ignore the good news and focus on the bad news and often do so in order to portray the ID movement as a sinister scapegoat. How often have you heard it said that because of ID, countries such as China and India will soon surpass the United States in science unless people take a stand?
Well, did anyone ever think to ask people in India or China how they feel about their own country’s future and its relationship with science?
I talked briefly about these little RNAs here and here. Now comes the animation that outlines the basic events associated such RNA.
I wrote a post a couple years ago on the topics in the title and I thought I'd repost it here in light of all the discussion on the topic.
In my last post, I talked about how the nature of science is to make abstractions. That is, when scientists try to make general theories about something they strip the phenomenon of all its "unnecessary" qualities and properties and only look at the relevant ones. For example, if I want to come up with a general theory of projectile motion, I don't have much need for information about what my projectile is made of or how much it costs or what color it is. Very often, I won't even care what shape my projectile is (I'll just assume it to be a point-mass). All I'll be concerned about is the initial velocity of the projectile, it's mass, the force of gravity at my experiment location, its initial angle of motion, and the height it falls. In all likelihood, I'll make a further abstraction of the motion into vertical and horizontal components of motion and look at those separately. And I haven't even begun to mention things like the legal properties of the projectile (maybe it's a hollow-point bullet and not legal in some places) or the biological properties of the projectile (maybe it's a human cannonball).
Neutrophils are the most common type of white blood cell in your body. They are also the first to show up at a site of infection. Watch the video and you'll see why.
I encourage you to watch the video below. While it is 15 minutes long, it is worth watching, as you'll see how the educational elites are teaching multiplication and division to school children.
It is well known that eukaryotic cells are more complex than prokaryotic cells. For example, while the typical eukaryotic cell is 10-100 micrometers in diameter, contains numerous membranous organelles, has a cytoskeleton, and reproduces through mitosis, the typical bacterial cell is only 0.2-2.0 micrometers in diameter, lacking organelles and cytoskeleton, while reproducing through binary fission.
Yet the theme of enhanced complexity repeats itself at increasingly smaller scales like a fractal image.
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| Nature, Design, and Science by Del Ratzsch |
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| The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues by Mike Gene |
