Beliefnet has posted Part II of the Sam Harris/Andrew Sullivan debate. In this one Sullivan bows out with a single response, while Harris predictably moves to assert his dominance without showing even the tiniest smidgeon of understanding about where Sullivan was coming from throughout.

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Behold the orange. Being perfectly round, it has no sharp edges with which to poke you in the eye if it happened to fall from the tree. Note how easily it fits into the palm of my hand. And it even comes with its own biodegradable wrapper! To open it, you"¦..hey wait, the thing doesn't have a tab! Where's the dagburnit tab?!

Ah, behold the thumbnail. Note how it so perfectly punctures the biodegradable wrapper and"¦.. Read the rest of this entry »

From here:

In a new study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Newmark and his colleagues at the U. of I. report that planarians share some important characteristics with mammals that may help scientists tease out the mechanisms by which germ cells are formed and maintained. Newmark's team made a few discoveries related to a gene, called nanos, which was previously known to play a critical role in germ cell development in several other model organisms.

Unlike fruit flies and nematodes, which show signs of germ cell initiation in the earliest stages of their embryonic development, planarians do not generally express nanos or produce germ cells until several days after hatching. This delayed initiation of germ cell growth is called inductive specification, and is common to mammals and a number of other animals.

Check it out:

Researchers from the University of Darmstadt in Germany and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry reported this week on a family of mites that have forsaken asexual reproduction and re-evolved to reproduce sexually. Reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the revival of a complex trait such as sexual reproduction after it had been dormant for millions of years raises interesting questions about our understanding of evolutionary biology.

[...]

The discovery raises some intriguing questions. Why do some organisms continue to reproduce asexually, given the distinct evolutionary advantages - especially defenses against parasites, predators and competitors - from reproducing sexually and mixing genomes? And how can an organism jump-start a group of genes - such as those specific to sexual reproduction - after many millions of years of not being used?

Here is the study. I have not read it yet, but it sure looks interesting.

Larry Moran, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto, is comparing the New Atheists to the women's rights movement:

Do you realize that women used to march in the streets with placards demanding that they be allowed to vote? At the time the suffragettes were criticized for hurting the cause. Their radical stance was driving off the men who might have been sympathetic to women's right to vote if only those women had stayed in their proper place.

The comparison, of course, is ludicrous. The women's rights movement was about securing basic civil rights, such as the right to vote, to women. The New Atheists are all about taking away the rights of others, demanding that religious upbringing be made illegal and that ID-friendly students should be flunked.

Like taking a dump on a doorstep and then knocking to ask for toilet paper, the New Atheists' attempt to appropriate the respect of civil rights movements is the height of chutzpah.

Update: More at Mixing Memory.

Matthew Nisbet offers his perspective on the disconnect between the scientific community and huge elements of the public. He says:

The problem is, is that when you actually look at the opinion polls, you have what I describe as a two Americas of public perceptions on the issue. Seventy-five percent of college-educated Democrats accept that human activities are contributing to climate change. On the other hand, only roughly a quarter of college-educated Republicans accept that science.

And so, what's going on here? It's because several Democratic leaders, like Al Gore, and even some scientists are really adopting what I call the catastrophe frame or the Pandora's Box frame, really focusing in on specific climate impacts that might be scary or frightening, such as the possibility of more intense hurricanes.

Yes, the Pandora's Box frame is part of the problem, as the public has long grown accustomed to false alarms. But this does not explain the disconcordance among educated, mainstream Democrats and Republicans. As such, there is clearly another frame at play "“ the Al Gore frame.

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Since so many crtiics are deeply troubled by Intelligent Design and equate ID with Holocaust-denial, here's one possible solution to The ID Problem:

Laws that make denying or trivialising the Holocaust a criminal offence punishable by jail sentences will be introduced across the European Union, according to a proposal expecting to win backing from ministers Thursday.

The front-loading perspective on evolution continues to spread and deepen. From, The origin of the brain lies in a worm:

The rise of the central nervous system [CNS] in animal evolution has puzzled scientists for centuries. Vertebrates, insects and worms evolved from the same ancestor, but their CNSs are different and were thought to have evolved only after their lineages had split during evolution. Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] in Heidelberg now reveal that the vertebrate nervous system is probably much older than expected. The study, which is published in the current issue of Cell, suggests that the last common ancestor of vertebrates, insects and worms already had a centralised nervous system resembling that of vertebrates today.

and

"Our findings were overwhelming," says Alexandru Denes, who carried out the research in Arendt's lab. "The molecular anatomy of the developing CNS turned out to be virtually the same in vertebrates and Platynereis. Corresponding regions give rise to neuron types with similar molecular fingerprints and these neurons also go on to form the same neural structures in annelid worm and vertebrate."

What is so encouraging about this type of finding is that it is not unique. On the contrary, there seems to be a growing pattern of scientists finding that molecules and systems are "probably much older than expected." But what has been behind all these failed expectations? Perhaps the view of simple beginnings has played a role.

There are two basic schools of thought concerning abiogenesis. One is the conventional prebiotic soup speculation championed by people like Miller and Bada. The other is the pioneer metabolic speculation, which assumes a hot volcanic flow that interacts with transition metal catalysts and is championed by Wachtershauser. Both schools describe their speculations and hypotheses as theories. And both are arguing with each other in the pages of Science again (2-16-07).

In this case, Miller, Bada, and several others wrote a letter in reply to a published study by Wachtershauser and Huber, declaring that the study relied on various bogus assumptions. Wachtershauser and Huber replied by arguing that it depends on perspective. They also provide the Friday quote:

From the point of view of the prebiotic soup theory, our critics see our reaction products entering the primitive ocean to become additional ingredients of the prebiotic soup, wherein after some thousand or million years, and under all manner of diverse influences, the magic of self-organization is believed to have somehow generated an unspecified first form of life.