Internet forums are buzzing with speculation about a new picture from NASA's Spirit rover that people are calling "Mars Man" or "The Mars Creature" …

Let's start with the most distant view:

Zoom in a bit …

And then a little more …

So how are we to handle this buzz as epistemically responsible creatures? Well, Mike Gene gives us an answer in The Design Matrix.

We need higher epistemic resolution - in this case visual resolution - to infer anything but "rock shaped by atmosphere of Mars". The current image does not provide enough resolution to make a responsible design inference. It's that simple.

Now a question for Mike: When do we know that we have enough epistemic resolution? How deep must we go, how many levels of resolution must we traverse, before we are justified?

Another animal rights extremist unveils his peaceful and tolerant guide to activism. This time, it's Gary Yourofsky in the University of Southern Indiana newspaper, dreaming about inflicting violence on animal researchers, hunters and fur-clad women.

So, while my lifestyle and lectures are based on compassion, those who refuse to stop harming animals force me to support 'eye for an eye' and 'by any means necessary' philosophies. …

Institutionalized violence doesn't simply vanish with a peaceful protest, a dose of logic and whole lotta love. If people continually deny animals their inherent right to be free, radical tactics are necessary and justified. …

Deep down, I truly hope that oppression, torture and murder return to each uncaring human tenfold! I hope that fathers accidentally shoot their sons on hunting excursions, while carnivores suffer heart attacks that kill them slowly.

Every woman ensconced in fur should endure a rape so vicious that it scars them forever. While every man entrenched in fur should suffer an anal raping so horrific that they become disemboweled. Every rodeo cowboy and matador should be gored to death, while circus abusers are trampled by elephants and mauled by tigers. And, lastly, may irony shine its esoteric head in the form of animal researchers catching debilitating diseases and painfully withering away because research dollars that could have been used to treat them was wasted on the barbaric, unscientific practice vivisection.

HT: Secondhand Smoke

Okay, it's just a catchy title I borrowed, but the research looks interesting:

Genes have the ability to recognise similarities in each other from a distance, without any proteins or other biological molecules aiding the process, according to new research published this week in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B. This discovery could explain how similar genes find each other and group together in order to perform key processes involved in the evolution of species.
["¦]
The authors of the new study carried out a series of experiments in order to test the theory, first developed in 2001 by two members of this team, that long pieces of identical double-stranded DNA could identify each other merely as a result of complementary patterns of electrical charges which they both carry. They wanted to verify that this could indeed occur without physical contact between the two molecules, or the facilitating presence of proteins.

Previous studies have suggested that proteins are involved in the recognition process when it occurs between short strands of DNA which only have about 10 pairs of chemical bases. This new research shows that much longer strands of DNA with hundreds of pairs of chemical bases seem able to recognise each other as a whole without protein involvement. According to the theory, this recognition mechanism is stronger the longer the genes are.
The researchers observed the behaviour of fluorescently tagged DNA molecules in a pure solution. They found that DNA molecules with identical patterns of chemical bases were approximately twice as likely to gather together than DNA molecules with different sequences.

- Here

The roundworm C. elegans, a staple of laboratory research, may be key in unlocking one of the central biological mysteries: why we sleep. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine report in the January 11 advanced online edition of Nature that the round worm has a sleep-like state, joining most of the animal kingdom in displaying this physiology. This research has implications for explaining the evolution and purpose of sleep and sleep-like states in animals.
-Here

In the January 15th issue of G&D, a research team led by Dr. Richard Behringer at MD Anderson Cancer Center reports that they have successfully switched the mouse Prx1 gene regulatory element with the Prx1 gene regulatory region from a bat "“ and although these two species are separated by millions of years of evolution — the resulting transgenic mice displayed abnormally long forelimbs.

While forelimb length is just one of several key morphological changes that occurred during the evolution of the bat wing, this unprecedented finding demonstrates that evolution can be driven by changes in the patterns of gene expression, rather than solely by changes in the genes, themselves.

-Here

I suppose the book should have a warning label.

WARNING: Access to this book may be severely limited if you own a bunny.

Give it back!

Richard Dawkins, the well known atheist advocate and ID critic, has a well honed instinct for showmanship and a feel for the media. Let's take a look at what he's been doing.

A television program, which employs Richard Dawkins as an interviewer, requested an interview of creationist John Mackay. The interview choice is curious in that Mackay is a controversial figure; having been excommunicated from his church and not regarded by many Christian creationists as being representative of them. Nevertheless an interview took place despite only five hours prior notice. The interview was prerecorded and subject to editing prior to being televised.

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The bunny is hopping over to the Land of Edge once again. There are some thought provoking exchanges there which include comments of Stuart Hameroff arguing a concept mentioned at Telic Thoughts before. It's unusual to cite the last paragraph of a long page in an introduction but here is that paragraph from the Land Of Edge link.

There are interesting historical aspects to both sides of this physics/biology metaphor. Darwin provided a causal mechanism for seemingly teleological results. Similarly, quantum mechanics provides a causal mechanism for why the principle of least action works, a principle that smells teleological, the way it is formulated classically.- Piet

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If you gtz yer Matrix, send me a pic.

George Church is from the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He makes a couple of very interesting comments that show subtle, but very striking, parallels with The Design Matrix. Let me post a couple of examples :

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