Because I'm not very interested in the hype I've encountered ever since the 1970s on what the global climate is doing – whether we're all gonna die of another ice age or turn into Venus (neither) – thought I'd bring up another subject more pertinent to a serious issue we're facing that actually IS caused by the environment and the load of filth we've dumped into it. Cancer. Which now strikes 1/3 of us in our lifetimes and is quickly increasing to the point where more than 1/2 the population is expected to develop cancer before they die – of it or some other cause.

My friend Steve Wing, research epidemiologist at UNC-Chapel Hill (who also has some not very nice things to say about corporate control over researches undertaken as well as what conclusions may be reached and published, a subject for a different post) sent me this nifty alert awhile back…

The Cancer Market Outlook to 2013

"The Cancer Market Outlook to 2013" is a new report published by Business Insights that provides comprehensive coverage of the major markets in the global cancer area, incorporating a detailed epidemiological analysis of the nine major indications and key factors impacting their prevalence. Current leading brands of treatment within each cancer indication are analysed and eight of the market's leading players are profiled. With coverage of over 90% of the total market for cancer products, this report profiles the most promising areas of potential growth. Forecasts for currently marketed and key pipeline products over the 2007-13 period are also provided.

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Scholar Claims Dead Sea Scrolls 'Authors' Never Existed

Elior's theory has landed like a bombshell in the cloistered world of biblical scholarship. James Charlesworth, director of the Dead Sea Scrolls project at Princeton Theological Seminary and an expert on Josephus, says it is not unusual that the word Essenes does not appear in the scrolls. "It's a foreign label," he tells TIME. "When they refer to themselves, it's as 'men of holiness' or 'sons of light.' " Charlesworth contends that at least eight scholars in antiquity refer to the Essenes. One proof of Essene authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he says, is the large number of inkpots found by archaeologists at Qumran.

But Elior claims says these ancient historians, namely Philo and Pliny the Elder, either borrowed from each other or retailed second-hand stories as fact. "Pliny the Elder describes the Essenes as 'choosing the company of date palms' beside the Dead Sea. We know Pliny was a great reader, but he probably never visited Israel," she says.

Happy St. Patty's Day!

This is a response to last arguments and a post to me on the An Amazing First Century thread, which is too long for me to follow using dial-up…

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In Bradford's thread Approaches Determine Outcomes discussion is predicated on the assertion that science must approach its subject matter with an atheistic a priori assumption. Such an assumption dictates that there can be no invisible guiding hands or purposeful (telic) processes involved that might suggest the existence of any power greater than the human minds involved in science itself.

In these debates it is abundantly clear that there is in fact a prejudicial exclusion of any and all evidence in any field of science that might be interpreted to align with a spiritual worldview. Yet oddly enough, there are certain fields of physics that regularly are interpreted to provide supporting evidence for more esoteric spiritual beliefs like Buddhism. More oddly, that interpretation of physics hasn't led to the ugly Culture War battles seen daily wherever the subject is biology and evolution.

This certainly appears to suggest that the scientific prejudice against spiritual interpretations is mostly concerned with monotheistic spiritual beliefs in general, Christian beliefs in particular. Why Sam Harris, one of the 'New Atheists' most visible spokespersons, was once a bodyguard for the Dalai Lama! They don't seem to have much of an issue with Buddhism.

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Mother of Six has Octuplets

I presume everyone here has heard about the birth of a litter of eight to a 33-year old woman in California who already has six children ranging in age from 7 to 2-year old twins. The babies – 6 boys and 2 girls – were delivered 9 weeks prematurely and weigh anywhere from 1 pound 8 ounces to 3 pounds 4 ounces, all but one are breathing on their own. All are receiving fluids, proteins and vitamins intravenously, and all are expected to survive.

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January 20, 2009

In the thread Sad Smoke and
Mirrors, there has been some discussion of Behe's use of the clotting function as IC. Nobody much likes to talk about immune system function, because it's like that crazy cousin nobody likes to bring up at the family reunion. Way out of line, despite being quite predictable enough to design vaccines and such in order to purposefully and quickly 'evolve' antibodies to specific disease causes.

I say 'evolve' with the usual haha caveat that "everybody knows" that individual life forms don't evolve. They just exist, develop, decline and die. Maybe reproduce along the way. Evolution doesn't happen unless reproduction happens, and then only generations down the line. Except, according to un-careful word usage, when it comes to the immune system.

Speaking of which, this report appeared at ScienceDaily today:

Evolution in Action: Our Antibodies Take 'Evolutionary Leaps' to fight Microbes

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[h/t to PZ]

Seems Ken Miller has a guest post on a Discover Magazine blog, entitled Smoke and Mirrors, Whales and Lampreys that pretends to re-live Kitzmiller and foretell exactly where those ever-evil IDists will be going in the future with their brilliant plot to enslave the world. Mwahahahaha!!!!

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John Tierney contemplates New Year's resolutions with a new research review from psychologists at the University of Miami spanning 8 decades in his New York Times article today,

For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It

Some choice excerpts:

His [Michael McCullough's] professional interest arose from a desire to understand why religion evolved and why it seems to help to many people. Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier.

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Saw a story yesterday from BBC (or maybe Telegraph) about a 'hole' in planet Earth's magnetosphere. Then today I found a compilation of recent stories (since the year 2000) about further interesting magnetic events in our close solar neighborhood -

Meanwhile, Some Chaos in the Neighborhood

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This is Version 2.0 of That Other Thread, a portion of the intro that I reproduce here…

As so often happens in the fast-moving discussions, Bradford's Dark Matter Can Enlighten Minds thread has become unwieldy for dial-up. Just as the subject veered from "the usual" Designed vs. Multiverse arguments (stale in the extreme as well as precisely equivalent sans POV) were enlivened by an offering of Oleg's citing Hawking and Hertog's new approach to cosmology – the Flexiverse.

An edited summary of Amanda Gefter's article in NewScientist about this new "top-down" approach to cosmology where the 'sum of histories' manages to get summed by intelligent observers at THIS end of time rather than built up moment-by-moment from THAT end of time was linked and cited. I managed to find a more complete (yet publicly available) version of the article
Here.

Now. I promise not to click directly into any loading tab, and hopefully this version will work better than the beta…

As so often happens in the fast-moving discussions, Bradford's Dark Matter Can Enlighten Minds thread has become unwieldy for dial-up. Just as the subject veered from "the usual" Designed vs. Multiverse arguments (stale in the extreme as well as precisely equivalent sans POV) were enlivened by an offering of Oleg's citing Hawking and Hertog's new approach to cosmology – the Flexiverse.

An edited summary of Amanda Gefter's article in NewScientist about this new "top-down" approach to cosmology where the 'sum of histories' manages to get summed by intelligent observers at THIS end of time rather than built up moment-by-moment from THAT end of time was linked and cited. I managed to find a more complete (yet publicly available) version of the article

Here.
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This is an open thread!

In Bradford's thread Superstitious Nonsense I found myself sidetracked from the actual topic by a couple of our critics who seemed to be playing dumb. In the attempt to outline the evidence for immaterial process in what we call the "Mind" – as opposed to the physical machine we call the brain – I introduced the concept of noncomputability which factors large in the Hameroff-Penrose Orch-OR theory of consciousness.

Raevmo asked repeatedly for an example of this noncomputability, which I realize would take us even farther afield (deep subject). With that thread now over 100 comments, not something I would long be able to follow with my clunky dial-up. So this thread will take that topic out of Bradford's thread so that it can be examined further.

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Proteins With 'Cruise Control' Act Like Adaptive Machines

"The discovery answers an age-old question that has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin: How can organisms be so exquisitely complex, if evolution is completely random, operating like a 'blind watchmaker'?" said Chakrabarti, an associate research scholar in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton. "Our new theory extends Darwin's model, demonstrating how organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution to create order out of randomness."

The paper presents the first quantitative experimental evidence that evolutionary control strategies in the organisms themselves work to maximize their fitness to the environment they inhabit. Chakrabarti calls this an application of "Control Theory," which is basically an appeal to engineering and… design. He of course denies that the findings support the notion of ID, but ID encompasses the notion that design can be entirely 'natural' if one allows for the actual participation of organisms in their own design and evolution. Something biologists have been notoriously reluctant to do for the last 150 years. Looks like now they're going to have to go ahead and admit what the evidence demonstrates to be true.

It's about time.