Because I’m too busy (and tired) to draw out the significant points, let me simply tease readers of Telic Thoughts with a title and a few words.

In 1961, the 26th Cold Spring Harbor Symposium was entitled Cellular Regulatory Mechanisms. In molecular biology, this was a historic meeting which included the work of Jacob and Monod. Bernard Davis, a microbiologist from Harvard, gave the opening address entitled, “The Teleonomic Significance of Biosynthetic Control Mechanisms.”

Feast your eyes on some of his remarks:

Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. John Krystal, corresponding author of this commentary and Editor of Biological Psychiatry, remarks: “We felt that it was important to respond publicly to the attacks that have been directed at scientists, their families, and their neighbors because to be silent in the face of the attacks is to condone them. We condemn these misguided attacks.

- Here

In his essay, The Question of Purpose, David Zeigler states his objective:

My “purpose” (we can create our own temporally and spatially limited purposes) in writing this piece is to point out one of the most important and real issues in the teaching of Darwinian evolution that so often goes unaddressed, or more amazingly—unrecognized, and this issue is really fairly obvious.

Yet before getting to the “most important and real issues,” it would help for Zeigler to explain his views of science:

Read the rest of this entry »

Writing in the journal, Evolution: Education and Outreach, David Zeigler has an article entitled, "The Question of Purpose." Zeigler’s argument is twofold: Darwinian science teaches us that there is no purpose or meaning outside of ourselves and teachers can improve evolution education by better stressing the non-teleological nature of evolution and reality. You can read this for yourself here (pdf file). I’m hoping to comment on several aspects, but I thought you’d like to check it out first and have an opportunity to correct me if I have wrongly mischaracterized it.

David Berlinski will conduct a tour of the United States in April to promote his newest book The Devil's Delusion. Berlinski is a talented writer, an imposing intellect and not reluctant to buck the tide of prevailing opinion.

Confident assertions by scientists that… they have demonstrated that God does not exist have nothing to do with science, and even less to do with God's existence.- David Berlinski

Attitudes about Intelligent Design are influenced by how we view science and God and whether our view of one affects our attitude toward the other. New Atheists have weighed in with their opinions. Another perspective from a bright analytical mind not committed to theism or Christianity is a refreshing turn of events.

Check it out. It's interesting to find that Miller does not consider himself a theistic evolutionist.

Here is something off the heavily trodden path. Is the accelerated expansion evidence of a forthcoming change of signature on the brane? From the paper:

We show that regular changes of signature on brane-worlds in AdS5 bulks may account for some types of the recently fashionable sudden singularities. Therefore, the possibility that the Universe seems to approach a future sudden singularity at an accelerated rate of expansion might simply be an indication that our braneworld is about to change from Lorentzian to Euclidean signature. Both the brane and the bulk remain fully regular everywhere. We present a model in which the weak and strong energy conditions hold on the brane, in contrast with the standard cosmologies leading to the analogous kinematical behaviour (that is, with a diverging Hubble factor).

Marc “Bars” Mars writes about the Universe's signature. How's that for a personal signature? You wouldn't happen to be an astrophysicist with a name like that would you? Will the time dimension become space-like and can anyone visualize concepts like this? Would physical evidence of what Mars is writing about take the form of a universe that appears to be expanding and if so what does this say about Hubble and the red shift? If nothing else it says this much to me. There is need for greater humility and less hostility in discussions about Nature. If fundamental ideas about the Universe can change so too can ideas about biology.

Sometimes plugs can be appreciated by more than plumbers. I found this to be the case with NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND. There are attention grabbing comments like this one:

The mind has played a role in physics since the earliest days of quantum physics. The Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 featured a debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein about whether the mind and consciousness are (Bohr) or are not (Einstein) part of physics. Einstein's position has dominated mainstream physics for decades, but the battle simmered on for the entire twentieth century.

Read the rest of this entry »

Check this story out…

DNA is Blueprint, Contractor and Construction Worker for New Structures

In the Northwestern study, gold nanoparticles take the place of atoms. The novel part of the work is that the researchers use DNA to drive the assembly of the crystal. Changing the DNA strand's sequence of As, Ts, Gs and Cs changes the blueprint, and thus the shape, of the crystalline structure. The two crystals reported in Nature, both made of gold, have different properties because the particles are arranged differently.

"We are now closer to the dream of learning, as nanoscientists, how to break everything down into fundamental building blocks, which for us are nanoparticles, and reassembling them into whatever structure we want that gives us the properties needed for certain applications," said Chad A. Mirkin, one of the paper's senior authors…

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

Read the rest of this entry »