Confessions of a Conservative Atheist
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Scientists discover a new cell that lives like a virus and a new rule of life that can best be seen as the opposite of a regular rule, introducing chaos into the operation of a cell at a fundamental level. Scientists like tidy groupings, where you are either in or you’re out. At least since… Continue reading Evolution, two recent discoveries, and how there remain more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy
Almost everyone knows that an octopus is much smarter than we would expect for a boneless creature that lives in the ocean, but next to no one expected they would achieve their intelligence using some of the same genes and chemical processes we do. Octopi and their cephalopod cousins have long been regarded as unusually… Continue reading Our brains might have more in common with an octopus than we’d like to believe, suggesting that famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ new paradigm is correct
Whether you have heard of Caenorhabditis elegans, your own body and mind work much the same way. Essentially, your brain is C elegans’ times 331,125,828 or so, having neurons that look both inward and outward, reflecting even upon themselves over and over and over again. I am one of those neurons. I am a neuron… Continue reading I am a neuron in the human brain, almost the same as that found in a lowly roundworm
Since the 1960s, scientists have focused on a gene’s ability to encode proteins, resulting in a causal chain of gene expression from the initial coding in a strand of DNA, to the extraction of the code into RNA, to the formation of the protein and it’s ultimate expression in an organism. This view now appears… Continue reading A better late than never paradigm shift in molecular biology, long predicted by Richard Dawkins, happening right before our eyes
We, indeed all life on Earth, are as ancient as we are new, as grandly complex as we are simple. Indeed, it is fair to say that complex life wouldn’t exist at all without this contradiction. The mammalian ear is significantly more complex than our bird and lizard cousins in the vertebrate family. Rather than… Continue reading Evolution: Three new studies highlight the marvelous contradictions between preserved forms and new innovations that support complex life on Earth
We’re just starting to understand how evolution takes advantage of much more than mutations in our DNA. Everything evolves, from the biochemical pathways to the cellular structures that support them. Further, some of these structures are incredibly ancient, shared by all life, and still working today. The human body is constructed from four basic building… Continue reading Scientists reconstruct a 3.3 billion year old protein and discover an all new biochemical pathway critical to life and hiding in plain sight
Meet JCVI-syn3A, the world’s first self-reproducing synthetic organism. This tiny little microbe was designed by trial and error in a lab and is capable of both maintaining its own internal structure and creating copies of itself, just like a real cell. The implications for medicine and our understanding of ourselves are, needless to say, enormous.… Continue reading Designing self-replicating cells one gene at a time and solving the mystery of the origins of life
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 