Free Republic

Science Intrudes Into Morality Dec 23, 2008 — The Pope recently declared that we need to save humanity from self-destructive behaviors, like homosexuality. Can science intrude on questions of human behavior and morals? New Scientist thought so; a blog entry today says the Pope “misuses science to attack homosexuality.”One would think that moral behavior would lie outside the field for a scientific news source, but online news editor Rowan Hooper went on, mocking the Pope’s claim that the church has a role in saving “human ecology” like scientists have a role in protecting tropical forests. Hooper called this “a bizarre...

Contact: Deborah S. Rogers dsrogers@stanford.edu 650-630-7760 Stanford University Human culture subject to natural selection, Stanford study shows The process of natural selection can act on human culture as well as on genes, a new study finds. Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes. Speeded or slowed rates of evolution typically indicate the action of natural selection in analyses of the human genome. This study of cultural evolution, which compares the rates of change for structural and decorative Polynesian canoe-design traits, is...

above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews — those of northern European heritage — resulted from natural selection in medieval Europe, where they were pressured into jobs as financiers, traders, managers and tax collectors. Those who were smarter succeeded, grew wealthy and had bigger families to pass on their genes, they suggested. That evolution also is linked to genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher in Jews. The new study was funded by the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Aging, the Unz Foundation, the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin.

In January 1955, Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College, published a paper called “Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life” in American Scientist, the journal of Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society. In it, Dr. Jacobson speculated on the chemical qualities of earth in Hadean time, billions of years ago when the planet was beginning to cool down to the point where, as Dr. Jacobson put it, “one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive.”... Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y....

Science Daily — In a molecular tour de force, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have provided an exquisitely detailed picture of natural selection as it occurs at the genetic level. Writing Oct. 11, 2007 in the journal Nature, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Sean B. Carroll and former UW-Madison graduate student Chris Todd Hittinger document how, over many generations, a single yeast gene divides in two and parses its responsibilities to be a more efficient denizen of its environment. The work illustrates, at the most basic level, the driving force of evolution."This is how new capabilities arise and new...

Atheist Scientists in Uproar over Movie Showing Intolerance of Evidence for Intelligent Design EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed Coming to Theatres in February 2008 LOS ANGELES, October 5, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) -  Atheist scientists who have become famous for attacking those who disagree with them are now loudly complaining about supposedly being mistreated in a film they haven't seen. Oxford zoologist, Richard Dawkins, has made a lot of money and fame calling people who believe in God "delusional." Yet he is now grumbling that the producers of EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed "tricked" him into doing an interview. EXPELLED exposes the intimidation, persecution...

24 Observations on the Intelligent Design versus Macro Evolution debate I kicked off quite a firestorm with my recent post on Marketing Darwin. The blogger Orac picked it up, shredded it to pieces, which led to dozens of comments at my blog and his. Smelling fresh blood, Professor PZ Meyers takes me to task, and more comments ensue. Basically, I get trashed really badly. Thank goodness I am secure in my old age! :) I find it all interesting. Many of the commenters raise some really good points, and I agree with some of them. Many though seem to deliberately...

RIO VISTA – Two whales lost in the Sacramento River have made progress toward their ocean home, but rescuers were concerned Monday about encounters they might have with large ships as they near San Francisco Bay. The mother humpback whale and her calf were spotted Monday morning near the Benicia-Martinez Bridge, about 45 miles from the Pacific, said Carol Singleton of the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. The pair had traveled about 24 miles in 24 hours, but their pace had slowed. They were first spotted May 13 and got as far as 90 miles inland to the Port of...

Cannes - A semi-documentary about a group of US men who had sex with horses has taken the title as the most shocking movie at the Cannes film festival. But while Zoo has drawn big, curious crowds at its screenings, the real unsettling quality about the movie is its approach: it depicts the men in a sympathetic light, one that tries to push the viewers to understanding their sexual perversion. The documentary - in which actors recreate non-explicit scenes under audio interviews with some of the men involved - centres on a true-life incident. In July 2005, a 45-year-old man...

The dynamics of evolution are fully in play within the environment of a tumor, just as they are in forests and meadows, oceans and streams. This is the view of researchers in an emerging cross-disciplinary field that brings the thinking of ecologists and evolutionary biologists to bear on cancer biology. Insights from their work may have profound implications for understanding why current cancer therapies often fail and how radically new therapies might be devised. A review by researchers at The Wistar Institute of current research in this new field, published online November 16, will appear in the December issue of...

(AP) SALINAS, Calif. The FBI searched two spinach packaging companies Wednesday for evidence in the nationwide E. coli outbreak that sickened 192 people. Agents from the FBI and the Food and Drug Administration used warrants to search the San Juan Bautista plant of Natural Selection Foods LLC and a Growers Express plant in Salinas to determine whether they followed food safety procedures. Federal health officials said early in their investigation that deliberate contamination was not suspected. "We are investigating allegations that certain spinach growers and distributors may not have taken all necessary or appropriate steps to ensure that their spinach...

Mastodons Driven to Extinction by Tuberculosis, Fossils Suggest Kimberly Johnson for National Geographic News October 3, 2006 Tuberculosis was rampant in North American mastodons during the late Ice Age and may have led to their extinction, researchers say. Mastodons lived in North America starting about 2 million years ago and thrived until 11,000 years ago—around the time humans arrived on the continent—when the last of the 7-ton (6.35-metric-ton) elephantlike creatures died off. Scientists Bruce Rothschild and Richard Laub pieced together clues to the animals' widespread die-off by studying unearthed mastodon foot bones. Rothschild first noticed a telltale tuberculosis lesion on...

Conservatives are outbirthing libs by a wide margin. How soon can you get knocked up? Let this be your rallying cry. Let it be your new hot-button topic, a raw naked condomless blog-ready wildfire underground grassroots crusade, your juiciest of incentive programs, your inspired call to hot naked impregnable sperm-a-riffic action. Because the statistics are ugly, getting uglier: Despite all divine hope and prayer to the contrary, it looks like baby-happy conservatives are outbreeding liberals by a margin of some 20 to 40 percent. It's a fact. It's a trend. It's an onslaught. It's a dreadful soul-curdling predicament and the...

Natural Selection Foods has offered to pay the out-of-pocket medical expenses of people who have been sickened in the nationwide E. coli outbreak, traced to spinach the company processed at a plant in San Juan Bautista. "We know it's the right thing to do," Chief Operating Officer Charles Sweat said at a news conference held next to Mission San Juan Bautista Thursday afternoon. At least 189 people, mostly outside California, have been sickened since August, said the Food and Drug Administration. One person has died. State and federal health officials had found E. coli in nine bags of Dole baby...

<p>He was killed in a freak accident in Cairns, police sources said. It is understood he was killed by a sting-ray barb that went through his chest.</p> <p>He was swimming off the Low Isles at Port Douglas filming an underwater documentary and that's when it occured.</p>

COLLEGE STATION — A Texas A&M University student was killed while trying to jump aboard a moving train, police said. Robert Walker Best, 23, was killed early Saturday when he slipped under the train on a rail line located a few blocks from the university campus. He was pronounced dead at the scene, officials said. Best, of San Antonio, would have been a fifth-year senior biology major when classes resumed Monday. Police said Best was with two male friends when the accident occurred — one a student at Blinn College and the other a University of Texas student. College Station...

EuroStemCell scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have demonstrated one of the body's most sophisticated ways of regulating the genetic material of stem cells. Their findings, published in Nature Cell Biology, show for the first time the mechanism that adult muscle stem cells use to protect their DNA from mutations. Understanding this has important implications for cancer research, the study of gene regulation, and ultimately growing stem cells of therapeutic potential in the laboratory. When a cell divides, its DNA is duplicated and each resulting daughter cell inherits one copy of the DNA. Over time, errors arising during the...

"Birth Control Is Selfish" ... The Message Society Doesn't Want To Hear This past weekend graduates of Saint Thomas University were treated to a surprising speech by 21-year-old graduating student Ben Kessler. Some graduates walked out, many jeered, and others spewed profanities in response to his speech. Just what did he speak of which caused such an outcry? The War in Iraq? Border control? NSA spying? None of the above. So, what exactly did Mr. Kessler do wrong? He touched society's third rail: contraception. Mr. Kessler had the audacity to call the use of birth control "an act of selfishness."...

Seat belt use is reaching record levels, so just who are the holdouts who fail to buckle up? Often they are young men who live in rural areas and drive pickups, the government says. About 48 million people do not regularly put on seat belts when they are on the road, a figure the government's highway safety agency hopes to lower with an annual public education campaign ahead of the summer driving season. The "Click It or Ticket" campaign involves checkpoints, patrols and advertisements to help enforce seat belt laws. It runs from May 22 through June 4. The latest...

Sometimes you have to wonder about the New York Times. It printed a long, breathtakingly written, scientific-sounding piece that just had one problem: It wasn’t news. Now, why would it do that? The article, titled “Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story,” was run prominently on the front page of the New York Times last week. The reporter excitedly announced that scientists had found “the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving.” That’s big news. What was the evidence? “Researchers have detected,” the story says, “some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped...