A review of a new book on our ancient ancestor, and some thoughts on anthropology and politics.
Category Archives: General Science
A Stone-Age Phrase Book
I’m a little skeptical that this would actually work. But the researchers have the luxury that there is no chance that they would ever be able to test it.
[Update early afternoon]
Got Medieval makes short work of this.
All Hail Prehistoric Fish
…inventors of s3x. I suspect that it’s been somewhat refined since then, though.
Reconstructing the Ancestral Routes to Nucleobases
A few weeks ago, I linked to a very interesting paper on how life may have evolved. In response to some comments here, the abstract has been revised. Here is the note to me in email:
The abstract was revised to (hopefully) eliminate ambiguity and make it clearer that Sylvain’s proposed chemical steps are not just a partial solution, but rather, go from the first reaction all the way to all the biomolecules necessary to “usher in the RNA world.” The full-picture illustration was also added on the home page to help readers grasp the scope of what is being offered.
To me, one of the compelling aspects of this is that all the relevant biomolecules form in one location through ‘room temperature’ chemical steps that do not require anything exotic.
Topics relevant to the Origin of Life that are addressed in this paper:
- Why the relevant amino acids are all left-handed
- Why there are 20 standard amino acids, and why those 20
- Why the relevant amino acids are all “alpha-amino”
- Why the relevant sugars are right-handed
- The origin and preservation of homochirality
- The origin of nucleobases A, G, C, U
- The origin of RNA
- The origin of the lipids
To put this into perspective, each one of these topics is a major big deal. That this model shows them as possibly being parts of interrelated cascading chemical steps is stunning. It is interesting to note that these chemical steps take place, not in a “primordial soup,” but in a sheltered microenvironment of a mineral host structure. Since these proposed reactions do not work in water, the concept of life originating in a “primordial soup” may have mislead Origin of Life chemists for many decades.
We’ll see where it goes. If it can actually tackle abiogenesis, it is a big deal.
I Did Not Know That
I hadn’t realized that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, exactly two-hundred years ago today. Alan Boyle is covering the bicentennial Darwin week all week. And in honor of the event, Charles Johnson points out a story debunking one of the most common ignorant accusations against evolution — that there are no “transition” fossils.
Not Just A Theory
Here’s a useful web site for those people who claim that evolution is “only a theory,” an argument that’s so ignorant that it’s not even wrong.
Bailout Questions
Here are some good ones. I suspect that the socialists will have a response to this one, though:
President-elect Obama claims that spending approximately $800 billion will create 3.675 million new jobs. That comes to $217,000 per job. This doesn’t sound like a very good value, especially with the national average salary around $40,000. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just mail each of these workers a $40,000 check?
The response will be that the jobs will last more than a year. But of course, they’d have to last at least five years to be equivalent.
Syllogism Practice
I scored a hundred percent on this quiz. But remember, it’s a test of deductive, not inductive logic (e.g., ignore whether or not the premises are valid — focus on the validity of the syllogism itself).
[Via Paul Hsieh, who got the same score as I did. Or so he says…]
Thoughts On Extinction
…and scientific paradigm shifts, from A Jacksonian.
[Via Joe Katzman]
The Origin Of Life
An interesting new theory, for those well versed in organic chemistry.
[Update in the afternoon]
This seems related:
Not content with achieving one hallmark of life in the lab, Joyce and Lincoln sought to evolve their molecule by natural selection. They did this by mutating sequences of the RNA building blocks, so that 288 possible ribozymes could be built by mixing and matching different pairs of shorter RNAs.
What came out bore an eerie resemblance to Darwin’s theory of natural selection: a few sequences proved winners, most losers. The victors emerged because they could replicate fastest while surrounded by competition, Joyce says.
“I wouldn’t call these molecules alive,” he cautions. For one, the molecules can evolve only to replicate better. Reproduction may be the strongest – perhaps only – biological urge, yet even simple organisms go about this by more complex means than breakneck division. Bacteria and humans have both evolved the ability to digest lactose, or milk sugar, to ensure their survival, for instance.
Joyce says his team has endowed its molecule with another function, although he will not say what that might be before his findings are published.
More fundamentally, to mimic biology, a molecule must gain new functions on the fly, without laboratory tinkering. Joyce says he has no idea how to clear this hurdle with his team’s RNA molecule. “It doesn’t have open-ended capacity for Darwinian evolution.”
Not yet.