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Category: evolution – Page 3

From Darwin to Derrida: evolution as interpretation

One of the first commandments of my scientific education was ‘thou shalt not use teleological language.’ This was closely related to a second commandment ‘thou shalt not commit anthropomorphism’. It was permissible to compare a frog to a machine but not to a human being (unless one also compared the human being to a machine). Biology did not concern itself with questions of value, purpose, and meaning. These were the province of flakey disciplines such as the humanities, social science, or religion. Asking ‘why’ rather than ‘how’ was unscientific, perhaps even sinful. In my book Darwin to Derrida, I offer an extended defense of the use of teleological reasoning in biology. The physical universe is a world without values. But meaning and purpose are the defining features of living things, they do things for good reasons because there are things in the world that they value. Biologists should not be ashamed of the difference.

Darwinian paradigm min

SUGGESTED READING The fight for the future of biology By Denis Noble

Teleology comes from the Greek telos, something at the end, which was translated into Latin as causa finalis, and from thence into English as final cause. The final cause was that ‘for the sake of which’ an action was performed or ‘for the sake of which’ a thing existed. Final causes have been rejected as unscientific because a cause cannot come after its effect. But there is no backward causation when we act with intention. We form a plan which we attempt to implement. The intention comes before the fruition. There is no guarantee we will succeed. The outcome is not predestined. The same applies to the intentional actions of human beings. One of my favorite passages from Augustine is this:

How Mercury formed its graphite crust and core

As the BepiColombo mission prepares to enter the final phase of its journey to Mercury, a series of studies conducted by researchers at the University of Liège and KU Leuven sheds new light on the early stages of the evolution of the planet closest to the sun. Using experimental petrology, the researchers are reconstructing in the laboratory the formation of Mercury’s core, the crystallization of its magma ocean and the formation of its mantle. The studies are published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Nature Communications and Advances in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry.

The terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) are the result of more than four billion years of evolution, which began with accretion from the disk surrounding the young sun. During the early stages of evolution, the heat released caused these planets to melt, creating what is known as a magma ocean.

This key stage determines the distribution of elements between the metallic core and the mantle. As it crystallizes, this ocean structures the solid mantle, the partial melting of which will subsequently generate the magmas that form the crust. It is also at this stage that an initial atmosphere may form.

The New Era Of SMA — From Gene Therapy to Living Without Limits | Dr. Tracey Dawson

A New Era for SMA — Dr. Tracey Dawson, PhD, — SVP and U.S. Therapeutic Area Head of Neuroscience, Novartis.

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) has undergone one of the most remarkable transformations in modern medicine. A disease that once carried devastating consequences, particularly in its most severe forms, can now be treated with therapies designed to dramatically alter its course — especially when treatment begins early.

But medical progress creates a fascinating new question. What happens when you don’t just change the disease — you change what’s possible for the person living with it?

Because today’s SMA community includes children treated before symptoms emerge, young adults who have grown up in this new treatment era, and adults who have lived with SMA for decades and carry the consequences of disease that occurred before these therapies existed.

And that’s where our conversation today gets particularly interesting. Because the next challenge may not simply be developing better medicines. It may be helping people take full advantage of the lives those medicines make possible.

Continue reading “The New Era Of SMA — From Gene Therapy to Living Without Limits | Dr. Tracey Dawson” | >

From Militarized Patriarchy to FemaleCentric Societies in Space

Expanding humanity into outer space would represent one of the greatest transitions in human history. If millions of people eventually live and work in space, the social structures familiar to us today are likely to evolve into very different forms. Predicting those structures is difficult. Few, if any, could have predicted the profound societal transformation that occurred in Europe following the Industrial Revolution. The transition from extended families living within largely rural and feudal systems to nuclear families living in densely populated industrial cities and democratic states is now well studied, yet it would have been difficult to foresee before it occurred.

Similarly, when hunter-gatherer communities began settling permanently and developing agricultural villages, their social structures changed dramatically. We understand many aspects of this transformation today, but those living before the transition could hardly have predicted its consequences.

This article attempts to connect the consequences of large human populations living in space with the possible evolution of societies both on Earth and beyond it. One major consequence considered here is the possible abolition—or fundamental transformation—of the military institution, along with other highly hierarchical institutions.

Scientists resurrect ancient proteins, offering new antibiotic leads

University of Oregon biologists have resurrected prehistoric proteins up to 160 million years old that carry natural antimicrobial properties. The revived molecules could inspire the design of new treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections, a pressing global health issue.

Described in a paper published in PLOS Biology on Aug. 25, the scientists worked their way up the tree of life, reconstructing peptides—short protein fragments—dating back to the earliest placental mammals, the diverse lineage that includes humans and nearly all mammals alive today. In laboratory tests, the researchers found that some of the extinct peptides were more potent against drug-resistant bacteria than some of their present-day counterparts.

Evolution’s ancient remedies could offer new starting points for scientists designing treatments that supplement or replace antibiotics that no longer work, said Matt Barber, senior author of the paper and evolutionary biologist at the UO College of Arts and Sciences.

The Man Who Saw Humanity From Two Billion Years Away

Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,” in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity’s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of humanity, 2 billion years in the future.

“Last and First Men” eschews the dramatic conventions of the novel form: There are few significant characters or particularities of place. Instead, the plot is a causal chain of civilizations rising and falling. There is a voice, infused with a distant sense of beauty and tragedy as it considers humanity in the abstract. Stapledon described the novel as “an essay in myth creation.”

In his autobiography, Stapledon relates the “Anglesey vision” that inspired the novel. He was scrambling on an island off the rugged coast of Wales when he came across a colony of seals surrounded by crashing waves. Perhaps the faces of the seals suggested blurred abstractions of human faces. He had “a sudden fantasy of man’s whole future, aeon upon aeon of strange vicissitudes and gallant endeavours in world after world.”

Myeloproliferative Neoplasms

Classic myeloproliferative neoplasms, including essential thrombocythemia, polycythemia vera, and primary myelofibrosis, are chronic, clonal hematopoietic stem-cell disorders. These disorders are driven by gain-of-function mutations in the genes Janus kinase 2 (JAK2), calreticulin (CALR), or the thrombopoietin receptor (MPL) that activate cytokine signaling. These mutations arise decades before clinical disease develops and confer a clonal advantage that is further shaped by comutations in epigenetic, splicing, or signaling genes. Inflammation enhances clonal dominance, favoring the development of myelofibrosis and thrombotic complications. Disease evolution may culminate in secondary acute myeloid leukemia, which has a poor prognosis.

New Monte Carlo method accelerates simulations of densely entangled polymer melts

Long polymer chains are everywhere: in synthetic materials, soft matter, biological systems such as chromosomes, and mathematical models of filaments and knots. When many such chains are densely packed, they form what physicists call a polymer melt. In this crowded environment, each chain is constrained by the others around it. These entanglements are central to the behavior of polymeric materials, but they also make the systems extremely difficult to simulate. As chain length increases, the time needed to obtain a new independent configuration grows very rapidly. For very large systems, conventional simulations can therefore become computationally prohibitive.

For more than 70 years, scientists have used many “tricks” to speed up this process, including so-called Monte Carlo methods with ingenious moves designed to accelerate the evolution of the system. These methods helped, but the basic problem remained: In a dense melt, changes still had to propagate through a highly tangled system, slowing down the simulation.

New measurements explain how silicon and diamond achieve extreme reversible stretching

A research team led by Yang Lu from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), has uncovered the microscopic physical nature of ultralarge elasticity in covalent semiconductors such as silicon and diamond. The discovery provides quantitative guidance for deep elastic strain engineering (DESE), paving the way for the development of next-generation electronic, optoelectronic and quantum devices.

Despite the potential of DESE, the underlying deformation mechanisms of these covalent crystals have long remained elusive. The research team was the first to directly observe the pure lattice evolution of single-crystal silicon and diamond under tension at the atomic scale.

By precisely quantifying the resulting lattice strains, the researchers bridged macroscopic mechanical strain with microscopic lattice strain, establishing a physical foundation for the design of advanced semiconductor devices. The research team also includes PhD student Jiayi Li and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Heyi Wang.