Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers in the US have built an “alien” DNA system from eight building block letters, so expanding the genetic code from four and doubling its information density. The new system meets all of the requirements for Darwinian evolution and can also be transcribed to RNA. It will be important for future synthetic biology applications and expands the scope of molecular structures that might be capable of supporting life, both here on Earth and more widely in the universe.

One of the main characteristics of life is that it can store and pass on genetic information. In modern-day organisms, this is done by DNA using just four building blocks: guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine (G, A, C and T). Pairs of DNA strands form a double helix with A bonding to T and C bonding to G.

Four more building blocks .

Continue reading “Hachimoji DNA doubles the genetic code” »

A black, thumb-sized missile sails through the jungle air, a thunderous buzzing announcing its arrival. The massive insect lands heavily on a tree-bound termite nest, taking a moment to fold its brassy wings and stretch its humongous, curved jaws. This is Wallace’s giant bee, the beefiest and bumbliest bee on Earth. After going missing for nearly four decades, the species has just been rediscovered in its native Indonesia.

Wallace’s giant bee (Megachile pluto) gets its name from its original discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist famous for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection alongside Charles Darwin. Wallace collected the bee while on an expedition in Indonesia’s North Moluccas islands in 1858, describing it as a “large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle.” The tiny titan then went more than a century without being spotted by Western scientists, only seen again by entomologist Adam Messer in 1981, who was able to observe some of its behavior on a number of small islands. But since then, no one had documented any encounters with the huge bee.

Firstly, it greatly depends on how you define immortality. If you define it as living forever and being indestructible as in a comic book, then, no, it is highly unlikely. However, if you define it in terms of showing no decline in survival characteristics, no increase in disease incidence and no increase in mortality with advancing age, then yes. The first is a science-fiction fantasy; the second is based on real-world biology that evolution has already selected for in certain species. We call this state negligible senescence.

Senescence and negligible senescence

Continue reading “Is Immortality Possible?” »

Looks like an interesting new book.

01:34 Group selection: what it is and why it’s controversial
16:58 David defends group selection against its strongest critics.
28:09 Does group selection have a socialist dark side?
38:21 Razib on how a scientist went in a “dark direction”
47:19 Using evolutionary science to solve real-world problems.
56:23 How understanding evolution can make you a better teacher.

Continue reading “Science Saturday: Multi-Level Selection Theory | Razib Khan & David Sloan Wilson [Science Saturday]” »

Feature

The extravagant splendor of the animal kingdom can’t be explained by natural selection alone — so how did it come to be?

A male Indian peafowl. Credit Credit Kenji Aoki for The New York Times.

Continue reading “How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution” »

Scientists have discovered that grasses are able to short cut evolution by taking genes from their neighbours. The findings suggest wild grasses are naturally genetically modifying themselves to gain a competitive advantage.

Understanding how this is happening may also help scientists reduce the risk of genes escaping from GM crops and creating so called super-weeds—which can happen when genes from GM crops transfer into local wild plants, making them herbicide resistant.

Since Darwin, much of the theory of evolution has been based on common descent, where natural selection acts on the genes passed from parent to offspring. However, researchers from the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield have found that grasses are breaking these rules. Lateral gene transfer allows organisms to bypass evolution and skip to the front of the queue by using genes that they acquire from distantly related species.

Continue reading “How our plants have turned into thieves to survive” »

Love: The Glue That Holds the Universe Together. “Love contrasts with fear, light with dark, black implies white, self implies other, suffering implies ecstasy, death implies life. We can devise and apprehend something only in terms of what it is not. This is the cosmic binary code: Ying/Yang, True/False, Infinite/Finite, Masculine/Feminine, On/Off, Yes/No… There are really only two opposing forces at play: love as universal integrating force and fear as universal disintegrating force… Like in Conway’s Game of Life information flows along the path of the least resistance influenced by the bigger motivator – either love factor of fear factor (or, rather, their sophisticated gradients like pleasure and pain) – Go or No go. Love and its contrasting opposite fear is what makes us feel alive… Love is recognized self-similarity in the other, a fractal algorithm of the least resistance. And love, as the finest intelligence, is obviously an extreme form of collaboration… collectively ascending to higher love, “becoming one planet of love.” Love is the glue that holds the Universe together…” –Excerpt from ‘The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution’ by Alex Vikoulov, available now on Amazon.

#SyntellectHypothesis #AlexVikoulov #Love

P.S. Extra For Digitalists: “In this quantum [computational] multiverse the essence of digital IS quantum entanglement. The totality of your digital reality is what your conscious mind implicitly or explicitly chooses to experience out of the infinite -\-\ a cocktail of love response and fear response.”

Continue reading “Happy V Day!” »

Psychiatry as a field, meanwhile, quivers with theoretical uncertainty. It has not become a sub-speciality of neurology, as one might have expected if mental illness mapped directly to neural behaviour. And common genetic variations with large effects on mental disorders are elusive. The various incarnations of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have enabled diagnostic consistency and the objectification of mental illnesses. But the DSM has resulted in overlapping diagnoses, and contrived symptom-cluster checklists. At times, it impinges on the territory of healthy mental function. Allen Frances, chair of the task force that wrote the manual’s fourth edition in 1994, revolted against out-of-control mental diagnosis in his 2013 book DSM: Saving Normal.

Adrian Woolfson weighs up a study on the role of evolution in conditions such as depression and anxiety.