HUMAN SKULLS REVEAL BIODEVELOPMENT

Neuroscience News gives yet more evidence against the foolish Darwinian notion that random changes all added up in the end to new organisms or new features of existing ones. The study of human skulls cited shows that changes occurred in a co-ordinated fashion,and therefore must have been the result of intelligent processing. If they had occurred randomly, piecemeal, we would not have the brains needed to do any studies of anything...

NON-GENETIC INHERITANCE PROVED!

ScienceDaily reports that Columbia University Medical Centre (CUMC) researchers have found the first direct evidence that an acquired trait can be inherited without any DNA involvement. The findings suggest that Lamarck, whose theory of evolution was supposed to have been eclipsed by Darwin's, may not have been entirely wrong.

'In our study, roundworms that developed resistance to a virus were able to pass along that immunity to their progeny for many consecutive generations,' reported lead author Oded Rechavi, PhD, associate research scientist in biochemistry and molecular biophysics at CUMC. 'The immunity was transferred in the form of small viral-silencing agents called viRNAs, working independently of the organism's genome.'

And were passed on for at least a hundred generations.

It is nice to have yet more evidence for what this blog has asserted all along. How long will it take for the Darwin-worshippers, the random-mutations priesthood, to admit the truth--that Darwin was wrong?

CELL-SIGNALLING IS TWO-WAY

MIT News reports that the chemical signalling of cells is two-way. The mechanism senses whether the signals have been received and the 'volume' is adjusted as necessary.

Cells receive external signals through sensing molecules--or receptors--embedded in the cell membrane. They then start a cascade of signalling molecules that carry the signals to the nucleus or other internal structures in the cell. The new research shows that the speed or other characteristics of this signalling process can change when the signals are being received.

NATURE AND NUTURE SHAPE THE BRAIN

ScienceDaily reports new research demonstrating the impact that life experiences can have on genes and behavior. The studies examine how such environmental information can be transmitted from one generation to the next--a phenomenon known as epigenetics. The new knowledge could ultimately improve understanding of brain plasticity, the cognitive benefits of motherhood, and how a parent's exposure to drugs, alcohol, and stress can alter brain development and behavior in their offspring. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2011, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of news about the science and health of the brain.

GLOBAL BACTERIAL SOCIAL-NETWORKING

Much as people can exchange information instantaneously in the digital age, bacteria associated with humans and their livestock appear to exchange genetic material related to human disease and antibiotic resistance freely and rapidly through a mechanism called horizontal gene-transfer (HGT), reports ScienceDaily.

JUNK DNA IS NOT JUNK

As this blog has said more than once, what was dismissed by ignorant scientists as 'junk' DNA turns out to be far from that, as ScienceDaily reports.

It makes all the difference between man and apes.

But it should be no surprise to anyone that a far more sophisticated and intelligent creature should have vastly more processing-power in its DNA. It had to. It could not have been made with less.

It is simple logic. For the outcome to be more sophisticated and intelligent the fundamentals must be. If the DNA is as dumb as a brick it is impossible to get a highly intelligent creature.

CELLULAR PROCESSING-POWER MEASURED

This ScienceDaily reports the start of putting some hard data on the decision-making power of cells, individually and together.

At last!

But it overlooks the self-evident fact that a cell makes decisions about many things, not just one. The sum of all those possiblities, amplified exponentially by many cells, and by the passage of time over many generations, makes possible, obviously, enormous processing power.

THE PROCESSING POWER OF ONE NEURON

Using very fine electrodes, researchers have revealed some of the astonishing processing-power of a single human neuron.

Full story at http://www.blogger.com/%3CA%20href=">ScienceDaily.

'HIDDEN CODE' IN DNA

This report on ScienceDaily again shows that there is a lot of intelligent processing going on, including across generations, in DNA continuum.

A 'hidden' code linked to the DNA of plants allows them to develop and pass down new biological traits far more rapidly than previously thought, according to the findings of a groundbreaking study by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

The study, published September 16 in the journal Science, provides the first evidence that an organism's 'epigenetic' code--an extra layer of biochemical instructions in DNA--can evolve more quickly than the genetic code and can strongly influence biological traits.

While the study was limited to a single plant species called Arabidopsis thaliana, the equivalent of the laboratory rat of the plant world, the findings hint that the traits of other organisms, including humans, might also be dramatically influenced by biological mechanisms that scientists are just beginning to understand.

'Our study shows that it's not all in the genes,' said Joseph Ecker, a professor in Salk's Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory, who led the research team. 'We found that these plants have an epigenetic code that's more flexible and influential than we imagined. There is clearly a component of heritability that we don't fully understand. It's possible that we humans have a similarly active epigenetic mechanism that controls our biological characteristics and gets passed down to our children.'
 
For the rest of the report click on the link at the top of this posting.

GENETIC RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN ACTION

If you read this article in ScienceDaily and do not say, 'Aha! That's intelligent research-and-development processing in action!', you are not seeing what you are seeing...

Smart genes experimenting, trying things out, advancing the organism with intelligent development.

SMART PROCESSING WITH A SINGLE ELECTRON

A report in ScienceDaily shows how fine-tuned biological logic can be--even down to the way a single electron is used in a strange but smart way to achieve the desired result with maximum efficiency.

The enzyme photolyase, which is naturally produced in the cells of plants and some animals (but not in mammals, including humans) repairs DNA by damaged by sunlight by tearing open the misshapen, damaged area in two places and reforming it into its original, undamaged shape.

But the enzyme does not break up the injury in both pieces at once. It is a two-step process that sends a single electron through the DNA molecule in a circuitous route from one breakup site to another.

Ultraviolet (UV) light damages DNA by exciting the atoms in the DNA molecule, causing accidental bonds to form between the atoms. The bond is called a photo-lesion, and can lead to a kind of molecular injury called a dimer. Dimers prevent DNA from replicating properly, and cause genetic mutations that lead to diseases such as cancer.

The dimer in question is called a cyclobutane pyrimidine dimer, and it is shaped like a ring that juts out from the side of the DNA.

For those organisms lucky enough to have photolyase in their cells, the enzyme absorbs energy from visible light--specifically, blue light--to shoot an electron into the cyclobutane ring to break it up. The result is a perfectly repaired strand of DNA.

MOLECULAR SOUP EXHIBITS BRAIN-LIKE BEHAVIOUR

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have made an artificial neural network of DNA, creating a circuit of interacting molecules that can recall memories based on incomplete patterns, just as a brain can.

'The brain is incredible,' says Lulu Qian, a Caltech senior postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering and lead author on the paper that described the work, published in the July 21 issue of the journal Nature, and reported on ScienceDaily. 'It allows us to recognize patterns of events, form memories, make decisions, and take actions. So we asked, instead of having a physically connected network of neural cells, can a soup of interacting molecules exhibit brainlike behavior?'

The answer was yes.

Beyond technological challenges, engineering these systems could also provide indirect insight into the evolution of intelligence. 'Before the brain evolved, single-celled organisms were also capable of processing information, making decisions, and acting in response to their environment,' says Quian. The source of such complex behaviors must have been a network of molecules floating around in the cell. 'Perhaps the highly evolved brain and the limited form of intelligence seen in single cells share a similar computational model that's just programmed in different substrates.'

'Our paper can be interpreted as a simple demonstration of neural-computing principles at the molecular and intracellular levels,' says co-author Jehoshua Bruck. 'One possible interpretation is that perhaps these principles are universal in biological information processing.'

Which is what this blog has been saying for years.

PROTEINS MAKE AND UNMAKE THEIR PUMPS

This story in ScienceDaily shows how finely tuned biological logic is. This split-second timing of a vital process in cellular life could never be achieved by hit-and-miss means, only by very precise logic.

Researchers from the RUB-Department of Biophysics of Prof. Dr. Klaus Gerwert have succeeded in providing evidence that a protein is capable of creating a water molecule chain for a few milliseconds for the directed proton transfer. The combination of vibrational spectroscopy and biomolecular simulations showed the proton-pump mechanism of a cell-membrane protein in atomic detail. The researchers demonstrated that protein-bound water molecules play a decisive role in the function.

Protein-bound water is decisive: specific proteins can transport protons from one side (uptake side) of the cell membrane to the other side (release side)--a central process in biological energy conversion.

Full story here.

SWITCH FOR LIMBS AND DIGITS IN ANCIENT FISH

Genetic instructions for developing limbs and digits were present in primitive fish millions of years before their descendants first crawled on to land, researchers have discovered. Genetic switches control the timing and location of gene activity. When a particular switch taken from fish DNA is placed into mouse embryos, the segment can activate genes in the developing limb region of embryos, University of Chicago researchers report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The successful swap suggests that the recipe for limb development is conserved in species separated by 400 million years of evolution.

As that story in ScienceDaily shows, the long-term intelligent processing of biodevelopment had begun 400 million years before Darwin-worshippers could even dream up the slightest excuse for what they like to call 'evolutionary pressure.' The switches for limbs and digits, which fish do not need, do not want, and cannot benefit from, were starting to be formed. Biodevelopment's intelligent processing was beginning to work out a higher form of animal.

CAN DNA DO QUANTUM COMPUTING?

This article on ScienceDaily suggests that it can. That would help explain why biodevelopment is so smart. It has underlying computer power far in advance of anything computer scientists have yet to develop. It would be ironic if after struggling for years to develop a quantum computer we found out that our own DNA has been doing it for aeons.

DNA CAN DETECT QUANTUM STATES

German research has established that DNA can distinguish between quantum states known as spin in electrons.

Quantum phenomena, it is generally agreed, take place in extremely tiny systems. Single atoms, for instance, or very small molecules. To investigate them, scientists must usually cool their material down to temperatures approaching absolute zero. Once such a system exceeds a certain size or temperature, its quantum properties collapse. Biological molecules are quite large, and work at temperatures that are much warmer than the temperatures at which most quantum physics experiments are conducted. One would expect that the quantum phenomenon of spin, which exists in two opposing states, would be scrambled in these molecules, and thus irrelevant to their function.

But biological molecules have another property: they are chiral. They exist in either left- or 'right-handed forms that cannot be superimposed on one another. Double-stranded DNA molecules are doubly chiral, both in the arrangement of the individual strands and in the direction of the helices' twist.

To see if DNA could detect spin the researchers fabricated self-assembling, single layers of DNA attached to a gold substrate. They then exposed the DNA to mixed groups of electrons with both directions of spin. The results surpassed expectations: The biological molecules reacted strongly with the electrons carrying one of those spins, and hardly at all with the others. The longer the molecule, the more efficient it was at choosing electrons with the desired spin, while single strands and damaged bits of DNA did not exhibit this property. These findings imply that the ability to pick and choose electrons with a particular spin stems from the chiral nature of the DNA molecule, which somehow sets the preference for the spin of electrons moving through it.

Full story at ScienceDaily.

RNA 'GUIDED' TO ALTER DNA INSTRUCTIONS

The process of transcribing DNA instructions into proteins has now been found to be a lot smarter than previously imagined.

A detailed comparison of DNA and RNA in human cells has uncovered a surprising number of cases where the corresponding sequences are not, as has long been assumed, identical. The RNA-DNA differences generate proteins that do not precisely match the genes that encode them.

The finding, published May 19, 2011, in Science Express, suggests that unknown cellular processes are acting on RNA to generate a sequence that is not an exact replica of the DNA from which it is copied. Vivian Cheung, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator who led the study, says the RNA-DNA differences (which the researchers casll RDDs), which were found in all 27 individuals whose genetic sequences were analysed, are a previously unrecognised source of genetic diversity that should be taken into account in future studies. They found at least one RDD site in 40% of genes.

Cheung says the particular RNA-DNA discrepancies that they found appear systematic. There are four bases, or letters, that make up the DNA code: A, T, G, and C. The RNA equivalents are A, U, G, and C. In individuals who had RNA-DNA differences at a specific site in the genome, the mismatched bases were always the same. In other words, if the team found a C in the RNA sequence where they expected an A, all individuals who had an RDD at this point also had a C in their RNA sequence--never a G or a U. 'Such uniformity makes us believe that there is a 'code' or 'guide' that mediates the RDDs and they are not random events,' says Cheung. 'And it is important to note that since these RDDs were found with just 27 individuals, they are common.'

Full article in ScienceDaily.

BABY'S DNA CHANGED BY MUM'S DIET

Lamark would be delighted! The DNA of babies altering itself spontaneously to fit its environment...

Full report on the BBC website.

NOT ONLY THE FITTEST SURVIVE

Darwin's notion that only the fittest survive has been called into question by new research published in the journal Nature, and reported on ScienceDaily. A collaboration between the Universities of Exeter and Bath in the UK, with a group from San Diego State University in the US, challenges our current understanding of evolution by showing that biodiversity may evolve where previously thought impossible.

Conventional wisdom has it that for any given niche there should be a best species, the fittest, that will eventually dominate to exclude all others.

This is the principle of survival of the fittest. Ecologists often call this idea the 'competitive exclusion principle' and it predicts that complex environments are needed to support complex, diverse populations.

Professor Robert Beardmore, from the University of Exeter, said: 'Microbiologists have tested this principle by constructing very simple environments in the lab to see what happens after hundreds of generations of bacterial evolution, about 3,000 years in human terms. It had been believed that the genome of only the fittest bacteria would be left, but that wasn't their finding. The experiments generated lots of unexpected genetic diversity.'

This test-tube biodiversity proved controversial when first observed and had been explained away with claims that insufficient time had been allowed to pass for a clear winner to emerge.

The new research shows that the experiments were not anomalies.

THE BRAIN IS A MIRROR OF EVOLUTION

‘I think; therefore I am’&EMDASH;Descartes famous quotation can be assigned a new meaning in biodevelopment, the better term for 'evolution'. For what is happening constantly in our brain is a copy of the process. The brain constantly processes and evaluates data coming in from the external and internal environment, it eliminates what is unnecessary and illogical, it tries many possibilities, even outlandish ones in dreams, and arrives at its conclusions. A vast sifting process is going on constantly in order to arrive at the conclusions best-fitted to the circumstances, present and future.

The difference is that our thinking can be distorted by bad upbringing, both external and internal, but the process of evolution is far more sensible (spontaneous abortion and unsurvivable disease weed out the failures).

Just as the organism alters its behaviour to benefit it in changing circumstances, so too does that which makes up the organism--all the way down to biomolecular level.

CELLS THINK - LETTER TO SCIENCE

A copy of a letter sent in early 2011 to Science magazine, the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (it was not published):

An article headed Molecular Dynamic Simulations on page 1607 of volume 330 of Science dated 17 December 2010 said, 'a simple protein with 100 amino acids can fold 3^198 different ways... Proteins sort through all these possibilities in milliseconds or less.' And your editorial on page 1724 of volume 330 dated 24 December 2010 said, 'An animal cell behaves as though it contains a tiny computer, assessing the many signals it receives... But the crucial next challenge... is to decipher exactly how the elaborate networks of signalling molecules that exist inside a cell enable it to make its crucial decisions--a process analogous to cell "thinking".'

Without the quotation marks round 'thinking' those two excerpts together express a fundamental truth: intelligence drives life. Cellular intelligence is driven by molecular intelligence; organic intelligence is driven by cellular intelligence.

It is not just neurons that think and together make a vastly higher capability. All cells do. The entire body is brain, because every cell is intelligent (and because the purpose of the body is to serve the brain). I think, therefore I am what I am; I am what I am, therefore I think.

The cell does *not* behave as if it contains a tiny computer. No, it is a vastly powerful network of tiny computers--the myriad of molecules in it. It is a World-Wide Web of them, and the body is a Galactic Hyper-Web of World-Wide Webs.

But the driver of life is vastly more than just the driver of the life and development of the organism. Via genetic inheritance the intelligent processing continues through the generations, and thus the development of that life-form continues across the aeons.

It is not 'natural selection' and 'random mutations.' It is intelligent selection and intelligent changes.

Both disease and evolutionary dead-ends are therefore the same thing, on different time-scales: processing errors (albeit sometimes ones that did not produce enough flexibility to accommodate environmental changes).

PROTEIN INTELLIGENCE AFFIRMED

From Science, the journal of the American Assocation for the Advancement of Science, volume 330, 17th of December 2010, page 1607:

'...to simulate the gyrations proteins make as they fold... is a combinatorial nightmare. Each two neighbouring amino acids in a protein chain can bind to one another at two different angles, each of which can have three conformations. So a simple protein with 100 amino acids can fold in 3198 different ways. Getting at the atomic detail is even scarier. Proteins sort through all those possibilities in milliseconds or less. Computers take far longer.'

Which confirms and underlines the point made often in this blog: biodevelopment is intelligent, it has enormous computational power, it works out the best result, at micro level in milliseconds and at macro level over the aeons.