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01Mar
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26Feb
The Canadian women’s hockey team can now be called an Olympic dynasty! 3 gold medals in 3 Olympics! Woohoo! Now, it’s the men’s turn.
However, a “stain” on the Olympicsw occurred after. Don’t read further unless you have a strong stomach! Continue reading »
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22Feb
“Life-like evolution in a test tube” is the title of an article at Cosmos Magazine that describes a potential breakthrough in Origin-of-Life (OOL) research. (HT RichardtHughes at AtBC )
For the first time, scientists have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes - that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components.
If true, this could help shed light on the RNA-World and create many different and intriguing lines of research.
That said, there’s an obvious caveat: these RNA molecules were designed. For a purely natural RNA-World scenario to be true, scientists would have to show that a self-replicating RNA could have arisen through natural means, and last time I checked, they ain’t even close to demonstrating this.
Keep in mind I am NOT questioning whether evolutionary mechanisms exist. It is obvious that they do exist and function in nature. However, take a good look at what Dr. Joyce and his colleagues did: they took their knowledge of how living things work and change/evolve, and used it to create an RNA molecule that “evolves” (or runs under the properties of known evolutionary mechanisms). This is very similar to what engineers do, using their knowledge of the known world/universe to create an object or system to suit some predetermined function(s) or design objective(s). In essence, what Joyce et al. did was attempt to engineer life.
As if to reinforce the engineering aspect of the research, the article goes on to say:
The ultimate goal is to create genetic systems that behave like life, and are for all intents ‘life’ as we know it, but arose without using biological systems.
“The aim is to create systems that have inventive capabilities, that can develop novel solutions to challenges posed by the environment. But that we don’t have yet,” [molecular biologist Gerald Joyce] said. …
[Joyce continues] “They are synthetic genetic systems, and they are evolving. But they’re not living because they don’t yet show the capacity to invent functions out of whole cloth [independently from basic building blocks].
“The idea is to given them enough information wherewithal [build up enough genetic informaton] so they can start inventing their own solutions, rather than just optimising existing solutions,” he added.
To recap, Joyce et al. “create[d] … [synthetic] genetic systems that behave like life” (i.e. replicate and pass on genetic information - a simple design objective). Further research will have the goal of ”… creat[ing] systems that have inventive capabilities, that can develop novel solutions to challenges posed by the environment.” (i.e. predetermined function). To accomplish this, the researchers aim to “give them enough information wherewithal [build up enough genetic informaton] so they can start inventing their own solutions, rather than just optimising existing solutions…”
Golly gee! That sure sounds a lot like engineering and front-loading to me.
“Front-loading is the investment of a significant amount of information at the initial stage of evolution (the first life forms) whereby this information shapes and constrains subsequent evolution through its dissipation.”
p.147, The Design Matrix by Mike GeneI thought FLE/design couldn’t lead to fruitful research. Silly me!
All kidding aside, this could set the stage for interesting new OOL research. Stay tuned!
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04Jan
In the Alberta engineering community, there’s a lively (and mostly civil) debate occurring on global warming*. Being an engineer in Alberta, I figure why should I leave the debate out of EE.
That said, there are limits to the debate that I will allow here at EE. Those limits are perhaps best described by my position on the subject:
1. I accept that the Earth may be in the midst of a warming trend.
2. I have not seen any evidence that has withstood scrutiny that humans are the cause of this trend.
3. I have not seen any evidence that has withstood scrutiny that this warming trend is catastrophic/runaway/etc.
So let’s have some fun with this. The asylum is now open.
*This debate can be (mostly) found in the “Reader’s Forum” section of the APEGGA newsletter: The PEGG. It’s interesting to follow - once you get past the kooks on the extreme ends of the spectrum.
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04Jan
This one’s been in the EE closet for a while, and I’m just getting around to clearing it out.
Here is an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal:
“A Dark Matter Breakthrough?”by Lawrence Krauss
Note the hesitant language used throughout the article. IMHO, this is a breath of fresh air that is sorely needed in popular science articles.
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04Jan
MacLean’s magazine recently had a great article profiling Stephen McIntyre, a global warming realist who, along with Ross McKitrick, helped to break the so-called “smoking gun” of global warming, Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph.
Some excerpts:
The truth is that McIntyre, 62, little resembles the caricature of a wild-eyed climate-change “denier.” He is scrupulous about focusing his criticism on statistical procedures and disclosure practices. He is polite to, and about, climate scientists. He refuses to make grand categorical statements of the “Global warming is just commie horse puckey” type, preferring to remain agnostic, and he discourages such talk on his website, Climate Audit.
Spanish paleoclimatologist Eduardo Zorita of Germany’s GKSS Research Centre, who has clashed at times with both McIntyre and the climate-research elite, says that “in the realm of science, it doesn’t really matter by whom and why a study is criticized. It only counts whether or not the criticism is reasonably well-founded, is logical, and relevant for the final results.” [emphasis mine]
The world of mining [McIntyre worked for Noranda during its heyday as well as other smaller resource firms] is one in which everyone is constantly aware of how engineering results can be tampered with or misrepresented to rip off investors. And in 2003, when McIntyre first saw the hockey stick graph, it reminded him uncomfortably of some stock promoter’s over-optimistic revenue projection. McIntyre asked lead “hockey stick” author Michael Mann for the underlying data and was startled when Mann had trouble remembering where he had posted the files to the Internet. “That was when the penny dropped for me,” McIntyre says. “I had the sense that Mann was pulling together the data for the first time—that nobody had ever bothered to inquire independently into the hockey stick before.”
To McIntyre, a scientist’s data and code stand in the same relationship to a finished paper that drilling cores do to a mining company press release. “If you’re offering securities to the public,” McIntyre observed in a May 2008 talk at Ohio State University, “there are complicated and expensive processes of due diligence, involving audits of financial statements, independent engineering reports, opinions from securities lawyers and so on. There are laws requiring the disclosure of adverse results.” Peer review in scientific journals is good, he suggested, but it is limited and vulnerable to compromise. “There is far more independent due diligence on the smallest prospectus offering securities to the public than on a Nature article that might end up having a tremendous impact on policy.” [emphasis mine]
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21Dec
Mike Gene at his blog, The Design Matrix, provides a simple and solid defence against criticisms on FLE. See the following links for the whole story.
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08Dec
The National Post is currently running a thought-provoking five-part series entitled “Rethinking Green”. Click on the links below for the articles, and feel free to provoke your thoughts in the comments section.
Feed the World: Grow Fish in Alberta’s Badlands (see pic here)
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30Nov
It’s a high price to pay being a Riders fan. I’m still in shock.
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11Nov
May God bless the men and women in the Canadian military.
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