Gente, a Folha de São Paulo nem deu txum pra Darwin ou Dawkins como leitura de férias
Eu quase tive um ataque do coração gente: a Folha de São Paulo mais uma vez deixou Darwin (o homem que teve a maior ideia que toda a humanidade já teve) e Dawkins (o profeta do neoateísmo pós-moderno, chique e perfumado e evangelista evolucionista número 1) de fora.
Desta vez da lista de leitura de férias selecionada por um grupo de especialistas.
Vide "Afinal, por que ler nas férias?", de Ivan Barroso aqui [requer assinatura da FSP ou do UOL]. Há outros links dos demais especialistas.
De Londres: Darwin, snif!!! Dawkins, sniff!!!
Fui, nem sei por que, mas acho que a Folha de São Paulo se cansou do oba-oba, da louvaminhice, do beija-mão e beija-pé de Darwin e de Dawkins.
A conferir em 2010 quando virá a nova teoria da evolução: a SÍNTESE EVOLUTIVA AMPLIADA que não deve e nem pode ser selecionista porque as evidências encontradas na natureza não corroboram esta especulação transformista darwiniana.
Tentando elucidar a evolução da diversidade de pigmentação dos olhos em ciclídeos
The Eyes Have It: Regulatory and Structural Changes Both Underlie Cichlid Visual Pigment Diversity
Christopher M. Hofmann1#*, Kelly E. O'Quin1#, N. Justin Marshall2, Thomas W. Cronin3, Ole Seehausen4,5, Karen L. Carleton1
1 Department of Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States of America,
2 Sensory Neurobiology Group, School of Biomedical Sciences University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia,
3 Department of Biological Sciences, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America,
4 Aquatic Ecology and Evolution, Institute of Ecology and Evolution, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland,
5 Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology, Centre of Ecology, Evolution and Biogeochemistry, Kastanienbaum, Switzerland
Abstract Top
A major goal of evolutionary biology is to unravel the molecular genetic mechanisms that underlie functional diversification and adaptation. We investigated how changes in gene regulation and coding sequence contribute to sensory diversification in two replicate radiations of cichlid fishes. In the clear waters of Lake Malawi, differential opsin expression generates diverse visual systems, with sensitivities extending from the ultraviolet to the red regions of the spectrum. These sensitivities fall into three distinct clusters and are correlated with foraging habits. In the turbid waters of Lake Victoria, visual sensitivity is constrained to longer wavelengths, and opsin expression is correlated with ambient light. In addition to regulatory changes, we found that the opsins coding for the shortest- and longest-wavelength visual pigments have elevated numbers of potentially functional substitutions. Thus, we present a model of sensory evolution in which both molecular genetic mechanisms work in concert. Changes in gene expression generate large shifts in visual pigment sensitivity across the collective opsin spectral range, but changes in coding sequence appear to fine-tune visual pigment sensitivity at the short- and long-wavelength ends of this range, where differential opsin expression can no longer extend visual pigment sensitivity.
Author Summary Top
The molecular mechanisms that generate biodiversity remain largely elusive. We examined how two of these mechanisms, changes in gene expression and changes in gene coding sequence, have generated an incredibly diverse set of visual systems in rapidly speciating African cichlids. We found large differences in cone opsin gene expression among cichlids inhabiting the clear waters of Lake Malawi. These changes are likely to have strong influences on retinal sensitivity and appear to be driven primarily by different foraging needs. Cichlids inhabiting the turbid waters of Lake Victoria, however, only expressed a subset of their opsin genes and variation in gene expression appears to by driven primarily by the spectrum of environmental light. When we compared the sequences of these opsin genes, we found greater variation in the genes at the ultraviolet and red edges of the sensitivity range. Taken together these findings suggest that changes in gene expression and coding sequence can be complementary and work in concert to generate changes in sensory systems. Because of their correlation with ecological factors, these changes are also likely to be adaptive and to have played a role in generating the tremendous diversity of cichlids in these two lakes.
Citation: Hofmann CM, O'Quin KE, Marshall NJ, Cronin TW, Seehausen O, et al. (2009) The Eyes Have It: Regulatory and Structural Changes Both Underlie Cichlid Visual Pigment Diversity. PLoS Biol 7(12): e1000266. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000266
Academic Editor: Mohamed A. F. Noor, Duke University, United States of America
Received: April 22, 2009; Accepted: November 12, 2009; Published: December 22, 2009
Funding: Funding for this work was provided to KC by the University of Maryland and the National Science Foundation, IBN 0131285, 0654076, 0841270; and to OS by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Vídeos em português sobre o Design Inteligente na internet
O NBDI - Núcleo Brasileiro de Design Inteligente, Campinas, SP, é um pequeno mas crescente grupo de professores, pesquisadores e alunos em universidades públicas e privadas que promove a Teoria do Design Inteligente no Brasil, e aponta as insuficiências epistêmicas da Síntese Evolutiva Moderna no contexto de justificação teórica.
Ao contrário do que tem sido afirmado de que recebemos bastante dinheiro dos Estados Unidos, nosso grupo é formado por idealistas que tiram dinheiro do seu bolso e do seu tempo para promover a TDI no Brasil. Prova disso, é que desde 1998 o NBDI sequer conseguiu traduzir e publicar livros ou vídeos sobre o Design Inteligente. Todavia, nós já deparamos com vários vídeos postados no YouTube sem a devida autorização dos autores e proprietários do copyright de tradução e veiculação no Brasil.
Nós entramos em contato com alguns responsáveis de blogs esclarecendo a situação delituosa. Alguns acolheram nossos esclarecimentos e de pronto removeram esses vídeos promovendo a TDI. Teve gente que pediu para fazermos 'vista grossa', pois a remoção desses vídeos impediria o avanço da TDI no Brasil. Nós discordamos desta atitude anti-ética, e esta é a razão maior desta nota: nós do NBDI não somos responsáveis por estes vídeos postados no YouTube, e deploramos que nossas ideias estejam sendo promovidas assim de forma delituosa.
Nada podemos contra a verdade, a não ser pela própria verdade vale em qualquer discurso sobre quaisquer ideias. Eu espero sinceramente que os donos de copyright descubram esta violação dos seus direitos, e tomem as providências legais cabíveis.
Foi duro escrever isso, mas foi necessário, pois nós do NBDI nada temos a ver com isso.
London Review of Books Vol. 32 No. 1 · 7 January 2010
The Darwin Show
Steven Shapin
It has been history’s biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events in at least 45 countries, and, on or around 24 November, there was another spate of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In Mysore, Darwin Day was observed by an exhibition ‘proclaiming the importance of the day and the greatness of the scientist’. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there were performances of a one-man musical, Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert (‘Twas adaptive radiation that produced the mighty whale;/His hands have grown to flippers/And he has a fishy tail’). At Harvard, the celebrations included ‘free drinks, science-themed rock bands, cake, decor and a dancing gorilla’ (stuffed with a relay of biology students). Circulating around the university, student and faculty volunteers declaimed the entire text of the Origin.
On the Galapagos Islands, tourists making scientific haj were treated to ‘an active, life-seeing account of the life of this magnificent scientist’, and a party of Stanford alumni retraced the circumnavigating voyage of HMS Beagle in a well-appointed private Boeing 757, intellectually chaperoned by Darwin’s most distinguished academic biographer. The Darwin anniversaries were celebrated round the world: in Bogotá, Mexico City, Montevideo, Toronto, Toulouse, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Bangalore, Singapore, Seoul, Osaka, Cape Town, Rome (where it was sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Culture, part of a Vatican hatchet-burying initiative), and in all the metropolitan and scientific settings you might expect. The English £10 note has borne Darwin’s picture on the back since 2000 (replacing Dickens), but special postage stamps and a new £2 coin honoured him in 2009, as did stamps or coins in at least ten other countries.
Darwin had an anniversary Facebook group dedicated to him: its goal was to have 200,000 unique Happy Birthdays posted by 12 February and a million ‘friends’ by the November anniversary of the Origin. The group also planned a mass ‘Happy Birthday, Darwin’ sing-along, but I don’t think this actually happened. Then there were the Darwin-themed T-shirts, teddy bears, bobbleheads, tote bags, coffee mugs, fridge magnets, mouse mats, scatter cushions and pet bowls; the ‘Darwin Loves You’ bumper-stickers, the ‘Darwin Is My Homeboy’ badges, and the ‘I ♥ Darwinism’ thongs. The opening line of the year’s most substantial historical contribution, Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, is: ‘Global brands don’t come much bigger than Charles Darwin.’ Quite right.
Darwin freely confessed to late-onset philistinism: ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.’ He eventually found Shakespeare ‘so intolerably dull that it nauseated me’. But the imaginative arts lined up to pay tribute. In Cambridge, Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt spoke about their ‘literary relationship with Darwin’. The joint Yale-Cambridge museum homage, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge and the Yale Center for British Art), rightly called ‘the best show of the year’, was a brilliant exploration of the impact of evolutionary ideas on painting, photography and the illustrative arts, and of the fecundity of Darwin’s responsiveness to the visual impact of nature’s richness, diversity and intricacy. The Natural History Museum in South Kensington hosted the cleverly named After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions – installations, video, film and literary works inspired by Darwin’s late work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. And Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter Ruth Padel published Darwin: A Life in Poems, evoking the emotional nexus from which the Origin emerged:
‘I never dreamed that islands sixty miles apart, made of the same stone, of nearly equal height in the same climate, could have different tenants.’ Fast forward twenty years and you see him write of this scatter-burst of rock in open sea, ‘We seem brought near that mystery of mysteries, the first appearance of new beings on the earth.’
The Rambert Dance Company produced a new work, The Comedy of Change, as their contribution. The ballet’s scientific adviser ‘gave a lecture about Darwinian ideas’, after which she and the choreographer ‘did some tango moves’ to evoke the mating dances of birds. The University of Birmingham celebrated with The Rap Guide to Evolution, featuring the ‘African-American Atheist Rapper Greydon Square’, the ‘self-styled “Walking Stephen Hawking”’. In Manhattan, the Ensemble Theater produced Darwin’s Challenge (‘On his trip aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin wanders into a cave on Galapagos and finds himself on the set of a 21st-century reality TV show … He gets kicked off in Act Two’) – a play which Scientific American dyspeptically summed up as ‘maybe the first attempt ever to hijack the life of the theorist of natural selection as a medium for cracking fart jokes’.
Radio 4’s Something Understood discussed whether geniuses were born or made, taking Mozart and Darwin as exemplars and underlining the case for Darwin with a song called ‘Charlie’ by the one-time anarcho-punk group Chumbawamba: ‘All of nature in its place/By hand of the designer/Comes our Charlie spins the world/From here to Asia Minor/In between the Platypus/And perfect Aphrodite/Charlie come with opposing thumb/To question the Almighty.’ And, uncategorisably, 2009’s Burning Man Festival, in the vast Black Rock Desert of Nevada, featured the theme of ‘Evolution’: the 12-metre human shape – burned to extinction at festival’s end – rose above a ‘tangled bank’ consisting of irregular wooden triangles … At night the tangled bank came alive with luminous life forms scratching, crawling and slithering their way through it … Strange Ur-creatures peep outward from the surface of this primal soup. The central tree supporting Burning Man, beribboned with a double helix, existed in flux: switching on and switching off, changing colours unexpectedly.
The installation, meant to symbolise the work of evolution, itself instantiates evolution’s historical trajectory from counterculture to counterculture, with only a brief stop in between to pick up paying passengers.
Then there were the national and international conferences (scientific, historical, philosophical and literary), the special issues of academic and general-interest periodicals, the television and radio shows, and of course the books, including at least four new biographies specially for children. Darwin Year celebrates something much more diffuse, more general and more consequential than the life and works of a great Victorian naturalist. Darwin has escaped from disciplinary confines, and even from academic ones, because what he did is supposed to have changed ‘the way we think’ – lots of us, if not all of us – about the world, about ourselves and about how we go about knowing the world. It is a celebration – yet another – of a moment that is said to have ‘made the modern world’, definitively, exhaustively, irreversibly.
The New York Times announced that ‘the theory of evolution really does explain everything in biology,’ but that’s rather modest in the context of current celebratory hype. In now canonical versions, Darwin’s idea of evolution through natural selection – his ‘dangerous idea’ – was, as Daniel Dennett famously said, ‘the single best idea anyone has ever had’. Better than any idea of Newton’s or Einstein’s, and better than any idea had by Jesus or Aristotle or Hume or that other great 12 February 1809 birthday boy, Abraham Lincoln. It ‘unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law’. If T.H. Huxley was ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, the Oxford emeritus professor for the public understanding of science, Richard Dawkins, has been called his unmuzzled rottweiler; according to Dawkins, Darwin’s idea wasn’t just a great one (‘the most powerful, revolutionary idea ever put forward by an individual’), it is essentially the only idea you need to explain life and all its phenomena: ‘Charles Darwin really solved the problem of existence, the problem of the existence of all living things – humans, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria. Everything we know about life, Darwin essentially explained.’ One-stop shopping for the inquiring mind in a hurry, though one can wonder why an idea of such evident and all-encompassing power would – a century and a half later – need this aggressive marketing.
While Dawkins concedes that Darwin ‘made some mistakes’ – for example, he got genetics all wrong, but so did everyone else in the 19th century before there was any genetics to get right – the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson will have none of that: ‘The man was always right.’ Uniquely among the sciences, evolutionary biology comes with a patronymic, and so another oddity is why – if we take some of the wilder rhetorical flourishes literally – evolutionary theory is talked about as if nothing much has changed scientifically since Darwin’s time. Scientists don’t routinely refer to physics as Newtonianism or claim that ‘everything we know about physics, Newton essentially explained.’
Put aside for a moment whether any of these extravagant claims about modernity-making is even approximately right: not whether Darwin’s specific evolutionary ideas were powerful and broad (which they undoubtedly were) but whether they have marked the world in indelible ways and whether in fact they constitute the universal explanatory tool that some claim they do – whether, as Dawkins says, we ‘have no choice’ but to concede Darwinian supremacy and whether Darwinian evolution has the power to nail down almost all the problems that have occupied thinkers across disciplines and cultural practices. The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky once said that ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,’ and now an anthropologist claims that ‘nothing about humans makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ (Nothing.) Under the influence of a scientific rush of blood you get something that sounds like a recommendation that every mode of inquiry other than evolutionary biology and its allied disciplines shut up shop and go home. So we have the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Foley: ‘For centuries, humans have wondered about why humans are the way they are, and they’ve turned to philosophy and to religion to answer that question.’ But humans should stop doing that: Darwin allowed us to set philosophy and religion aside and to see that the answers to such questions either belonged to evolutionary biologists or they were nonsensical. That is, however, a step too far for some otherwise sympathetic scientists. As the geneticist Steve Jones put it, Darwin Year has encouraged ‘vulgar Darwinists’ in their already souped up tendency misleadingly to treat evolutionary biology as ‘a universal solvent that can sort out the most recalcitrant problems of society, consciousness, politics, literature and more’.
Even conceding the more expansive claims for Darwin’s genius and influence, we’re still some way from understanding what the festivities have been about. There are other claimants for the prize of towering scientific genius, and for ‘making the modern world’, but none of them has been the occasion for global festivities on anything like this scale. The 400th anniversary of Galileo’s birth was 1964, and Descartes’s 1996; Newton’s Principia turned 300 in 1987; Einstein’s Wunderjahr papers in Annalen der Physik, changing the way physicists think about space, time and matter, had their centenary in 2005. All were duly marked, mainly by historians, philosophers and physicists, but there was nothing remotely approaching Darwin 200. Even if we had an unambiguous metric for ranking scientific genius and modernity-making – one by which Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Einstein were chopped liver compared to Darwin – neither genius nor influence would be a sufficient explanation for the events of 2009.
The very idea of paying homage to the great scientists of the past is problematic. Scientists are not widely supposed either to be heroes or to have heroes. Modern sensibilities insist on scientists’ moral equivalence to anyone else, and notions of an impersonal Scientific Method, which have gained official dominance over older ideas of scientific genius, make the personalities of scientists irrelevant in principle. Honouring past scientists is therefore a different sort of thing from, say, paying homage to history’s generals, politicians or, indeed, imaginative artists. You don’t need to subscribe to a strict form of Pascal’s theory of history (had Cleopatra’s nose …) to accept, in one way or another, that individuals and circumstances can make a difference to the course of events. Had Lincoln not been president, the Civil War would quite probably have had a different trajectory and outcome; had Bush and Cheney not run the show, it’s plausible that Iraq would have not been invaded as a response to 9/11 or that an invasion would have turned out differently; and had Mozart not lived there would have been no Figaro. But it’s hard to accept that if Watson and Crick – clever and ambitious though they were – had not found the double helical structure of DNA, no one else would have done so.
Artists create; scientists discover. That’s our usual understanding of the thing, and scientists – together with some of their philosophical allies – have been in the van of insisting so. (That’s one way in which ‘relativism’ and ‘social constructivism’ are commonly opposed.) If science is discovery and not invention, then it follows that discoverers’ relation to what they reveal is different in both intellectual texture and moral resonance from Mozart’s relation to his operas, Shakespeare’s to his plays, and even Bush’s to his wars. You couldn’t say of Figaro or Lear or the Iraq war that they were waiting there to be ‘discovered’. ‘Something of that sort’ may well have come into being, but an example of ‘something like’ Figaro is Salieri’s Axur, Re d’Ormus or even Abba’s ‘Waterloo’. You don’t necessarily have to construct counter-factual histories to support this sort of sensibility. Scientists are often said to hit on ‘the same’ (or ‘nearly the same’) idea at about ‘the same’ time: Galileo, Scheiner and several others on sunspots; Leibniz and Newton on the calculus; Priestley and Scheele on oxygen; Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam on electroweak gauge theory; and, of course, Darwin and the undercelebrated Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution by natural selection. Every instance of what has been called ‘simultaneous discovery’ lends credence to the notion that the individual does not matter in the course of science, or matters in a very different sort of way from authorial mattering in the creative arts. Homage to the scientist and to the artist sits astride one of our great cultural faultlines. What is owed to reality, and what to the creative work – even the imaginative, literary and political work – of those who are said to lift the veil of reality’s structural and dynamic secrets?
You can still say, with perfect accuracy, that the Origin is much more than its ‘essential’ theory of natural selection: it is a book, a magnificent theatre of persuasion, ‘one long argument’ (as Darwin called it), supported by masses of arduously compiled evidence, ingeniously organised and vouched for by a special individual, with known special virtues and capacities. (Historical reactions differed even on the recognition of the Origin’s literary qualities: George Eliot sourly considered the book ‘ill-written and sadly wanting in illustrative facts’, lacking ‘luminous and orderly presentation’, and Karl Marx complained about ‘the clumsy English style’.) As Richard Horton observed in a special issue of the Lancet, Darwin’s fame, unlike that of today’s scientists, was ‘based on books … His books were neither summaries nor simplifications: they were the core of his originality.’ Writing books was not, for Darwin, an irritating obligation to report on discoveries: reporting and persuading were, for him, seamlessly joined creative acts. He liked writing and took enormous pains in composition; he cared deeply about its power and effects on readers. Whatever might be meant by the ‘essence’ of evolution by natural selection is something you could say was discovered: the text called the Origin was composed, in exactly the same sense that Figaro was composed, artfully put together, invented. Wallace’s 1858 paper ‘discovering’ evolution by natural selection stung Darwin into a frenzy of long pent-up composition, so it’s plausible to identify at least two discoverers of the theory but only one author of the Origin. Wallace himself was well aware that it was one thing to come up with a theory but a much greater thing to make it credible: he thought of himself as a mere ‘guerrilla chief’ of evolution while Darwin was ‘the great general’, mapping out the grand literary and political strategy to make natural selection stick in the culture.
Paradoxically, this year’s events have been a celebration of a historical figure and his historical work in which specifically historical interests have been notably marginal. The party is one in which the present, with its pressing present concerns, processes fragments of the past in roughly the same way that assorted blocks of white fish, bulked out with filler, are processed into fish fingers. Myths have a market; myth-busting has a small one; setting the historical Darwin in his Victorian intellectual and social context has practically none at all.
Barry Werth’s Banquet at Delmonico’s – a fine popular book on Herbert Spencer’s American success that has been rather swamped by 2009’s Darwinmania – underlines the fact that, successful as the Origin was, large numbers of 19th-century readers got their understanding of ‘evolution’ from Spencer’s very different, teleologically orientated works. Countless others took in their evolutionism from the progressivist Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a ‘Victorian sensation’ anonymously published in 1844 by the Scottish journalist Robert Chambers and abominated by Darwin as just the sort of thing that was bound to vulgarise evolution and to make it scientifically disreputable. As James Secord shows in the introduction to his edition of Evolutionary Writings, Vestiges was, at the time Darwin wrote, ‘the one evolutionary book that all English-speaking readers could be expected to know’.
The historical road to recognising the significance and the power of Darwinian natural selection has been neither straight nor smooth. Just after the Darwin commemorations of 1909, the New York Times blandly announced that natural selection
has ceased to be regarded as the key to all the biologies; so that it is probable that his fame in this regard reached its acme last year … The general attitude of contemporary biologists towards the great achievement of Darwin differs considerably from the chorus of universal acceptance which was current in the 1870s and 1880s. Instead of having solved the problem of the origin of species, Darwin, it is now recognised, only raised the question.
That is to say, natural selection as ‘the key’ to organic change needed to be synthesised with Mendelian genetics, and this was an achievement of the period from the late 1920s to the 1950s, vital contributions to which were made by the English statistician R.A. Fisher, a eugenicist and a devout Christian who saw biological progress as evidence of God’s active and continuing role in nature, and whose centenary in 1990 was not a significant media event.
You could point out that Darwin would have been regarded as a very great naturalist and considerable geologist even if he had not published the Origin, given the extent and meticulousness of his work on, among other things, barnacles, coral reefs and volcanic islands, insectivorous and climbing plants, the sex life of orchids, the role of earthworms in making vegetable mould, domesticated plants and animals, the expression of animal and human emotions, and polymorphic botanical species (about which Darwin said that nothing in his scientific life ‘has given me so much satisfaction’). All of these have been pushed far into the background in the current celebrations. You could also say that a lot more was going on in the Origin than the versions of ‘natural selection’ celebrated by present-day evolutionists and their fan clubs. And that too would be correct. The voices of historians of science have been scarcely audible in Darwin Year, sometimes organising their own conferences, more often being wheeled onstage by those with other agendas, like ‘attendant lords … to swell a progress, start a scene or two … Deferential, glad to be of use.’
If you were historically minded, you might find it interesting that while the first-year sales of the Origin were good – 1250 copies of the first printing (sold out to the trade on day one) and 3000 of the rapidly produced 1860 second edition – books offered for sale by the publisher John Murray at the same time included 7600 copies of an account of the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and 3200 copies of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. From 1860 to 1865, the monthly sales of ‘the book that made the modern world’ were less than 30, although a cheap edition of the Origin pushed its total British sales to 16,000 by the mid-1870s. ‘Considering how stiff a book it is, this is a large sale,’ Darwin noted. That said, Vestiges had sold 24,000 copies by the time Origin appeared; Darwin’s 1881 volume on earthworms was a much greater initial publishing success than the Origin; and 60,000 copies of the natural theological tracts making up the Bridgewater Treatises – whose design argument Darwin sought to destroy – had been sold between 1833 and 1860.
You might also observe that the historical Origin, as opposed to either the modern textbook cut-and-paste version or its celebrated ‘essence’, advanced natural selection as one, admittedly powerful, engine of organic change, but also quite explicitly allowed for the role of the ‘direct action’ of the ‘external conditions of life’ and the inherited ‘effects of use and disuse’ (i.e. what are commonly called ‘Lamarckian’ forces), and what Darwin called the ‘laws of growth’ (or developmental constraints causally connecting changes in one part of an organism to another part): ‘I am convinced,’ Darwin wrote, ‘that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.’
A man regarded in 2009 as an avatar of atheism had originally intended to become a clergyman and, even after he had fallen away from any semblance of Anglican orthodoxy, agreed with the Reverend Charles Kingsley and the Reverend William Whewell, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, that it was just as ‘noble’ a conception of God that he worked through divinely instituted natural laws as that he used his powers directly to create each species. Four years after the Origin appeared, Kingsley wrote that ‘God’s greatness, goodness and perpetual care I never understood as I have since I became a convert to Mr Darwin’s views.’ Darwin insisted that he saw no good reason why evolution by natural selection ‘should shock the religious feelings of anyone’. Nor do those now using Darwin to power up secularism have much time for the historical figure whose funeral at Westminster Abbey was the occasion for the archdeacon to praise Darwin for having read ‘many hitherto undeciphered lines in God’s great epic of the universe’. Disbelief, Darwin wrote, eventually ‘crept over’ him, but that disbelief is less accurately categorised as atheism than as an unstable mix of agnosticism and a robust form of deism not uncommon among clerics of the Victorian Church of England. Even in America, many late 19th-century Protestant theologians had no great problem reconciling evolution with a rational and purified Christianity. (The strong assimilation of human beings and their mental capacities to the animal model was a sticking point for many – but then it still is.) Nor was biblical fundamentalism nearly as much a feature of Victorian opposition to Darwin as it is of the early 21st century. There are almost certainly more ‘young earth creationists’ – those claiming that the world was created in exactly six 24-hour days somewhere between 5700 and 10,000 years ago – among the educated and semi-educated classes now than there were in Darwin’s time.
The historical Darwin is only a spectral presence at his own commemoration. The Origin as a complex literary and scientific performance was not a focus of the global festivities, nor was Darwin’s own understanding of what he had and had not done, still less the full range of his scientific concerns. What has just been celebrated is not the historical specificity of a mid-19th-century text, or the Victorian author of works on earthworms, orchids and insectivorous plants, but the founding of a particular intellectual lineage, a lineage that led from 1859 to some version of the gene-theory-augmented ‘modern evolutionary synthesis’ that is valued today. Darwin did not discover or invent modern evolutionary biology and its intellectual fellow travellers; at most, he was at one end of a genealogy whose latest members he would scarcely have recognised.
There’s no need to be pedantic about this. If what has happened has only something to do with the historical Darwin, it has a lot to do with us, and what some of us choose to construe and to celebrate as present-day ‘Darwinism’. Those are considerable facts in their own right. A phenomenon as widely dispersed as the Darwin commemorations is bound to have had many causes, serving many purposes. ‘Every age moulds Charles Darwin to its own preoccupations, but the temptation is hard to resist,’ Philip Ball noted in the Observer. ‘In the early 20th century, he became a prophet of social engineering and the free market. With sociobiology in the 1970s, Darwinism became a behavioural theory, while neo-Darwinist genetics prompted a bleak view of humanity as gene machines driven by the selfish imperatives of our DNA.’
One inescapable present concern is, of course, the resurgence of biblical fundamentalism. Polls and attitude surveys can give you all sorts of results depending on how the questions are phrased and posed, but in 2008 a Gallup poll found that 44 per cent of US adults accepted that ‘God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,’ while only 14 per cent agreed that ‘human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.’ America is at one extreme among developed countries – 62 per cent of Egyptians and 73 per cent of South Africans seem never to have heard of Darwin or his theory – but Britain too has many doubters: Dawkins has claimed that four in ten Britons believe in creationism, though in June 2009 a British Council survey less alarmingly found that nearly a quarter of Londoners were creationists while a little less than half agreed that there was enough scientific evidence to support Darwin’s evolutionary theory. It isn’t clear, however, what that response means in light of the finding that only 45 per cent of British adults claimed to have heard of Darwin and to know ‘at least a little’ about his theory.
The centre of gravity of Darwin Year has been a celebration of secularism, a crusade against rampant religiosity and ‘public ignorance of science’. Darwin has been figured as the Scourge of the Godly. The National Secular Society notes that ‘Darwin’s 200th birthday has become a rallying point for scientists opposing creationism.’ ‘Is it important to celebrate Charles Darwin today?’ the Independent asked, answering that ‘Darwin’s legacy is threatened by proponents of creationism. By commemorating him we defend it … No advance has so upended our worldview since the realisation that the world was not flat’ – a claim that sits awkwardly alongside complaints about the limited grip of Darwinism on modernity’s collective ‘worldview’. Dawkins, who has led the troops out of the trenches in the war against scientific ignorance and religious credulity, has a wonderfully tautological answer for that: Darwin is ‘controversial among people who don’t know anything, but if you talk to people who are actually educated, he’s not really controversial’. And: ‘In order not to believe in evolution you must either be ignorant, stupid or insane.’ In Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006), Darwin’s own stated agnosticism wasn’t nearly good enough: the Old Testament God – one of the ones who don’t exist – is famously described as ‘a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochist, capriciously malevolent bully’. ‘My dream’, Dawkins said, was that his own work ‘may help people to “come out” as atheists’. Presiding over Channel 4’s The Genius of Charles Darwin, Dawkins recruited the great agnostic naturalist as a paladin of atheism, in theology as in science less like the historical Darwin than like Dawkins himself. ...
Steven Shapin is Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation was published in 2008. Never Pure, a collection of his papers on the history and sociology of science, will be out in spring 2010.
O impacto de transferência horizontal de gene de longa distância sobre o tamanho do genoma procariótico
The impact of long-distance horizontal gene transfer on prokaryotic genome size
Otto X. Cordero1 and Paulien Hogeweg
- Author Affiliations
Theoretical Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Utrecht, Padualaan 8 3584 CH, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Edited by James M. Tiedje, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, and approved October 30, 2009 (received for review July 11, 2009)
Abstract
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is one of the most dominant forces molding prokaryotic gene repertoires. These repertoires can be as small as ≈200 genes in intracellular organisms or as large as ≈9,000 genes in large, free-living bacteria. In this article we ask what is the impact of HGT from phylogenetically distant sources, relative to the size of the gene repertoire. Using different approaches for HGT detection and focusing on both cumulative and recent evolutionary histories, we find a surprising pattern of nonlinear enrichment of long-distance transfers in large genomes. Moreover, we find a strong positive correlation between the sizes of the donor and recipient genomes. Our results also show that distant horizontal transfers are biased toward those functional groups that are enriched in large genomes, showing that the trends in functional gene content and the impact of distant transfers are interdependent. These results highlight the intimate relationship between environmental and genomic complexity in microbes and suggest that an ecological, as opposed to phylogenetic, signal in gene content gains relative importance in large-genomed bacteria.
functional gene content microbial genomes scaling lateral gene transfer
Footnotes
1To whom correspondence should be sent at present address:
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139.
E-mail: ottoxcordero@gmail.com
Author contributions: O.X.C. and P.H. designed research; O.X.C. performed research; O.X.C. analyzed data; and O.X.C. and P.H. wrote the paper.
Received 30 January 2004; received in revised form 27 April 2004; accepted 28 April 2004
Abstract
Malignant cells are characterized by abnormal segregation of chromosomes during mitosis (“aneuploidy”), generally considered a result of malignancy originating in genetic mutations. However, recent evidence supports a century-old concept that maldistribution of chromosomes (and resultant genomic instability) due to abnormalities in mitosis itself is the primary cause of malignancy rather than a mere byproduct. In normal mitosis chromosomes replicate into sister chromatids which are then precisely separated and transported into mirror-like sets by structural protein assemblies called mitotic spindles and centrioles, both composed of microtubules. The elegant yet poorly understood ballet-like movements and geometric organization occurring in mitosis have suggested guidance by some type of organizing field, however neither electromagnetic nor chemical gradient fields have been demonstrated or shown to be sufficient. It is proposed here that normal mirror-like mitosis is organized by quantum coherence and quantum entanglement among microtubule-based centrioles and mitotic spindles which ensure precise, complementary duplication of daughter cell genomes and recognition of daughter cell boundaries. Evidence and theory supporting organized quantum states in cytoplasm/nucleoplasm (and quantum optical properties of centrioles in particular) at physiological temperature are presented. Impairment of quantum coherence and/or entanglement among microtubule-based mitotic spindles and centrioles can result in abnormal distribution of chromosomes, abnormal differentiation and uncontrolled growth, and account for all aspects of malignancy. New approaches to cancer therapy and stem cell production are suggested via non-thermal laser-mediated effects aimed at quantum optical states of centrioles.
Signature in the Cell, o livro que a Nomenklatura científica não quer que você leia
Gente, finalmente uma resenha decente sobre o livro Signature in the Cell, de Stephen Meyer, um teórico e proponente do Design Inteligente [Até que rimou...]
Este livro e quaisquer outros sobre Design Inteligente podem ser encomendados na Livraria Cultura ou comprados diretamente da Amazon.
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In a Thing So Small
Ignazio de Vega
Signature in the Cell Stephen Meyer HarperOne, 2009
“Inquiry into final causes is sterile,” Francis Bacon wrote, “and, like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing.” And yet mankind continues to make such inquiries, either out of insatiable scientific curiosity or in the belief that, in ways perhaps inhospitable to expression, virgins consecrated to God do, in fact, produce something fruitful.
Certainly in our own day such inquiries are made with apostolic fervor, both by those who adhere to science and by those who follow faith – and by that segment of every population, quieter than the first two and by far more numerous, who believe it’s possible to live in both mindsets simultaneously. These are the great and rancorous ‘God Debates’ of our beleaguered modern moment, with battle-ready contestants on both sides, writers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Behe, and Kenneth Miller squaring off on TV screen and town hall stage to wrestle with eschatological questions as old as Abraham. The fool sayeth in his heart ‘there is no God’ – the wise man, apparently, sayeth it on Larry King Live.
Into this supercharged atmosphere Cambridge-educated chemist and scientific historian Stephen Meyer puts forth his own case in his new book Signature in the Cell. In its calmly-reasoned 400 pages (with an extra 100 tightly-packed endnotes), Meyer constructs the strongest argument yet made for the theory of Intelligent Design, and he does it without once advocating any living God.
He’s trained in some very abstruse and technical matters (despite his best efforts – and this is a very readable book – there are portions of Signature in the Cell that will only really be clear to other scientists), but he consistently makes his points and analogies as simple as those Charles Darwin used 150 years ago in The Origin of Species. And of course the closer analogy is to Meyer’s fellow Cambridge-alum William Paley (1743-1805), whose Natural Theology gave us the celebrated illustration of a man crossing a heath who finds a watch and considers it no strain on his common sense to imagine from that watch a watchmaker. Meyer has in some ways updated Paley for the 21st century, writing, “a computer user who traces the information on a screen back to its source invariably comes to a mind, that of a software engineer or programmer.”
But Meyer is not simply Paley gone techno – he’s not calling mankind the pinnacle of creation (as Bertrand Russell tartly observed, that would hardly be a pinnacle to brag about), and he’s not calling anybody to Sunday services. He keeps his case well clear of church, synagogue, or mosque and centers it in the laboratory where it belongs.
It’s a struggle just to get there, as he acknowledges two-thirds of the way through his mild-mannered bombshell of a book. In a classic example of turnabout being fair play, he takes the 4,000-year primacy of faith-based ontology and casts it as the persecuted underdog, and it’s hard not to nod in sympathy. When scientists encounter something like the famous Rosetta Stone, they automatically infer a cadre of scribes doing the intricate trilingual carving. When paleontologists uncover caches of chipped flints at dig sites, they automatically assume they’re looking at the handiwork of early hominid hunters. When NASA trains its massive SETI antennae toward the heavens, they presuppose that “any specified information imbedded in electromagnetic signals coming from space would indicate and intelligent source.” Meyer’s point here is one of congruence: in all cases (concerning both the known – archeological items we have to hand – and the unknown – as yet unreceived signals from another world), intelligence and intent can be known from its handiworks. And yet, when it comes to the question of life itself, even expressing a similar thought about an intelligent purpose is enough to get you mocked, sidelined, or fired. If you’re really unlucky, it might get you a visit from Christopher Hitchens.
Information is the key to all of these cases, and it’s central to Meyer’s contentions about Intelligent Design, a concept he defines as “the deliberate choice of a conscious, intelligent agent or person to affect a particular outcome, end, or objective.” Years ago, Richard Dawkins characterized our increasing knowledge of DNA as “the final, killing blow to the belief that living material is deeply distinct from nonliving material,” but Meyer tackles this and other cautions head-on (his serial dismantling of Dawkins throughout the book is conducted with a very satisfyingly mandarin delicacy). Unlike many other proponents of Intelligent Design, Meyer isn’t afraid of the newly-revealed intricacies of DNA: he welcomes them.
His key assertion is both mathematical and intuitive – namely, that information and uncertainty are inversely related:
By equating information with the reduction of uncertainty, [U.S. mathematician Claude] Shannon’s theory implied a mathematical relationship between information and probability. Specifically, it showed that the amount of information conveyed by an event is inversely proportional to the probability of its occurrence.
Every heavily-loaded, efficiently-coded system of information we know of was intentionally made, not generated by random chance and accrued mutation. All information top-heavy systems have authors, designers. Their handiwork is separated from the rest of the natural world by the simple asymptote of their own complexity, and none more so than DNA:
In prokaryotic cells, DNA replication involves more than thirty specialized proteins to perform tasks necessary for building and accurately copying the genetic molecule. These specialized proteins include DNA polymerases, primases, helicases, topoisomerases, DNA-binding proteins, DNA ligases, and editing enzymes. DNA needs these proteins to copy the genetic information contained in DNA. But the proteins that copy the genetic information in DNA are themselves built from that information. This again poses what is, at the very least, a curiosity: the production of proteins requires DNA, but the production of DNA requires proteins.
(When Meyer talked with a software engineer at the Institute where he works, the engineer commented on the things he’d observed while trying to create a program that simulates cell organization and growth:
It’s like we are looking at 8.0 or 9.0 versions of design strategies that we have just begun to implement. When I see how the cell processes information, it gives me the eerie feeling that someone else figured this out before we got here.)
Meyer never names that someone else – he’s concerned only with getting the possibility re-admitted to the room it once owned. Signature in the Cell pushes forward no theistic agenda; it merely, boldly, convincingly makes the case that among the many competing theories explaining the rise of life from lifelessness, explaining the mind-boggling complexity of life and the DNA that makes it possible, Intelligent Design is not only a legitimate possibility but – and here Meyers’ book will raise ire – the most likely possibility, from the standpoint both of science and common experience where, as Meyer puts it, “intelligent agents produce, generate, and transmit information all the time.” He elaborates:
Experience shows that large amounts of specified complexity or information (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source – from a mind or a personal agent. Since intelligence is the only known source of specified information (at least starting from a nonbiological source), the presence of specified information-rich sequences in even the simplest living systems points definitely to the past existence and activity of a designing intelligence. ...
Read more here/Leia mais aqui. Ignazio de Vega is a native of Trujillo, Peru, and a seminary student in Lima. He is a regular contributor to Open Letters Monthly.
História de uma baleia de 4.5 milhões de anos atrás encontrada na Espanha
Story of 4.5-Million-Year-Old Whale Found in Spain
ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2009) — In 2006, a team of Spanish and American researchers found the fossil remains of a whale, 4.5 million years old, in Bonares, Huelva. Now they have published, for the first time, the results of the decay and fossilisation process that started with the death of the young cetacean, possibly a baleen whale from the Mysticeti group.
These are vertebra colonized by bivalves. (Credit: Esperante et al.)
This is not the first discovery of the partial fossil remains of a whale from the Lower Pliocene (five million years ago) in the Huelva Sands sedimentary formation, but it is the first time that the results of the processes of fossilisation and fossil deposition following the death of a whale have been published.
The work of this international group, published in the latest issue of Geologica Acta, is the first taphonomic (fossilisation process) study done on cetacean remains combined with other paleontological disciplines such as ichnology (the study of trace fossils).
"Once the whale was dead, its body was at the mercy of scavengers such as sharks, and we know that one of these voracious attacks resulted in one of its fins being pulled off and moved about ten metres. It remained in this position in the deposit studied," Fernando Muñiz, one of the study's authors and a researcher in the University of Huelva's "Tectonics and Paleontology" research group, currently working as a palaeontologist for the City Council of Lepe, in Huelva, said.
The researchers have described the fossil remains discovered in Bonares, Huelva, at an altitude of 80 metres above sea level and 24 kilometres from the sea, and have studied the main taxonomic characteristics and associated fauna. The team also created a paleoenvironmental model to explain how the skeleton -- which is incomplete apart from some pieces such as its three-metre-long hemimandibular jaw bones -- was deposited. ...
Esperante, R., Muñiz Guinea, F., and Nick, K.E. Taphonomy of a Mysticeti whale in the Lower Pliocene Huelva Sands Formation (Southern Spain). Geologica Acta, 7(4): 489-504, December 2009
Abstract
This paper reports the occurrence of an incomplete fossil baleen whale skeleton in the Lower Pliocene Huelva Sands Formation (Guadalquivir basin) near the town of Bonares, southwestern Spain. The skeleton was found in the highly bioturbated glauconitic sandstone unit in association with Neopycnodonte cochlear shells. Several morphological features of the mandibles, scapula and vertebrae suggest that the specimen belongs in the suborden Mysticeti, family Balaenopteridae. Most bones show abrasion due to a long exposure on the seafloor, and some bones show shark tooth marks and both micro- and macro-bioerosion by scavengers. The position of the bones suggests that the carcass landed on the seafloor on its left side and then turned right side up. Sedimentological and paleontological features indicate that the whale was buried in shallow platform waters under low sedimentation rates.
Entre alguns macacos, os dentes são para tempos difíceis
Among Apes, Teeth Are Made for the Toughest Times
ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2009) — The teeth of some apes are formed primarily to handle the most stressful times when food is scarce, according to new research performed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The findings imply that if humanity is serious about protecting its close evolutionary cousins, the food apes eat during these tough periods -- and where they find it -- must be included in conservation efforts.
What's a biological anthropologist from George Washington University doing teamed with a National Institute of Standards and Technology materials researcher? Together, they study the teeth of great apes to support the theory that ape teeth and jaws have evolved to handle fallback foods, the diet that apes follow when their primary foods are unavailable. (Credit: NIST Public Affairs Office)
The interdisciplinary team, which brought together anthropologists from George Washington University (GWU) and fracture mechanics experts from NIST, has provided the first evidence that natural selection in three ape species has favored individuals whose teeth can most easily handle the "fallback foods" they choose when their preferred fare is less available. All of these apes -- gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees -- favor a diet of fruit whenever possible. But when fruit disappears from their usual foraging grounds, each species responds in a different way -- and has developed teeth formed to reflect the differences.
"It makes sense if you think about it," says GWU's Paul Constantino. "When resources are scarce, that's when natural selection is highly active in weeding out the less fit, so animals without the necessary equipment to get through those tough times won't pass on their genes to the next generation."
In this case, the necessary equipment is the right set of molars. The team examined ape tooth enamel and found that several aspects of molar shape and structure can be explained in terms of adapting to eat fallback foods. For instance, gorillas' second choice is leaves and tree bark, which are much tougher than fruit, while orangutans fall back to nuts and seeds, which are comparatively hard. ...
Received: 30 September 2008; Accepted: 24 October 2008
DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER (DOI)
10.1002/ajpa.20978
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Professores, pesquisadores e alunos de universidades públicas e privadas com acesso ao site CAPES/Periódicos podem ler gratuitamente este artigo do American Journal of Physical Anthropology e de outras 15.474 publicações científicas.
Fóssil guardado por um século 'refaz' a árvore genealógica dos carnívoros
Fossil Shelved for a Century Reworks Carnivore Family Tree: Limbs Changes Understanding of Early Carnivore Locomotion
ScienceDaily (Dec. 23, 2009) — More than a hundred years after its discovery, the limbs and vertebrae of a fossil have been pulled off the shelf at the American Museum of Natural History to revise the view of early carnivore lifestyles. Carnivores -- currently a diverse group of mostly meat-eating mammals like bears, cats, raccoons, seals, and hyenas -- had been considered arboreal in their early evolutionary history. But now that the skeleton of 'Miacis' uintensis has been unpacked from its matrix of sandstone, it is clear that some early carnivores were built to walk on the ground at least part of the time. The new research is published this month in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
An early carnivore that was a close relative of Miacis uintensis, Vulpavus, is about to climb on a tree trunk. This illustrates the varied locomotor adaptations seen across even the earliest relatives of living carnivorans. (Credit: Marlene Donnelly and The Field Museum)
"Carnivores are highly varied today, and they were also very diverse in the past," says lead author Michelle Spaulding, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and the Museum. "Examination of this fossil tells us that they were not all sitting in trees, looking down. 'M.' uintensis did not have a lot of adaptations for an arboreal lifestyle."
"It is typically thought that the miacoids of the Eocene -- the basal fossil relatives of modern Carnivora that root the family tree -- were arboreal," concurs co-author John Flynn, Frick Curator of Fossil Mammals at the Museum. "But we now are beginning to see that there was a greater diversity of locomotor styles in early carnivores."
'M.' uintensis was discovered on an American Museum of Natural History expedition in 1894 among the brown and red sandstones of the White River beds in Utah. Paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, who first named the iconic dinosaurs Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor mongoliensis, described the teeth of the newly discovered mammal carnivore species in a Museum monograph the following year. The specimen dates to 39-42 million years ago.
But the species is more than teeth and a jaw. Another specimen found in 1896 is more complete, represented by much of the skull, shoulder bones, limb bones, and even some tiny foot and finger bones. This specimen remained on a shelf in the Museum, largely ignored, because its teeth were badly crushed.
"When I examined the femur, I immediately knew this was a terrestrial animal because of the shape of its knee. It has a long and deep groove where the patella, or kneecap, would go," says Spaulding. If the early carnivore had been exclusively arboreal, the end of the femur would have had a flatter surface so that the joint would have a greater range of motion. Spaulding and Flynn found other indicators of terrestrial locomotion on bones like the radius, one of the two lower arm bones. The distal part of the radius, or the portion of the bone that would be in contact with the wrist, of 'M.' uintensis has an oval shape with a projection above the rim. These features also reduce the range of motion, making limbs more stable for walking on the ground. Other features, however, indicate that 'M.' uintensis had some adaptations for climbing, so this early carnivore was most likely flexible in locomotion style, active mostly on the ground but also capable of climbing bushes and trees. ...
Discutindo a filogenia eucariótica à luz de árvores de multigenes
Kingdoms Protozoa and Chromista and the eozoan root of the eukaryotic tree
Thomas Cavalier-Smith*
- Author Affiliations
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK *tom.cavalier-smith@zoo.ox.ac.uk
Abstract
I discuss eukaryotic deep phylogeny and reclassify the basal eukaryotic kingdom Protozoa and derived kingdom Chromista in the light of multigene trees. I transfer the formerly protozoan Heliozoa and infrakingdoms Alveolata and Rhizaria into Chromista, which is sister to kingdom Plantae and arguably originated by synergistic double internal enslavement of green algal and red algal cells. I establish new subkingdoms (Harosa; Hacrobia) for the expanded Chromista. The protozoan phylum Euglenozoa differs immensely from other eukaryotes in its nuclear genome organization (trans-spliced multicistronic transcripts), mitochondrial DNA organization, cytochrome c-type biogenesis, cell structure and arguably primitive mitochondrial protein-import and nuclear DNA prereplication machineries. The bacteria-like absence of mitochondrial outer-membrane channel Tom40 and DNA replication origin-recognition complexes from trypanosomatid Euglenozoa roots the eukaryotic tree between Euglenozoa and all other eukaryotes (neokaryotes), or within Euglenozoa. Given their unique properties, I segregate Euglenozoa from infrakingdom Excavata (now comprising only phyla Percolozoa, Loukozoa, Metamonada), grouping infrakingdoms Euglenozoa and Excavata as the ancestral protozoan subkingdom Eozoa. I place phylum Apusozoa within the derived protozoan subkingdom Sarcomastigota. Clarifying early eukaryote evolution requires intensive study of properties distinguishing Euglenozoa from neokaryotes and Eozoa from neozoa (eukaryotes except Eozoa; ancestrally defined by haem lyase).
O que a Grande Mídia Tupiniquim precisa fazer em 2010
Transcrevo aqui a definição do propósito do jornalismo que encontrei online - o de fornecer informação ao público para que possa ser livre e autogovernante. Segundo os autores do livro The Elements of Journalism - What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, Bill Kovach e Tom Rosenstiel, para realizar esta tarefa os jornalistas devem seguir os passos abaixo:
1. A primeira obrigação do jornalismo é com a verdade.
2. Sua primeira lealdade é com os cidadãos.
3. Sua essência é uma disciplina de verificação.
4. Seus praticantes devem manter independência daqueles a quem cobrem.
5. Deve servir como um monitor independente do poder.
6. Deve fornecer um fórum para a crítica pública e compromisso.
7. Deve se esforçar para tornar o significante interessante e relevante.
8. Deve manter as notícias de forma abrangente e proporcional.
9. Aos seus praticantes deve ser permitido exercer suas consciência pessoal.
Revelação da tradução: mais descobertas confirmam que os pequenos RNAs trabalham de maneiras 'misteriosas'
The Scientist
Volume 23 | Issue 12 | Page 51
By Jef Akst
Translation Revelation
More findings confirm that small RNAs work in mysterious ways.
Nearly 20 years after its discovery, RNA interference (RNAi) is part of biology’s orthodoxy. Small RNA molecules can disrupt gene expression by degrading messenger RNAs (mRNAs) on their way to becoming proteins, or otherwise interfering with translation. But the discovery that these same small RNA molecules might be able to do just the opposite—enhance gene expression—was somewhat heretical.
In 2007, molecular biologist Shobha Vasudevan of Yale University and her colleagues produced the unanticipated findings: Small RNA molecules known to be involved in RNAi, known as microRNAs (miRNAs), can activate translation, promoting the conversion of mRNAs to proteins. It was a “surprise finding,” Vasudevan recalls.
Further investigation revealed that activation occurred only during cell-cycle arrest, induced by serum starvation. In actively growing cells, on the other hand, miRNAs suppressed translation. The exact mechanism of activation is unclear, Vasudevan says, but it appears to involve the recruitment of Argonaute (AGO) proteins—known participants in the RNAi pathway—and fragile X mental retardation–related protein 1 (FXR1). These proteins combine with the miRNA to form complexes that bind to the 3' untranslated region (3'-UTR) of the mRNA of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNFα) to initiate translation.
This discovery was hot on the heels of another unexpected finding—that of RNA activation (RNAa) at the level of gene transcription. Just one year earlier, molecular biologists Long-Cheng Li and Robert Place and their colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, found that small RNAs could switch on gene transcription1—a finding that was corroborated just a few months later by a group of researchers working independently at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.2 (See the May 2009 issue of The Scientist.) And last year, additional research revealed more of the mysterious qualities behind translation activation by miRNA.
“These papers are making us look at miRNAs as a far more versatile system of regulating gene expression,” says Vasudevan, now at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. ...
Marilyn Roosinck 'falou e disse': sozinha a teoria da evolução de Darwin não pode explicar todos os aspectos da vida.
Marilyn Roosinck (Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation em Ardmore, OK, USA) acredita que a evidência acumulada de pesquisas sobre vírus indica que a teoria da evolução de Darwin sozinha não pode explicar todos os aspectos do desenvolvimento da vida, mas que as lacunas podem ser preenchidas com a teoria simbiótica da evolução.
Fonte:
EMBO reports VOL 11 | NO 1 | 2010 Phillip Hunter, The missing link - Viruses revise evolutionary theory
Crise na teoria da evolução? Que crise? Não existe crise epistêmica na teoria da evolução pois é uma teoria científica tão corroborada quanto a lei da gravidade...
Fui, nem sei por que, pensando na cara de Darwin, o cara que teve a maior ideia que toda a humanidade já teve (menos Dennett, menos) e que pensou que tinha ejetado a ideia de design de uma vez por todas da ciência. Que venga la nueva teoría de evolución - a SÍNTESE EVOLUTIVA AMPLIADA que não deve e nem pode ser selecionista. Razões das evidências que não corroboram este mecanismo evolutivo que Darwin disse ser sua teoria (e não era! Alfred Russel Wallace e outros que o digam).
Darwin morreu, gente! Já era! Kaput! Viva Darwin!!!
O 'furore' que vai causar o artigo "The Universal Plausibility Metric (UPM) & Principle (UPP)"
The Universal Plausibility Metric (UPM) & Principle (UPP) David L Abel
Department of ProtoBioCybernetics/ProtoBioSemiotics, The Gene Emergence Project of The Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc, 113-120 Hedgewood Dr Greenbelt, MD 20770-1610, USA
Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 2009, 6:27doi:10.1186/1742-4682-6-27
Published: 3 December 2009
Abstract
Background
Mere possibility is not an adequate basis for asserting scientific plausibility. A precisely defined universal bound is needed beyond which the assertion of plausibility, particularly in life-origin models, can be considered operationally falsified. But can something so seemingly relative and subjective as plausibility ever be quantified? Amazingly, the answer is, "Yes." A method of objectively measuring the plausibility of any chance hypothesis (The Universal Plausibility Metric [UPM]) is presented. A numerical inequality is also provided whereby any chance hypothesis can be definitively falsified when its UPM metric of ξ is < 1 (The Universal Plausibility Principle [UPP]). Both UPM and UPP pre-exist and are independent of any experimental design and data set.
Conclusion
No low-probability hypothetical plausibility assertion should survive peer-review without subjection to the UPP inequality standard of formal falsification (ξ < 1).
Este artigo vai causar um grande 'furore' na Nomenklatura científica. Especialmente em relação aos cenários especulativos da teoria geral da evolução de Darwin:
1. Ao explicar por que o progresso da ciência depende da nossa rejeição de teorias falseadas e a não retenção de explicações altamente improváveis:
"But at some point our reluctance to exclude any possibility becomes stultifying to operational science. Falsification is critical to narrowing down the list of serious possibilities. Almost all hypotheses are possible. Few of them wind up being helpful and scientific ally productive. Just because a hypothesis is possible should not grant that hypothesis scientific respectability. More attention to the concept of “infeasibility” has been suggested. Millions of dollars in astrobiology grant money have been wasted on scenarios that are possible, but plausibly bankrupt. The question for scientific methodology should not be, “Is this scenario possible?” The question should be, “Is this possibility a plausible scientific hypothesis?” One chance in 10200 is theoretically possible, but given maximum cosmic probabilistic resources, such a possibility is hardly plausible. With funding resources rapidly drying up, science needs a foundational principle by which to falsify a myriad of theoretical possibilities that are not worthy of serious scientific consideration and modeling."
2. A inclusão indevida na ciência de conjecturas metafísicas que ignoram ou inflacionam os recursos probabilísticos:
"The application of The Universal Plausibility Principle (UPP) precludes the inclusion in scientific literature of wild metaphysical conjectures that conveniently ignore or illegitimately inflate probabilistic resources to beyond the limits of observational science. The UPM and UPP together prevent rapidly shrinking funding and labor resources from being wasted on preposterous notions that have no legitimate place in science. At best, notions with ξ < 1 should be considered not only operationally falsified hypotheses, but bad metaphysics on a plane equivalent to blind faith and superstition."
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Acho que no Brasil, o Prof. Dr. Décio Krause (UFSC), autor do Introdução aos Fundamentos Axiomáticos da Ciência (São Paulo, EPU, 2002, pp. xii + 211, ISBN 85-12-79110, e João Carlos Marques Magalhães (UFPR) sejam os cientistas brasileiros mais indicados para replicar a tese de Abel.
A especiação como uma força ativa promovendo a evolução genética
Trends in Ecology & Evolution Volume 25, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 14-20
Speciation as an active force in promoting genetic evolution
Chris Venditti1 and Mark Pagel1,2
1 School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6BX, UK
2 Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
Abstract
There is a growing appreciation among evolutionary biologists that the rate and tempo of molecular evolution might often be altered at or near the time of speciation, i.e. that speciation is in some way a special time for genes. Molecular phylogenies frequently reveal increased rates of genetic evolution associated with speciation and other lines of investigation suggest that various types of abrupt genomic disruption can play an important role in promoting speciation via reproductive isolation. These phenomena are in conflict with the gradual view of molecular evolution that is implicit in much of our thinking about speciation and in the tools of modern biology. This raises the prospect of studying the molecular evolutionary consequences of speciation per se and studying the footprint of speciation as an active force in promoting genetic divergence. Here we discuss the reasons to believe that speciation can play such a role and elaborate on possible mechanisms for accelerated rates of evolution following speciation. We provide an example of how it is possible detect whether accelerated bursts of evolution occur in neutral and/or adaptive regions of genes and discuss the implications of rapid episodes of change for conventional models of molecular evolution. Speciation might often owe more to ephemeral and essentially arbitrary events that cause reproductive isolation than to the gradual and regular tug of natural selection that draws a species into a new niche.
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Professores, pesquisadores e alunos de universidades públicas e privadas com acesso ao site CAPES/Periódicos podem ler gratuitamente este artigo da Trends in Ecology & Evolution e de outras publicações científicas.
The party's over, it's time to call it a day. They've burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away. It's time to wind up the masquerade. Just make your mind up -- the piper must be paid. The party's over, the candles flicker and dim. You danced and dreamed through the night, it seemed to be right just being with him. Now you must wake up, all dreams must end. Take off your make up, the party's over. It's all over, my friend.
-- "The Party's Over" (Words by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; music by Jule Styne; performed by Nat King Cole)
Darwin Year is drawing to a close.
The festivities went into full swing on February 12 (Darwin's 200th birthday), with parties at hundreds of locations in scores of countries. There were birthday cakes galore. At least two (in Wagga Wagga, Australia and Sopot, Poland) boasted 200 candles; one cake (in Pune, India) was shaped like a finch. At two parties, guests were served "primordial soup."
In Arcata, California, the Department of Biological Sciences at Humboldt State University invited partygoers to bring ornaments representing their favorite organisms to put on the "tree of life," and it offered a prize to those who came dressed as Darwin. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy sponsored "the largest party in town," including birthday cake, 200 free drinks, and"science-themed student rock bands."
The New York State Museum in Albany not only served birthday cake in Darwin's honor, but also presented four cooking demonstrations by local chefs paired with biologists, each demonstration to "focus on a different branch of the Tree of Life: vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, and fungi."
For those wanting to honor Darwin online, New York-based Internet consultant Phil Terry set up a "Join Darwin on Facebook" site where well-wishers could record videos, pen poems, draw pictures, and otherwise wish the Father of Evolution a happy 200th. According to Kendall Crolius, who assisted Terry, volunteers working on the project referred to themselves as "proud monkeys."
For those wanting souvenirs, the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution in England sold "limited edition Darwin and Beyond mugs" for £7.50 each. The American Association for the Advancement of Science offered "Viva la Evolución" T-Shirts, with Darwin wearing a Che Guevara-style beret.
Celebrations continued throughout the year. In England, the Rambert Dance Company put on a show that was "a distillation of Darwinian ideas about evolution, particularly sexual selection." The Linnean Society of London [15] hosted Kelley Swain, who was inspired by the works of Charles Darwin to write a book of poetry, Darwin's Microscope, and read selections from it in a talk titled "The Poetry of Science." Tea was served in the library, followed by a wine reception.
Graças a D's, oops, a Darwin que 2009 está acabando e junto com ele o fim das louvaminhices, beija-mão e beija-pé de Darwin. Ufa, la maládie du siécle, oops du post-modernism, chérie, est trés sei lá o quê!
As palavras funcionando como alelos: conectando a evolução da linguagem com aprendizes bayesianos de modelos de deriva genética
Words as alleles: connecting language evolution with Bayesian learners to models of genetic drift
Florencia Reali* and Thomas L. Griffiths - Author Affiliations
Department of Psychology, 3210 Tolman Hall, MC 1650, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-1650, USA
* Author for correspondence (florencia.reali@gmail.com).
Abstract
Scientists studying how languages change over time often make an analogy between biological and cultural evolution, with words or grammars behaving like traits subject to natural selection. Recent work has exploited this analogy by using models of biological evolution to explain the properties of languages and other cultural artefacts. However, the mechanisms of biological and cultural evolution are very different: biological traits are passed between generations by genes, while languages and concepts are transmitted through learning. Here we show that these different mechanisms can have the same results, demonstrating that the transmission of frequency distributions over variants of linguistic forms by Bayesian learners is equivalent to the Wright–Fisher model of genetic drift. This simple learning mechanism thus provides a justification for the use of models of genetic drift in studying language evolution. In addition to providing an explicit connection between biological and cultural evolution, this allows us to define a ‘neutral’ model that indicates how languages can change in the absence of selection at the level of linguistic variants. We demonstrate that this neutral model can account for three phenomena: the s-shaped curve of language change, the distribution of word frequencies, and the relationship between word frequencies and extinction rates.
language evolution genetic drift Bayesian inference neutral models
Footnotes
↵1 Our description corresponds to a ‘haploid’ version of the Wright–Fisher model, with just one allele per organism. In the more conventional diploid model, an additional factor of 2 appears in front of N, as N is taken to be the number of organisms rather than the number of alleles.
↵2 Note that, under certain conditions, the shape of the stationary distribution does not correspond exactly to the shape of the prior. For example, as illustrated in figure 1 for the case of K = 2 and N = 10, a uniform prior given by α/2 = 1 is associated with a bell-shaped stationary distribution.
↵3 As suggested by an anonymous reviewer, it is possible that the model in Baxter et al. (2006) admits an extension to accommodate the infinite case, but this possibility has not been explored in previous work.
↵4 In our example we assume that languages can only maintain one kind of word order (and that there are only two possibilities). This is simplifying assumption, as illustrated by languages such as German where word order in subordinate clauses can differ from word order in main clauses.
A regulação pós-tradução impacta o destino dos genes duplicados
Posttranslational regulation impacts the fate of duplicated genes
Grigoris D. Amoutzias a,b,1, Ying He a,b,1, Jonathan Gordon a,b, Dimitris Mossialos c, Stephen G. Oliver d,2 and Yves Van de Peer a,b,3
- Author Affiliations
aDepartment of Plant Systems Biology, Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, 9052 Ghent, Belgium
bDepartment of Molecular Genetics, Ghent University, 9052 Ghent, Belgium
cDepartment of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, University of Thessaly, Larissa GR 41221, Greece
dCambridge Systems Biology Centre and Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1GA, United Kingdom
Edited by Marc C. E. Van Montagu, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium, and approved November 17, 2009 (received for review October 8, 2009)
↵1 G.D.A. and Y.H. contributed equally to this work.
Abstract
Gene and genome duplications create novel genetic material on which evolution can work and have therefore been recognized as a major source of innovation for many eukaryotic lineages. Following duplication, the most likely fate is gene loss; however, a considerable fraction of duplicated genes survive. Not all genes have the same probability of survival, but it is not fully understood what evolutionary forces determine the pattern of gene retention. Here, we use genome sequence data as well as large-scale phosphoproteomics data from the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which underwent a whole-genome duplication ∼100 mya, and show that the number of phosphorylation sites on the proteins they encode is a major determinant of gene retention. Protein phosphorylation motifs are short amino acid sequences that are usually embedded within unstructured and rapidly evolving protein regions. Reciprocal loss of those ancestral sites and the gain of new ones are major drivers in the retention of the two surviving duplicates and in their acquisition of distinct functions. This way, small changes in the sequences of unstructured regions in proteins can contribute to the rapid rewiring and adaptation of regulatory networks.
2To whom correspondence may be addressed at: Cambridge Systems Biology Centre and Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, Sanger Building, 80 Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1GA, United Kingdom. E-mail: steve.oliver@bioc.cam.ac.uk.
3To whom correspondence may be addressed at: Department of Plant Systems Biology, Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), 9052 Ghent, Belgium. E-mail: yves.vandepeer@psb.vib-ugent.be.
Author contributions: G.D.A., D.M., S.G.O., and Y.V.d.P. designed research; G.D.A., Y.H., and J.G. performed research; G.D.A., Y.H., and J.G. analyzed data; and G.D.A., S.G.O., and Y.V.d.P. wrote the paper.
The C.M.S. (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector—one of the Large Hadron Collider’s four main experiments—near the Swiss-French border. Its mission: to re-create conditions at the beginning of time.
Compared with the market-driven, killer-app insta-culture of the Digital Age, the new Large Hadron Collider exists in a near-magical realm, a $9 billion cathedral of science that is apparently, in any practical sense, useless. Exploring its whizbang machinery, deep underground, the author probes the collider’s brush with disaster last year—and the secrets it may soon unlock. Plus: More photos of the Large Hadron Collider.
Among the defining attributes of now are ever tinier gadgets, ever shorter attention spans, and the privileging of marketplace values above all. Life is manically parceled into financial quarters, three-minute YouTube videos, 140-character tweets. In my pocket is a phone/computer/camera/video recorder/TV/stereo system half the size of a pack of Marlboros. And what about pursuing knowledge purely for its own sake, without any real thought of, um, monetizing it? Cute.
And so in our hyper-capitalist flibbertigibbet day and age, the new Large Hadron Collider, buried about 330 feet beneath the Swiss-French border, near Geneva, is a bizarre outlier.
The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, cern, is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours. It’s also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, punctuated by shopping-mall-size subterranean caverns and fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs.
The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.
If all has gone according to plan, the physicists at cern by late November will have flipped a switch, and proton beams in each of two pipes will have started shooting around the ring, one beam clockwise and the other counterclockwise, at an energy level of 3.5 trillion electron volts, several times that of the current most-powerful-particle-accelerator-ever-built. And then, any day now, the L.H.C.’s proton streams will be forced to begin colliding head on, at a combined energy of seven trillion electron volts, producing up to 800 million collisions per second.
So many years, so much effort, so much money and matériel, so much energy and cutting-edge ingenuity. And yet the wizards at the controls aren’t really out to produce anything practical, or solve any urgent human problem. Rather, the L.H.C. is, essentially, a super-microscope that will use the largest energies ever generated to examine trillionth-of-a-millimeter bits of matter and record evanescent blinks of energy that last for only trillionths of a trillionth of a second. It’s also a kind of time machine, in the sense that it will reproduce the conditions that prevailed 14 billion years ago, giving scientists a look at the universe as it existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang. The goal—and it’s a hope, a dream, a set of strong suspicions, rather than a certainty—is to achieve a deeper, better, truer understanding of the fundamental structure and nature of existence.
In other words, it’s one of the most awesome scientific enterprises of all time, even though it looks like a monumental folly. Or else, possibly, the reverse.
The Quench
When the proton beams start shooting around, it will in fact be for the second time. The On buttons of the new super-collider were first punched on September 10, 2008, and for a while everything was going extraordinarily well. The start-up had been preceded by some well-publicized hysteria on the fringes, with alarmists worrying that the L.H.C. would create a black hole that could swallow the earth. (The fear is unfounded.) There was also a cern subplot in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, in which Illuminati steal anti-matter from the L.H.C. in order to evaporate the Vatican. (Also not a concern—it would take an impossible amount of time and energy to produce enough anti-matter to make a bomb.) On September 10, the physicists at cern could not have been more pleased. Within 50 minutes of the start-up the proton beams were firing perfectly. Plus, says Dave Barney, a British physicist who has devoted his professional life to the collider, “the world hadn’t been destroyed. So that was nice.”
But then, Barney notes, “the 19th happened.” By September 19, a Friday, the collider had been humming along for nine days, and proton collisions were imminent. In one of its eight two-mile-long sectors, the power had already been raised almost to the maximum with no problems, while seven of the eight sectors were “commissioned,” or fully activated. The last to go was the sector beneath the French villages of Crozet and Échenevex, at the foot of the Jura Mountains. Around noon the power there was cranked up past 5 trillion electron volts, toward 5.5.
The tunnel of the L.H.C. is a 12-foot-wide concrete tube, like a very large sewer pipe but lit and air-conditioned for the technicians who must access the machinery. The accelerator consists of 1,232 cylinders, each of them 50 feet long and 2 feet thick, strung through the tunnel like a 17-mile chain of 35-ton sausage links laid in a circle. The proton beams are fired through three-inch pipes embedded in the center of the sausages. Surrounding those pipes inside the giant sausages are powerful electromagnets, which make the protons travel in their great circles at nearly the speed of light. And surrounding each of the magnets—the sausage casing—is a jacket of liquid helium to cool the super-conducting cables. When they’re turned on, the force inside, pushing out against the super-hardened steel container, is equal to the power of a 747 taking off.
The big magnetic sausages are called dipoles, and the bundled cables connecting each one to its end-to-end neighbor are packed inside copper casings the size of a cigarette lighter. Each casing is filled with solder to make the connection solid. As it happened, that was the source of the problem: one of the copper casings on one of the dipoles had not been properly soldered. And so, around midday on September 19, 2008, the connection “quenched”—which means a super-conducting cable suddenly lost its super-conductivity, turning into an ordinarily conductive wire that couldn’t take the 11,000 amps of electricity.
Sparks erupted. An intense electrical arc began burning a hole in the dipole’s steel jacket. Pressurized helium turned from liquid to gas and blasted into the tunnel, creating a huge pressure wave. In a domino-like chain reaction, 35-ton dipoles were jerking and smashing against other 35-ton dipoles, some blown two feet off their moorings.
The main damage was done within 20 seconds. It was all over a half-minute after that. Ten of the million-dollar dipoles were wrecked and smoldering. Twenty-nine more were damaged. The destruction extended for more than 2,000 feet, and smoke and soot billowed through the tunnel. In the vicinity of the accident the air had been instantly supercooled by the tons of escaping helium—which meant that several hundred feet underground, sealed off from skies and weather, snow began to fall. “Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice,” wrote Robert Frost, but in this sector of the Large Hadron Collider, the showstopping spectacle involved both at once.
Up on the surface, in the control rooms, there was in fact no sound, no bump, no rumble. No sirens or Klaxons went off. But in the main control room, someone noticed that green tabs on one of the 300 computer monitors had suddenly turned red: the emergency Stop buttons in the tunnel had been hit. No one had been down there to hit them—the tremendous pressure wave of escaping helium had fortuitously done the job. More monitors started turning red. “The beam is gone,” Alick Macpherson, a particle physicist from New Zealand, said to the scientists around him. In many languages at once people quietly muttered “Fuck” and “Shit.” ...
"I had a dream that this happened. Darwin rode up to me on a unicorn and told me that reason had triumphed. really." [Eu sonhei que isto aconteceu. Darwin veio até mim montado em um unicórnio, e me disse que a razão triunfara. Realmente.]
Agência FAPESP – A FAPESP e a Vale S.A. assinam, nesta quarta-feira (23/12), um acordo de cooperação científica e tecnológica em cerimônia na sede da Fundação, em São Paulo. O convênio apoiará a pesquisa científica, tecnológica ou de inovação a ser desenvolvida em áreas como mineração, energia, biodiversidade e produtos ferrosos para siderurgia.
FAPESP e Vale S.A. assinam nesta quarta-feira (23/12), em evento na sede da Fundação, um acordo de cooperação científica e tecnológica para apoiar pesquisas em áreas como mineração, energia e biodiversidade (Foto: Vale S.A.)
A previsão de investimentos é de até R$ 40 milhões, sendo metade proveniente da FAPESP e metade da Vale. Os temas contemplados no acordo, alguns bastante abrangentes, refletem a complexidade das atividades da Vale e desafios que a companhia enfrenta. “Essa amplitude abre múltiplas oportunidades para pesquisa em várias áreas do conhecimento”, disse Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, diretor científico da FAPESP.
Segundo Brito Cruz, o acordo de cooperação é mais uma oportunidade que a FAPESP oferece à comunidade de pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo de participar de temas de pesquisas relevantes para uma grande empresa e para a sociedade brasileira.
“A FAPESP investe tradicionalmente na formação de recursos humanos e no apoio à pesquisa acadêmica em todas as áreas do conhecimento e, ao mesmo tempo, considera importante fomentar a pesquisa em projetos que explorem as possibilidades de interação entre universidades e empresas”, afirmou.
A Fundação, lembra Brito Cruz, firmou recentemente acordos de cooperação com companhias como Microsoft, Dedini, Braskem e Sabesp, entre outras.
O acordo de cooperação FAPESP-Vale tem foco “no desenvolvimento de tecnologias e processos capazes de mudar paradigmas dentro de empresa”, segundo Luiz Eugênio Mello, diretor do Instituto Tecnológico Vale (ITV), o braço de pesquisa da mineradora.
Segundo ele, a Vale, que é a maior empresa privada do país e a segunda maior mineradora do mundo, pretende, com o acordo, aproximar-se de cientistas de instituições paulistas, a fim de desenvolver pesquisa de fronteira em áreas consideradas estratégicas.
“Não se trata de obter apenas ganhos incrementais ou pontuais, pois, para isso, continuaremos investindo em pesquisa própria e em parcerias com universidades e pesquisadores”, disse à Agência FAPESP.
Mello, que é professor do Departamento de Fisiologia da Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp) e presidente da Federação de Sociedades de Biologia Experimental (FeSBE), afirma que um dos principais objetivos da parceria é levar para a empresa o conhecimento produzido nas universidades e nas instituições de pesquisa, adotando um modelo de inovação aberta.
A Vale investiu, em 2008, US$ 38 milhões em convênios para desenvolver projetos de interesse da empresa. A empresa aplicou, naquele ano, US$ 1,13 bilhão em pesquisa e desenvolvimento – com um faturamento de US$ 38,5 bilhões – e tem em seus quadros cerca de 500 pesquisadores no Brasil e no exterior, sendo a metade deles de doutores.
“Temos parcerias com a Universidade de São Paulo na área de logística, com a Federal de Minas Gerais em hidrometalurgia e com a Federal de Ouro Preto em mineração”, disse Mello.
Mello ressalta que a parceria com a FAPESP se justifica pelo tamanho da comunidade científica de São Paulo, que é a maior no país e responde por 51% do número de artigos publicados em revistas internacionais indexadas, e a experiência da Fundação na colaboração com empresas.
Áreas de pesquisa
O acordo entre a FAPESP e a Vale engloba uma ampla gama de temas de pesquisa, mas a lista tem um caráter indicativo. Algumas das áreas contempladas, como a busca de novas rotas de biocombustíveis e a contabilidade ambiental, são totalmente novas para a Vale.
“Outras, como a melhoria da eficiência energética e a biodiversidade, já eram alvos de parcerias com pesquisadores. E também há áreas, como a de geotecnia, em que temos pesquisa própria, mas consideramos que um olhar externo pode nos beneficiar”, apontou Mello.
No campo da mineração, o acordo indica como área prioritária, por exemplo, a busca de métodos de prospecção mineral por sensoriamento remoto e estudos sobre a formação geológica de cavernas e sobre as espécies que as habitam.
No campo da energia, o objetivo é desenvolver novas rotas de obtenção de biocombustíveis, por meio de algas e resíduos florestais – uma área em que a Vale não tem expertise –, até estudar modelos capazes de melhorar a eficiência da geração hidrelétrica, entre outros.
A lista inclui também pesquisas no campo da ecoeficiência e biodiversidade, a fim de acelerar a recuperação de ambientes degradados ou reduzir os danos ambientais das atividades da empresa, além de aperfeiçoar o uso de recursos hídricos e identificar materiais sustentáveis para uso em construções próximas às minas.
Pesquisas sobre produtos ferrosos para siderurgia – visando ao aprimoramento dos processos de obtenção da matéria-prima – e o desenvolvimento de novos produtos ou a modelagem matemática de todas as etapas do beneficiamento dos minérios a fim de aperfeiçoar sua eficiência são outras áreas indicadas.
Pesquisa coordenada
Além do acordo de cooperação com a FAPESP, a Vale assinou parcerias em moldes semelhantes com as fundações estaduais de amparo à pesquisa de Minas Gerais (Fapemig) e do Pará (Fapespa), Estados em que a empresa tem atuação importante em suas atividades produtivas.
A Fapemig investirá R$ 20 milhões e a Fapespa, R$ 8 milhões, para uma contrapartida da Vale que é de R$ 20 milhões em Minas Gerais e de R$ 32 milhões no Pará. Somando o total de investimentos com as três fundações, o investimento chega a R$ 120 milhões.
Segundo Mello, a assinatura dos convênios é uma das decorrências da criação do Instituto Tecnológico Vale, lançado em dezembro e concebido para coordenar as ações de ciência e tecnologia da empresa. “A criação do instituto é uma mudança de paradigma nas estratégias de pesquisa e desenvolvimento da Vale”, disse.
Agência FAPESP – Por que o método de código de barras de DNA, o chamado DNA barcoding, é menos eficiente para diferenciar espécies vegetais em comparação à sua aplicação com os animais?
Essa pergunta esteve no centro da palestra do professor Sean Graham, da Universidade da Colúmbia Britânica no Canadá, durante o Simpósio Internacional sobre DNA Barcoding do Programa Biota-FAPESP, realizado este mês na sede da Fundação.
Sean Graham, na Universidade da Colúmbia Britânica, explica por que a técnica de DNA barcoding ainda apresenta obstáculos para a identificação de vegetais (CBOL)
Segundo Graham, a primeira dificuldade enfrentada pelos biólogos é a grande diversidade de espécies vegetais, cerca de 400 mil classificadas. O segundo obstáculo foi estabelecer quais seriam os marcadores para as plantas, ou seja, que trechos do DNA seriam escolhidos para serem objetos da comparação.
“Essa definição é muito difícil, pois não há uma resposta perfeita”, disse. Para o cientista, muitas questões devem ser levadas em conta como, por exemplo, quais informações se deseja obter e quantos genes devem ser considerados.
A definição é tão difícil que o próprio Consórcio para o Barcode da Vida (CBOL, na sigla em inglês) deliberou durante sua terceira conferência, realizada na Cidade do México em novembro, que os trechos selecionados deverão ser testados por 18 meses, para comprovar ou não a sua eficácia em diferenciar espécies.
A situação se complica quando se tenta estabelecer a diferenciação de espécies vegetais muito próximas. “Os animais têm lacunas maiores tanto nas variações genéticas intraespecíficas (dentro da mesma espécie) como nas interespecíficas (entre espécies diferentes)”, disse Graham.
Como nas plantas essas lacunas são mais estreitas, sobretudo nas intraespecíficas, detectar as diferenças se torna mais difícil, apontou.
O professor canadense destacou que, diferentemente dos animais, as espécies vegetais se hibridizam com mais frequência, ou seja, se intercruzam produzindo novas espécies. Como resultado, há muitas plantas novas para se analisar e, quanto mais jovem for o seu genoma, mais difícil será a sua caracterização.
“Os desafios vão além da técnica de DNA barcoding. A taxonomia, por exemplo, ainda é pouco abrangente”, disse Graham.
“A maior parte do que sabemos sobre as plantas é zero”, disse, comparando o ponto atual do conhecimento com uma imagem desfocada. “Mas é importante sair do zero [com o DNA barcoding], mesmo se for para obter uma imagem apenas razoável”, afirmou.
Agência FAPESP – A mais profunda erupção vulcânica de que se tem notícia foi descoberta no Oceano Pacífico, próximo aos arquipélagos de Fiji e Samoa, a 1,2 mil metros abaixo da superfície. Indícios da existência do vulcão submarino, denominado West Mata, foram encontrados no fim do ano passado, mas confirmados apenas em maio último.
Agora, os cientistas responsáveis pela descoberta, em missão financiada pela National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) e pela National Science Foundation (NSF), divulgaram vídeos e fotos da erupção. É o primeiro vulcão submarino filmado em plena atividade, algo que os cientistas tentam fazer há mais de 25 anos.
Com ajuda de robô submarino, cientistas obtêm vídeos e fotos que mostram pela primeira vez uma erupção vulcânica nas profundezas oceânicas (divulgação)
O resultado, segundo os autores, é “espetacular”. As imagens produzidas incluem grandes bolhas de lavas com cerca de 1 metro de largura que são lançadas na fria água do mar e jatos vermelhos brilhantes de lava ejetada.
Outra novidade conseguida foi a obtenção de imagens de lava avançando pelo fundo oceânico. Sons da erupção foram gravados por um hidrofone e depois montados junto às imagens.
“Encontramos um tipo de lava que nunca havia sido vista durante a erupção de um vulcão ativo”, disse o cientista-chefe da missão Joseph Resing, da Universidade de Washington.
As imagens foram produzidas pelo robô submarino Jason, que os cientistas conseguiram levar a poucos metros da erupção. “Em terra, ou mesmo em águas mais rasas, não seria possível chegar tão perto e conseguir registrar tantos detalhes”, disse Bob Embley, da NOAA, outro integrante da missão.
Os vídeos foram apresentados no dia 17, em San Francisco, na conferência anual da União Geofísica Norte-Americana.
O vulcão West Mata está produzindo lavas do tipo boninite, que estão entre as mais quentes das erupções ocorridas em tempos modernos. Segundo os cientistas, registros de lavas semelhantes às do vulcão submarino foram encontradas apenas em vulcões extintos há mais de 1 milhão de anos.
“O resultado é que, pela primeira vez, podemos examinar, com bastante proximidade, a maneira com que as ilhas oceânicas e os vulcões submarinos são formados”, disse Barbara Ranson, diretora da Divisão de Ciências Oceânicas da NSF.
Os pesquisadores estimam que 80% da atividade vulcânica terrestre ocorra nos oceanos, com a maioria dos vulcões localizada em grandes profundidades. Até esta descoberta, a NOAA e a NSF vinham financiando pesquisa em vulcões submarinos há 25 anos, sem conseguir registrar uma erupção profunda.
Agência FAPESP – O Newton International Fellowship está com seleção aberta para doutores que desejam continuar seus estudos no Reino Unido.
Promovido pela Academia Britânica, pela Academia Real de Engenharia e pela Royal Society, o Newton International Fellowship é um programa de pós-doutorado com duração de dois anos, destinado a especialistas que não possuam cidadania britânica e não estejam trabalhando no Reino Unido.
Programa oferece bolsa de pós-doutorado por dois anos no Reino Unido. Bolsa é de 24 mil libras esterlinas por ano, mais 8 mil libras para pesquisa
O programa envolve as áreas de humanidades, ciências naturais, ciências sociais e engenharias. A bolsa oferecida é de 24 mil libras esterlinas por ano, mais 8 mil libras anuais para gastos com a pesquisa e 2 mil libras para despesas de mudança.
Para poder se submeter ao programa, o candidato deve ter um orientador em uma instituição no Reino Unido. O programa também exige uma carta de recomendação a respeito do candidato que explique os motivos e benefícios que o Newton Fellowship poderá lhe proporcionar.
A oportunidade é aberta a doutores e a estudantes que completem o seu doutorado antes do início do programa. As inscrições vão até o dia 1º de fevereiro de 2010 e os aprovados iniciarão o programa em janeiro de 2011.
NOTA CAUSTICANTE [DEVE SER O AQUECIMENTO GLOBAL ANTROPOGENICAMENTE PROVOCADO QUE ME CAUSA ESTE PRURIDO] DESTE BLOGGER:
Entre Newton e Darwin como cientistas, eu sou mais Newton e não abro! Pelas aplicações práticas de sua teoria e estudos. Onde estão então as fanfarras e celebrações deste cientista que tem o maior número de citações na História da Ciência? Nihil. Nada. Zero!!!
Newton não é celebrado pela Nomenklatura científica assim como Darwin foi em 2009 por uma razão muito simples: Newton era criacionista [Argh, isso é como cometer um genocídio epistêmico e fechar de vez as portas de ingresso na Akademia...]
Agência FAPESP – A Faculdade de Ciências Agrárias e Veterinárias da Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), sediada no campus de Jaboticabal, abriu concurso para professor assistente doutor (MS3).
O aprovado irá ministrar três disciplinas: “Solo”, “Manejo e Conservação do Solo e da Água” e “Conservação do Solo e da Água”, junto ao Departamento de Solos e Adubos da faculdade.
O trabalho é em regime de dedicação integral à docência e à pesquisa com remuneração de R$ 6.707,99 referente a 40 horas semanais.
As inscrições deverão ser feitas no período de 4 de janeiro a 2 de fevereiro de 2010, nos dias úteis na Seção de Comunicações da faculdade, à via de acesso Prof. Paulo Donato Castellane, s/n, Jaboticabal, SP.
UM BANDO DE DODÔS - O Circo da Evolução e do Projeto Inteligente (Flock of Dodos, 2006) - documentário bem-humorado dirigido pelo biólogo [SIC ULTRA PLUS 1: Olson é oceanógrafo] e cineasta Randy Olson que aborda o argumento criacionista [SIC ULTRA PLUS 2: desde quando 'complexidade irredutível' de sistemas bióticos e 'informação complexa especificada' que são evidências encontradas na natureza é 'criacionismo'?] conhecido como "desenho inteligente" [SIC ULTRA PLUS 3: o termo acolhido pela nomenclatura científica é "Design Inteligente"] (Intelligent Design); o filme foi legendado pelo Coletivo Ácido Cético com o apoio do próprio diretor.
Eu vi o blog Coletivo Ácido Cético através da indicação do link no site da URGS [não sei até onde vai a legalidade da utilização de um site de universidade pública para a promoção do ateísmo], e cheguei a esta pérola de deturpação sobre o Design Inteligente: o filme "Um bando de dodôs".
O problema do cético globalizado, como é o caso dos membros do CAC é que ele tenta bater palmas apenas com uma das mãos, tem antolhos epistêmicos e não é capaz de considerar as dificuldades epistêmicas fundamentais da teoria geral da evolução no contexto de justificação teórica. Vem aí uma nova teoria da evolução - a Síntese Evolutiva Ampliada que não pode e nem deve ser selecionista por causa das evidências encontradas na natureza. Quem anunciou a crise paradigmática da biologia evolutiva? Quem anunciou o surgimento de uma nova teoria da evolução? Quem, cara pálida? Nós os céticos e críticos científicos da teoria do design não inteligente (Darwinismo).
Quando eu vi a promoção do "UM BANDO DE DODÔS - O Circo da Evolução e do Projeto Inteligente " na I Semana Cética na UFRGS, 13/10/2008, eu até ri pra valer, e nem me importei. Afinal de contas, quem está na chuva é para se queimar. Nem sei como eu perdi o anúncio da II Semana Cética na UFRGS. Novamente o documentário em questão. Haja falta de criatividade, sô!
O que o CAC não reporta para seus leitores, é que logo após o documentário de Olson ter sido apresentado nos Estados Unidos, nós do DI respondemos com o site "Hoax of Dodos" [A fraude dos dodôs]. Visite o site e veja as fraudes perpetradas pelo 'biólogo' Olson que é incensado pelo CAC.
Uma das fraudes do documentário de Olson: que os embriões de Haeckel não são usados nos livros-texto de Biologia modernos como prova da evolução (ancestralidade comum). No Brasil, até recentemente Amabis e Martho usaram estes desenhos, deixaram de usá-lo, mas não dizem por que deixaram: eles sabiam que era uma fraude secular??? Um amigo meu, autor de um dos livros didáticos aprovados pelo MEC/SEMTEC/PNLEM, me confidenciou que os autores dos livros didáticos sabiam disso...
Assista aos vídeos abaixo:
Aldo Mellender de Araújo, UFRGS, um dos membros do CAC [não sabia] é meu amigo, e espero que continue sendo, apesar de nossas visões extremas sobre a evolução.
Há uma boutade em O Terceiro Homem que se conta ter sido um improviso de Orson Welles no instante da filmagem. Referindo-se à Suíça, diz ele ao interlocutor que, em meio a traições, envenenamentos e assassinatos dos Bórgia, os italianos produziram uma Renascença. Já os suíços, após séculos de ordem e democracia, produziram o quê? "O relógio cuco".
Com todo respeito... como costuma dizer a coluna de Ancelmo Goóis em O Globo. Welles, como todo criador de gênio, podia-se permitir a esses arroubos divertidos, sem suscitar a ira do alvo, que certamente terminaria atingindo o comum dos mortais.
Mas a sarcástica tirada do cineasta me vem imediatamente à cabeça depois da repercussão na imprensa do resultado do referendo suíço sobre os minaretes islâmicos, cuja construção deverá ser doravante banida de todos os cantões daquele território nacional. Minarete, como bem se sabe, é a pequena torre ao lado da mesquita, de onde o muezzin convoca os fiéis para a oração.
Crença religiosa à parte, esse chamado é esteticamente apreciável. O árabe é uma língua mística e reflexiva, com grande complexidade gramatical e notável sonoridade fonêmica. A chamada aos fiéis, que repete o versículo inicial do Corão – confirmando a unicidade de Alá e a condição profética de Maomé – é uma recitação em que se esmeram, como na prolação de um poema, os locutores. E, como num poema, a pura e simples tradução dificilmente restituiria a carga simbólica da língua original.
Estado nacional é laico
Segundo os jornais, a maioria vitoriosa no referendo foi de 52%, o que salva do ridículo 48% dos cidadãos suíços. Ridículo – há poucas outras palavras disponíveis para se definir essa decisão, lamentável até para o próprio governo federal da Suíça, conforme nota oficial distribuída à imprensa. O ponto crítico da questão se põe assim: como conviver democraticamente com a crença do Outro rejeitando a integridade de seus templos ou santuários? Em outros termos, como tolerar sem tolerância?
Apesar da tímida autocrítica governamental, o fato é que o referendo foi proposto e organizado por dispositivos de Estado, com todas as injunções de obrigatoriedade do cumprimento da decisão. E mais: foi imediatamente apoiado pelo presidente da França (onde existem seis milhões de muçulmanos), para quem os fiéis islâmicos deveriam ser "mais discretos" em termos religiosos. Nicolas Sarkozy não deixou por menos a escalada do ridículo: a "indiscrição" (a ser entendida como a demonstração pública da fé ou a construção de monumentos religiosos) deveria ser reservada ao catolicismo, por ser mais "natural e local".
Mas se o evento se afigura de imediato como ridículo em termos de ética social imediata – essa em que pontificam os costumes e as injunções coletivas de se respeitar a sua diversidade –, não escapa ao olhar mais cauteloso o risco político de uma nova variedade das ideologias nacionais em ascensão nos países ditos de Primeiro Mundo.
Como já observaram analistas de diversas linhagens teóricas, toda ideologia nacional vive da entronização de ideais para os quais se possam transferir os sentimentos de sacrifício, amor, temor, respeito etc. De onde se transferem? Precisamente das comunidades religiosas, que são cimentadas por afecções dessa natureza. Mas como bem se sabe, há muitíssimo tempo, os Estados nacionais vêm deixando de recorrer à universalidade teológica apregoada pelo catolicismo tradicional, reservando apenas uma reverência esporádica às autoridades ungidas por Roma. O Estado nacional é laico, proclamam aqueles que apostam numa cidadania republicana, livre da heteronomia sobrenatural.
O ovo da serpente
Na prática, porém, o universalismo da crença administrado por Roma pode assumir a forma de "religião de Estado", ao modo de uma forma transitória de ideologia nacional, como um escudo contra o que se supõe serem ameaças do Outro (o imigrante, o representante de outra cultura ou de outro sistema civilizatório), agora numerosamente muito próximo, às vezes, vizinho de porta. Os véus nas cabeças das mulheres, as prostrações diárias para as orações, as mesquitas com seus minaretes, as recitações jaculatórias podem soar como fantasmas contra-hegemônicos aos cultores da etnicidade fictícia em que implica a "comunidade imaginada" (expressão com que Benedict Andersen designa a nação) instituída por todo Estado nacional.
É essa ideologia canhestra e anacrônica que preside a iniciativas como o referendo suíço, a preocupações com a "identidade nacional" como aquelas manifestadas por Sarkozy ou ao desejo dos grupos ultraconservadores de acrescentar a cruz católica à bandeira italiana. Curiosamente, é a mesma dos reinados petrolíferos ou das nações em aparente decomposição social, que a imprensa ocidental costuma erigir como o oposto do mundo civilizado.
Pode ser que tudo termine em pizza, mas quem leva a sério a hipótese da aparição concomitante e internacional de um novo tipo de fascismo deve botar as barbas de molho. A intolerância é apenas o ovo da serpente.
Blogs, blogueiros, ativistas da internet estão mobilizados: o alvo é a Folha de S.Paulo, acusada de ter colaborado com a repressão nos tempos da ditadura militar. Há ataques pessoais ao diretor de Redação (que, na época, tinha seus dez anos de idade) e a jornalistas que lá trabalham hoje, como se fossem responsáveis por fatos ocorridos quando lá não estavam – e nem idade para isso tinham.
É um fenômeno curioso: os fatos de que o jornal é acusado são conhecidos há muito tempo, e isso não impediu boa parte dos blogueiros e ativistas anti-Folha da internet de trabalhar lá, até mesmo de ocupar altos cargos na empresa, em funções de direção. Parece que, depois que estes importantes funcionários deixaram o jornal, o passado da empresa piorou muito. Aqueles fatos que eram conhecidos mas esquecidos enquanto trabalhavam lá, de repente se tornaram intoleráveis.
Gostar da Folha ou não, gostar de seus concorrentes ou não, isso faz parte do jogo: é uma decisão tomada pelos consumidores de informação. Mas uma campanha sistemática como a que está sendo movida neste momento deve ser vista com reservas: que é que está por trás dela? A quem interessa tentar desmoralizar um jornal que, entre suas iniciativas políticas, deu firme apoio à campanha das Diretas-Já, apontou fraudes como a da licitação da Ferrovia Norte-Sul, no governo Sarney, abriu suas portas a pessoas malvistas pelo regime militar, como Oswaldo Peralva, Tarso de Castro, Samuel Wainer, Janio de Freitas?
Papel, internet, rádio, TV, twitter, há espaço para todos. Como dizia um antigo anúncio do candidato Eduardo Suplicy, acenda sua estrela, em vez de tentar apagar a dele. Que o consumidor de informação escolha o que for melhor para si.
Este blog é contra a Folha de São Paulo porque é um veículo que violenta a cidadania dos seus leitores no seu direito à informação, pela sua seletividade em 'ouvir o outro lado', e por não praticar o jornalismo que seu Manual da Redação propõe: moderno, objetivo e apartidário. Quando a questão é Darwin, a FSP sofre da síndrome ricuperiana: "O que Darwin tem de bom, a gente mostra; o que Darwin tem de ruim, a gente esconde".
Marcelo Leite, da FSP, no encerramento de conferência sobre a evolução na Fac. de Medicina da USP, em 2006, sobre o avanço do criacionismo (por tabela a teoria do Design Inteligente) no Brasil, disse: "NÃO DAMOS ESPAÇO!"
E aqui neste blog a FSP leva chumbo grosso, sem dó nem piedade!!!
Molecular biology for years meant breaking down living cells to their smallest component parts, the genes and proteins that govern what a cell does. But a list of parts tells only so much. To understand how living cells really work, biologists are now trying to visualize how the parts are assembled into operational units.
A team of European scientists has chosen one of the smallest known bacteria, called Mycoplasma pneumoniae, as a test-bed for trying to integrate all the bottom-up knowledge about an organism into a full understanding of how it actually works. The microbe causes a form of bacterial pneumonia and has shed so many functions from its stripped down genome that it can survive only as a parasite on other cells.
The European findings so far, reported in the current Science, are that the bacterium is a collection of some 200 specialized protein machines.
The machines are composed of individual proteins, which recognize each other and assemble into complexes. Some of the machines make copies of the genes embodied in the DNA of the bacterium’s genome. Others, called ribosomes, synthesize proteins according to the genetic instructions they receive. Another class, called chaperones, make sure the new proteins fold up correctly. Then there are processing machines in which each component carries out one step of a multistage chemical process.
...
In a commentary in Science, two biologists at the University of Arizona, Howard Ochman and Rahul Raghavan, say the European work shows that “there is no such thing as a ‘simple’ bacterium,” given how complex even this miniature member of the bacterial world has turned out to be. ...
Se a teoria da evolução através da seleção natural não explica a origem da complexidade irredutível de um 'simples' flagelo bacteriano, como pode explicar a complexidade e diversidade das coisas bióticas 'superiores'???
Seleção natural? Nem a pau, Juvenal! É 100% design inteligente!!! Processo télico.
Cientistas próximos de decifrar o código das histonas
Scientists Take a Step Towards Uncovering the Histone Code
ScienceDaily (Dec. 21, 2009) — Researchers at Emory University School of Medicine have determined the structures of two enzymes that customize histones, the spool-like proteins around which DNA coils inside the cell.
The structures provide insight into how DNA's packaging is just as important and intricate as the information in the DNA itself, and how these enzymes are part of a system of inspectors making sure the packaging is in order.
The results are published online this week in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.
A team of scientists led by Xiaodong Cheng, PhD, professor of biochemistry at Emory and a Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar, used X-rays to probe the architecture of two enzymes, PHF8 and KIAA1718. The enzymes are known as histone demethylases because they remove methyl groups (chemical modifications of a protein) from histones.
Mutations in the gene encoding one of the enzymes, PHF8, cause a type of inherited mental retardation. Understanding how PHF8 works may help doctors better understand or even prevent mental retardation.
Many biologists believe the modifications on histones are a code, analogous to the genetic code. Depending on the histones' structure, access to DNA in the nucleus can be restricted or relatively free. The idea is: the modifications tell enzymes that act on DNA valuable information about getting to the DNA itself.
"This work represents a step toward uncovering the molecular basis for how demethylases handle multiple signals on histones," says Paula Flicker, PhD, who oversees cell signaling grants at the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "Knowledge of how these complex signals help govern patterns of gene activity will bring us closer to understanding how cells determine their identity during development."
To understand histone demethylases' role in the cell, Cheng says, think of the cell as a library with thousands of books in it.
"To find a particular book in a library, you need some signs telling you how the stacks are organized," he says. "Similarly, the machinery that reads DNA needs some guidance to get to the right place." ...
Nature Structural & Molecular Biology Published online: 20 December 2009 | doi:10.1038/nsmb.1753
Enzymatic and structural insights for substrate specificity of a family of jumonji histone lysine demethylases
John R Horton1,4, Anup K Upadhyay1,4, Hank H Qi2,3,4, Xing Zhang1, Yang Shi2,3 & Xiaodong Cheng1
Abstract
Combinatorial readout of multiple covalent histone modifications is poorly understood. We provide insights into how an activating histone mark, in combination with linked repressive marks, is differentially 'read' by two related human demethylases, PHF8 and KIAA1718 (also known as JHDM1D). Both enzymes harbor a plant homeodomain (PHD) that binds Lys4-trimethylated histone 3 (H3K4me3) and a jumonji domain that demethylates either H3K9me2 or H3K27me2. The presence of H3K4me3 on the same peptide as H3K9me2 makes the doubly methylated peptide a markedly better substrate of PHF8, whereas the presence of H3K4me3 has the opposite effect, diminishing the H3K9me2 demethylase activity of KIAA1718 without adversely affecting its H3K27me2 activity. The difference in substrate specificity between the two is explained by PHF8 adopting a bent conformation, allowing each of its domains to engage its respective target, whereas KIAA1718 adopts an extended conformation, which prevents its access to H3K9me2 by its jumonji domain when its PHD engages H3K4me3.
1. Department of Biochemistry, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
2. Department of Pathology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
3. Division of Newborn Medicine, Department of Medicine, Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
4. These authors contributed equally to this work.
Correspondence to: Xiaodong Cheng1 e-mail: xcheng@emory.edu
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Professores, pesquisadores e alunos de universidades públicas e privadas com acesso ao site CAPES/Periódicos podem ler gratuitamente este artigo da Nature Structural & Molecular Biology e de outras publicações científicas.
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NOTA IMPERTINENTE DESTE BLOGGER:
A seleção natural (um processo cego, aleatório, que não tem como 'visualizar' o futuro das ações bióticas) pode explicar a origem da informação complexa especificada das histonas? Nem a pau, Juvenal! É 100% design inteligente!!! Um processo télico!!!
Comportamento humano moderno 500.000 anos antes do que se pensou
Modern Behavior of Early Humans Found Half-Million Years Earlier Than Thought
ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2009) — Evidence of sophisticated, human behavior has been discovered by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers as early as 750,000 years ago -- some half a million years earlier than has previously been estimated by archaeologists.
Stone tools from the Benot Ya'aqov arah. (Credit: Image courtesy of Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
The discovery was made in the course of excavations at the prehistoric Gesher Benot Ya'aqov site, located along the Dead Sea rift in the southern Hula Valley of northern Israel, by a team from the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology. Analysis of the spatial distribution of the findings there reveals a pattern of specific areas in which various activities were carried out. This kind of designation indicates a formalized conceptualization of living space, requiring social organization and communication between group members. Such organizational skills are thought to be unique to modern humans.
Attempts until now to trace the origins of such behavior at various prehistoric sites in the world have concentrated on spatial analyses of Middle Paleolithic sites, where activity areas, particularly those associated with hearths, have been found dating back only to some 250,000 years ago.
The new Hebrew University study, a report on which is published in Science magazine, describes an Acheulian (an early stone tools culture) layer at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov that has been dated to about 750,000 years ago. The evidence found there consists of numerous stone tools, animal bones and a rich collection of botanical remains. ...
Science 18 December 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5960, pp. 1677 - 1680 DOI: 10.1126/science.1180695
Spatial Organization of Hominin Activities at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel Nira Alperson-Afil,1,* Gonen Sharon,1 Mordechai Kislev,2 Yoel Melamed,2 Irit Zohar,3,4,5 Shosh Ashkenazi,5 Rivka Rabinovich,1,5 Rebecca Biton,5 Ella Werker,6 Gideon Hartman,7 Craig Feibel,8 Naama Goren-Inbar1,*
The spatial designation of discrete areas for different activities reflects formalized conceptualization of a living space. The results of spatial analyses of a Middle Pleistocene Acheulian archaeological horizon (about 750,000 years ago) at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, indicate that hominins differentiated their activities (stone knapping, tool use, floral and faunal processing and consumption) across space. These were organized in two main areas, including multiple activities around a hearth. The diversity of human activities and the distinctive patterning with which they are organized implies advanced organizational skills of the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov hominins.
1 Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel.
2 Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel.
3 Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel.
4 Department of Zoology, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.
5 National Natural History Collections, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Givat Ram, Jerusalem 91904, Israel.
6 Department of Botany, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Givat Ram, Jerusalem 91904, Israel.
7 Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
8 Department of Geological Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: alperson@mscc.huji.ac.il (N.A.-A.); goren@cc.huji.ac.il (N.G.-I.)
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Professores, pesquisadores e alunos de universidades públicas e privadas com acesso ao site CAPES/Periódicos podem ler gratuitamente este artigo da Science e de outras publicações científicas.
Published online 16 December 2009 | Nature 462, 843-845 (2009) | doi:10.1038/462843a
Human genomics: The genome finishers
Dedicated scientists are working hard to close the gaps, fix the errors and finally complete the human genome sequence. Elie Dolgin looks at how close they are.
Elie Dolgin
From her windowless fifth-floor office at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Deanna Church has few distractions from the job that lies before her. On her computer sit 888 open 'tickets', or outstanding problems with the human genome sequence. Although that number fluctuates, it's a not-so-subtle reminder that she and her team at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) have a long way to go to finish the job started nearly two decades ago by the Human Genome Project.
This is the same project that an international team of scientists spent close to US$3 billion on to complete. In 2000, the scientists announced, to much fanfare at a White House ceremony, that they had finished the draft sequence of the human genome. They waxed poetic about opening 'evolution's lab notebook' when they published the draft the next year1. And they uncorked champagne bottles again in 2003 when the sequence was officially deemed finished2. By then, media outlets were reporting the developments with a twinge of fatigue. "This time it is the real thing, scientists promise," New Scientist reported. Another year passed before the final analyses were published3, and two more went by before the paper detailing the last, fully polished chromosome came out in 2006 (ref. 4).
Still, three years later, Church is hunched over her computer, clicking away at her mouse, quietly clearing up the lingering troubles with the iconic sequence. Some of her tickets, submitted by her collaborators and users from around the world, are reports of missing bits. Others describe stretches in which someone thinks the sequence is mistaken. Still others are unique and unexpected challenges, such as complex DNA rearrangements, that could take years to sort out.
"It's a frustration," says Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. "It's an extremely high-quality genome. It's the best there is, period. The problem is that a very small percentage of uncertainties still translates into a significant number of problems."
Church and her colleagues are working to build a solid, accurate reference, but their efforts have revealed how slippery that concept can be. The sequence, for instance, does not represent any one person's genome. It is an amalgam of DNA from different people, both male and female. It was put together this way to maintain anonymity for those who contributed the DNA and to ensure that the sequence represented all humanity — "our shared inheritance", as then-head of the project, Francis Collins, said.
But that shared inheritance is hard to capture. The genomes of two individuals look less alike than many had originally assumed. Rather than following a linear path of 3 billion base pairs with a letter changed now and then along the way, human genomes detour into hundreds of vastly different stretches in which, depending on the individual, millions of base pairs can be deleted, inserted, repeated or inverted.
A finished reference genome — if attainable — will therefore look very different from the project's first renditions. That's where Church and her team of finishers come in. They are striving to smooth out the differences and to develop a more dynamic platform that can capture much of humanity's commonalities and uniqueness. Some say it's a wasted effort now that individual human genomes can be sequenced at a fraction of what it cost ten years ago, but most say the reference is invaluable as a bedrock to support the sequencing of future human genomes.
Resolving the problems in the sequence will not win Church many accolades. She won't meet the president or land any papers in high-impact journals as those who "finished" the genome before her did. And once she puts a ticket to rest, there's always another one waiting. "It's not sexy," she says. "But it's important." ...
Agência FAPESP – Uma criatura começa a explorar um mundo desconhecido. Ela tem que executar certas tarefas predeterminadas como coletar alimentos, encontrar e recolher objetos coloridos e competir com outras criaturas que também terão que fazer esses trabalhos e tentarão enganá-la, escondendo a comida e os objetos que possam lhe interessar.
Esse cenário foi criado virtualmente por um grupo de pesquisadores da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp). Uma vez lá dentro, as criaturas são autônomas, ou seja, nenhum humano a controla. Elas devem agir de acordo com o que conseguiram aprender ao longo dessa convivência. Esse mundo eletrônico foi projetado para estudar e aplicar um tipo de memória que ainda é pouco explorada pela ciência, a memória episódica.
Criatura virtual que aprende sozinha pode dar início a uma nova geração de sistemas inteligentes, aponta pesquisa feita na Unicamp (divulgação)
“É a memória de nossa história pessoal que se baseia naquilo que fizemos e nas coisas que testemunhamos”, explicou o coordenador da pesquisa, Ricardo Ribeiro Gudwin, professor da Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e Ciência da Computação da Unicamp, durante o Seminário Raciocínio Baseado em Modelo em Ciência e Tecnologia, ocorrido de 17 a 19 de dezembro na universidade.
O evento foi realizado no âmbito do Projeto Temático Logical Consequence and Combinations of Logics – Fundaments and Efficient Applications apoiado pela FAPESP e coordenado por Walter Carnielli, professor do Departamento de Filosofia do Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da Unicamp.
Segundo Gudwin, para que seja bem-sucedida, a criatura virtual conta com recursos que tentam simular os sistemas cognitivos de animais e de seres humanos. Como em muitas situações comuns na vida real, será preciso recolher informações a respeito de um ambiente desconhecido (fazer uma codificação), guardá-las de um modo eficiente (armazenamento) e depois acessá-las quando forem necessárias (recuperação).
Para desenvolver essa memória, o grupo elaborou regras que devem ser seguidas para todas as criaturas do ambiente virtual: evitar paredes e outros obstáculos, coletar alimentos, que podem ser ou não perecíveis, recolher determinados objetos do cenário e tentar prever o que os demais atores do jogo farão e tentar atrapalhá-los. “Essa última função está ligada à teoria da mente, que envolve tentar saber o que o outro pensa”, disse.
A experiência também procura reproduzir algumas complexidades e técnicas usadas por humanos para relembrar episódios. De acordo com o pesquisador da Unicamp, não há espaço para absorver todas as informações com as quais se tem contato, por isso, na hora de registrar algo, é preciso utilizar filtros que eliminem dados menos importantes e lançar mão de estratégias para economizar memória, como manter em um arquivo único memórias muito parecidas.
As criaturas também tentam reproduzir habilidades mais difíceis, como conseguir estabelecer conexões entre causas e efeitos que estão bastante separados no tempo. São as chamadas “consequências tardias”, ou a associação de uma reação ocorrida no presente à ação que a causou, mas que se passou há dias, meses ou anos.
Decisões próprias
Fazer o sistema aprender e desenvolver a própria memória em vez de carregar dados prontos pode abrir portas para novas aplicações em computação nas quais o volume de dados ainda são uma barreira.
“Quando o ambiente é muito extenso, não há como colocar todos os dados nem fazer uma programação de trajetória, por isso é importante que o sistema descubra sozinho essas informações”, disse Gudwin.
Isso se aplica, por exemplo, a sistemas de monitoramento de tráfego. Em vez de dar entrada com os dados de toda uma malha viária, um sistema dotado de memória episódica poderia identificar pontos de gargalo e tomar decisões prioritárias a fim de manter o fluxo de veículos.
De acordo com Gudwin, a administração de empresas também ficaria mais eficiente com sistemas descobrindo sozinhos problemas que seriam difíceis de serem detectados em uma grande companhia. E os fãs de jogos eletrônicos poderiam contar com oponentes virtuais “inteligentes”, capazes de aprender sobre as fraquezas do rival e evoluir como se fossem de carne e osso.
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NOTA DO BLOGGER:
A 'inteligência' desta criatura virtual recebeu 'inputs' do programador para realizar determinadas tarefas, analisá-las e decidir qual melhor opção escolher. Teleologia pura. Design Inteligente!!!
Agência FAPESP – A utilização do bagaço de cana-de-açúcar ocorre principalmente na queima em usinas para gerar energia elétrica. Mas pesquisadores estão desenvolvendo novos usos para o resíduo, que é considerado o mais importante na indústria sucroalcooleira.
Uma alternativa é a geração de combustível, no chamado etanol de segunda geração. O potencial é enorme, especialmente por causa da disponibilidade de matéria-prima. O volume desse subproduto representa cerca de um terço da produção de cana-de-açúcar no Brasil, que vem batendo recordes a cada ano.
Grupo de pesquisa na Unicamp desenvolve equipamento para fazer a separação das partes do bagaço de cana-de-açúcar, facilitando a obtenção do etanol celulósico (foto: Eduardo Cesar)
A safra de 2009, anunciada este mês pelo Ministério da Agricultura, ultrapassa 600 milhões de toneladas de cana-de-açúcar, o que representa em torno de 200 milhões de toneladas de bagaço.
Melhorias genéticas obtidas em laboratório também contribuem para aumentar a biomassa do vegetal. Isso refletirá em plantas de maior porte e, consequentemente, com mais bagaço no fim do processo convencional de produção de açúcar e de etanol.
Foi pensando em dar um tratamento preliminar a esse rejeito que pesquisadores da Faculdade de Engenharia Agrícola da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Feagri-Unicamp), coordenados pelo professor Luis Augusto Barbosa Cortez, desenvolveram um equipamento capaz de separar esse material heterogêneo em partes semelhantes.
Após a última moenda da cana, o bagaço torna-se praticamente um pó formado de partículas e fibras de vários tamanhos. A porção mais dura dessa mistura é rica em lignina e oriunda da parte externa do caule, sendo praticamente seca. Já o material mais mole é úmido e deriva do interior da planta. Essa é a melhor parte para entrar no processo de produção de etanol, por ser rica em celulose.
“A lignina é mais difícil de degradar, por isso a parte de dentro, com menor teor de lignina, é a ideal para ser submetida à hidrólise”, explicou Cortez, referindo-se ao processo que quebra o açúcar da celulose e o transforma em álcool.
“A lignina é um agregador que oferece resistência à quebra das moléculas. Quanto menos lignina contiver o material, mais fácil é o processo de obtenção do álcool celulósico”, explicou.
Por isso, a classificação do bagaço obtida por meio da tecnologia desenvolvida pelo grupo da Feagri tende a ganhar cada vez mais importância à medida que avançam as pesquisas sobre a nova geração do etanol.
Criar uma tecnologia para classificar de maneira contínua e automática essas diferentes partes do bagaço da cana foi o desafio dos pesquisadores. Para isso, o grupo contou com o apoio da FAPESP, por meio da modalidade Auxílio à Pesquisa – Regular, e com a participação do professor Guillermo Roca, da Universidade de Oriente, em Cuba, que veio ao Brasil para participar do projeto.
Foram os trabalhos de Roca que estabeleceram os princípios gerais para construção do invento, um tipo de classificador pneumático. Nele, o bagaço é inserido por um orifício diagonal, localizado em sua parte superior, e empurrado por uma válvula rotativa sobre um fluxo constante de ar.
“As partículas grossas são então depositadas no fundo, as de tamanho médio ficam em um coletor na parte intermediária do dispositivo e as menores e mais leves são levadas pelo ar por um tubo curvo até um depósito mais alto”, explicou Cortez.
“Não é preciso preparar o bagaço antes de colocá-lo na máquina”, ressaltou. Isso faz seu custo operacional ser interessante à indústria. Mesmo antes de se começar a produção do etanol de celulose, a separação do bagaço pode melhorar a qualidade dos vários destinos que esse subproduto tem recebido. A parte seca do bagaço, por exemplo, proporciona uma queima mais uniforme e eficiente para produzir energia termelétrica.
Outras aplicações
Enquanto a tecnologia não estiver pronta para a indústria, o bagaço continuará sendo empregado na produção de ração animal, fertilizante e, principalmente, de material de queima para alimentar caldeiras geradoras de energia elétrica dentro das usinas. Para isso, ele não recebe nenhum tratamento. “Ele não é sequer secado antes de ser queimado, o que diminui a eficiência da queima”, disse Cortez.
Quando se iniciar a segunda geração do etanol, a parte mais valorizada do bagaço será retirada do depósito inferior do classificador desenvolvido na Unicamp. Por meio de análises, o grupo averiguou que a fração mais grossa tem maior teor de celulose e quantidades menores de lignina, sendo a mais apropriada para a produção do álcool.
Além da indústria sucroalcooleira, o invento poderá ser útil em qualquer ramo de atividade que necessite separar materiais sólidos granulados heterogêneos. Por exemplo, grãos moídos na indústria alimentícia, hidrato de cal, na área de mineração, e o pó resultante da moagem de pedras, na construção civil.
A eficiência e a versatilidade do equipamento motivaram o depósito do pedido de patente por meio da agência de inovação Inova Unicamp.
Agência FAPESP – Distinguir o falso e suprimir o verdadeiro é, para a maior parte dos casos, indispensável para se fazer uma boa ciência cognitiva. A declaração provocativa foi feita por John Woods, professor da Universidade da Colúmbia Britânica, no Canadá.
O filósofo participou na semana passada do Seminário “Raciocínio Baseado em Modelo em Ciência e Tecnologia”, na Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp). O evento foi realizado no âmbito do Projeto Temático Logical Consequence and Combinations of Logics – Fundaments and Efficient Applications apoiado pela FAPESP e coordenado por Walter Carnielli, professor do Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da Unicamp.
Filósofo canadense John Woods explica como métodos não instrumentais auxiliam no avanço do conhecimento científico (foto: F.Reynol)
Woods se refere a dois recursos utilizados pelo raciocínio baseado em modelo voltado à ciência: a idealização e a abstração. Segundo ele, ambos são distorções da realidade que acabam trazendo bons resultados para a investigação científica. “São essas distorções que os tornam interessantes”, disse.
Enquanto a idealização representa em demasia um fenômeno expressando aspectos considerados falsos, a abstração o sub-representa ao eliminar algumas variáveis em favorecimento de outras na tentativa de simplificar o problema. Um exemplo de idealização são problemas de física em que não é considerado o atrito das superfícies.
As ideias de Woods fazem um contraponto à imagem instrumentalista da ciência, de uma ferramenta para registrar a realidade por meio apenas de medições precisas e fiéis. Para ele, os modelos científicos de sucesso contêm distorções. “A distorção não é incompatível com a aquisição do conhecimento”, destacou.
A base estaria no próprio sistema de modelagem, que nunca será idêntico ao fenômeno representado. “Se algo com que um objeto se parece nunca será o próprio objeto, então dizer o que é esse objeto é o mesmo que afirmar o que ele não é”, disse Woods.
O filósofo criou um modelo representativo para explicar como tais modelos conseguem ser bem-sucedidos. Segundo ele, os conhecimentos resultantes desses processos modelados não são obtidos por instrumentos, mas por cognição, e ainda usam uma técnica contraintuitiva ao trabalhar com considerações irreais, idealizadas ou até mesmo falsas.
“Entender as coisas de maneira errada é um meio de entendê-las corretamente. É intrigante mesmo – e dá certo”, afirmou.
Além de Carnielli, coordenaram o seminário o professor Lorenzo Magnani, da Universidade de Pavia, e o professor Claudio Pizzi, da Universidade de Siena. As duas instituições italianas promoveram o evento em conjunto com a Unicamp.
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Testando a tese de Woods:
1. Ouve-se o silvo de um trem no túnel, mas você entendeu errado pensando ter sido o canto belíssimo de uma ave exótica.
2. Baseado nesse entendimento errado, mesmo assim você decidiu entrar no túnel para 'conhecer' esta ave exótica.
3. O silvo do trem ficou mais forte e passou por cima de você que entendera ter sido apenas o canto de uma ave exótica.
4. Antes de morrer você entendeu corretamente: o silvo não era o canto de uma ave exótica, mas isso fora tarde demais para entender os contorcionismos hermenêuticos filosóficos e exercícios de para-lógica...
Agência FAPESP – Um grupo de cientistas chineses e norte-americanos descobriu um dinossauro venenoso, com aparência de ave, que viveu há cerca de 128 milhões de anos onde hoje está a China.
Trata-se da primeira descrição de veneno na linhagem que deu origem às aves modernas. O estudo será publicado esta semana no site e em breve na edição impressa da revista Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Cientistas descobrem na China um parente do velorirraptor que paralisava as vítimas com o uso de veneno, há cerca de 128 milhões de anos (divulgação)
“Podemos dizer que esse animal era uma ave venenosa. É um achado que certamente terá um grande impacto”, afirmou Larry Martin, professor da Universidade do Kansas e curador do Museu de História Natural e Instituto de Biodiversidade, um dos autores da pesquisa.
O animal descrito, Sinornithosaurus (“ave-lagarto da China”), é um parente próximo do velocirraptor. Viveu em florestas no nordeste da China que continham grande variedade de animais, incluindo outros dinossauros e aves primitivas.
“Tinha o tamanho aproximado de um peru atual e, muito provavelmente, tinha penas. Foi um predador especializado de aves e dinossauros de pequeno tamanho. Era um parente muito próximo do microrraptor, que tinha asas e planava”, explicou Martin.
Segundo o cientista, o veneno não era letal, mas colocava rapidamente a vítima em choque, diminuindo as chances de retaliação ao ataque, de fuga ou de ser devorado por outros predadores. Em pouco tempo o Sinornithosaurus devorava sua presa.
“As vítimas eram atacadas de surpresa. Ele se escondia em uma árvore, por exemplo, e dava o bote por trás. O objetivo era posicionar as mandíbulas. Uma vez que os dentes estavam na pele da presa, o veneno penetrava na ferida, saindo de glândulas e escorrendo pelos dentes. A vítima entrava em choque e observava o predador em ação enquanto era devorada, sem poder reagir”, disse Martin.
O Sinornithosaurus tinha pelo menos duas espécies que, segundo o estudo, empregavam um sistema de veneno semelhante ao de alguns lagartos modernos, como os do gênero Heloderma. Mas tinha dentes mais longos, eficientes para passar pelas camadas de penas de suas vítimas, no caso das aves.
O artigo The birdlike raptor Sinornithosaurus was venomous, de Larry D. Martin e outros, poderá ser lido em breve por assinantes da Pnas em www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0912360107.
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Professores, pesquisadores e alunos de universidades públicas e privadas com acesso ao site CAPES/Periódicos poderão ler em breve gratuitamente este artigo do PNAS e de outras publicações científicas.
Agência FAPESP – O Projeto Temático “Microsoft SinBiota2.0 –Sistema de Informações do Programa Biota-FAPESP: Planejando os próximos dez anos” tem uma vaga em aberto para Bolsa de Pós-Doutorado da FAPESP.
O objetivo do projeto é o desenvolvimento de uma nova especificação para o Sistema de Informações Ambientais do Programa Biota/FAPESP, incluindo novas tecnologias e ferramentas que darão suporte aos pesquisadores vinculados ao programa pelos próximos dez anos.
Objetivo do projeto de pesquisa é o desenvolvimento de uma nova especificação para o Sistema de Informações Ambientais do programa (SinBiota 2.0) (foto: Biota-FAPESP)
O candidato ideal deve ter competência nas seguintes áreas:
1) Modelagem de bancos de dados, inclusive para dados não textuais (por exemplo, imagens e sons), visando à performance e escalabilidade;
2) Interfaces para dispositivos móveis, visando à simplicidade, acessibilidade, responsividade e eficiência;
3) Sistemas de mapas, visando à sua adequação aos propósitos do SinBiota 2.0;
4) Identificação de necessidades de usuários; cenários de user experience;
5) Técnicas de descoberta de conhecimento, visando à sua aplicabilidade no contexto do Biota;
6) Interconversão e qualidade de dados, visando à interoperabilidade com ferramentas de informações ambientais e climáticas como Garp, MaxEnt, Bioclim, SVM, Enfa, Diva-GIS etc.
7) Cloud-computing e redes sociais virtuais, visando à sua aplicabilidade ao contexto do Biota;
8) Experiência na especificação e desenvolvimento de sistemas de informação de médio a grande porte, utilizando tecnologias profissionais;
9) Domínio do inglês (falado e escrito).
Experiência internacional será considerada.
Interessados devem enviar, até o dia 8 de janeiro de 2010, para o supervisor do projeto e responsável pela seleção dos candidatos, professor João Meidanis (meidanis@scylla.com.br), os seguintes documentos em formato PDF:
1) Curriculum Vitae completo, incluindo a Lista de Publicações;
2) Carta de apresentação indicando a razão do interesse na bolsa e com um breve relato de sua experiência;
3) Indicação de três referências com endereço de e-mail para contato.
A vaga está aberta a brasileiros e estrangeiros e o período da bolsa é de 24 meses. O valor da Bolsa de Pós-Doutorado da FAPESP é de R$ 4.508,10 mensais.
Outras vagas de Bolsas de Pós-Doutorado, em diversas áreas do conhecimento, estão publicadas no site FAPESP-Oportunidades, em www.oportunidades.fapesp.br.
Agência FAPESP – O Departamento de Alimentos e Nutrição da Faculdade de Engenharia de Alimentos da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) abriu concurso para contratação de professor titular de três disciplinas na área de Análise Sensorial e Controle de Qualidade. As inscrições vão até 1º de março de 2010.
O candidato selecionado será responsável pelas disciplinas Análise Sensorial de Alimentos, Análise Sensorial e Instrumental e Anatomia e Fisiologia dos Órgãos dos Sentidos. O docente atuará no regime de tempo parcial, com possibilidade de extensão para o regime de dedicação integral à docência e à pesquisa.
Podem participar professores associados da Unicamp e docentes de outras instituições que possuam o título de livre-docente há no mínimo três anos, além de integrantes da parte suplementar do quadro docente da universidade que exerçam função MS-5 ou MS-6.
O concurso será composto de três provas: de títulos, didática e de arguição. A avaliação dos títulos e dos trabalhos publicados pelos candidatos caberá a uma comissão julgadora. O resultado da avaliação deverá sair em até 24 horas e terá peso dois para o cálculo da nota final de cada concorrente.
Na segunda prova, didática, os candidatos disporão de 50 a 60 minutos para expor um tema relacionado ao programa das disciplinas em concurso, escolhido livremente. Na terceira e última prova, eles serão arguidos pela comissão julgadora a respeito do conteúdo dos memoriais entregues no ato da inscrição. A arguição durará, no máximo, 60 minutos.
Após realização das três provas, a comissão julgadora submeterá seu parecer final à Câmara de Ensino, Pesquisa e Extensão da Unicamp.
Thomas Nagel, filósofo ateu 'falou e disse': a ideia de design inteligente é cientificamente válida
A tese de Thomas Nagel, um filósofo ateu, é que se o argumento contra o design inteligente na biologia evolutiva (Darwinismo) é considerado um argumento científico, então o argumento a favor do design inteligente em biologia deve ser considerado um argumento científico válido porque as duas conclusões diferentes são apenas um final da história sobre o mesmo argumento. Isso, é claro, não é dizer que um ou o outro argumento sobre o design seja verdadeiro; é meramente dizer o óbvio: para qualquer um dos dois argumentos ser verdadeiro, só se a questão de design inteligente for uma questão científica.
Caracas, mano: se o design inteligente não é uma questão científica, QED: o design não inteligente também não é!!!
JC E-Mail: a humanidade lutando contra o maior e mais eficiente mecanismo de evolução - as grandes extinções
A humanidade não chegou a um acordo sobre o aquecimento global. Os cientistas, que deveriam ser contrários, apóiam esta que é a maior oposição contra a maior ideia que toda humanidade já teve: as grandes extinções como mecanismo evolutivo onde somente o mais apto sobrevive.
Leia mais aqui:
6. Clima: Países dizem que texto final da cúpula é ilegítimo Conferência do clima acaba com documento frágil, que não chega a ser adotado. Declaração de Copenhague será só um anexo do que foi discutido, sem peso legal e sobre o qual as nações apenas "tomarão nota"
"E agora? Sem uma estratégia internacional bem definida, as emissões de gases do efeito estufa continuarão a crescer, como vem crescendo desde o início da Revolução Industrial"
"É urgente criar um foro dos poluidores que contam e podem realmente decidir alguma coisa, em separado, sem ter de jogar para a plateia ruidosa reunida em Copenhague"
"O gás carbônico, além de aquecer a Terra, modifica a química dos mares"
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NOTA CAUSTICANTE DESTE BLOGGER:
Para um ex-evolucionista de carteirinha que eu fui, fico perplexo, abespinhado, de ver tanta reação histérica até da comunidade científica, pois querer evitar o aquecimento global é IMPEDIR que um dos maiores mecanismos evolutivos entre em ação e o mais apto sobreviva. Cop 15 é cética de Darwin, e isso é um crime de lèse majesté epistêmico.
Gente, eu sou a favor da ciência: que a maior ideia que toda a humanidade já teve tenha seu livre curso e nós possamos, finalmente, assistir a evolução em ação diante de nossos olhos.
Fui, nem sei por que, pensando que Darwin deve estar se revirando no seu túmulo aconchegante na Abadia de Westminster, ele um ateu no armário, oops, agnóstico que preconizou as grandes extinções como um dos mecanismos evolutivos. Impedir que a evolução tenha curso livre com moções tipo Cop 15 é um desserviço à ciência e à evolução do Homo sapiens sapiens.
Que venga o aquecimento global sobre todos nós, sem dó nem piedade, para tapar definitivamente as bocas dos céticos do fato, Fato, FATO da evolução.
O Programa de Pós-graduação em Bioinformática é interdisciplinar, possui o foco na área de informática aplicada a bioquímica (principalmente em genômica, transcriptômica e proteômica) e trabalha em parceria com vários departamentos da UFPR e instituições externas, no país e no exterior.
O programa aceita egressos das áreas de Ciências Biológicas, Ciências da Saúde, Computação, Sistemas de Informação, Ciências Exatas e afins.
O curso, realizado pelo Programa Interunidades de Pós-Graduação em Bioinformática da Universidade de São Paulo, contemplará diferentes disciplinas e aplicações no contexto da Bioinformática.
As aulas acontecerão de 1 a 5 de fevereiro de 2010. Mais informações.
Mostra do Museu de História Natural de Nova York explora o impacto das descobertas sobre o genoma na ciência, na tecnologia, na medicina e no cotidiano
O Sesc Rio, com apoio do Sistema Fecomércio-RJ, e o Instituto Sangari levam ao Rio de Janeiro a exposição "Revolução Genômica", concebida pelo Museu de História Natural de Nova York.
A exposição, adaptada para o público brasileiro, está aberta até 28 de março de 2010, no SESC Quitandinha, em Petrópolis. A mostra internacional atraiu mais de um milhão de visitantes em todo o mundo e apresenta amplo panorama sobre os impactos da genética no cotidiano, destacando os conceitos básicos envolvidos no tema, como o de que todos os organismos existentes possuem DNA.
Com 1.700 m2, a "Revolução Genômica" foi ampliada do seu formato original em extensão e número de seções. Dividida em três células - Salão da Biodiversidade, A Era do Genoma e O Brasil e a Revolução Genômica - a mostra apresenta, por meio de recursos cenográficos arrojados e painéis interativos, uma visão cultural da ciência contemporânea, passando pelos campos da biologia molecular, genética, seus impactos na ciência, na tecnologia e, principalmente, na vida humana.
Ação educativa
A partir de fevereiro, quando as escolas voltarem de férias, o programa educativo da exposição "Revolução Genômica" promoverá o encontro de educadores, visitas guiadas, atividades de extração do DNA do morango e entrega de material educativo.
Para tanto, serão produzidos materiais de apoio para os professores e um DVD para cada estudante da rede pública de ensino com um tour virtual pela exposição, informações sobre DNA, Projeto Genoma e outros. A mostra espera receber mais de 10 mil alunos. As escolas públicas terão entrada franca.
Para fevereiro também está programado um ciclo especial de palestras com pesquisadores brasileiros, que atualmente realizam trabalhos de ponta em genética e Genômica e outras áreas-chave do conhecimento.
A visitação é de terça a sábado, das 9h às 18h, e domingos e feriados, das 9h às 17h. O Sesc Quitandinha fica na Av. Joaquim Rolla, 2 - Petrópolis - RJ.
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NOTA DESTE BLOGGER:
A genômica é um das áreas científicas que tem trazido 'dores de cabeça' à teoria geral da evolução de Darwin. Isso será abordado nesta mostra??? Duvido...
O design inteligente em ação diante de nossos olhos
Eis um site fantástico mostrando a complexidade da vida.
Fica aqui o desafio epistêmico: tudo isso é resultado apenas de design não-inteligente (acaso, necessidade, mutações filtradas pela seleção natural ou mecanismos evolutivos de A a Z) ou simplesmente design inteligente???
Do fundo do baú: Erwin Schrodinger sobre o que é a vida (artigo de 1944)
WHAT IS LIFE?
ERWIN SCHRODINGER
First published 1944
What is life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell.
Based on lectures delivered under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, in February 1943.
To the memory of My Parents
Preface
A scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough I of knowledge, at first hand, of some subjects and, therefore, is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a life, master. This is regarded as a matter of noblesse oblige. For the present purpose I beg to renounce the noblesse, if any, and to be the freed of the ensuing obligation. My excuse is as follows: We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning reminds us, that from antiquity to and throughout many centuries the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread, both in and width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge by during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true who aim be lost for ever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them -and at the risk of making fools of ourselves. So much for my apology. The difficulties of language are not negligible. One's native speech is a closely fitting garment, and one never feels quite at ease when it is not immediately available and has to be replaced by another. My thanks are due to Dr Inkster (Trinity College, Dublin), to Dr Padraig Browne (St Patrick's College, Maynooth) and, last but not least, to Mr S. C. Roberts. They were put to great trouble to fit the new garment on me and to even greater trouble by my occasional reluctance to give up some 'original' fashion of my own. Should some of it have survived the mitigating tendency of my friends, it is to be put at my door, not at theirs. The head-lines of the numerous sections were originally intended to be marginal summaries, and the text of every chapter should be read in continuo.
E.S. Dublin September 1944
Homo liber nulla de re minus quam de morte cogitat; et ejus sapientia non mortis sed vitae meditatio est. SPINOZA'S Ethics, Pt IV, Prop. 67
(There is nothing over which a free man ponders less than death; his wisdom is, to meditate not on death but on life.)
Charles Darwin e Richard Dawkins ficaram de fora da lista dos melhores de 2009 da Folha de São Paulo
Gente, eu quase caí para trás, e não acreditei o que os meus olhos viram, oops, leram: cinco especialistas escolhidos pela Folha de São Paulo deixaram de fora Charles Darwin (olha que 2009 foi o Ano Darwin 200, das louvaminhices, beija-mão e beija-pé de Darwin) e Richard Dawkins (do maior espetáculo da Terra e 'profeta' do neoateísmo pós-moderno, chique e perfumado) entre os melhores de 2009.
Eis a minha foto de solidariedade a Darwin e Dawkins pelo erro da Folha de São Paulo, pecado imperdoável por toda a eternidade e por todos os multiversos imaginados e reais, cometido contra o homem que teve a maior ideia que toda a humanidade já teve e ao seu único e autêntico 'profeta'.
Agora vai: mais ideias sobre a evolução da baleia...
Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(4):1289-1299. 2009 doi: 10.1671/039.029.0423
New Middle Eocene Archaeocetes (Cetacea:Mammalia) from the Kuldana Formation of Northern Pakistan
Lisa Noelle Cooper,*,1,2 J.G.M. Thewissen,1 and S.T. Hussain3
1Anatomy Department, Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, 4209 State Route 44, Rootstown, Ohio 44272-0095 U.S.A., l.noelle.cooper@gmail.com, lisa1225cooper@yahoo.com
2School of Biomedical Sciences, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio 44242
3Department of Anatomy, Howard University, College of Medicine, Washington, D.C. 20059 U.S.A.
*Corresponding author.
ABSTRACT
Two new species of fossil cetaceans (Pakicetus calcis and Pakicetus chittas) are described from a new locality in the Kuldana Formation (Lutetian, middle Eocene) of the Kala Chitta Hills in Northern Pakistan. Additional dentitions of the pakicetid Nalacetus ratimitus, the remingtonocetid Attockicetus, and additional dental material of the holotype of Ambulocetus natans are also described. Dental morphology of Nalacetus is intermediate between pakicetids and ambulocetids, as indicated by the presence of an ambulocetid-like P4, but pakicetid-like molars. Premolars of the specimen tentatively described as Attockicetus imply that some pakicetids and remingtonocetids were coeval. Furthermore, the new pakicetid dentitions described here are the most complete to date and further our understanding of pakicetid dental diversity.
Received: April 30, 2007; Accepted: January 2, 2009
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Professores, pesquisadores e alunos de universidades públicas e privadas com acesso ao site da CAPES/Periódicos podem ler gratuitamente este artigo do Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology e de outras publicações científicas.
É preciso parar Al 'Apocalipse' Gore: o único que vai lucrar muitos $$$ com sua empresa que capta créditos ecológicos com esta histeria de aquecimento global ser antropogenicamente provocado.
Alguém já investigou e reportou sobre esta empresa dele???
Quando mentes brilhantes se reúnem em torno de uma figura científica de renome em reuniões e celebraçoes de louvaminhice, beija-mão e beija-pé como no caso de Darwin, algo me diz que o que está em jogo não é a ciência como ciência, mas ideologia: materialismo/naturalismo filosófico posando como se fosse a própria ciência.
A que ponto chegamos: culto à personalidade e idolatria secularista!
Vade retro, Darwin-ídolo!!!
Os ídolos foram feitos para destruição. Onde foi mesmo que eu li isso???
Padronização nos embriões de Drosophila mais 'complexo' do que antes imaginado...
ALÔ MEC/SEMTEC/PNLEM:
Ideias antigas sobre desenvolvimento embrionário em nossos livros didáticos de Biologia do ensino médio vão ter que passar por profundas revisões: é muito mais 'complexo' do que antes imaginado.
O bom da ciência é isso: o que foi 'verdade científica' um tempo, deixa de ser pouco tempo depois.
Nada como um dia atrás do outro em ciência...
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Researchers Revise Long-Held Theory of Fruit-Fly Development
ScienceDaily (Dec. 19, 2009) — For decades, science texts have told a simple and straightforward story about a particular protein -- a transcription factor -- that helps the embryo of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, pattern tissues in a manner that depends on the levels of this factor within individual cells.
"For 20 years, this system of patterning has been used in textbooks as a paradigm for patterning in embryos, controlled by transcription factors," says Angelike Stathopoulos, assistant professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Now Stathopoulos and her Caltech colleagues, reporting in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), have called that paradigm into question, revealing a tale that is both more complicated and potentially more interesting than the one previously described.
A) This cross-section of an early Drosophila embryo shows the levels of the transcription factor Dorsal, which is present in a nuclear gradient. B) The predominant view in the field had been that different levels of Dorsal support the expression of distinct target genes along the dorsal-ventral axis of embryos. C) The Caltech team found that levels of nuclear Dorsal cannot account for the fact that the gene ind ceases to be expressed in dorsal regions of the embryo. (Credit: PNAS/Stathopoulos et al, Caltech)
The football-shaped embryo of the fruit fly has a dorsal (back/top) side and a ventral (front/bottom) side. During development, the cells in each of these regions begin to differentiate and take on specific, specialized roles. Those decisions are influenced, at least in part, by chemical signals in the cells' environment, including signals called transcription factors -- proteins that, by promoting the transcription of particular DNA sequences, regulate whether specific genes are turned on or off.
In Drosophila, the textbooks said, decisions in the early embryo are made by a transcription factor called Dorsal (which, confusingly, is found primarily in the cells in the ventral part of the embryo, and is absent in those in the dorsal part). Dorsal was said to be the key determinant of the ultimate fate of the cells in which it is present -- as long as it is present in high enough concentrations to be noticed by the nuclei. ...
Quantitative imaging of the Dorsal nuclear gradient reveals limitations to threshold-dependent patterning in Drosophila
Louisa M. Liberman1, Gregory T. Reeves1 and Angelike Stathopoulos2
- Author Affiliations
Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, MC114-96, Pasadena, CA 91125 ↵1L.M.L and G.T.R contributed equally to this work.
Edited by Eric H. Davidson, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, and approved November 3, 2009 (received for review June 4, 2009)
Abstract
The NF-κB-related transcription factor, Dorsal, forms a nuclear concentration gradient in the early Drosophila embryo, patterning the dorsal-ventral (DV) axis to specify mesoderm, neurogenic ectoderm, and dorsal ectoderm cell fates. The concentration of nuclear Dorsal is thought to determine these patterning events; however, the levels of nuclear Dorsal have not been quantified previously. Furthermore, existing models of Dorsal-dependent germ layer specification and patterning consider steady-state levels of Dorsal relative to target gene expression patterns, yet both Dorsal gradient formation and gene expression are dynamic. We devised a quantitative imaging method to measure the Dorsal nuclear gradient while simultaneously examining Dorsal target gene expression along the DV axis. Unlike observations from other insects such as Tribolium, we find the Dorsal gradient maintains a constant bell-shaped distribution during embryogenesis. We also find that some classical Dorsal target genes are located outside the region of graded Dorsal nuclear localization, raising the question of whether these genes are direct Dorsal targets. Additionally, we show that Dorsal levels change in time during embryogenesis such that a steady state is not reached. These results suggest that the multiple gene expression outputs observed along the DV axis do not simply reflect a steady-state Dorsal nuclear gradient. Instead, we propose that the Dorsal gradient supplies positional information throughout nuclear cycles 10-14, providing additional evidence for the idea that compensatory combinatorial interactions between Dorsal and other factors effect differential gene expression along the DV axis.
development gene expression
Footnotes
2To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: angelike@caltech.edu
Author contributions: L.M.L. and A.S. designed research; L.M.L. and G.T.R. performed research; L.M.L. and G.T.R. analyzed data; and L.M.L., G.T.R., and A.S. wrote the paper.
Reescrevendo a história do Holocausto 70 anos tarde demais
Auschwitz 'Arbeit Macht Frei' Sign Stolen
Associated Press
WARSAW, Poland -- The Nazis' infamous iron sign declaring "Arbeit Macht Frei" -- German for "Work Sets You Free" -- was stolen Friday from the entrance of the former Auschwitz death camp, Polish police said.
The 16-foot-long, 90-pound iron sign at the Holocaust memorial site in southern Poland was unscrewed on one side and torn off on the other, police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo said.
Reuters
The theft from the entrance to the camp, where more than one million people, mostly Jews, died during World War II, triggered world-wide condemnation. "The theft of such a symbolic object is an attack on the memory of the Holocaust, and an escalation from those elements that would like to return us to darker days," Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said in a statement from Jerusalem. "I call on all enlightened forces in the world who fight against anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia and the hatred of the other, to join together to combat these trends."
The sign disappeared from the Auschwitz memorial between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m., Mr. Padlo said. Police deployed 50 police, including 20 detectives, and a search dog to the Auschwitz grounds, where barracks, watchtowers and ruins of gas chambers stand as testament to the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
Police said they were reviewing footage from a surveillance camera that overlooks the entrance gate and the road beyond, but declined to say whether the crime was recorded.
Auschwitz museum spokesman Jaroslaw Mensfelt said it might have been too dark for the camera to have captured images. He said the thieves apparently carried the sign 300 yards to an opening in a concrete wall. That opening had been left intentionally to preserve a poplar tree dating back to the time of the war. Four metal bars that had blocked the opening were cut. Tire tracks and footprints in the snow led from the wall opening to the nearby road, where police presume the sign was loaded on to a vehicle.
Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said he had trouble imagining who would steal the sign. "If they are pranksters, they'd have to be sick pranksters, or someone with a political agenda. But whoever has done it has desecrated world memory," Mr. Schudrich said. ...
O angst da Nomenklatura científica enquanto a Síntese Evolutiva Ampliada não vem...
Quando uma teoria científica entra em crise, o comportamento da Nomenklatura científica é fazer de conta que tudo vai bem no quartel de Darwin, oops de Abrantes:
1. Joga-se para debaixo do tapete epistêmico as dificuldades fundamentais que dificultam a corroboração da teoria no contexto de justificação teórica; e afirmação solene, de pés juntos e dedos cruzados, de que não existe 'crise' com a teoria aceita pela comunidade científica;
2. A elaboração de novas teorias ad hoc tentando 'salvar' a teoria 'konsensual' do vexame epistêmico. Afinal de contas, a maior ideia que toda a humanidade já teve não pode ser execrada assim publicamente;
3. A eliminação das ideias teóricas que vão de encontro ao paradigma vigente ou que propõem novas incursões epistêmicas nunca dantes permitidas.
4. O silenciamento dos críticos e oponentes do paradigma: inquisição sem fogueiras y otras cositas mais.
5. Silêncio pétreo da Nomenklatura científica sobre tudo o que ocorre nas publicações científicas questionando o paradigma, e as ações por detrás dos bastidores da KGB, oops peer-reviewers é très chic, chérie, très chic, protegendo o paradigma contra inovações, revisões parciais ou até o simples descarte.
A foto acima explica o angst da Nomenklatura científica em 2009, ano Darwin 200, sobre o que dizer e não dizer, e o que fazer na elaboração de uma nova teoria geral da evolução que livre a cara de Darwin do fragoroso vexame epistêmico em 2010.
Devaneios deste blogger em inglês sobre esta questão:
"Contemporary Western attitudes toward the fall of the Darwinian paradigm suggest that ideological beliefs endure when they are widely shared and can satisfy important emotional needs."
Uau!!! Crenças ideológicas amplamente compartilhadas para satisfazer importantes necessidades emocionais...
Os caminhos de Darwin no Hotel Estância Santa Luzia - Mauá -SP
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Uma pergunta mais do que indiscreta deste blogger:
Contaram para os visitantes que a teoria da evolução através da seleção natural de Darwin não fecha as contas epistêmicas no contexto de justificação teórica desde 1859? E que já vem aí a nova teoria da evolução - a Síntese Evolutiva Ampliada que não pode e nem deve ser selecionistas porque as evidências encontradas na natureza dizem o contrário???
Uma visão festiva do Hubble proclamando a formação de uma grande estrela
Hubble's Festive View of a Grand Star-Forming Region
ScienceDaily (Dec. 20, 2009) — Just in time for the holidays: a Hubble Space Telescope picture postcard of hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds. The festive portrait is the most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood.
The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in our galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.
The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. (Credit: NASA, ESA, F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O'Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee)
Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known. Several of them are over 100 times more massive than our Sun. These hefty stars are destined to pop off, like a string of firecrackers, as supernovas in a few million years.
The image, taken in ultraviolet, visible, and red light by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, spans about 100 light-years. The nebula is close enough to Earth that Hubble can resolve individual stars, giving astronomers important information about the stars' birth and evolution. ...
Às 18h30, na próxima terça-feira, dia 22/12, no Rio
O livro organizado pela pesquisadora da Coordenação de História da Ciência do Museu de Astronomia e Ciências Afins (Mast) foi editado pela Via Lettera Editora.
Resultado do Encontro Internacional de Historiadores da Teoria de Darwin, realizado em Manaus (AM), em 2004, o livro traz à discussão a teoria darwinista sob três vertentes: a construção da teoria e o meio físico e biológico; darwinismo e o meio cultural e político; e darwinismo e divulgação. A coletânea de 23 artigos apresenta partidarismos e oposições à teoria do naturalista inglês.
A publicação foi organizada a partir de uma parceria com mais três especialistas em história das ciências: Magali Romero Sá, pesquisadora da Fundação Oswaldo Cruz; Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, diretor do Departamento de Publicações do Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC); e Rosaura Ruiz Gutierrez, atual presidente da Academia Mexicana de la Ciencia. Pela característica da organização e autores, o livro traz artigos em português e espanhol.
O lançamento será em 22 de dezembro, das 18h30 às 21h, na Livraria Museu da República (Rua do Catete, 153, Catete).
Por que sou ‘pós-darwinista’? Porque já fui evolucionista de carteirinha. Hoje, sou cético da teoria macroevolutiva como verdade científica. Contudo, meu ceticismo ao ‘dogma central’ darwinista não é baseado em relatos da criação de textos sagrados. Foi a séria e conflituosa consideração do debate que ocorre intramuros e nas publicações científicas há muitos anos sobre a insuficiência epistêmica da teoria geral da evolução. Eu fui ateu marxista-leninista. Hoje, não tenho mais fé cega no ateísmo. Não creio mais na interpretação literal dos dogmas de Darwin aceitos ‘a priori’ e defendidos ideologicamente com unhas e dentes pela Nomenklatura científica. A Ciência me deu esta convicção. Aprendi na universidade: quando uma teoria científica não é apoiada pelas evidências, ela deve ser revista ou simplesmente descartada. Sou pós-darwinista me antecipando à iminente e eminente ruptura paradigmática em biologia evolutiva. Chegou a hora de dizer adeus a Darwin. Mestre, Doutorando em História da Ciência – PUC-SP.
CV Lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/6602620537249723
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