Imagine a typical1 citizen of a country in Western Europe. She doesn't believe in god(s) and neither did her parents or grandparents. How should she feel? Should she be depressed and overcome with a sense of hopelessness because there are no god(s) to save her? 
Jonathan Eisen is becoming one of my favorite bloggers. He alerts us to a horrible press release published recently by the National Science Foundation (USA):How to Thrive in Battery Acid and Among Toxic Metals.The scientists made an unexpected discovery: Galdieria's genome shows clear signs of borrowing genes from its neighbors.A "new mechanism of evolution" that was only revealed a decade ago by genome sequencing? Jonathan Eisen explains why this is so very wrong. You should read his post: Ugg - story about gene transfer/evolution based on NSF press release has a NASA-esque smell. I agree 100%. We've got to put and end to this kind of ridiculous hype and misrepresentation. It's damaging to science.1
Many genes that contribute to Galdieria's adaptations were not inherited from its ancestor red algae, but were acquired from bacteria or archaebacteria.
This "horizontal gene transfer" is typical for the evolution of bacteria, researchers say.
However, Galdieria is the first known organism with a nucleus (called a eukaryote) that has adapted to extreme environments based on horizontal gene transfer.
"The age of comparative genome sequencing began only slightly more than a decade ago, and revealed a new mechanism of evolution--horizontal gene transfer--that would not have been discovered any other way," says Matt Kane, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.
"This finding extends our understanding of the role that this mechanism plays in evolution to eukaryotic microorganisms."
Galdieria's heat tolerance seems to come from genes that exist in hundreds of copies in its genome, all descending from a single gene the alga copied millions of years ago from an archaebacterium.
"The results give us new insights into evolution," Schoenknecht says. "Before this, there was not much indication that eukaryotes acquire genes from bacteria."
Eukaryotic innovations usually arise through gene duplications and neofunctionalizations, which lead to expansion of existing gene families (8). In contrast, archaea and bacteria commonly adapt through horizontal gene transfer (HGT) from other lineages (9). HGT has also been observed in some unicellular eukaryotes (10); however, to our knowledge, horizontally acquired genes have not been linked to fitness-relevant traits in free-living eukaryotesThat point is reiterated in the summary.
These findings for G. sulphuraria mirror the results of a previous systematic study, which showed that proteobacterial adaptation relies on the horizontal acquisition of genes that function at the bacteria's interface to the environment (19). Whereas the importance of HGT for evolution of Bacteria and Archaea is well established, adaptation of a eukaryotic extremophile by gene transfer from Bacteria and Archaea is unexpected and shines a new light on the evolution of unicellular eukaryotes.There's nothing about a new mechanism of evolution in the actual paper.
[Image Credit: Gerald Schönknecht]
1. Ed Yong gets it right: How the Lord of the Springs Survives Where Most Things Die, demonstrating, once again, that good science writers can cut through the hype and lies.
Schönknecht, G., Chen, W.H., Ternes, C.M., Barbier, G.G., Shrestha, R.P., Stanke, M., Bräutigam, A., Baker, B.J., Banfield, J.F., Garavito, R.M., Carr, K., Wilkerson, C., Rensing, S.A., Gagneul, D., Dickenson, N.E., Oesterhelt, C., Lercher, M.J., and Weber, A.P. (2013) Gene Transfer from Bacteria and Archaea Facilitated Evolution of an Extremophilic Eukaryote. Science 339:1207-1210. [PubMed] [doi: 10.1126/science.1231707]
I have been known to cause some problems on other forums, for obvious reasons, but I had hoped that on this forum we will be able to get to the bottom of the problems such as" vitalism vs entropy barrier, self assembly of proteins, self-cell membrane formation, metabolism first vs RNA world, why did evolution need 600 types of mangoes and how did they evolve and why?I offered to answer two questions; the one on self assembly of proteins and the one on why male pattern baldness evolved. I suggested that John Witton could send the check to a neutral third party and that we could agree on a judge who would decide whether I had answered the questions satisfactorily. I recommended Michael Behe as the judge for the first question and Michael Denton as the judge for the second question.
Why did Larry Moran and Craig Venter evolve to baldness only on the part of the scalp but they have retained their bushy hair on the side and lower back of their scalp????
For those who answer one of these question logically, I am willing to pay $1000.00
I’m glad you took the bait Larry…for the lack of better word in English… You are not a very good bluffer though…I’m hoping you don’t play poker and bet large sums of money… Anyway, even though you are paddling back from some of the issues I have presented you know you can’t explain, I’m still going to pursue this transaction, since I can still nail you on those two issues you feel comfortable with…You have nothing to lose...or it might be a little bit of pride, which is fine with me… So, this is what I’m doing. I am sending two cheques $1000.00 US each to Michael Behe and Michael Denton with the explanation of our agreement. They may not like writing extensive explanation as to their judgment or nothing at all, except Larry or John is the winner in their view. We just have to accept that.Then on Monday he said ...
I have contacted both Behe and Denton. I have emailed the Discovery Institute regarding our arraignment. Even The Star is interested, if Behe participates... I don't think anybody takes you seriously Larry... We'll see.. You seem to be a big mouth that writes text books nobody understands, even you ...;)I checked with Michael Behe on Thursday but he still had not heard from John Witton. I wasn't able to find out how to contact Michael Denton ... I'm waiting for Witton to send me the contact information since he already got in touch. (If anyone has an email address please send it to me.)
Larry is right. I have not sent the cheques or the paper to Behe or Denton yet... I'm sick with a bad case of stomach flu...You don't have to believe me... I will try to contact you when I'm better...Sorry to all my supporters...According to Witton he now "got Larry by the balls." I thought I should let all my enemies know about this so they can watch the spectacle. Some Sandwalk readers might want to help John by answering one of the other questions for $1000.
Last Sunday (March 3, 2013) CBC radio aired a discussion on "Does religion have a place in public life?" The host was Rex Murphy. You can listen to the entire thing at: Does religion have a place in public life?.... you're debating the wrong question. It's not the role of religion in public institutions. it's the difficulty of being a person of faith working with people who haven't any ... any religion. And I'm speaking as someone with 27 years in parliament ...It gets worse. She claims that atheists simply don't share her values, such as the Golden Rule, therefore you can't find common ground when trying to make policy.
[Hat Tip: Thanks to Tony Burns for preparing the audio excerpt.]
Friday night, after cutting out the cardboard bases, still deep in defeat Watson went home and then to the theatre. Saturday morning, February 28, he came in, cleared a place to work, got out his cardboard cutouts.
Though I initially went back to my like-with-like prejudices, I saw all too all too well that they led nowhere. When Jerry [Donohue] came in I looked up, saw that it was not Francis, and begin shifting the bases in and out of various other pairing possibilities. Suddenly I became aware that an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical in shape to a guanine-cytosine pair held together by at least two hydrogen bonds. All the hydrogen bonds seem to form naturally; no fudging was required to make the two types of base pair identical in shape.1Watson stumbled into this part of the solution visually, from a shape, a representation, and that had happened several times before; that is the way his mind works. Note two of the four kinds of bases have the same contour. Watson found that the purine adenine, a fused double ring with other atoms fringing it at several points, could form two hydrogen bonds with the pyrimidine thymine, a single ring, when he placed the two cutouts side by side in the right way. The bond were the correct length, and were straight lines, N—H--O or N--H—N, as Pauling's model-building precepts required. Guanine and cytosine made hydrogen bonds the same way. The pairing could not be switched, however, for then the various atoms around the fringes got in each other's way. But when an A-T pair was laid on top of a G-C pair, the two compound shapes were exactly congruent. Such pairs could fit inside the backbones without bulges or pinches.
Donahue said these pairs agreed with what he knew. Crick, when he came in, immediately pointed out that the way the bases in these pairs would attach to their sugars meant that the two backbones ran in opposite directions, just as they had to do. Each chain could include both purines and pyrimidines, with pairs flipped over. That satisfied the dyadic symmetry. Chargaff's ratios were satisfied, too. The bases could appear in any order on one chain. Once that order was fixed, though, the base pairing, guanine always with cytosine and adenine with thymine, determined a complementary order on the opposite chain.
That morning, Watson and Crick knew, although still in mind only, the entire structure: it had emerged from the shadow of billions of years, absolute and simple, and was seen and understood for the first time. Twenty angstrom units in diameter, seventy-none billionths of an inch. Two chains twinning coaxially, clockwise, one up the other down, a complete turn the screw in 34 angstroms. The bases flat in their pairs in the middle, 3.4 angstroms and a tenth of a revolution separating a pair from the one above or below. The chains held by the pairing closer to each other around the circumference one way than the other, by an eighth of a turn, one groove up the outside narrow, the other wide. A melody for the eye of the intellect, not a note wasted. In itself, physically, structure carried the means of replication—positive to negative, complementary. As the strands unwound, at double template was there in the base pairing, so that only complementary nucleotides could form bonds and drop into place as the daughter strands grew. ... one doubts, of course, that Crick and Watson altogether realized, that morning, what they had seen. "We have discovered the secret of life," Crick told everyone within earshot over drinks that noon at the Eagle. It was not the entire secret of life, yet truly for the first time at the ultimate biological level structure had become one with function, the antimony dialectically resolved. The structure of DNA is flawlessly beautiful.
Horace Freeland Judson
The Eighth Day of Creation Expanded edition 1996, pp. 148-150
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
1. James D. Watson, The Double Helix, p. 194
The Big Island (Hawaii) is one giant pile of lava from five different volcanoes. The large one, slightly below center in the photo, is Mauna Loa and it is still an active volcano. You can see streaks of old lava flows spreading out from the summit. Mauna Kea, the slightly higher volcano above center, is now dormant.1 The active volcano that tourist visit is Kilauea, below and to the right on Mauna Lao. 
This is the dry side of the island and the surrounding area is very desert-like. As you can see from the photo I took (below), the resort area is not desert at all. That lush vegetation requires constant watering. (I don't know were the water comes from.) You can also see the parts of the lava flow that have not been transformed. It's very impressive to see it up close.
[Hat Tip: Ms. Sandwalk took the photos of snow-capped Mauna Loa with her telephoto lens.
1. That's where the Hawaiian observatories are located.
2. Liberia and Burma are the other two countries that aren't metric.
This is a view of Wakiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii. I took it from LuLu's Surf Club where I was eating fish tacos and drinking Hawaiian beer. (The fish tacos were horrible. The beer was acceptable.)
The USS Arizona (BB-39) is an American battleship built during World War I. It was modernized and upgraded in 1930. 
I’ve still got plans to post more on this subject, but an unfortunate event has blocked me. I was going to make my next post on evolutionary psychology one that focused on some of the papers, and in particular, I wanted to discuss a good paper or two, so that I could start off on the right tone. And people sent me links and papers.I understand his pain. I've often asked for good examples of evolutionary psychology and gotten nothing but garbage. For example, an evolutionary psychologist named Gad Saad once sent me a list of The Great, Profound, and Valuable Works of Evolutionary Psychology. At some point we have to question the value of an entire field if it can't come up with even a handful of high quality papers.
Only problem: they were all awful. Every one. I couldn’t believe that even these papers that some people were telling me were the best of the bunch were so lacking in rigor and so rife with unjustified assumptions. I read through about a dozen before I gave up in disgust and decided that there were better things to do in my time.
I’d ask again, but I was burned so badly on that last go-round that I’d have a jaundiced view of any recommendation now.
"Darwin’s Dead Idea and the Man Who Helped Kill It" makes for highly engaging reading. Witness the fascinating journey of a smart, inquisitive adolescent rejecting his school’s ask-no-questions religious indoctrination into a mathematician, philosopher, and scientist of the highest order, one who today is powerfully and persuasively challenging academia’s reigning answer to the questions that haunt us all: Where did we come from? Why is there something rather than nothing? A leading spokesman for the scientific theory that is shattering materialist assumptions about reality and the origin of life, Dr. William Dembski responds to probing questions from James Barham, general editor of TheBestSchools.org. That interview forms the core of DDI. Dembski’s forthright and humbly restrained responses reveal the courage, perseverance, and original thinking that have made him a lightning rod in the scientific community. The heated controversy surrounding intelligent design theory dramatically confirms Machiavelli’s observation that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. DDI introduces readers to one of the stellar lights of the new order of things now emerging on the horizon.I'm speechless.
