What's this,the human brain is extremely sophisticated?(Who knew?)

Brain connections “more sophisticated than thought” (straight face here)

Hello, base, do we have a connection? The human brain is said by many to be the most sophisticated known item in the universe.

Never mind, from ScienceDaily::


Inhibitory connections between neurons act as the brain’s brakes, preventing it from becoming overexcited. Researchers thought inhibitory connections were less sophisticated than their excitatory counterparts because relatively few proteins were known to exist at these structures. But a new study overturns that assumption, uncovering 140 proteins that have never been mapped to inhibitory synapses. Some of the proteins have already been implicated in autism, intellectual disability and epilepsy, suggesting new treatment avenues. – Akiyoshi Uezu, Daniel J. Kanak, Tyler W.A. Bradshaw, Erik J. Soderblom, Christina M. Catavero, Alain C. Burette, Richard J. Weinberg, and Scott H. Soderling. Identification of an Elaborate Complex Mediating Postsynaptic Inhibition. Science, September 2016 DOI: 10.1126/science.aag0821 Paper. (paywall) More.

Memo to the new atheists from one of their own:don't open the champagne just yet.

Atheism is doomed: the contraceptive Pill is secularism's cyanide tablet

 
 
 The 1960s counterculture slogan “make love, not war” could have been invented for the Hutterites, a conservative, pacifist Anabaptist community in the US and Canada. Numbering 400 at the end of the 19th century, when they moved to Dakota on the point of extinction, there are almost 50,000 Hutterites today, despite conversion being extremely rare (they speak an archaic form of High German and live in the middle of nowhere, which makes it unlikely they’ll turn up at your doorstep with a funny grin).

They are not alone. The Mormons continue to grow by 40 per cent every decade, largely thanks to a high birth rate, so much so that by 2080 there will be anywhere between 63 and 267 million Mormons, depending on whether that figure falls to 30 per cent or 50 per cent.

And Evangelical Christians now account for two thirds of white American Protestants, while the ultra-Orthodox account for 17 per cent of British Jewry, but 75 per cent of children.

Across the western world the fertility rate of religious conservatives far outstrips that of non-believers, so much so that modern liberal secularism is endangered. That, anyway, is the thesis of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, a fascinating new book by Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck University, which is published later this month. It may well be one of the most significant books of our era.

It used to be taken for granted that, just as liberal democracy meant the end of history, so it also meant the end of religion. Once people became rich, educated and sexually liberated, they left irrational beliefs and other such nonsense behind.

Christianity declined steadily from the mid-19th century but it wasn’t until the 1960s that European societies were able to fully abandon the emotional baggage of their civilisation’s infancy, and especially its repressive attitude to sex.

But if what Kaufmann is saying is true – and the demographic data suggests it is – then the contraceptive Pill was not so much secular Europe’s liberation as its cyanide tablet.

The good news is that Europe will not become Islamicised (although Kaufmann’s estimate of 20 or 25 per cent is Islamic enough). The bad news (for some) is that it will become Evangelical Protestant instead. This will at least be encouraging for Israel, although whether it will be the same progressive, secular Israel where gays can serve in the military is another matter, as by the second half of the century the ultra-Orthodox will be the majority.

New Atheists comfort themselves with the idea that religious people will continue to drift their way, like rustics to the city, but the figures do not bear this out. It is true that liberal religious people continue to embrace atheism at a rate that alarms the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Methodist Churches, and Reform synagogues. Once religions start to accept secularism and rationality, their young people usually reach the logical conclusion of doubt – unbelief.

More conservative religions do not have that problem. Only 5 per cent of the more traditional Amish leave the faith, and when a community’s birth rate outstrips the national average by 200 or 300 per cent they can easily afford to lose one in 20 of the flock.

While the likes of Richard Dawkins aim their bile at traditional Christianity, fundamentalists are largely immune to their attacks, and become only stronger as the more committed members of the established churches head their way. Those religions that survive will become more conservative.

God alone knows what will happen to the Church of England this century, but we can safely say that the Catholic Church will become smaller but more committed. It will continue to exist at the margins of an atheist-dominated Europe ruled by an increasingly intolerant secular Left.

Widespread anti-religious feeling will only get more intense as the coming demographic changes outlined by Kaufmann appear to ring true, and as Evangelical Christians start to become more significant in, for example, the British Conservative Party.

But that smaller, more orthodox Catholic Church will have a huge inbuilt advantage – what French Canadian Catholics used to call “revenge of the cradle”. Many orthodox Catholics I know have 3 or 4 children – that’s not a recklessly high number, but in a society where the atheist fertility rate is around 1 child per woman, that advantage will show over a few decades, especially since orthodox Catholics have a far smaller drop-off rate than their liberal brethren.

Much as this will anger the New Atheists, which is a plus, Kaufmann’s thesis is disturbing. Personally I prefer Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and Anglican civilisation to some of the wackier strains of Evangelical Christianity. As for fundamentalist Islam…

It’s happened before: Kaufmann believes that Christianity’s rise from 40 followers to 6 million within three centuries had less to do with conversions that with higher birth rates, since the Christians rejected such pagan practises as polygamy and infanticide.

Today we view the ancient world’s attitude to infanticide as barbaric and incomprehensible, but perhaps future generations will look at our attitudes to abortion in the same way – that's not because pro-lifers would have won the argument, simply that (in addition to the effect of the Pill) abortion is killing the atheists of tomorrow.

Why chirality remains a problem for origin of life science.

Tagish Lake Meteorite Does Not Solve the Homochirality Problem
Evolution News & Views


Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, share a puzzling feature. All amino acids used in making proteins are "left-handed" amino acids.

In chemistry, we call molecules "left-handed" or "right-handed" based on how things attach to a carbon atom. Imagine the palm of your hand is a carbon atom, and your fingers are different molecules attached to the carbon (e.g., a hydrogen, an amine, a carboxylic acid). Notice that both of your hands have the same "things" attached to it, but in a different order such that your hands are mirror images of each other. My right and left hands both have a pinky finger, a thumb, and an index finger, but the arrangement is different. The same thing happens to carbon atoms that have different things attached to it; you can get molecules that are mirror images of each other. These mirror images are mostly chemically equivalent. (See here and here for more on homochirality.)

The interesting part of this is, when we try to make amino acids in the lab, we always end up with a 50/50 mixture of right- and left-handed amino acids. But when scientists try to construct proteins from this 50/50 mixture, the proteins do not function properly. Right-handed amino acids do not work. So the big question is: How did nature make only left-handed amino acids? Or was there a 50/50 mixture and nature somehow isolated only the left-handed ones to make proteins?

Scientists from the Goddard Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory believe their recent studies on a Tagish Lake (British Columbia) meteorite sample may provide an answer to this question. (See here for the press release. The research paper is still in press). They found that the Tagish Lake sample has an excess of left-handed aspartic acid, one of the 20 amino acids used in protein construction. They also noted, however, that the sample contains only a slight left-handed excess (8% greater) of alanine, another one of those 20 amino acids. They, therefore, conclude that the amino acids on the meteorite sample are not from biological contamination from Earth, but were formed in space. Furthermore, the excess left-handed aspartic acid must have formed and been isolated somehow inside the meteorite, as opposed to being exposed to certain types of radiation that may cause a slight excess of one hand of amino acids over another.

The Tagish Lake meteorite has many unique properties that have made its classification difficult. It has been a subject of interest since January 2000 when it landed. For a look at some of the unique features of the Tagish Lake meteorite, see here. Importantly, the meteorite contained many more organic compounds than just amino acids.

The Goddard Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory researchers conclude that the amino acids must have formed within the meteorite, and the left-handed excess of aspartic acid is likely due to crystallization that occurs in the presence of water. Alanine, on the other hand, does not crystallize in the same way. This is why there was only a left-handed excess of aspartic acid but a minimal excess of alanine. They speculate that perhaps the early Earth formed left-handed amino acids in a similar way -- by forming crystals in the presence of water.

The fact that a particular handedness can be isolated through crystallization is not news. Chemists do this in the lab when they want to isolate a left- or right-handed molecule. This only works if the molecule can form crystals that only contain one hand. Not all molecules form crystals and not all molecules form crystals that are purely left- or purely right-handed. Alanine is not a good candidate for isolating one form using crystallization because alanine crystals form from combinations of left- and right-handed molecules, giving the chemist crystals that are 50/50 left- and right-handed.

So what makes this finding so interesting? The researchers reason that because they have found a left-handed excess of aspartic acid that formed naturally, they speculate that nature could do this on Earth or perhaps the early Earth was seeded from amino acids that traveled on a meteorite similar to this one.

Unfortunately, this does not quite solve the left-handed (or "homochirality") problem. You see, in order to form left-handed crystals of aspartic acid, there needs to be a slight abundance of left-handed molecules in the first place. In other words, crystals do not form from a true 50/50 mixture. There must be a slight excess of left-handed molecules to form pure left-handed crystals. Given the alanine observation (an 8% excess of left-handed molecules), we might conclude that something caused a slight excess, such as polarized light interacting with the amino acids. This is a possibility, but of the amino acids found on the meteorite, only aspartic acid and alanine are mentioned, meaning that whatever caused the slight excess did not affect all of the amino acids.

Another glaring problem is, while crystallization may be an explanation for how some left-handed amino acids were isolated in nature, it does not explain all of the amino acids. Not all of the amino acids form homochiral crystals. So were there two different mechanisms that happened to isolate only left-handed versions of all 20 of the predominant amino acids? This seems to be a bit of a stretch, and does not solve the mystery of why nature prefers left-handed amino acids.

The NASA report ends, as much origin-of-life research ends, with more speculation and storytelling than actual findings or viable conclusions:

This process only amplifies a small excess that already exists. Perhaps a tiny initial left-hand excess was created by conditions in the solar nebula. For example, polarized ultraviolet light or other types of radiation from nearby stars might favor the creation of left-handed amino acids or the destruction of right-handed ones, according to the team. This initial left-hand excess could then get amplified in asteroids by processes like crystallization. Impacts from asteroids and meteorites could deliver this material to Earth, and left-handed amino acids might have been incorporated into emerging life due to their greater abundance, according to the team. Also, similar enrichments of left-handed amino acids by crystallization could have occurred on Earth in ancient sediments that had water flowing through them, such as the bottoms of rivers, lakes, or seas, according to the team." [emphasis added]
All of these statements are speculative and do not necessarily follow from the actual findings in the meteorite. The meteorite shows that aspartic acid, which we already know forms homochiral crystals, formed homochiral crystals while alanine, which we know forms crystals with a 50/50 composition, had a slight left-handed excess. This says nothing about how these amino acids could have formed on the early Earth.

Furthermore, the Tagish Lake sample contained multiple organic compounds, not just amino acids, so if these meteorites provide a naturalistic example of possible origin-of-life mechanisms, we need to consider the presence of other compounds that nature apparently did not "choose" to employ. These findings, therefore, do not help us understand why nature builds proteins from 20 particular organic compounds that are specifically left-handed or where those 20 amino acids came from.

Christendom's theologians are finding that commonsense is a bit more resilient than they previously thought.

New Poll Finds Evangelicals’ Favorite Heresies
Kevin P. Emmert




Jesus, Almost as Good as His Father?
Almost all evangelicals say they believe in the Trinity (96%) and that Jesus is fully human and fully divine (88%).

But nearly a quarter (22%) said God the Father is more divine than Jesus, and 9 percent weren’t sure. Further, 16 percent say Jesus was the first creature created by God, while 11 percent were unsure.

No doubt, phrases like “only begotten Son” (John 3:16) and “firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15) have led others in history to hold these views, too. In the fourth century, a priest from Libya named Arius (c.250–336) announced, “If the Father begat the Son, then he who was begotten had a beginning. … There was a time when the Son was not.” The idea, known as Arianism, gained wide appeal, even among clergy. But it did not go unopposed. Theologians Alexander and Athanasius of Alexandria, Egypt, argued that Arius denied Christ’s true divinity. Christ is not of similar substance to God, they explained, but of the same substance.

Believing the debate could split the Roman Empire, Emperor Constantine convened the first ecumenical church council in Nicaea in A.D. 325. The council, comprising over 300 bishops, rejected Arianism as heresy and maintained that Jesus shares the same eternal substance with the Father. Orthodoxy struggled to gain popular approval, however, and several heresies revolving around Jesus continued to spread. At the second ecumenical council in Constantinople in 381, church leaders reiterated their condemnation of Arianism and enlarged the Nicene Creed to describe Jesus as “the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.”


In other words, the Son is not a created being, nor can he be less divine than the Father.

The Holy Spirit: May the Force Be with You?
But if evangelicals sometime misunderstand doctrines about Jesus, the third member of the Trinity has it much worse. More than half (51%) said the Holy Spirit is a force, not a personal being. Seven percent weren’t sure, while only 42 percent affirmed that the Spirit is a person.

And 9 percent said the Holy Spirit is less divine than God the Father and Jesus. The same percentage answered “not sure.”


Like Arianism, confusion over the nature and identity of the Spirit dates to the early church. During the latter half of the fourth century, sects like Semi-Arians and Pneumatomachi (Greek for “Spirit fighters”) believed “in the Holy Spirit”—as the First Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) taught—but said the Spirit was of a different essence from the Father and the Son. Some said the Spirit was a creature, and others understood the Spirit to be a force or power, not a person of the Trinity.