New Tissue Scaffold Regrows Cartilage And Bone

MIT engineers and colleagues have built a new tissue scaffold that can stimulate bone and cartilage growth when transplanted into the knees and other joints.

The scaffold could offer a potential new treatment for sports injuries and other cartilage damage, such as arthritis, says Lorna Gibson, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and co-leader of the research team with Professor William Bonfield of Cambridge University.

Intern Daily

Pawlenty says he will veto medical marijuana bill

Gov. Tim Pawlenty told reporters on Tuesday afternoon that he will definitely veto a medical marijuana bill that passed the state Legislature on Monday. But, he added, “I have great empathy for the sick.”

Legislators on both sides of the aisle watered down the bill by eliminating the ability for patients to grow their own marijuana, limiting the bill only to patients who are terminally ill and adding a sunset date two years from enactment, but none of those concessions appear to have affected Pawlenty’s opinion of the bill.

Minnesota Independent

Mockingbirds Can Recognize A Face In A Crowd

The birds are watching. They know who you are. And they will attack. Nope, not Hitchcock. It’s science. University of Florida biologists are reporting that mockingbirds recognize and remember people whom the birds perceive as threatening their nests.

Terra Daily

Turkey blamed for looming crop ‘disaster’ in Iraq

Iraq faces an agricultural “disaster” this summer if Turkey continues to retain waters from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which have sustained Iraqi agriculture for millennia, experts say.

The controversy over the sharing of the mighty rivers at the root of Iraq’s ancient name of Mesopotamia — meaning “between the rivers” in Greek — is almost as old as the country itself.

Seed Daily

The Myth of Gabriel García Márquez

Up to this point, Martin has not been challenging what he calls his subject’s “mythomania”—how could he, since it’s the basis of the writer’s art and fame—but he has not been retelling the myths, either. He has been grounding them, laying out the pieces of what became the puzzles. And that’s what he’s doing here, too, it turns out. He is playing with us for a moment, precisely because the magic of this moment has to be acknowledged in some way.

Slate

Family, Army of God defend man who drove car into abortion clinic

Derosia was sentenced to time served, but the state is seeking to have him permanently committed for mental illness. Derosia has faced at least two commitment proceedings in the last decade.

His family is opposing the current commitment, saying Derosia was only doing the Lord’s work.

Minnesota Independent

‘Dirty Tricks’ Over Toxic Waste

London’s High Court will on Wednesday hear allegations of dirty tricks in the biggest class action ever brought before the British courts.

It arises from the dumping of toxic waste three years ago in Ivory Coast’s largest city, Abidjan.

In the aftermath, up to 100,000 people fell sick and 16 died.
Common Dreams

E-Waste Recovery Rates Increase

The National Center for Electronics Recycling (NCER) recently released its 2008 per capita collection index (PCCI) for electronics recycling, showing a 7 percent increase in recovered e-waste from 2007. The PPCI is designed to measure changes in the amount of recovered electronics collected in six representative electronics recycling programs across the U.S.

“We have been gathering these numbers from the same collection programs for the last three years in order to measure the overall trends,” says NCER Executive Director Jason Linnell. “As anyone who runs electronics collection programs will tell you, volumes are increasing.”
ENN

More Critically Endangered Birds On IUCN Red List Than Ever

The latest evaluation of the world’s birds reveals that more species than ever are threatened with extinction, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™.

BirdLife International, which conducted the research for the IUCN Red List, found 1,227 species (12 percent) are classified as globally threatened with extinction. The good news is that when conservation action is put in place, species can be saved.
ScienceDaily

Our own Quiche Moraine blogger, Greg Laden, has won the Dichotomy Prize for his post on “good” vs. “bad” birds.

This is a very important blog carnival because it has served for so long, and so consistently, as a model for all other nature- and science-oriented carnivals.

The blog post was written by N8 (I assume N’s 1 through 7 were unavailable), and it is a stupendous carnival, with seemingly thousands of entries.

Please go read it and click on all the links!

-LLSC

I was reading today about the problems facing the Theological Evolutionists. They accept the science of evolution yet hold on to their faith that an active creator designed the process of evolution to lead to Man. Bart Klink’s essay at Infidels.org spells out their quandary. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Had the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago missed the earth, it’s likely that our little branch on the tree of life would never have developed, since the end of dinosaur dominance made it possible for our small mammal ancestors to flourish. How are such chance contingencies in the history of life compatible with the alleged providence of a Creator?

If we step outside of our chauvinistic inclination to look at evolution as a process with humans as the teleological result of its process, the unfolding story of life’s continual divergence makes even more sense. As Klink illustrates, we are but a small twig on a minor branch of the Tree of Life and not necessarily its crown.

In biology, we know that the whole of the aviary are descendants of common ancestors within the mighty dinosaurs. Prior to the great meteor crash on what is now the Yucatan peninsula, the antecedents of modern birds had already begun to fan out from their common ancestry with coelurosaurs (a group which includes velociraptors.)

For the layperson looking at dinosaurs, this relationship is easier to see in the modern raptors such as eagles, owls, falcons and hawks. These magnificent birds have the temperament of what we think of as keen hunters demonstrating the truism that nature is “red in tooth and claw.” The raptors hunt and eat and participate in Dawkins’ “evolutionary arms race.”

But what of the pretty little flutterers that stop by your bird feeder to chirp and nip at the seeds you leave for them? These are perhaps a bit more difficult to visualize as sharing common ancestry, relatively recent common ancestry, with the slashing and flesh-ripping velociraptors depicted in Jurassic Park.

Crows ripping at the flesh of a dead squirrel on the ground? Yes, they are living from meal to meal and cawing their warnings to each other, much as the more vicious dinosaurs of our imagining. The budgie in your cage, playfully bobbing and primping in front of a mirror? It is harder to imagine such a cutie as the descendant of the mighty hunters of 65 million years ago. Nonetheless, it is a survivor of evolution.

Most of the problem that people have in accepting evolution is the popular notion that is often falsely ascribed to Charles Darwin, a phrase he only temporarily accepted. “Survival of the fittest” conjures images of nature constantly at war for food and sex, a battle between predator and prey and suggests that adaptability involves the continual development of “bigger, faster and stronger” predators and the concomitant “bigger, faster and stronger” prey.

“Survival of the fittest” did not originate with Darwin. It was coined instead by philosopher Herbert Spencer and applied by “Social Darwinists” to describe a condition of raw power in economics, unfettered by regulation or oversight. Evolution, properly understood, does not entail survival of the fittest. It is not a matter of the fastest, the strongest and smartest proceeding to the next generation. It is a matter of populations surviving well enough to continue until they eventually face extinction.

Small birds find various niches to fill. The budgie and the robin survive because there is enough of the food energy that they can use to last through successive generations, and all they need to pass on their genes is to reproduce in great enough numbers that their predators can’t overwhelm and destroy their species. Malthus’ essays on population and economics are said to be prime inspirations for Darwin’s ideas on natural and sexual selection. A species which can outnumber and outlast its competition will continue, if it can adapt to changes in the environment.

When the great rocks collided with the Earth at Chicxulub, (and possibly others at the same time in Ukraine and in the Indian Ocean,) a mass extinction ended the reign of the dinosaurs, the large beasts who ruled as the number one predators on land for 160 million years. It ended the reign of the plesiosaurs in the oceans. It left open, after Earth’s recovery, niches for new forms to arise from the common stock shared by dinosaurs and birds, and here we are in the modern age feeding sparrows and chirping birds outside of our windows.

The smaller birds survived because the massive disasters left for them room to build their populations. Out of the ashes of the K-T extinction arose new plant life, new forms of food for the taking by hungry birds. (To return to Jurassic Park for a moment, Ian Malcolm explains “Life finds a way.”) The massive disaster also likely made it possible for mammals to diversify and embiggen, and transform to the point where arose humans smart enough to make and fill bird feeders.

The quick answer to Bart Link’s question I quoted above is that the meteors colliding with earth at the K-T Boundary was a deus ex machina, that the dinosaurs had finished their role in paving the way towards the eventual development of man. The big bad rocks were the Hammers of the God(s) and a necessary step for Theistic Evolution.

That answer is unsatisfying to me for the simple reason that it really adds nothing but a violation of Occam’s Razor. It’s an unnecessary addition to the point of inquiry. Evolution takes advantage of catastrophes, and often the fit to survive are not the biggest, strongest nor the fastest; just the ones who make it through.  I am happy that the meteors struck, because if not for their destruction there would have been no key lime pie and no humans to eat it.  There would have been no birds calling outside my window on a Sunday morning to wake me.  I just don’t think they were intentional.

Consider the lowly bird. It’s outside my window. Consider the mighty T. rex. Its bones are in a museum.