Biology // Current TV

Evolution in Action by AMNH [video]

This video tells the story of speciation in Central Africa's roiling, rapid Lower... more

GrrlScientist
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Fin to limb evolution clue found

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News A study has shed light on a key... more

putdownmypants
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Bryan's Proud of Gay Animals: That's Gay Extra

In honor of LGBT Pride month, Bryan Safi celebrates nature's OG gays: animals.... more

bryan_safi
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12 comments

Thinking Plants

Science discounts the idea that a creatively intelligent species of plants could... more

cornucopia3000
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From Gears to Genes: A Sea Change in Transhumanism

Transhumanism is the idea of guiding and improving human evolution with intention through the use of technologies and culture. If those technologies are not robotic and cybernetic but, instead, genetic and organic, then so be it.

For the better part of its existence, transhumanism was a philosophy built around computers, robotics, A.I, and nanotech. Extropianism, one of the most impressive and potent iterations of transhumanism, was born out of Silicon Valley. Many transhumanist research institutes still operate out of the lovely California epicenter of futurist dreaming.
Only in the past decade have we started to realize that transhumanism won’t realize its dreams through mechanization and computerization. Though seminal authors on transhumanism, like Kurzweil, Morovac Moravec, Drexler, and More focus on nanotechnology and cybernetics, those technologies haven’t seen real progress since the 70’s.

But genetics and biotech has. Starting in the 1950’s with the Pill, vaccines, and antibiotics, our knowledge of medicine and biology radically improved throughout the second half of the twentieth century with assisted reproduction technologies like IVF, not to mention genomic sequencing, stem cell research, organ transplantation, and neural mapping, advances in biology and medicine are what are driving the transhumanist revolution. When someone like Mark Gubrud starts arguing transhumanism won’t work because we can’t upload our minds into robot bodies, one has to gawk for a moment in awe at the irrelevance of the argument. It’s like arguing we can’t ever cure cancer because cold fusion is impossible.

Transhumanism is the idea of guiding and improving human evolution with intention through the use of technologies and culture. If those technologies are not robotic and cybernetic but, instead, genetic and organic, then so be it. And that seems to be the way things are going.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment of change, but 2001 seems to be a good year as any. Before that you have an engineer’s perspective on how to improve humanity, as with the above authors. After that, you have writers like Bostrom, Pearce, Hughes, Agar, and Bailey nodding to the older, mechanical ideas, but instead choosing to focus on pre-implantation genetic diagnostics, senescence, cognition enhancing drugs, growth hormones, eugenics, mood control, suffering, sentience, sexuality and neurodiversity. The clone has replaced the cyborg, and the only engineering that matters has the words “genetic” or “chemical” as a prefix.

Cryonics, A.I., and nanotech remain points of interest, but of significantly reduced importance. One of our best and most amazing cybernetic devices, a cochlear implant, is rudimentary compared to the fantastic goals of syncing a mind, a thing we can’t even define, with circuitry. Yet our efforts to sequence the very instructions from which a mind is grown, DNA, has been a smashing success. Genetics and biotechnology is currently where electronics and computing were in the 1960’s: the very basics have been established and we don’t even know what we’re going to do with the technology. We don’t even know what we have yet: biology is in a liminal space.

And it is because of that liminality that we as transhumanists must not focus on technologies, on possibilities or guesses as to what may come, but rights and responsibilities. No one, and I mean no one, predicted the iPhone and everything it entails (cellular communication, hand-held computing, the internet, digital music and video, mass affordability) at the dawn of the computing era. No one even predicted it during the Dot Com Boom. To guess as to where biotech might go in the next 50 years is an equally huge exercise in futility.

The critical difference is, of course, that the human body is biological. Unlike technology, which mediates our interaction with the world, whatever advances occur in biology will mediate how we are embodied and will directly effect our state of existence. It is this existential threat to the “human” that is triggering the backlash and why opponents of transhumanism are no longer Luddites, but bioconservatives. Technology is no longer the enemy, but the very nature of humanity itself.

To be a bioconservative is to pick a moment in time and choose it as the appropriate point for human beings to remain in evolutionary stasis. That we have gone from a pre-sapiens, hunter/gatherer, small tribe, nomadic, raw-food-processing species that lacked language, culture, and higher reasoning to a sprawling, urban, technological, language-based, culture-ruled, rational super species is irrelevant. The cry of the bioconservative is, to paraphrase McKibben, “Enough! This far, but no further, in the name of ‘humanity’ as we have retroactively defined it!”

But their movement will fail as bioconservatives oppose the very essence of the thing they claim to love: human nature.

If there is one thing humans do, it is change, learn, and evolve. We are the apotheosis of evolution, because for the first time in the universe the process has a conscious agent. Like a confused and frightened Urizin stumbling along with the love and wisdom of Sophia as our guide, we desperately seeking to live up to our potential and the racking weight of the knowledge that we may fall short. As with computers and the digital revolution, we do not know where biotech and the genetic revolution will take us. But we know it will take humanity somewhere else, somewhere new.

One can reject that change, concede to fear and in doing so reject one’s humanity; or one can take hold of the brighter burning flame of science and philosophy and, in doing so, dare to believe we can ethically and boldly bring our species out of the biological Dark Ages and into a future of unexpected wonders and challenges.Transhumanism is the idea of guiding and improving human evolution with intention... more

UtopianSky
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Two Genes Help Explain How Tibetans Survive in High Altitude

Researchers from the University of Utah and Qinghai University in China have... more

UtopianSky
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10 Years After Human Genome, Few Cures

Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced that the first draft of the human... more

rodstradamus
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Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 - first synthetic organism

Craig Venter Institute (JVCI), has successfully produced the first self-replicating,... more

dariusvons
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1 year ago
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BP Tries to Block Photos of Dead Wildlife

For animal lovers, one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the Gulf spill is the oil-drenched wildlife washing up on shore. If you're too horrified to look at any photos, you're in luck — BP doesn't want you to see them.

As of Friday morning, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s tally of dead animals collected in the Gulf area was 527 birds, 235 sea turtles (six to nine times the average rate), and 30 mammals, including dolphins. Yesterday morning, the spill washed over Queen Bess Island (called “Bird Island” by locals), which is a habitat for Louisiana brown pelicans, the state bird that was once an endangered species. Forty-one of the birds were coated with oil, and that number is expected to rise.

Have you seen the terrible pictures of all this carnage? Neither have I. And neither has anyone else.

Wonder why? The New York Daily News reported on Wednesday that BP has ordered its contractors not to share pictures or otherwise publicize the scores of dead and injured wildlife.

An unnamed BP contractor gave a reporter a very different tour from the one presented to President Obama during his recent visit. Among the “highlights,” if that's what they can be called, was a decomposing dolphin that the worker said had been found filled with oil. The shoreline grass of Queen Bess Island was covered with stricken marine life, some dead and some struggling to breathe. The normally white heads of pelicans were dark with oil.

The worker said BP was insistent it didn't want any photos of the dead animals. "There is a lot of coverup for BP," the worker told the reporter. "They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence."

As extra assurance that most of us will never see photographic or any other evidence of the true extent of the carnage, Louisiana residents said BP quickly whisks off dead and injured wildlife to inaccessible buildings and offshore ships. Out of sight, out of mind ... but forever in locals' memories.

New York Daily News reporters trying to get a closer look at the disaster were escorted from a beach by police who said they were taking orders from BP. Even Louisiana residents have been required to sign non-disclosures.

Really, BP? Did you not get the memo this isn’t a police state? You may be able to control politicians by lining their pockets, but your bucks stop there. This disaster is going to affect all of us, and we have every right to see the extent of the damage.

In an encouraging development, this week Charlie Riedel of the Associated Press was somehow able to bypass BP's myriad roadblocks and snap some appalling photos. They may make us want to shield our eyes, but it's important we don't bury our heads just as BP would love for us to do.For animal lovers, one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the Gulf spill is the... more

captainplanet71
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The empathetic vegetarian brain: Study finds significant difference found between the brain functions of vegans and omnivores

It is often the case that meatless lifestyles are chosen for ethical reasons related to valuing animal rights. As a consequence of their food choices, vegetarians and vegans are often accused of and taunted for loving animals more than people. But do most vegetarians care less for fellow humans than animals, care for humans and animals equally, or care more for humans than animals but still care more for animals than omnivores do?

A study published yesterday in PLoS ONE has attempted to parse out differences among omnivores, vegetarians and vegans in brain responses to human and animal suffering. The three groups were first given the Empathy quotient questionnaire, and it was determined that vegans and vegetarians scored significantly higher in empathy than omnivores. Next, the subjects had their brains scanned with fMRI as they viewed images of human suffering, animal suffering and “neutral” natural landscapes.

Many differences were found among the brains of those with different feedings habits.

Firstly, vegetarians and vegans had higher engagement than omnivores of “empathy related areas,” such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), while observing both human and animal suffering. This seems to suggest that there is a neural basis for those with meatless lifestyles having greater empathy for all living beings.

However, when viewing animal suffering but not human suffering, meat-free subjects recruited additional empathy related areas in prefrontal and visual areas and reduced their right amygdala activity. This may be interpreted as evidence that vegetarians and vegans care more about the emotions of animals than those of humans. It is important to consider how the study was conducted, though, before reaching such a conclusion.

The authors themselves note a couple of weaknesses in their design. The subjects’ brain activities while they viewed human or animal suffering were compared to the baseline/control condition of “neutral” scenes that did not include living beings, faces, or suffering of any kind, which are all factors that should have been considered. The subjects were also simply asked to look at the images of the different conditions without being asked about their thoughts or feelings, so it is impossible to confidently attribute their brain responses to specific emotions. But even if the demonstrated brain activity represented empathy, there is also the possibility that the subjects were desensitized to images of human suffering that appear daily on the news. Desensitization to an image does not necessarily reflect empathetic feelings toward fellow humans.

So a claim that vegetarians/vegans love animals more than humans because they have more empathetic neural activity while viewing suffering animals than suffering humans is unsubstantiated at this point.

Another major finding in this study was differences in neural representations of cognitive empathy between vegetarians and vegans. All of these subjects had chosen not to eat meat for ethical reasons, but the authors suggest that these differences in vegan and vegetarian brain responses indicate that the groups experience empathy for suffering differently, possibly due to differences in reasons for their diet choices. Again, these results should be taken as preliminary because of weaknesses in the study’s design.

Overall the study is interesting, but it remains to be seen whether this will spark further research that will ultimately demonstrate findings significant enough to affect public policy and animal cruelty regulations.

For now, we have a bit of a clearer picture of the brain’s representation of empathy and a lot of extra material for the never-ending ethical debate over man’s right to meat.

Filippi M, Riccitelli G, Falini A, Di Salle F, Vuilleumier P, Comi G, & Rocca MA (2010). The Brain Functional Networks Associated to Human and Animal Suffering Differ among Omnivores, Vegetarians and Vegans PLoS ONE

http://neurokuz.blogspot.com/2010/05/empathetic-vegetarian-brain.htmlIt is often the case that meatless lifestyles are chosen for ethical reasons related... more

julesrs007
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ON "CREATION OF A BACTERIAL CELL CONTROLLED BY A CHEMICALLY SYNTHESIZED GENOME"

BY VENTER ET AL" [5.20.10] PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, George Church, Nassim N.... more

putdownmypants
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Lion Cub Birth Celebration Turns Tragic

Just two days ago, celebrations were underway at Smithsonian's National Zoo to mark the birth of an infant lion, the first such birth at the zoo in more than 20 years. Today the festivities abruptly turned to mourning, as the zoo this morning announced that the young male cub has died.

This week, lion keepers had been monitoring the cub and its mother, 6-year-old Nababiep, using a hidden video camera. When they noticed that the cub was not responding to Nababiep, the mother was moved outdoors to permit a veterinary examination of her offspring. At that point, its death was confirmed.

“Losing this lion cub is devastating for all of us at the National Zoo,” said Dennis Kelly, the zoo's director. “I believe this was a one-in-a-million fluke. Unfortunately, this is the downside to the ‘cycle of life.’ But, the animal care team and Zoo staff are consummate professionals, and I know they’ve learned a tremendous amount from creating the pride, breeding the lions and getting Nababiep through her first birth. We mourn this loss yet keep our focus on the best care for the lion pride.”

Pathologists performed a necropsy and discovered a straw awn—the pointed tip on a blade of straw—in the cub's lungs. This obstruction led to pneumonia, the cause of the cub's death. Zoos commonly use straw bedding for animals.

The cub appeared to be in good health when it was born at around 4 a.m. on May 18. Shortly thereafter, it was mobile and nursing.

The cub was the first for Nababiep, who has since rejoined her sister, Shera, in the outdoor lion exhibit at the zoo. Lion social structure in the wild typically consists of a single male along with females and their offspring. Together they form a pride, with both females and males actively hunting. This tight social structure is rare among large cats, since most are solitary animals.

Wild lions in Africa have experienced population declines due to hunting, disease and habitat loss. They are considered a vulnerable species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, so any lion birth is cause for celebration.

Keepers at the National Zoo remain hopeful that either of the females might soon mate again with the zoo's male lion, Luke. Based on this footage, taken recently by some visitors, Luke is more than ready to try againJust two days ago, celebrations were underway at Smithsonian's National Zoo to... more

Kurta
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2 years ago
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Marijuana May Extend Life Expectancy Of Lou Gehrig’s Disease Patients

Cannabis therapy may reduce symptoms and prolong survival in patients diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS aka Lou Gehrig’s disease), according to a scientific review published online last week by the American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Medicine.

Investigators at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle and Temple University in Pennsylvania reviewed preclinical and anecdotal data indicating that marijuana appears to treat symptoms of ALS as well as moderate the course of the disease.

Authors wrote: “Preclinical data indicate that cannabis has powerful antioxidative, anti-inflammatory, and neuroprotective effects. … Cannabis also has properties applicable to symptom management of ALS, including analgesia, muscle relaxation, bronchodilation, saliva reduction, appetite stimulation, and sleep induction. … From a pharmacological perspective, cannabis is remarkably safe with realistically no possibility of overdose or frank physical addiction. There is a valid, logical, scientifically grounded rationale to support the use of cannabis in the pharmacological management of ALS.”

They added, “Based on the currently available scientific data, it is reasonable to think that cannabis might significantly slow the progression of ALS, potentially extending life expectancy and substantially reducing the overall burden of the disease.”

Investigators concluded, “There is an overwhelming amount of preclinical and clinical evidence to warrant initiating a multicenter randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of cannabis as a disease-modifying compound in ALS.”

Writing in the March 2004 issue of the journal Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis & Other Motor Neuron Disorders, investigators at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco reported that the administration of THC both before and after the onset of ALS symptoms staved disease progression and prolonged survival in animals compared to untreated controls. To date, however, no clinical trials have assessed the use of marijuana or any of the plant’s cannabinoids on patients diagnosed with ALS.

Lou Gehrig’s Disease is a fatal, progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is characterized by the selective loss of motor neurons in the spinal cord, brain stem, and motor cortex. An estimated 30,000 Americans are living with ALS, which often arises spontaneously and afflicts otherwise healthy adults. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of patients with ALS die within three to five years following the onset of disease symptoms.

http://blog.norml.org/2010/05/19/marijuana-may-extend-life-expectancy-of-lou-gehrig%e2%80%99s-disease-patients-study-says/Cannabis therapy may reduce symptoms and prolong survival in patients diagnosed with... more

copperdragon
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Biologist Dr Reese Halter - BP Oil Spill Could Destroy Corals and Medicines

Join award-winning conservation biologist Dr Reese Halter, May 12, 2010 live on MSNBCs... more

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At Ole Macdonald's Animal Truck pull- - -

Top 10 Strongest Animals Compared to Body Weight... more

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World governments fail to deliver on 2010 biodiversity target

TRAFFIC - Wildlife Trade News - World leaders have failed to deliver commitments made in 2002 through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to reduce the global rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, and have instead overseen alarming biodiversity declines, according to a paper just published in the journal Science.

In the first assessment of progress made towards achieving the 2010 target, scientists from a wide range of institutions examined data from over 30 indicators of biodiversity – such as changes in species’ populations and risk of extinction, habitat extent and community composition – but found no evidence for a significant reduction in the rate of decline.

“Our analysis shows that governments have failed to deliver on the commitments they made in 2002: biodiversity is still being lost as fast as ever, and we have made little headway in reducing the pressures on species, habitats and ecosystems”, said Dr Stuart Butchart, of the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre and BirdLife International, and the paper’s lead author.

“2010 will not be the year that biodiversity loss was halted, but it needs to be the year in which we start taking the issue seriously and substantially increase our efforts to take care of what is left of our planet.”

The indicators included in the study were developed and synthesized through the 2010 Biodiversity Indicators Partnership – a collaboration of over 40 international organizations and agencies developing global biodiversity indicators and the leading source of information on trends in global biodiversity.

They included indicators developed by TRAFFIC and IUCN to monitor trends in the status of species used for food and medicine. These showed that birds and mammals used for these purposes are generally more threatened than those that are not. This may be due to over-exploitation or for other reasons such as habitat loss, or a combination of factors.

“Regardless of the causes, the diminishing availability of wildlife resources threatens the health and well-being of the people who depend on them directly for food and medicine and on their wild harvest as a source of income,” said Thomasina Oldfield, Research and Analysis Programme Leader for TRAFFIC and a co-author of the Science paper.

There needs to be urgent action to tackle the world’s biodiversity crisis, coupled with sustained investment in coherent monitoring and use of indicators to track and improve the effectiveness of any responses.

The results from the latest study will feed into Global Biodiversity Outlook 3, the flagship publication of the CBD, to be released in Nairobi on May 10th, when government representatives from around the world will meet to discuss the 2010 target and how to address the biodiversity crisis.

“Although nations have put in place some significant policies to slow biodiversity declines, these have been woefully inadequate, and the gap between the pressures on biodiversity and the responses is getting ever wider,” said Butchart
http://www.traffic.org/home/2010/4/30/world-governments-fail-to-deliver-on-2010-biodiversity-targe.htmlTRAFFIC - Wildlife Trade News - World leaders have failed to deliver commitments made... more

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12 Things You Didn't Know About Boobs

12 Things to look forward to---- http://oddee.com/item_96989.aspx

remanns
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Weeds 1, Monsanto 0, Farmers -1: evolution strikes back!

This should come as no surprise, but The New York Times breathlessly informed us... more

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Mammoths had 'anti-freeze blood'

Mammoths had a form of "anti-freeze" blood to keep their bodies supplied... more

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NASA…Evidence of Life On Mars!!! Aliens On Red Planet??? PHOTOS/VIDEO

NASA…Evidence of Life On Mars!!! TheSun.com By RHODRI PHILLIPS and PAUL... more

ctpatriot1970
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