The cenancestor is defined as the last common ancestor of every currently living being. Its nature has been inferred from the identification of homologous genes between archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotic lineages. These inferences indicate that the cenancestor had a relatively modern protein translation system, similar in complexity to that of a current cell. However, the key enzymes for the replication of genetic material and for cell membrane biosynthesis are not homologous in bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. Here, we briefly review the history of the concept of the last universal common ancestor and the different hypotheses proposed for its biology.
«The question of the origin of life is one of the fundamental problems of science.» Few would disagree with this statement by the Russian biochemist Alexander I. Oparin, pioneer in
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, the American linguist George Lakoff (New Jersey, 1941) attends Mètode.
Despite the phenomenal progress molecular biology has made, we remain without an adequate account of the organization of proteins into an organism.
The tragedy of the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa was exacerbated by World Health Organization (WHO) rhetoric that depicted medical personnel as saviors of an irrational and emotional public.
We can support the idea that creativity in social and human sciences benefits more from preserving a plurality of scientific production spaces than from a single homogeneous space, which usually tends to fall into complacency.
This article examines the figure of the scientist in such fictional narratives and what these characterizations indicate about public attitudes toward science in our contemporary world.
Paradoxes – and the problem they present for logic – can be traced as a subject for reflection from the Sophists to contemporary language philosophers and mathematicians, visiting Aristotle, Abel
Rhetoric has always been linked to markets or forums, to social interaction, to the verbal weapons of debate and the activation of emotions and the manipulation of others. Its history
Against a contrasting backdrop of consensus on key issues on climate science, a heterogeneous group dubbed climate «skeptics», «contrarians», «deniers» have significantly shaped contemporary discussions of climate science, politics and policy in the public sphere. This essay focuses on the USA context, and explores some of the intertwined social, political and economic factors, as well as cultural and psychological characteristics that have together influenced public attitudes.
This article examines the television coverage of the three 2013 and 2014 reports by the Working Groups of the IPCC in five European countries: Germany, Norway, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom.
The need for green fiscal reform is urgent in the face of climate change. Some oppose it, however, arguing that such reforms disproportionately burden poorer individuals whose emissions are far smaller than those of wealthier individuals.
Everything seems to point to the fact that the education system is not yet succeeding in conveying the characteristic features of climate change to society.
Eight out of ten Spaniards think the hole in the ozone layer, caused by human actions, is the key physical cause of climate change. This belief, constructed from scientific elements (concepts, images, icons, discourse), is a product of popular culture. Science has never confirmed this relationship.
The scientific community has reached an ample consensus about the existence of climate change and its causes; one of the most extensive in the history of science.
The social and behavioral sciences share many characteristics with the «hard» or «natural» sciences, including a commitment to the systematic analysis of empirical data, whether quantitative or qualitative. Yet the subject matter of social science is sometimes elusive, involving many abstract entities like values and cultures, and its methods do not always involve measurement or experimentation.
Many philosophers and historians of science deny that there is a single scientific method that applies across all scientific disciplines. Here I distinguish normative from descriptive versions of this thesis. I defend the thesis that there are general normative principles that govern every science.
This article briefly reviews and criticizes various strategies that have been proposed by philosophers of science in order to establish a distinction between science and non-science.
Scientific research is validated by reproduction of the results, but efforts to reproduce spurious claims drain resources. We focus on one cause of such failure: false positive statistical test results caused by random variability.
The history of particle physics has witnessed many experiments that could illustrate the role of statistics, but few can boast a discovery of such scientific impact and dimensions as the Higgs boson, resulting from a colossal collective and technological endeavour.
Bayes’s rule, a simple eighteenth century theory about assessing knowledge, was controversial during most of the twentieth century.
Experimental determination or detection of the physiological mechanisms underlying disease is by and large a highly complex task. This fact has turned epidemiology into the main tool for generating knowledge in the medical field.
Big Data brings unprecedented power to address scientific, economic and societal issues, but also amplifies the possibility of certain pitfalls.
