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The International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) is a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism, naturalism, or reductionism. The society provides a forum for formulating, testing, and disseminating research on complex systems through critique, peer review, and publication. Its aim is to pursue the theoretical development, empirical application, and philosophical implications of information- and design-theoretic concepts for complex systems. Society Announcements ISCID is pleased to announce the latest issue of PCID, Volume 4.2 November 2005. The current issue features papers by Pattle Pun, William Dembski, Fernando Castro-Chavez and others. A variety of topics are addressed, including (1) cellular origins and evolution, (2) the nature of information and (3) the usefulness of evolutionary algorithms ...[more] October 2005: ISCID recommends five more books, this time on language evolution, that you should read...[more] News and Features A new approach and algorithms in genome analysis promises to reveal the secrets of 'Junk DNA'. The new approach to gene prediction is based on detecting the genomic signatures of transcription, accumulated over evolutionary time...[more] Researchers have developed a new method for identification of functional RNA structures based on phylogenetic analysis. The algorithmic search results in a high false positive associated with very large uncertainties, but the candidate result set with low false positives identifies a large number of known functional RNAs, and contains new candidate functional RNAs ...[more] Announcing the 2006 International Conference on Complex Systems. Join an international community of Complex Systems educators, researchers and professionals for insights into current research on complex systems. This is an opportunity to connect with others who are using and developing complex systems approaches in their work...[more] Human genome phenotype variation may be due to systematic large-scale genome information re-arrangements in structurally vulnerable or apposite sequences, rather than point mutations over time...[more] Geneticists have discovered a correlation between linkage disequilibrium for SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) or short sequence insertion deletion mutations, and large scale genome sequence deletions. They posit that not only can SNPs therefore be used to infer locally proximate deletions, but that both are responsible for variation in genetic phenotypes...[more] Researchers at Duke University have proposed that a unified theory of physics will ultimately enable apparent common design features in the movement systems of diverse organisms and species to be a consequence of biological systems responding to environmental demands according to the same spatio-temporal dynamical rules or ‘flow’...[more] ISCID is pleased to announce the latest issue of PCID, Volume 4.1 July 2005. The current issue features papers by Casey Luskin, William Dembski, Jakob Wolf and others. A variety of topics are addressed, including (1) human origins, (2) the nature and place of human beings and (3) the nature of evolution...[more] Conference Announcement: Applications of Methods of Stochastic Systems and Statistical Physics in Biology, October 28-30, 2005. Presented by the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Biocomplexity this conference looks like excellent. Among other things, its purpose is to: "Promote interactions between physicists, mathematicians, biologists, chemists and engineers with interests in modeling stochastic behavior in biology."...[more] ISCID is pleased to announce the latest issue of PCID, Volume 3.1 November 2004. The journal features papers from Royal Truman, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson and others. A variety of topics are addressed, including (1) computer simulations of Darwinian evolution, (2) irreducible complexity and (3) the application of intelligent design ...[more] The 2005 International Conference on Natural Computation will feature the most up-to-date research results in computational algorithms inspired from nature, including biological, ecological, and physical systems...[more] An enormous team of Chinese researchers have produced an improved map of the rice genome, and have proposed that new species and new functions in rice arose evolutionarily on the basis of a mutation-duplication mechanism whereby the genome ‘tests’ mutations for efficacy...[more] A team of cognitive researchers investigating the bottlenecks in mental response to complex tasks proposes a stochastic model of cumulative evidence for modeling response times and processing ...[more] IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity: June 12th - 15th, 2005, San Jose, California... [more] An international group of researchers, including members of the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Austin in Texas, has applied methods of contact network epidemiology to demonstrate that the outcomes of SARS disease outbreaks may have very different outcomes with minimal differences in initial infection patterns and outbreak conditions. They offer quantitative insight into the heterogeneity of SARS outbreaks worldwide...[more] In an attempt to converge results for computational genomic analysis on Darwinian macro-evolutionary assumptions, a computational biologist has invented a putative standard for genomic analysis which effectively maximises the likelihood of finding conserved sequences based on chosen constraints and, and in so doing rejects methods with more rigorous constraints that result in lesser correlations. In what reads like a case study in probabilistic informational displacement and NFL, readers may find it an interesting exercise to mentally substitute the term 'complex specified sequences' for 'conserved sequences' where it occurs, and to note the reference to 'detection of a specified feature'. This research highlights the continuing acute misconception among leading scientists that chance mechanisms are adequate to explain complex specified information...[more] Using mathematical modeling of real time data recorded via electrophysiology, researchers have employed computational methods to probabalistically extrapolate/estimate steps in signal processing within the auditory receptor cells of the grasshopper based on their output, concluding that the results could be applied to other similar mechanical-to-neural signal transduction and processing mechanisms. The sub-millisecond temporal resolution of signal processing stages is too fine, and the auditory system to delicate, to determine the bioelectrical processes by direct biophysical experimental observation...[more] The National Science Foundation is embarking on a multidisciplinary initiative to pursue Darwin's vision of a phylogenetic Tree of Life, by conducting targeted research to resolve phylogenetic relationships for groups of organisms within the 1.7 million currently described species using new data from genetics and genome sequences, and incorporating old standards such as morphology. The NSF is placing a lot of faith in the predicted outcome, making available an estimated $29M in research grants of up to $3M to be awarded to research proposals based on eligibility as determined by the NSF and external reviewers ...[more] Cellular development in morphogenesis of different organisms and organs usually involves complex cascades or exchanges of proteins providing signals as regulators and cues for critical phases of development such as cell adhesion. By altering levels of possible activator proteins, Elain Fuchs et al. have manipulated the expression of Snail, a regulatory protein involved in the development of hair follicles, yielding insights that may help them understand how the processes of epithelial development work in skin cancer...[more] A burgeoning field of research in DNA science involves attempts to understand the self- assembly capabilities of complex biological molecules such as proteins and DNA by producing synthetic molecules that form periodic or aperiodic crystals, thereby demonstrating the propensity for such synthetic molecules to bind together in predictable ways. Recently, such experiments have been combined with prefatory computer simulations to produce more complex fractal aperiodic crystals based on synthetic molecules, and although the results are interesting, it is noteworthy that the self-assembling biological molecules being so 'modeled' are assumed to have evolved by Darwinian mechanisms - despite the probabilistic prohibitions of such a process occurring - and that little reference is made to the likelihood of complex self assembly capabilities arising by such mechanisms ...[more] "The reductionist method of dissecting biological systems into their constituent parts has been effective in explaining the chemical basis of numerous living processes. However, many biologists now realize that this approach has reached its limit. Biological systems are extremely complex and have emergent properties that cannot be explained, or even predicted, by studying their individual parts. The reductionist approach—although successful in the early days of molecular biology— underestimates this complexity and therefore has an increasingly detrimental influence on many areas of biomedical research, including drug discovery and vaccine development." ...[more] |
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