Metaphors and perception

Over at the BioLogos blog, Michael Ruse offers a short summary of his new book, Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.  Go read it and come back for a few observations below the fold.

Metazoan extremophiles

Deep under the Mediterranean Sea, small animals have been discovered that live their entire lives without oxygen and surrounded by ‘poisonous’ sulphides.

Also, from the same article:

“These extreme environments,” said Danovaro, “have been thought to be exclusively inhabited by viruses, Bacteria and Archaea. The bodies of multicellular animals have previously been discovered, but were thought to have sunk there from upper, oxygenated, waters. Our results indicate that the animals we recovered were alive. Some, in fact, also contained eggs.”

So contrary to conventional biological wisdom, metazoan life can thrive in extreme environments.  This new research also helps us appreciate how another popular belief is also probably false….

Front-loading and the Endocrine System

Human insulin has the ability to mimic a growth factor for the single celled organism, Tetrahymena. But did you know that Tetrahymena’s ability to respond to mammalian insulin has been extensively studied?