There is a good reason that I do not bill this as a 'current affairs' blog.  You are unlikely to read breaking stories here.  Nevertheless, I do get there eventually. 

A trawl through some recent back-issues of New Scientist (21st April) has turned up a couple of articles of some relevance to the (various) debate(s) over religion. 

Ken Stedman, of Portland State University in Oregon, has discovered some virus DNA that contains a sequence that seems to have been derived from an RNA virus.  This is very surprising - the divergence between these two types of virus is one of the oldest known, going right back prior to the advent of multicellular life.  The most likely explanation for this would seem to be that a DNA-based virus, and RNA-based virus and a (probably RNA-based) virus containing reverse transcriptase all infected a host cell at the same time.  The reverse transciptase was therefore able to take some genetic code from the RNA virus and insert it into the DNA of the DNA virus. 

Why is this significant?  One of the problems with understanding the early evolution of life as we know it is that it is difficult to see how DNA could have arisen.  Taken by itself, DNA is inactive and therefore pretty useless.  So it seems that it could not have arisen before the proteins needed to 'activate' it.  Yet those proteins are incapable of replication without DNA, so they could not have arisen before the DNA. 

The 'RNA world' hypothesis seeks to resolve this apparent catch-22.  In modern cells, RNA does little - it is primarily a 'messenger', taking information from DNA to the 'protein factories' of the cell.  But this conceals a surprisingly versatile chemistry; it is capable both of storing information (like DNA) and catalysing reactions (like a protein).  So, the theory goes, perhaps life began with RNA before evolving to the DNA/protein combo we see today. 

But this introduces some more problems.  One of these is that we have not yet found an RNA sequence capable of self-replication; this issue will not be addressed here.  Another issue is that moving data storage from RNA to DNA would require some sort of 'translation mechanism' - a little like switching from a video player to a DVD player.  For the casual viewer, this simply means restarting your film collection, but for a living organism the problem is more serious since the information lost would concern replication and thus be essential to life itself. 

So what Stedman has found is of tangential importance to this debate.  Although the exact mechanism cannot be the one used in the RNA world scenario - it requires existing DNA-based and cellular life - it does indicate that there are solutions to this problem.  A tantalising glimpse of a possible solution, but not enough yet to say this problem is solved. 

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Another New Scientist article, this one from 5th May, headlined 'Analytical thinking erodes belief in God'.  Humans apparently have 'two cognitive systems for processing information: one fast and intuitive, another slower and analytical.'  Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Colombia believes he has found a link between scepticism and analytical thinking.  Students were asked to rate their belief in God (and other supernatural ideas); then later invited back to repeat the test, having been 'primed' to use their analytical brains.  Naturally, a control group had no such priming on the second occasion. 

What Norenzayan found was that students who had recently been thinking analytically - solving puzzles and the like - were significantly less likely to believe in God.  He is quoted in the article as saying that 'Habitual analytical thinking could be one reason scientists tend to be disbelievers'.  If so, this may perhaps give some hope for a resolution to one of the more depressing results from New Scientist's 'God Issue' (see next post), that belief in God is innate and unlikely to go away even if false.  Perhaps as education improves, using our analytical systems will become more 'first nature' to more and more of us.