Daily Archives: February 15, 2017

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Niantic and The Pokemon Company have announced that more than 80 new Pokemon are headed to Pokemon Go this week.

The new Pokemon come from the Johto region, originally introduced in Pokemon Gold and Silver, and can be encountered in the wild starting this week. Niantic is also adding new Evolution items for evolving Pokemon, as well as new purchasable outfit and accessory options for customizing your trainer.

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New berries will also be introduced to aid in catching Pokemon. The new Nanab Berry will slow the movements of wild Pokemon, while the Pinap Berry will double the amount of candy earned from catching a Pokemon if the next ball thrown yields a successful catch. The new berries join the Razz Berriesthat were already in the game, which can be fed to a Pokemon to make them slightly easier to catch.

While a full list of new Pokemon isnt available yet, Niantic specifically mentioned that Chikorita, Cyndaquil, and Totodile will be among the new additions. The new Pokemon coming this week join the initial set of Pokemon from generation 2 introduced to Pokemon Go in December, which included Togepi, Togetic, Pichu, Elekid, Smoochum, Magby, Igglybuff, and Cleffa.

A few of the new Pokemon and new berry types on display.

Todays announcement arrives as the Pokemon Go Valentines Day event comes to a close, ending a week of double candy rewards and extended six-hour Lure Modules.

The news also ends months of speculation about the full Johto Pokedex appearing in Pokemon Go, following details datamined from previous updates. Additional features found from datamining, including shiny Pokemon variants, have not yet been officially announced.

For much more on Pokemon Go, see IGNs Pokemon Go wiki guide, including a list of original Pokemon that evolve in generation two.

Andrew is IGN's executive editor of news and currently has a full Pokedex for the United States and Europe. You can find him rambling about Persona and cute animals on Twitter.

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Pokemon Go Adds 80 Generation 2 Pokemon, New Evolution Items This Week - IGN

Without calling it a series, I've written several articles recently that followed a logical path. In the first, I described the distinction between incremental innovation and radical innovation. I also outlined the commonalities and differences between intelligent design and theistic evolution (TE) as approaches to biology. In a follow-up, I applied the concepts from the first article to the proposed evolution of the vertebrate eye, demonstrating that it could not have occurred without intelligent direction. That's mainly because the majority of steps required for the addition of a lens are disadvantageous in isolation, so selective pressures would have operated in opposition to the evolutionary process.

Let's now consider the challenge of waiting times -- the minimum time required for hypothesized evolutionary transformations, such as the development of the camera eye, to occur through undirected processes. Even if the selective pressures were favorable, the required timescales are far longer for sufficient numbers of coordinated mutations to accumulate than the maximum time available, as determined by the fossil record. Of special interest is the proposed cooption of crystallin proteins, which give the lens its refractive properties. Seemingly, one of the easiest evolutionary steps should be producing these proteins in the lens, for some of them are already used for other purposes. The main hurdle would simply be altering the regulatory regions of the first borrowed crystallin gene, so it binds to the correct set of transcription factors (TFs). The lens protein could then be produced in the fiber cells in sufficient quantities at the right time in development.

However, the cooption process is far more challenging than it might at first appear. It requires regions in the gene to bind to at least four new transcription factors. This alteration would involve numerous mutations creating the four corresponding DNA binding sites known as transcription factor binding sites (TFBS). As I mentioned in the previous article, the earliest lens should have closely resembled lenses of vertebrates today, so this lower estimate is almost certainly accurate.

A typical binding site involved in lens construction consists of a DNA sequence ranging from roughly 7 (e.g., SOX2) to 15 (e.g., Pax6) base pairs, so four TFBS would likely correspond to over 30 base pairs. One could think of these DNA sequences like the launch codes to a missile; they must be correct before the protein can be properly manufactured. The lower bound of 30 base pairs can be divided by a factor of 3 to compensate for sequence redundancies, flexibility in where in the DNA sequences start, and the fact that roughly one quarter of the bases would be correct purely by chance. This extremely conservative estimate indicates that over 10 mutations would be required to generate a proper sequence. All but the final mutation would be neutral.

We can now calculate the likelihood of sufficient mutations occurring in 10 million generations. The mutation rate for a specific base par is typically estimated for complex animals to correspond to a probability around 1 in 100 million. The chance of a mutation occurring in 10 million generations is then 1 in 10. Therefore, the chance of 10 coordinated mutations appearing on the same DNA strand works out to much less than 1 in 10 billion. No potential precursor to a vertebrate with a lens would have had an effective population large enough to acquire the needed mutations. For comparison, the effective population size estimate used for Drosophila melanogaster can be in the low millions. If the generation time were even as low as one year, a crystallin could not be coopted even in 10 million years, which is the time required for the appearance of most known phyla in the Cambrian explosion.

Moreover, this step is only one of hundreds required to produce a lens. Researchers have identified numerous TFs essential to lens development in vertebrates, and each has its own set of TFBS, which integrate into a complex developmental regulatory gene network. If only one connection were wired incorrectly, the eye in the vast majority of cases would not form properly, resulting in impaired vision. In addition, the lens is only one component of the eye, which is only one part of the visual system. The obvious conclusion is that, in the timeframe allowed by the fossil record, the reengineering to produce the vertebrate visual system would require foresight and deliberate coordination. Those are the hallmarks of design.

Biologists have claimed to produce viable scenarios for the evolution of several other complex systems. What all these stories share is that they ignore crucial details and lack careful analysis of feasibility. When we examine these issues in detail, the stories collapse for the same reasons that the one about the eye does: First, the selective pressures oppose transitions between key proposed stages. Second, the required timescales are vastly longer than what is available.

For biologists, rigorously evaluating evolutionary narratives has become fully possible only in the past several decades due to advances in molecular and developmental biology. Meanwhile, with breakthroughs in computer engineering, information theory, and nanotechnology, parallels between biological and human engineered systems are increasingly evident. These developments are making the intelligent design framework essential for scientific advancement. They also create new opportunities for ID proponents and theistic evolutionists to collaborate.

Proponents of TE want to push materialistic explanations for biological systems as far as possible, as science demands. ID advocates would not disagree with them on that. No one wants to trigger the design filter prematurely. So theistic evolutionists should join us in considering what the modern evolutionary synthesis with its auxiliary hypotheses, such as niche construction and epigenetic inheritance, can explain. We should all continue to examine how insights from evolution may benefit research on cancer, in epidemiology, and other fields.

ID researchers, meanwhile, can examine the limits of purely materialistic processes, and we invite theistic evolutionists to do likewise These combined efforts will help to define in greater detail what Michael Behe calls the edge of evolution. This understanding would also help advance research on cancer treatments, antibiotic protocols, and more. At the same time, ID proponents can help identify how principles and insights from engineering may advance biological research and related applications.

Many theistic evolutionists recognize that the appearance of design is real (but then, so does Richard Dawkins). This insight, at least, should inform their research. In contrast, anti-theistic evolutionists are biased against recognizing the benefits of design thinking. As a result, in studying life they have stumbled upon close parallels to human engineering, which, however, they recognized only begrudgingly. On the other hand, ID expects these parallel and is unsurprised to find them. A classic example is how researchers, misled by evolutionary thinking, dismissed a large portion of the human genome as "junk" DNA instead of anticipating that it would function as a genomic operating system.

TE researchers do not need to immediately agree with ID researchers on whether any particular feature of life is the result of primary design or secondary causes. They can still work together to best serve the cause of genuine science, and I hope they will do so more in the future.

See the rest here:

Eye Evolution: The Waiting Is the Hardest Part - Discovery Institute

CHRISTOPHE SIMON/Getty Images Tim CollinsFeatured ColumnistFebruary 15, 2017

Thomas Meunier looked up, and all he saw was empty space. For 70 minutes, he and his Paris Saint-Germain team-mates had seen little else, so he put his head down and ran and ran and ran, all the way from right-back to the other penalty area where Edinson Cavani was waiting for the baton, poised to blitz the final leg.

Thrashing the ball into the net, Cavani set off, first toward the corner flag and then past team-mates, beyond his own bench and past opposition manager Luis Enrique, covering more distance with more speed than every Barcelona player on the night combined to embrace those in the stands at the other end.

In the background, the scoreboard read 4-0. It may as well have read "The End."

Cavani's goal was the nadir in a nightmare for Barcelona, but it was also so much more. This was the goal and the brutal treatment the Catalans have been trending toward all season. Every warning that's been dealt, every concern that's been voiced, they'd all fixated on a moment and a night such as thisone that had felt as though it was coming, one when the consequences of drift would crystallise.

Even if the extent of Tuesday's hammering at Parc des Princeswas surprising, the nature of the performance wasn't. For those who've watched Barcelona closely this season, this wasn't anything new. Instead, it was more of the same; only the strength of the opponent was different.

Watching PSG harass and trample the Catalans was essentially the maxed-out version of the type of contest we'd seen a handful of times before. Rewind to the clash with Celta Vigo in October and you'll see all the same themes; rewind to the games against Valencia, Manchester City, Sevilla, Real Sociedad and Real Betis and you'll see them, too.

On Wednesday morning, the cover of Catalonia-based Sport read, "This is not Barca." You knew what it meant. In a broader sense, this isn't them: the identity, the philosophy, the strength of the collective. But Sport's cover was also wrongthis is what this Barca have become.

It is Luis Enrique of course who has steered Barcelona down this path. The period of evolution led by the Asturian since 2014 has been both necessary and highly successful, reaping a treble in his first season and a domestic double last term. But evolution has now become regression, with the process having gone beyond the outer limit of its effectiveness and the team having moved too far along the spectrum. Tuesday signals the end of such a shift.

"It is difficult," the Barcelona boss said afterwards. "They were superior to us from the start. It was a disastrous night for us in which we were clearly inferior.There's not much more to say. PSG did what we expected them to do and produced their best version and we were at our poorest."

Nowhere was that more evident on Tuesday than in midfield. Once the cornerstone of Barcelona's dominance, the central third at Parc des Princeswas the area of the game's greatest discrepancy. Marco Verratti was sublime for the hosts, the conductor behind the athletic enforcers in Adrien Rabiot and Blaise Matuidi.

That trio swamped Sergio Busquets and rendered an underdone Andres Iniesta irrelevant. Gone, then, was the control so characteristic of Barcelonathe command of possession, the metronomic quality of the ball movement, the domination of territory, the suffocation of the opponent.

The effects of that were felt everywhere. Angel Di Maria attacked the space between a besieged midfield and a backtracking defensive line, Julian Draxler tormented an exposed Sergi Roberto and the vaunted front three had no supply line.

"I was there for Barca's 5-0 win over Real Madrid and was left with a similar facial expression right after it as they have now," Di Maria told beIN Sports (h/t Marca). "Surely, Barcelona have been finished."

The collapse, though, of Barcelona's central foundation is more consequence than cause. The erosion of the club's midfield supremacy has been the casualty of the Luis Enrique-led evolution as the team's definition has changed, with the emphasis moving to the forwards.

In Lucho's first season, the club's march to a treble was due to the calibration of Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar falling into place largely within the existing framework. There was a degree of compromise, as the manager's desire for explosiveness met midway between it and structure. But since, that shift has continued unabated, taking Barcelona away from what they were and to where they are now. Luis Enrique will pay for that.

"[Johan]Cruyff built the cathedral. It is our job to maintain it," Pep Guardiola once said. The problem is not the cathedral; it's still there. The problem is that they've drifted too far from their own religion.

For that, Barcelona's players will have to take their share of responsibility. But they'll also get their chance to make amends. Luis Enrique likely won't.

The man who played at the Camp Nou for eight years around the turn of the century has a contract that expires in June, and he has been non-committal all season on his future. Tense and often prickly, the Barca boss has regularly exuded the feeling he's tired of the demands, tired of the scrutiny and political swirl. His position consumes even the greats, and you sense that strain has taken its toll.

At the beginning of the campaign, this writer suggested that this season would present stiffer challenges to the 46-year-old: "Just as testing will be the necessity to continue feeding his players' drive. Astutely, he'll need to keep pushing his stars, challenging them, appealing relentlessly to them as competitors for another year after already doing so for two."

It's this that's seemingly escaped him, and it's not unusual. The great Hungarian manager Bela Guttmann used to argue that the third season was the point at which methods grew stale, messages lost their punch and at which opponents worked out the riddle. "The third season," went his famous line, "is fatal." And so it looks to be proving.

Back in November, when Barcelona were ambushed and run over by Manchester City,Sport likened the Luis Enrique incarnation with the way Liam Gallagher once described Oasis: "Like a Ferrari: Great to look at. Great to drive. And it'll f--king spin out of control every now and again."

Under the club's current manager, years one and two were full of great driving. In year three, they've been gradually losing the back end before entering a high-speed spin on Tuesday. There's a pole not far in the distance.

Almost certainly heading out of the Champions League, Barcelona are three weeks from their earliest European exit in a decade. They're also one point back of Real Madrid in La Liga despite having played two more games.

"Desastre," said Mundo Deportivo on Wednesday. Sport added: "Shipwrecked without a manager." It's not quite true, but it likely soon will be.

Continue reading here:

PSG Hammering Signals the End for Luis Enrique-Led Evolution at Barcelona - Bleacher Report