The olfactory bulb sends signals to the brain (somehow) and our brain tells us there is an odor. We remember them and recognize them. I had a patient who started to smell the ocean, 75 miles away from Houston, as the first sign of her brain tumor. Smell recognition get built in as we become adults from infants. It is just like sight, an amazing capacity of brain interpretation.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-temporal-olfactory.html

If our frontal lobes are no better than described we are really apes. We know that is not so, and the author does try to explain how the parts of the brain interact:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/05/16/gorillas-agree-human-fro...

Over 25 million years ago:

http://www.nature.com/news/fossils-indicate-common-ancestor-for-two-primate-groups-1.12997

Big battles over their cognitive abilities:

http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthal-culture-old-masters-1.12974?WT.ec_id=NATURE-2013...

Changes away from ape ear bones shape a preparation for language that developed later? I always look for preprogramming:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130513174331.htm

Talk about complexity!:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/2013/05/12/mosses-make-two-different-...

A minor change and two different-looking plants. Also an explanation of Hox and homeobox genes

Certain proteins are in control through the hypothalmus of the brain:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/2013/05/13/growing-old-with-nf-kb/...

These mousse studies might well apply to us.

Definitely not:

"The finding, published online today in Nature, overturns the notion that this repetitive, non-coding DNA, popularly called "junk" DNA, is necessary for life."

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/05/scienceshot-carnivorous-plant-ej.html?ref=hp

Full article:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12132.html

More complete commentary:

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-carnivorous-bladderwort-genome-contradicts-notion.html

Who wins? Physicists claim we can get something from nothing. Really? From a true nothingness?

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-are-some-physicists-so-bad-at.html?commentP...

There is a low level of magnetism in the universe perhaps related to inflation.
Using quantum renormalization math suggests it may correct:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23526-quantum-trick-offers-source-for-mystery-cos...

How do we know butterfly coloration is mimickry. The answer is we really don't and just-so stories have popped up to flesh out Darwin's theory with no justification!

http://cadra.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/butterfly-mimicry-rings-a-case-of-natural-selecti...

It pays to think.

About 2 million years ago steak house:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130510124441.htm

"What makes humans unique is not material and looking for it in the architecture of the brain is a well-funded waste of time that eats up the time an intellectual powers of too many thinkers these days."

Our brain power makes us unique (as does our skeletal posture not covered in this article)

http://tbsblog.thebestschools.org/2013/05/09/where-human-uniqueness-apparently-does-not...

DNA goes through contortions to make a living person:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130509123647.htm

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-salk-epigenomics-stem-cells-mimic.html

If various exons (coding areas) of a gene are spliced in diffrent ways, the gene is expressed in different ways.

"On the other hand, the papers show that most alternative splicing events differ widely between even closely related species. “The alternative splicing patterns are very different even between humans and chimpanzees,” said Blencowe. “Alternative splicing is evolving faster than gene expression,” concluded Tom Cooper, professor of pathology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who was not involved in the work."(my bold)

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/33782/title/Evolution-by-Splicing/

This is why our DNA and chimp DNA are about 98% similar if one simply tallies coding bases, but the complexity of layers of management in the whole genome makes us very different from the chimp and it is estimated that the genomes are really about 83% similar in action,

A beautifully constructed article combining knowledge of evolution, plant biochemistry and the importance of CO2 levels. The UN's IPCC scare tactics about CO2 is criminal and simply is a money-making scheme for third-world countries.

"The current levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, approaching 400 parts per million, are low by the standards of geological and plant evolutionary history. Levels were 3,000 ppm, or more, until the Paleogene period (beginning about 65 million years ago). For most plants, and for the animals and humans that use them, more carbon dioxide, far from being a "pollutant" in need of reduction, would be a benefit. This is already widely recognized by operators of commercial greenhouses, who artificially increase the carbon dioxide levels to 1,000 ppm or more to improve the growth and quality of their plants."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323528404578452483656067190.html?KEYWORDS...

How do they know how to create daughter cells that shift into various parts of the organism. Same DNA in all, different outcomes in differnt tissues and organs:

"The findings suggest that the information on the X and Y chromosomes that makes this division possible is primed during gametogenesis—the process of creating ovum or sperm cells—in the parents." (my bold)

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-clues-stem-cells-kinds.html#jCp

Sir Fred Hoyle, Astronomer Royal on Design in nature:

Engineering and Science, November 1981, p. 12:

"Now imagine yourself as a superintellect working
through possibilities in polymer chemistry.
Would you not be astonished that polymers based
on the carbon atom turned out in your calculations
to have the remarkable properties of the enzymes
and other biomolecules? Would you not be
bowled over in surprise to find that a living cell
was a feasible construct? Would you not say to
yourself, in whatever language supercalculating
intellects use: Some supercalculating intellect
must have designed the properties of the carbon
atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an
atom through the blind forces of nature would be
utterly minuscule. Of course you would, and if
you were a sensible superintellect you would conclude
that the carbon atom is a fix.From 1953 onward, Fowler and I have been intrigued
by the remarkable relation of the 7.65
Me V energy level in the nucleus of 12C to the
7 .12 MeV level in 160. If you wanted to produce
carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by
stellar nucleosyhthesis, these are just the two
levels you would have to fix, and your fixing
would have to be just about where these levels are
actually found to be. Is that another put-Lip, artificial
job? Following the above argument, I am inclined
to think so. A common sense interpretation
of the facts suggests that a superintellect has
monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry
and biology, and that there are no blind forces
worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one
calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming
as to put this conclusion almost beyond
question." (my bolds)

It may not be possible to combine classical physics and quantum theory says Freeman Dyson:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2013/05/03/why-the-search-...

We may have to content with a duality.

What is God vs. no need to have a God.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.html

Dawkins:
"Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences. Once it has done so, of course, those intelligences can create other complex things: works of art and music, advanced technology, computers, the Internet and who knows what in the future? Darwinian evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There may be other "cranes" (Daniel Dennett's term, which he opposes to "skyhooks") that we have not yet discovered or imagined. But, however wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative cranes may be, they cannot be magic. They will share with Darwinian evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out of simplicity, while never violating natural law.

"Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place."

Armstrong:

"Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead. But can we respond religiously to evolutionary theory? Can we use it to recover a more authentic notion of God?

"Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the "God beyond God." The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Mr. Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate —when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection."