Becoming eyeless is an adaptation of sorts, no? ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2010) – University of Maryland biologists have identified how changes in both behavior and genetics led to the evolution of the Mexican blind cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) from its sighted, surface-dwelling ancestor. In research published in the August 12, 2010 online edition of the journal Current Biology, Professor William Jeffery, together with postdoctoral associates Masato Yoshizawa, and Å pela Goricki, and Assistant Professor Daphne Soares in the Department of Biology, provide new information that shows how behavioral and genetic traits coevolved to compensate for the loss of vision in cavefish and to help them find food in darkness. This is the first time that a clear link has been identified Read More ›

At this writing I see that my post here has 122 responses, and that my post here has 81 responses. After examining all the dialog one thing seems clear to me: The ID versus Darwinian-materialism question must inevitably invade and challenge the core of the human soul. Don’t tell me that anyone doesn’t at least eventually ask the only substantive and meaningful questions: 1) Why am I here? 2) Where did I come from? 3) Is there any ultimate purpose or meaning in my life? If Darwinism is true, the answers to these questions are obvious: 1) No reason. 2) Chemistry and chance, which did not have you in mind. 3) No. You are an ephemeral product of 2). The Read More ›

Because of my many duties and responsibilities I post infrequently at UD. However, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: My posts seem to inspire a great amount of debate and very long threads, as is the case here. I have a theory about why this is the case. My thesis is that people like me, a former materialist atheist, who have been influenced by logic, reason, and evidence (i.e., the ID movement) represent the greatest threat to the reigning nihilistic and anti-intellectual Darwinian orthodoxy.

The ability of some insects to imitate the leaves and stems of plants has fascinated collectors and researchers alike. Wings, legs and other body parts can all contribute to a very effective disguise, a phenomenon known as mimesis. There has been speculation, of course, about the adaptive origins of the observed characters, but very little data is available on which to build anything robust. The fossil record is meagre. The earliest example before this year has been the Eocene leaf insect Eophyllium, already fully formed and functional (noted here). It conveyed no evidence to support a gradual transformation model. Since living examples of leaf mimesis relate to angiosperm plants, it has been inferred that leaf mimesis is a trait that Read More ›

Did you ever wonder how mosquitoes find you so quickly? Next time you might try not breathing because they are attracted to the carbon dioxide you exhale. And how do insects detect carbon dioxide? Studies have found two different neuron cell proteins (neural receptors) that seem to do the job. And they do the job exquisitely.  Read more

The scientific evidence does not favor evolution but that doesn’t mean we know all the answers. In fact some people who agree evolution is unlikely, nonetheless argue for common descent. This can be confusing because common descent is so often presented as integral to Darwin’s idea. But this need not be the case.  Read more

Do you still think God is good?

— George Williams, 1987 (p. 157)

In the commentary following the death on September 8 of leading neo-Darwinian theorist George C. Williams — go here for a representative selection — I’ve seen no mention of the considerable role of theology in Williams’s thought. I’d speculate that this silence follows naturally from the wide, albeit tacit, acceptance by Williams’s closest colleagues of the theological assumptions he made. As Ludwik Fleck (1979, 41) understood, a premise on which a group of scientists agree (if they are conscious of holding the premise at all) is not likely to elicit comment.

But no one can open The Pony Fish’s Glow (Basic, 1987) or Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, Challenges (Oxford, 1992) and miss the theology.
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An article was published in The Guardian today, featuring a discussion between Oxford Zoologist, Richard Dawkins, and the renowned broadcaster, Sir David Attenborough. Describing the transformation of a dragonfly larva into a dragonfly, the pair remarked, DA: I am a naturalist rather than a scientist. Simply looking at a flower or a frog has always seemed to me to be just about the most interesting thing there is. Others say human beings are pretty interesting, which they are, but as a child you’re not interested in Auntie Flo’s psychology; you’re interested in how a dragonfly larva turns into a dragonfly. RD: Yes, it’s carrying inside it two entirely separate blueprints, two different programmes. DA: I couldn’t believe it! I remember Read More ›

This is a multi-part post in response to Merlin’s paper, “Evolutionary Chance Mutation: A Defense of the Modern Synthesis’ Consensus View”. See introduction and table of contents.

In the last installment, we talked about how Merlin tried to paint a whole range of semi-directed mutations as “evolutionarily random”, and how this falls short when compared to the motivation behind Darwinism in the first place – to remove any hints of teleology from biological description.

However, Merlin also describes what she would consider as evidence of directed mutation – a bias in mutations that produce exclusively adaptive mutations. In the previous installment I showed why this was an overly stringent requirement. However, even as a requirement, there are experiments showing that at least some directed mutations occur.
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George Williams died September 8th, 2010. An evolutionist, he had insightful things to say about biology’s information problem. Commenting on the “separability of information and matter,” he wrote: “You can speak of galaxies and particles of dust in the same terms because they both have mass and charge and length and width. You can’t do that with information and matter. Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise matter doesn’t have bytes. . . . This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains.” He saw that computer programmers transfer “information from one physical medium to another” and then “recover the same information in the original medium.”

Aircraft typically use air pressure measurements to determine their altitude above sea level. They may also use radar to directly measure their altitude above ground. Needless to say each approach is immensely complex. Insects also need to determine their altitude. Many do so by measuring how fast the ground passes beneath them. But new research has found that flies use a different method.  Read more

In this comment I included an essay I wrote in 1994 at the behest of a Christian friend, David Pounds, after my conversion from militant atheism to traditional Christianity. Dave encouraged me to write it, but it only chronicles one aspect of the journey (the most significant one). But there was another extremely significant aspect of this journey, which I cannot overemphasize, and that was reading Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, recommended to me by Dave. I was thoroughly schooled in traditional Darwinian orthodoxy, and never gave a thought to the possibility that there might be problems with it. It took me only a few hours over a couple of days to read the book, and my materialistic Read More ›

As regular readers of this blog know, Stephen Barr is no friend of ID.  But here he gets it right on Hawking’s recent foray into theology.  A sample: Physics scenarios and theories are merely mathematical stories. They may be fictional or describe some reality. And just as the words of a book by themselves can’t tell you whether it’s fact or fiction—let alone have the power to make the world they describe real—so with the equations of a physics scenario. As Hawking once understood, equations may turn out to be an accurate description of some reality, but cannot not confer reality on the things they describe. What Hawking called in his previous book the “usual approach of science” is in Read More ›

In 1996, palaeontologist Mike Benton published a fascinating analysis of tetrapod evolutionary data and concluded: “Competitive replacement has probably played a minor role in the history of tetrapods. In an assessment of the origins of 840 families of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, fewer than 26%, and probably fewer than 13%, were identified as candidate competitive replacements (CCR’s).” The alternative mechanism proposed was adaptation into new habitats. This finding was presented in the paper as bringing a different emphasis to our understanding of speciation than was brought by Darwin: “A classic view in evolution has been that many successful radiations of plant and animal groups in the Past have been mediated by competitive interactions. Newly successful groups are said to Read More ›

Evolution cannot be said to be absolutely true, but just about. Evolution could be false, but only if most everything we thought we knew is cleverly misleading us. Short of a massive cosmic conspiracy, evolution must be true. Either Darwin was right, or this is one of those Bobby Ewing dreams. This is how certain evolutionists are of their idea that all life (and everything else by the way) just happened to come together. But how can evolutionists be so certain when there are so many problems with their idea?  Read more