“It must be acknowledged that there is a big difference in the degree of confidence we can have in neo-Darwinism and in the multiverse. It is settled, as well as anything in science is ever settled, that the adaptations of living things on Earth have come into being through natural selection acting on random undirected inheritable variations. About the multiverse, it is appropriate to keep an open mind, and opinions among scientists differ widely. In the Austin airport on the way to this meeting I noticed for sale the October issue of a magazine called  Astronomy, having on the cover the headline “Why You Live in Multiple Universes.” Inside I found a report of a discussion at a conference at Stanford, Read More ›

Here Ann Gauger and Doug Axe respond to Todd C. Wood’s critique of their recent paper ruling out a proposed Darwinian pathway for enzymes:

he excuse for shrugging it off would, I expect, be that the transition we examined isn’t actually one that anyone thinks occurred in the history of life. That’s true, but it badly misses the point. As Ann and I made clear in the paper, our aim wasn’t to replicate a historical transition, but rather to identify what ought to be a relatively easy transition and find out how hard or easy it really is. We put it this way in the paper: Read More ›

Here Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib tells us that the gene that codes for colour in the Darwin textbook icon, the peppered moth, has been located (“The peppered moth’s dark genetic past revealed: Researchers find that a single ancestor is responsible for the ‘best example’ of natural selection.”).

The sacred story is recounted in a muted form, which is as much acknowledgement as Nature News (April 14, 2011) could accord to the considerable body of evidence that it is more aptly called the peppered myth: Read More ›

Here Darwin stalwart Nick Matzke gamely attempts to defend Barbara Forrest in the Beckwith Synthese affair, by pretending that there is some important discrepancy as to Beckwith’s unsympathetic views re intelligent design theory. Some background here.

Matzke must hope that everyone will overlook the fact that it was Forrest’s responsibility to get her facts right before she attempted a character assassination on Beckwith, and she signally failed to do so. Why Matzke and others can’t just accept that and move on remains a mystery.

Beckwith has always maintained a principle that may be difficult for some  to grasp: Read More ›

… as the God of the Gaps. Has anyone ever noted an ID theorist to use the term “gaps”, to support an argument for apparent design? Can anyone attest that Collins has ever read an actual ID theoretic work? See also here and here where Collins appears to have backed away from an earlier claim that so-called “junk DNA” proves that there is no design in life.

In “Survival of the Frummest: Darwinism and Judaism on Dating, Mating and Procreating,” Talia Kaufman of Yeshiva U enlightens us (April 14, 2011):

Human Mating Is Inherently StrategicOur subconscious has a whole lot more influence on our animalistic desires than we realize. Every aspect of attraction is subliminally dictated by our drive to find the mate that will best carry on our genes.

It is hard to think of a proposition more consistently refuted by human experience than the idea that people have a “drive to find the mate that will best carry our genes.” Read More ›

Thought you all might be interested in this video on whether or not mutations are random. It covers both why we originally thought mutations were random plus more current information which shows that the random mutation idea is not the whole picture.

Read More ›

ID community reb Moshe Averick does not see the point of “Rabbis Without God (?!)”, as his punctuation would seem to suggest. (Algemeiner , April 14, 2011) He describes Rabbi Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, is a “humanist rabbi, ordained by the International Institute for Humanistic Judaism.” He graciously informs the interviewer that “he’s not out to poach souls [for atheism] from the nearby Hillel House, the Catholic Newman Center, or any of the other august religious institutions…on the campus of the country’s most prestigious university.” What he doesn’t tell us is the obvious reason why he’s not out to poach souls; as an atheist he does not believe in the existence of the soul. In the Read More ›

Here: In my own view, the most interesting aspect of the recent Lenski paper is its highlighting of the pitfalls that Darwinian evolution must dance around, even as it is making an organism somewhat more fit. (1) If the “wrong” advantageous mutation in topoisomerase had become fixed in the population (by perhaps being slightly more advantageous or more common), then the “better” selective pathway would have been shut off completely. And since this phenomenon occurred in the first instance where anyone had looked for it, it is likely to be commonplace. That should not be surprising to anyone who thinks about the topic dispassionately. As the authors note, “Similar cases are expected in any population of asexual organisms that evolve Read More ›

Just recently, it came out that some Darwin lobbyists are attempting to get redress for the fact that the journal Synthese was forced to disclaim an unscholarly attack by one of their number on Baylor philosophy professor Frank Beckwith in one of Synthese’s guest-edited issues.

Indeed!

I can shed a bit of light on the affair. Read More ›

From Physorg, we learn that the spotted salamander is “the first known vertebrate to have an endosymbiont”, in the form of an alga conferring a benefit on the eggs by living inside them: Naturalists first noticed an association between spotted salamander eggs and green algae more than 100 years ago. This relationship was formalized by name in 1927 by Lambert Printz, who named the algal species Oophilia amblystoma. The genus name means “egg loving.” The nature of that symbiosis was not known until the 1980s, when experimentation revealed the salamander embryos do not develop as quickly or as fully in the absence of the green algae. Likewise, algae grown separately from the embryos but in the presence of water exposed Read More ›

From Rob Sheldon,

I think Stephen Barr’s “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith” (one of those Thomists who doesn’t like ID), addresses this issue. It works something like this – an ID person notices that the Big Bang is highly contingent, if one grain of sand were added to or removed from the Big Bang, we wouldn’t exist. So the ID guy says “Look at this fine-tuning. Why, this is evidence of design and a creator!” Then along comes the high energy physicist, and says, “No, this is exactly what you would expect if the Big Bang was followed a nano-nano-second later by an inflaton that expanded precisely 72 times. You, poor slob, were believing in a God-of-the-gaps, postulating God to fill that contingency when all along it was your ignorance of the inflaton that made you a believer. Now that we know about the inflaton, your assumption of an intervening intelligence is removed, and in such a manner all religion belief is and will be removed by increasing knowledge.”

So the sheepish George Murphy says, Read More ›

Some researchers are elated over whiteflies, whose eggs develop faster due to infection by certain bacteria,

“It’s instant evolution,” said Molly Hunter, a professor of entomology in the UA’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the study’s principal investigator. “Our lab studies suggest that these bacteria can transform an insect population over a very short time.” – “Instant Evolution in Whiteflies: Just Add Bacteria”, ScienceDaily (Apr. 8, 2011)

One outcome is more female whiteflies, for reasons presently unclear.

The fly is a pest, when present in large numbers, which the bacteria are believed to augment:

“Here in Arizona, it probably starts out on weeds in the spring, and then moves on to melons, and when melons are done, it moves in big numbers onto cotton and feeds on that all summer long,” Hunter explained. “In the fall, it moves on to vegetables, and so it just keeps going.”

Apart from bigger hordes in the short term, it is unclear where the evolution part comes in.

And, from New Scientist, we learn: Read More ›

In Free to Think: Why Scientific Integrity Matters (2010), Expelled’s Caroline Crocker recalls a conversation with a tutoring student’s mother, after a session teaching the textbook Darwin sludge:

“I want her to learn the truth!” Felicita exclaimed …Here I hesitated, “Listen, being vocal about this issue probably lost me three jobs and resulted in my being blacklisted from getting many others. Students are also being intimidated into following the party line. If I teach Maria both sides of the issue, I strongly advise that you instruct her not to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily we learn (Apr. 11, 2011), “A polyploidy event is basically the acquisition, through mutation, of a ‘double dose’ of genetic material,” explained Yuannian Jiao, a graduate student at Penn State and the first author of the study. “In vertebrates, although genome duplication is known to occur, it generally is lethal. Plants, on the other hand, often survive and can sometimes benefit from duplicated genomes.” Jiao explained that, over the generations, most duplicated genes from polyploidy events simply are lost. However, other genes adopt new functions or, in some instances, subdivide the workload with the genetic segments that were duplicated, thereby cultivating more efficiency and better specialization of tasks for the genome as a whole. Jiao also explained that, Read More ›