March 2014

I was very gratified to read Professor Larry Moran’s recent post, On teaching creationism in American public universities (17 March 2014). Professor Moran not only believes that Intelligent Design qualifies as science, but he also believes that it should be legal to teach science courses in Intelligent Design at university. To be sure, Moran thinks that ID is very bad science; nevertheless, he insists that “university students are mature enough to handle diverse points of view.” Good for him, I say. While Professor Moran and I have had our disagreements about evolution in the past, I salute him as a fair-minded man. Professor Moran’s post concludes with a zinger aimed at Professor Jerry Coyne, who maintains that “although it’s illegal Read More ›

As Aaron David Goldmansummarized this month, the evolution of early life was a complicated affair. First of all there was the origin of life (OOL) events that produced the first living organism. Then there was a tremendous amount of evolutionary progress leading to the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of today’s extant species. LUCA probably had DNA, an impermeable phospholipid membrane with much the same small army of proteins that attend to today’s cell membranes, the famed ATPase turbine-driven enzyme for ATP construction, protein synthesis machinery like today’s cells, the universal DNA code and DNA repair mechanisms. In short, LUCA was, as Goldman explains, a “sophisticated cellular organism that, if alive today, would probably be difficult to distinguish from other Read More ›

A branching pattern of variation was central to Darwin’s concept of speciation. As one population of organisms follows one trajectory, another population may spin off in a different direction. When they are sufficiently far apart, they are considered to be separate species. The Galapagos finches have been regarded as exemplars of Darwinian transformation, even leading to the claim that one newly developed population is “behaving as a separate species”. However, the most recent study, from one of the smaller islands (Floreana), concludes that the most likely cause of the disappearance of one of these species is hybridization. “The authors suggest that hybridization may have been responsible for the disappearance of the large tree finch from Floreana, and that it may Read More ›