A few days back, sparc objected: How often have we seen this very thread before? I am not interested in fishing but even I realize that I’ve seen the Abu 6500 C3 reel before (according to Google it appears 42 times on this site). Just opening another thread will not bring the stillborn FSCO/I to life. Didn’t you read what WE had to say about it? And what about Dembski, Meyer, Behe, Marks et al.? Do you think they even consider FSCO/I? FSCO/I just dead and never lived. The substance of this is of course that I have repeatedly used an exploded view of the Abu 6500 C3 reel: . . . as an apt, concrete example of the hard, Read More ›

We received a tip that a new Princeton book, Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation by Yale’s Gunter P. Wagner (not to be confused with Andreas Wagner) is both through and balanced: Günter Wagner, one of the preeminent researchers in the field, argues that homology, or character identity, can be explained through the historical continuity of character identity networks—that is, the gene regulatory networks that enable differential gene expression. He shows how character identity is independent of the form and function of the character itself because the same network can activate different effector genes and thus control the development of different shapes, sizes, and qualities of the character. Demonstrating how this theoretical model can provide a foundation for understanding the evolutionary Read More ›

The following post was generated by UD’s just-acquired, state-of-the-art news reporting app, Earlier Than Thought TM 😉 From the BBC: Scientists in China have described a new species of early bird, from two fossils with intact plumage dating to 130 million years ago. Based on the age of the surrounding rocks, this is the earliest known member of the clade that produced today’s birds: Ornithuromorpha. It pushes back the branching-out of this evolutionary group by at least five million years. … The little bird appears to have been a wader, capable of nimble flight. … previously the earliest known Ornithuromorph was 125 million years old. More. Here’s the abstract: Ornithuromorpha is the most inclusive clade containing extant birds but not the Read More ›

From Quanta Magazine: Researchers build the world’s largest evolutionary tree and conclude that species arise because of chance mutations — not natural selection. What? They are allowed to say that now? One reason scientists are skeptical is that Hedges’ clocklike pattern conflicts with the traditional picture of how evolution unfolds. “The classic view of evolution is that it happens in fits and starts,” Benton said. A change in the environment, such as a rise in temperatures after an ice age, might spark a burst of speciation as organisms adapt to their new surroundings. Alternatively, a single remarkable adaptation such as flight in the ancestors of birds or hair in mammals might trigger a massive expansion of animals with those characteristics. Read More ›

From Philip Ball at Nautilus: Ah, but isn’t all this wonder simply the product of the blind fumbling of Darwinian evolution, that mindless machine which takes random variation and sieves it by natural selection? Well, not quite. You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive. “Darwin’s theory surely is the most important intellectual achievement of his time, perhaps of all time,” says evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner of the University of Zurich. “But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded his theory. And he couldn’t even get close to solving it.” Hey, wait a minute. I put the obvious Read More ›

Because the Templeton Foundation is a sponsor: As Darwin’s man Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne tells it, Once again the World Science Festival (WSF) will take place in New York City in May, the brainchild of Brian Greene and Tracy Day. Let me begin by affirming that I’m all in favor of the Festival as a way to excite the public about science. Greene and Day have put enormous effort into this event, which has been a live affair, and a successful one, since 2008. But there’s a fly in the ointment: one of the big sponsors of the WSF is the John Templeton Foundation (JTF), which was also one of its founding benefactors. This is shown on the Read More ›

UD regulars might want to check out this thread at The Skeptical Zone. And follow it all the way through. In it you’ll get to see: (1) EL make assertions (and doubles down on them) about a book she later admits she didn’t even bother to read, assertions which were demonstrable false; (2) Keiths jump from the possibility of error/fraud in scientific studies on psi/the paranormal to the conclusion that the results must have been fraud/error; (3) Countless groundless, blanket assertions best epitomized by Alan Fox’s blanket statement “It doesn’t happen”, who remains silent on how he knows psi events “don’t happen”; (4) DNA_Jock completely misrepresent a past comment of mine on TSZ that concerned a video on spoon-bending saying Read More ›

Which happens purely as a result of natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinian evolution) building up huge quantities of complex, specified information, of course. Over at Evolution News & Views, Casey Luskin talks about that new book, Junk DNA: A journey through the dark matter of the genome (Nessa Carey), on the newfound functions of junk DNA: A new book from Columbia University Press, Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome, by virologist Nessa Carey provides a detailed review of the vast evidence being uncovered showing function for “junk DNA.” She explains that junk DNA was initially “dismissed” by biologists because it was thought that if it didn’t code for proteins, it didn’t do anything: Read More ›

Recently, ID critic Professor Jason Rosenhouse has written a series of posts on the topic of morality. In two posts (here and here), he defended the view that morality is objective, but in two other posts in reply to Barry Arrington (here and here), he attacked the only theory that provides morality with an objective grounding in a philosophically rigorous manner: natural law theory. To me, that sounds a lot like sawing off the branch that you’re sitting on. Professor Rosenhouse makes much of the fact that most people, most of the time, manage to agree about moral issues. Now, I’m happy to grant that our agreement about moral issues constitutes good prima facie evidence for the view that morality Read More ›

It happened this morning at 9:13 AM, a moment I shall never forget. The historians had always told us this day would come, but it just seemed impossible. Yes spontaneous origins seems absurd, they agreed, but the inexorable march of science will find it out. It always does. Don’t get in the way of science they warned, and now they have turned out right. And we are too loyal pupils of inductive philosophy to resist any conclusion by reason of its strangeness. Newton’s patient philosophy taught him to find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of the stars in their courses. And if evolutionists can with the same correctness of reasoning demonstrate Epicureanism to be Read More ›

A new book from Bloomsbury, A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth , by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink, is blurbed as follows: Charles Darwin’s theories, first published more than 150 years ago, still set the paradigm of how we understand the evolution of life–but scientific advances of recent decades have radically altered that understanding. In fact the currently accepted history of life on Earth is flawed and out of date. Now two pioneering scientists, one already an award-winning popular author, deliver an eye-opening narrative that synthesizes a generation’s worth of insights from new research. Writing with zest, humor, and clarity, Ward and Kirschvink show that many of our Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Now Northwestern University scientists propose a new model for how neural crest cells, and thus vertebrates, arose more than 500 million years ago. … The study also turns conventional thought on its head. Previously, scientists thought neural crest cells had to evolve to gain their incredible properties, but the Northwestern work shows the power was there all along. Researchers now can focus on the molecular mechanisms by which neural crest cells escaped having their potential restricted. If the neural crest cells did not have to evolve, but rather the “incredible properties” were there all along, is that not an argument for design in nature? Not that we can expect the researchers to make such an argument. They have Read More ›

From Nature, we learn that in statistics, P values problems are just the tip of the iceberg: P values are an easy target: being widely used, they are widely abused. But, in practice, deregulating statistical significance opens the door to even more ways to game statistics — intentionally or unintentionally — to get a result. Replacing P values with Bayes factors or another statistic is ultimately about choosing a different trade-off of true positives and false positives. Arguing about the P value is like focusing on a single misspelling, rather than on the faulty logic of a sentence. … The ultimate goal is evidence-based data analysis. This is analogous to evidence-based medicine, in which physicians are encouraged to use only Read More ›

Further to: Lee Spetner’s non-random evolutionary hypothesis (NREH) vs. neo-Darwinian theory (May 4, 2015), Spetner, author of The Evolution Revolution comments, The NREH is very different from Lamarckism. The latter is a theory of evolution based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. If an animal builds up strength in its limbs, this limb-strength can be inherited by its offspring. There was no mechanism offered for how it happened, principally because there was no understanding of heredity. The NREH, on the other hand, says that organisms have a built-in capability of responding to environmental stress by making epigenetic changes. These changes often involve the turning on of cryptic genes that produce phenotypic changes that are usually adaptive to the new stress. Read More ›

At Huffington Post, Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, interviews origin of life researcher Ricardo Flores, of the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Plant Biology, Valencia, Spain, who argues that a viroid-like entity is a prime candidate for the first replicon on Earth. Viroids are subviral world parasites, non-protein coding RNAs. Viroids. This from the interview: Ricardo Flores: We know now that there is a subviral world, which was not realized for the first 70 years of the 20th century. . . . Viroids represent the smallest organisms in terms of size on the biological scale. Compared to the genome of the tobacco mosaic virus, the viroid genome is 20 times smaller. . . . The simplest Read More ›