From ScienceDaily: A team from USC found the Eotiaris guadalupensis in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution from the Glass Mountains of west Texas, where it had been buried in a rock formation that dates back to 268.8 million years at its youngest.”This fossil pushes the evolution of this type of sea urchin from the Wuchiapingian age all the way back to the Roadian age,” said David Bottjer, professor at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and senior author of a paper announcing the find that appeared in Nature Scientific Reports on October 21. … Eotiaris guadalupensis is a cidaroid, one of the two main types of sea urchins found in today’s oceans. The other group, the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The fruit flies in question evolved into new species when they began laying their eggs and mating on apple trees, as opposed to their native hawthorn tree hosts. Three different kinds of parasitoid wasps were collected from a number of different fly host plant environments in the wild. Analyses in the lab showed that all three of the different kinds of wasps had diverged from others of the same kind, both genetically and with respect to host-associated physiology and behavior. “In a sense,” Smith said, “they have caught an entire community of parasitoids actively ecologically diverging in response to a historically documented host plant shift of their fly host.” These evolutionary changes, known as “sequential” or “cascading” events, Read More ›

Life seems to want to survive somehow, yet we never see anything that isn’t alive coming to life.   Further to: Looking for life in all the wrong places, the BBC tells us about the mud volcano worms: The Beaufort Sea tubeworms are only 7-8cm long. However, they are distantly related to giant tube-dwelling annelid worms that are found near deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Such worms can be 2m long. Both groups of worms survive without light, under intense pressures and in water that is often laced with acid and toxic gases. They can cope with a wide range of temperatures. Often one end of a tubeworm can experience near-freezing temperatures, while the other end is exposed to hot fluids flowing Read More ›

The harshest places on Earth … and often finding it. We seem to find life everywhere on Earth, nowhere else. From PBS: Before Northeast Natural Energy can send down fluid to fracture the Marcellus Shales, buried more than 1.5 miles below the surface for 400 million years, Wrighton, Wilkins, and a team of scientists will be collecting rock samples hauled up from the deep. They might find life:. The discovery that microbes could live in environments far more extreme than anyone suspected opened a wide range of habitats to microbial exploration. While some scientists explored the frigid, windswept deserts of Antarctica, others, like Bo Barker Jørgensen and Karsten Pedersen, geomicrobiologists at Aarhus University in Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology Read More ›

One wonders: Before anyone realized this, would those multiple copies be considered “junk”? From New Scientist: When they studied samples of elephant blood, they found that African elephants have at least 20 copies of the p53 gene from each parent. P53 is an ancient gene found in all multicellular animals. It detects stress or damage in the cell, and stops the cell from dividing until the stress has passed or the DNA is repaired. Humans inherit one copy from each parent, and it has a crucial role in protecting us from cancer. People who have a defective version – a condition called Li-Fraumeni syndrome – usually get cancer in childhood, and their lifetime risk is close to 100 per cent. Read More ›

As we have seen, Larry Moran channeled Ace Ventura when he falsely claimed I do not understand Darwinism and then, when challenged to back up his claim, came up with exactly bupkis. In the course of demonstrating his own incompetence, Larry gave us this gem of revisionist history: But, as most Sandwalk readers know, nobody predicted junk DNA, certainly not Darwinists. Junk DNA confers no fitness advantage on the individual. It’s certainly detrimental at some level because it uses up resources for no benefit. If Darwinists were presented with the possibility of junk DNA back in 1970 then they would almost certainly have rejected it because it doesn’t make sense in a strictly Darwinian world. In fact, most supporters of Neo-Darwinsm Read More ›

Here: In a remarkably embarrassing moment for the American Psychological Association, on Sunday night the group retracted the marquee study in the latest issue of its journal,Psychological Services.      

It almost feels like researchers think it is okay now to just doubt Darwin. It seems, we’re a long way from the “Darwin himself said” rubbish that used to deface media releases even a few years ago.* From ScienceDaily: A key concept in Darwin’s theory of evolution which suggests nature favors larger females that can produce greater numbers of off-spring must be redefined according to scientists behind ground-breaking new research. The study, published in the scientific journal Biological Reviews, concludes that the theory of ‘fecundity selection’ — one of Charles Darwin’s three main evolutionary principles, also known as ‘fertility selection’ — should be redefined so that it no longer rests on the idea that more fertile females are more successful Read More ›

Further to: Neil deGrasse Tyson on why he thinks ID must be wrong, he is relying on a rhetorical trick that works mainly among shallow people who watch smart-ass TV: Thinking about these questions as if they had no real world components. “I think of, like, the human body, and I look at what’s going on between our legs,” Tyson said. “There’s like a sewage system and entertainment complex intermingling. No engineer of any intelligence would have designed it that way.” Let us begin by positing what Tyson seem concerned to refute, that there is a God, who is perfect. “Immortal, invisible, God only wise,” as the hymn puts it. He is eternal and unchangeable, and can therefore BE perfect. Read More ›

O’Leary for News’ night job: Portrait of a social media addict … … who is brutally honest about what it feels like. Down with the selfie! Let’s be groupies! Cell photos can help us maintain relationships over time and distance. Can the internet make loved ones “immortal”? Attitudes to death are becoming increasingly weird in both the actual and the digital world. Is the internet guilty of killing high culture? By making everything equally free and accessible, the internet shone a spotlight on what we do want. And that is our responsibility. The law struggles to make sense of the internet Meanwhile, we can expect some strange decisions. Amazon’s “Workplace Hell,” Part II Jeff Lockhart was not “killed on the Read More ›

Here: See also: Jonathan McLatchie on irreducible complexity. Darwin faithful, create a distraction below. Others, there is always the What Is Information? conference next weekend. Follow UD News at Twitter!

See the story here. There is a name for using government coercion to suppress minority speech:  Fascism.  Whatever side of the climate issue you are on, alarm klaxons should be going off in your head, and shivers of dread should be running up and down your spine.  If that is not happening, you are either a fascist yourself and agree with the New York AG or you are not paying attention.

This will be my last post on this subject.  To remind our readers: 1.  I said I understand Darwinian. 2.  Larry Moran said that I do not. 3.  I challenged Larry to back up his claim.  He could have done that by, for example, pointing to a statement I made about Darwinism that is false. 4.  Larry put up two posts in response to my challenge. 5.  In the first post he quibbled about the term “Darwinism.”  Though in the end he admitted I have made it clear I am using the term as shorthand for Neo-Darwinism.  Larry’s Grade: F 6.  In the second post he said I erred when I wrote that Darwinists in the past said Darwinism predicts Read More ›

From the BBC: The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the “my-side bias” – our tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument – but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly Read More ›

Not here, that’s for sure: Toucher & Rich Explore How The Patriots Are Winning Coin Flips At ‘Impossible’ Rate The Patriots have won 19 of their last 25 coin tosses. This has caught the nation’s attention. Why? In the world of Darwinian evolution (natural selection acting on random mutation generates huge levels of information, not noise) and Boltzmann brains, only people who are ignorant, backward, bigoted, and easy to command would even dare wonder about this.* “Lucky or good? Patriots winning coin tosses at nearly impossible rate,” said Yahoo. “Patriots have no need for probability, win coin flip at impossible clip,” CBSSports said. Obviously because this is the Patriots, a simple explanation like “that is the potential nature of a Read More ›