2015

From New Scientist: Sometimes evolution just doesn’t have a choice. Reptiles have evolved to resist toad poisons four separate times, and each time they have made precisely the same biochemical changes to do it. What’s more, an even wider range of animals show similar adaptations in response to these toxins, giving us by far the most extensive illustration of so-called convergent evolution to date. “so-called” convergent evolution? Yup. That’s what it is called. Gotta problem with that? This striking convergence on a few evolutionary outcomes probably occurs because sodium channels play such a critical role in cells. “There are very few options for a gene to modify itself to develop resistance without impairing function,” says Casewell. “It suggests that in Read More ›

They don’t get it, but what else is new? From Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek, “Why Physics is Beautiful”: The beauty of physical law is too impressive to be accidental. It has led people throughout history to believe that some tasteful higher being created us, and that we inhabit a consciously designed world, like our notional Super Mario. But this is an extravagant hypothesis, which goes far beyond the facts it is meant to explain. Before adopting it, we should explore more economical alternatives. The answer likely lies within us. Beautiful things are those in which we find pleasure and seek out. They are, in neurobiological terms, things that stimulate our reward system. That explains why parents tend to find their Read More ›

Many Darwinists are fond of quoting Theodosius Dobzhansky who wrote “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.” It is good to know there are folks like wd400 — himself an evolutionary biologist — who believe in modern evolutionary theory but acknowledge that biologists can get along perfectly well without even understanding evolution, much less depending on it as Dobzhansky would have had us believe. In a comment to a prior post wd400 writes: Unfortunately a lot of molecular biologists (Collins included) don’t understand much about evolution. Here is a partial list of the awards won by Dr. Collins (per his Wiki entry): While leading the National Human Genome Research Institute, Collins was elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy Read More ›

In a comment to a prior post Seversky writes: Materialism has given us all the science and technology that we now take for granted. *Palm slaps forehead* This statement is demonstrably false.  And that demonstration is readily available to anyone with the slightest curiosity about the subject. Here is a little primer on the subject published in the LA Times today: The myth of the eternal war between science and religion – Robert Barron – Nov. 12, 2015 Excerpt: But this myth is so much nonsense. Leaving aside the complexities of the Galileo story, we can see that the vast majority of the founding figures of modern science — Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Tycho Brahe — were devoutly religious. Read More ›

Michael Egnor, here, at Evolution News & Views: Regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of the evolutionary argument that humans are descended from apes, the differences between humans and apes are so profound as to render the view that humans are apes abject nonsense. It is important to understand the fundamental difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Nonhuman animals such as apes have material mental powers. By material I mean powers that are instantiated in the brain and wholly depend upon matter for their operation. These powers include sensation, perception, imagination (the ability to form mental images), memory (of perceptions and images), and appetite. Nonhuman animals have a mental capacity to perceive and respond to particulars, which are specific material Read More ›

Further to johnnyb’s “Intelligent Design Creationism” as a Label”: The word salad “cdesign proponentsists” was cited as evidence of something  in comments 4 and 40. For readers confused by “cdesign proponentsists’” here’s the widely circulated story from an atheist blog at Patheos: Pandas, it turns out, went through several editions: in its first (1983) edition, it was titled Creation Biology, then renamed in 1986 to Biology and Creation, then renamed again in 1987 to Biology and Origins, finally becoming Of Pandas and People. The plaintiffs subpoenaed the book’s publisher, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, to obtain these prior drafts, and found something amazing. The earlier drafts, as you might expect from the titles, made repeated references to creationism. But Read More ›

From the University of Edinburgh: Until now, the oldest evidence of complex animals – which succeeded more primitive creatures that often resembled sponges or coral – came from the Cambrian Period, which began around 541 million years ago. Scientists had long suspected that complex animals had existed before then but, until now, they had no proof. … Genetic family tree data suggested that complex animals – known as bilaterians – evolved prior to the Cambrian Period. The finding suggests that bilaterians may have lived as early as 550 million years ago, during the late Ediacaran Period. … The team studied fossils of an extinct marine animal – known as Namacalathus hermanastes – which was widespread during the Ediacaran Period. The Read More ›

Some have. And they are said to “turn paleontology on its head.” F. protensa is 520 mya or so. (They had brains back then?) From Eurekalert: Science has long dictated that brains don’t fossilize, so when Nicholas Strausfeld co-authored the first ever report of a fossilized brain in a 2012 edition of Nature, it was met with “a lot of flack.” … His latest paper in Current Biology addresses these doubts head-on, with definitive evidence that, indeed, brains do fossilize. … The only way to become fossilized is, first, to get rapidly buried. Hungry scavengers can’t eat a carcass if it’s buried, and as long as the water is anoxic enough – that is, lacking in oxygen – a buried Read More ›

As we have been discussing, in 2006 Francis Collins said that Darwinism predicts (in the sense of retrodiction) that mutations located in “junk DNA” will accumulate steadily over time. A couple of years ago I said that Darwinist predictions (again, in the sense of retrodiction) about junk DNA turned out to be wrong, while ID Proponents predictions (this time in the actual sense of making an assertion about future findings) turned out to be true. It is good to know that even Collins admits this:  Earlier this year he confessed that his use of the term “junk DNA” was wrong, even hubristic.  At the 33rd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco on January 13, 2015 he said: I Read More ›

[It] is now obvious that the root is we are dealing with a domineering parasitical ideology in the course of destroying its host; through its inherent undermining of responsible rational freedom, the foundation of a sound life of the mind. Immediately, science, science education, the media and policy are being eaten out from within. KF Indeed.  The immediate context of KF’s observation is the seeming inability of the Darwinists to understand plain English over the past few days.  Allow me to establish some context.  In a post over at his Sandwalk blog Larry Moran quoted me when I wrote: For years Darwinists touted “junk DNA” as not just any evidence but powerful, practically irrefutable evidence for the Darwinian hypothesis. ID Read More ›

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 ›