From ScienceDaily: Not only is the ‘Jupiter as shield’ concept, implying that the planet shields Earth from comet impacts, not true, but perhaps Jupiter’s most important role in fostering the development of life on Earth was just the opposite — delivering the volatile materials from the outer Solar System needed for life to form. This new simulation study, and the previously underestimated role that Saturn may have also played in the evolution of life on Earth. … In “Jupiter: Cosmic Jekyll and Hyde”), Kevin Grazier, PhD, at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, describes the study in which he simulated the evolution of tens of thousands of particles in the gaps between the jovian planets for up to 100 Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A provocative study by evolutionary biologists takes on one of Charles Darwin’s central ideas: that males adapt and compete for the attention of females because it is the females who ultimately choose their mates and the time of mating. Instead, new research using fruit flies as a representative species indicates that females do not have specific preferences, suggesting that 150 years of evolutionary theory around mating choice may need to be tossed out. “Darwin’s female-choice theory has become the foundation for explaining the presence of exaggerated secondary sexual traits in many males, such as the peacock’s tail feathers,” says evolutionary biologist Rama Singh, an author of a paper in the journal PLOS ONE that explains the findings. “It Read More ›

Error found in study of first ancient African genome

“Finding that much of Africa has Eurasian ancestry was mistaken.” . . .

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From Evolution News & Views: February 12 is almost upon us. It will be Darwin Day, anniversary of the great man’s birth, which we call Academic Freedom Day in homage to Darwin’s wise warning that “a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” Yes, by now the fulsome comparisons of Darwin to Lincoln as a “great liberator” should be tumbling down the byteway. Looking back primarily at the year 2015, I see several themes in our coverage of intellectual freedom and threats to it. First, and this is really a perennial, there are those Darwinists whose censorship of ideas consists of spreading a cloud of misinformation. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Tel Aviv University researchers, in collaboration with scholars from Spain and Germany, have uncovered evidence of turtle specimens at the 400,000-year-old site, indicating that early man enjoyed eating turtles in addition to large game and vegetal material. The research provides direct evidence of the relatively broad diet of early Paleolithic people — and of the “modern” tools and skills employed to prepare it. “Until now, it was believed that Paleolithic humans hunted and ate mostly large game and vegetal material,” said Prof. Barkai. “Our discovery adds a really rich human dimension — a culinary and therefore cultural depth to what we already know about these people.” It’s unclear why researchers previously thought that. Surely it is safe to Read More ›

It’s the latest new prejudice. From Quanta, we earn that the presence of oxygen does not show, as formerly thought, that a planet might have life. Oxygen can build up in environments hostile to life: As Domagal-Goldman, then a researcher at the University of Washington’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL), well knew, the gold standard in biosignature gases is oxygen. Not only is oxygen produced in abundance by Earth’s flora — and thus, possibly, other planets’ — but 50 years of conventional wisdom held that it could not be produced at detectable levels by geology or photochemistry alone, making it a forgery-proof signature of life. Oxygen filled the sky on Domagal-Goldman’s simulated world, however, not as a result of biological activity Read More ›

From New York Mag: Based on this result from 2012 and a similar finding in a study with rats published in 2014, the lead researcher of the 2012 study, Aaron Schurger at INSERM in Paris, and two colleagues have written in their field’s prestige journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences that it’s time for a new perspective on Libet’s results — they say that their results call “for a reevaluation and reinterpretation of a large body of work” and that for 50 years their field may have been “measuring, mapping and analyzing what may turn out to be a reliable accident: the cortical readiness potential.” And like their counterparts in Germany, these neuroscientists say the new picture is much more in Read More ›

Re “Dreadful row breaks out re cladistics” (Darwin’s Tree of Life) , physicist Rob Sheldon offers, It is about the relative merits of using parsimony (Occam’s Razor) versus Bayesian (likelihood) analysis in cladistics. The first is more causal, more deterministic, more rational while the second allows priors and opinions and “other stuff” to influence the output. The Darwinian priors can be used in the 2nd, but are excluded from the 1st. So you would think Darwinians would like Bayesian, but they don’t; they seem to prefer parsimony. On the other hand, many have pointed out that parsimony merely looks deterministic, but smuggles in a lot of assumptions. So perhaps the debate is between implicit versus explicit Darwinists–because as long as Read More ›

According to computer scientist Leslie Valiant. From John Pavlus at Quanta: Valiant’s self-stated goal is to find “mathematical definitions of learning and evolution which can address all ways in which information can get into systems.” If successful, the resulting “theory of everything” — a phrase Valiant himself uses, only half-jokingly — would literally fuse life science and computer science together. Furthermore, our intuitive definitions of “learning” and “intelligence” would expand to include not only non-organisms, but non-individuals as well. The “wisdom of crowds” would no longer be a mere figure of speech. … How can a theory of learning be applied to a phenomenon like biological evolution? Biology is based on protein expression networks, and as evolution proceeds these networks Read More ›

This is the first of a series of posts reviewing Michael Denton’s new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. The fossil record has always been a problem for Darwinism, as Darwin himself was the first to note.  In Origin of Species he asserted that if his theory of gradual transformation of organisms through the accumulation of micro-adaptions over eons of time were true, “then the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, [must] be truly enormous.”  And in the very same paragraph he admitted that:  “Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.”  Darwin tried to save his Read More ›

6.6 MYA? See, for comparison, “Human and Chimp Genes May Have Split 13 Million Years Ago (LiveScience, 2014) Other estimates are on offer. Trying to resolve discrepancies between the molecular clock and human/hominid evolution, from ScienceDaily: Researchers at Columbia University introduce a model that considers how life history traits (e.g., age of puberty and reproduction) in parents affect the number of mutations inherited by their children. They find that because life history traits evolve, so should the mutation rate. In other words, the molecular clock is expected to wobble. Based on this model, and using what we know about life history traits in apes, they revisit the question of when humans and other apes split. Accounting for changes to life Read More ›

Teapots bust. From a story at Wired: Twitter Nerd-Fight Reveals a Long, Bizarre Scientific Feud The editorial in the February issue of the scientific journal Cladistics didn’t exactly drop with a bang. Cladistics has around 600 subscribers—almost half of which are libraries or other institutions—and it’s aimed at “scientists working in the research fields of evolution, systematics and integrative biology,” as the journal’s summary says. It’s a journal about building evolutionary trees of life, basically. Important, but harmless, right? … the editors of Cladistics were insisting that anyone trying to build those trees of life had to use a method called parsimony—that, in fact, anyone who didn’t use parsimony wasn’t doing real science. Science Twitter caught fire pretty fast after Read More ›

One can’t get a photo of a black hole but, from Wired: But thanks to a new telescope, Tim Johannsen, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, may be able to get a black hole pic after all. A loophole in physics means he might be able to see not the black hole itself, but its shadow. And, no big deal, but that photo just might overturn Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. What’s the loophole? … when astronomers look at a black hole, what they expect to see is a ring of bright light—the accretion disk—surrounding a circle of nothingness. That circle of nothingness is the shadow. (The black hole itself is Read More ›

From Emma C. Williams at at Quillette: An increasing number of high-profile academics are finding themselves barred from various establishments that are supposedly in the business of thought. Jamie Palmer has addressed the issue in this very magazine, and my first article here was about the attempted no-platforming of Professor Germaine Greer by students at Cardiff. The latest to join the list of fine academics declared unfit to speak at a supposedly learned venue is Professor Richard Dawkins. The Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, a forum that prides itself on being “a celebration of science and critical thinking” and with a declared goal of “fostering a more rational world” has decided that Dawkins’ sharing of a satirical video in Read More ›

From The Scientist: Many patients with genetic variations linked to cardiac disorders do not exhibit any symptoms, raising concerns about the validity of incidental findings of genetic tests. … “Over the last decade, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of new genetic variations, largely single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that might serve as biomarkers for many common conditions,” Maine physician William Gregory Feero, an associate editor at JAMA, wrote in an accompanying editorial. “In general, these account for little in the variance of disease, and the predictive value of such SNPs has been largely disappointing.” More. See also: There’s a gene for that… or is there? Follow UD News at Twitter!