2016

On Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016): Introduction The structuralist view, of course, has the advantage of being consistent with the fossil record. That record does not show, as Darwin suggested, a finely graduated organic chain between major Types. Instead, it shows abrupt appearance of various Types followed by stasis. Again, using the pentadactyl limb as an example, Denton has no doubt that the limb evolved from the fins of fish. Yet the fossil record simply does not support the view that the evolution of the limb from the fin occurred gradually over eons of time. The fossil record is instead conspicuous for the absence of transitional forms from fish fin to pentadactyl limb. This means one of Read More ›

The Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference is doing a design contest with a cash prize.
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but baby, look at you now. Science writer Chris Mooney advises that internet trolls are even worse than we thought. Internet Trolls Really Are Horrible People Narcissistic, Machiavellian, psychopathic, and sadistic. … Overall, the authors found that the relationship between sadism and trolling was the strongest, and that indeed, sadists appear to troll because they find it pleasurable. “Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others,” they wrote. “Sadists just want to have fun … and the Internet is their playground!” Hmmmm. Our local variety of troll (trollus Darwiniensis spp.) is usually not that scary. He is more of a hapless creature whose god has failed. A sort of Caliban explaining Setebos (or Darwin) to a world Read More ›

This is the third of a series of posts reviewing Michael Denton’s new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. This is a good time in our discussion to note that the title of Denton’s book has resulted in considerable unnecessary confusion, because far from believing that “evolution” as such is a theory in crisis, as we have seen, Denton is a firm believer in evolution defined as descent with modification.  Denton believes that the specific evolutionary theory of Neo-Darwinism is in crisis, and he wanted to title his book “Neo-Darwinism: A Theory in Crisis,” but his publisher prevailed upon him to use the more widely used, but far less accurate, term. In Chapter 3 Denton notes that everyone agrees Read More ›

From the BBC: One thing that has consistently baffled researchers, however, is how primates arrived in South America. Unlikely though it sounds, the monkeys simply have to have crossed the Atlantic. Last year, new evidence emerged that reignited the debate and pushed this transatlantic crossing theory to the forefront. Monkey teeth that look like old world monkey teeth, found in the Peruvian Amazon. But … Given that plate tectonics cannot explain how monkeys reached South America, rafting has to have played a part. In fact, it has been suggested that rafting events are also responsible for seeding South America with the ancestors of its rodents and hoatzin birds. Clearly, the Eocene Atlantic was a veritable thoroughfare for nautical creatures. … Read More ›

Made a point of putting off the pop science Valentine’s day drivel. But here’s a piece rolling through. From the BBC: Infanticide has been the driving force for monogamy for 20 million years In many primates today, a mother with a dependent infant is unavailable to mate until her infant is weaned. To get access to her, a male would first have to kill her child. This sort of targeted infanticide goes on in many species, including gorillas, monkeys and dolphins. This led Kit Opie of University College London in the UK and his colleagues, to propose a startling idea. Almost a third of primates form monogamous male-female relationships, and in 2013 Opie suggested that this behaviour had evolved to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A research project has tested the hypothesis that Asian common toad populations across Southeast Asia are genetically similar owing to their commensal nature and high dispersive ability. To the researchers’ surprise, three genetically divergent groups of toads were found, each in a different geographic area (mainland Southeast Asia, coastal Myanmar and the islands of Java and Sumatra). The ranges of these three groups of toads were also found to have statistically different climates. This suggests that the toads may be adapting to local climatic conditions and evolving into separate species. Thus, toads of one group may not be able to disperse and persist within the range of another group because of climatic differences. More. Of course, we would Read More ›

Further to Gravitational waves reliably detected – Updated IV, from Sean Carroll at the Atlantic: Einstein’s gravitational waves rest on a genuinely radical idea. … Einstein’s general relativity is a theory of gravity. It says that spacetime can be curved, and we feel the effects of that curvature as the gravitational force. According to relativity, the speed of light puts an absolute limit on how fast influences can travel through space. The Andromeda galaxy is two and a half million light years away, so it would take at the very least five million years to send a signal there and get a response back. We’ve all heard about this speed-of-light barrier, which applies to gravitational waves just as much as Read More ›

Ann Gauger on “de novo” genes at Evolution News & Views: De novo genes are genes that are present in a particular species or taxonomic group, and not present in any others. Why are they there and where did they come from? To answer these questions we have to first deal with some important assumptions of evolutionary biology. Sometimes called “orphan genes” because they have no parents we can identify. Because the field of research is still developing, different research groups use different criteria for deciding what counts as a TRG. For example, one recent estimate says that there are 634 genes that appear to have arisen de novo in the human genome, as compared with the chimpanzee and macaque Read More ›

From Sharon Begley at Stat News (“reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine”): ore than a decade after leading geneticists argued that race is not a true biological category, many studies continue to use it, harming scientific understanding and possibly patients, researchers argued in a provocative essay in Science on Thursday. “We thought that after the Human Genome Project, with [its leaders] saying it’s time to move beyond race as a biological marker, we would have done that,” said Michael Yudell, a professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University and coauthor of the Science paper calling on journals and researchers to stop using race as a category in genetics studies. “Yet here we are, and Read More ›

For some time now Upright Biped has been arguing that information cannot be reduced to chemistry, and last year he started his own website to further his key idea that when information is translated by cellular machinery, it organizes inanimate matter (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc) into all the living things on earth.  See biosemiosis.org  Essentially, UB says all of life is an artifact created by the manipulation of chemicals according to the information embedded in the cell. Now comes the March 2016 issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society with a special issue on DNA as Information.  The table of contents is here. We would like to draw special attention to the article What is Information by Marcello Barbieri.  The abstract Read More ›

This is the second of a series of posts reviewing Michael Denton’s new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. “Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small.  Gaps among known orders, classes, and phyla are systematic and almost always large.”  George Gaylord Simpson, “The History of Life,” in ed. Sol Tax, Evolution After Darwin (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1960), 1:149. “Unfortunately, the origins of most higher categories are shrouded in mystery; commonly new higher categories appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional ancestral forms.”  D.M. Raup and Steven M. Stanley, Principles of Paleontology (San Francisco:  W.H. Freeman and Co., 1971), 306. “The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder interviewed by John Horgan at Scientific American (blgs): Horgan: I have reasons to resent Sabine Hossenfelder. 1: She has criticized my end-of-science thesis. 2: She’s a free-will denier. 3: Scientists who write for non-scientists make it harder for mere journalists to make a buck. In December, she lectured at a physics conference in Germany, and then she reported on the conference in Forbes. Come on, how can journalists compete with that? (Um, you could, for example, try reporting on the genuine upheaval taking place in evolutionary biology. But you’d lose all your remaining friends … So let’s get back to work. ) Horgan: Nice! You recently said on your blog: “The biggest task of science bloggers–like Peter Read More ›

Here. If you watch the Discovery Institute, you’ll discover they’re constantly playing games, trying to find that winning PR technique that will persuade the hapless ignorati. Some of them are effective, even if dishonest: “irreducible complexity” injected all kinds of misleading chaos into the brains of their followers, and “teach the controversy” was a potent slogan. They’ve been flailing about in recent years, trying to emphasize their pretense of scholarliness with tripe like West’s efforts to use pseudohistory to blame Darwin for Hitler, or Meyer’s farcical, long-winded distortions of modern biology in Signature in the Cell. Those haven’t worked so well. Etc. A friend thinks Myers watches too many political debates on TV. Baroque accompanies Michael Denton’s new book, Evolution: Read More ›

As opposed to junk food for the mind on the brain: Last night I taught a two hour class called ‘Navigating Neuroscience’ for the Guardian Masterclass series and I had the interesting challenge of coming up with a two hour course on some key concepts to help people make better sense of brain science, how it’s discussed, and its changing place in society. As part of that, I recommended some books to give interested non-specialists a good critical introduction. I added a book after hearing some of the questions and I’ve included the list below. I’ve mentioned some of them before on Mind Hacks in their own right, but I thought they’re worth mentioning as a set. The books have Read More ›