Here. Biological Theory, June 2017, Volume 12, Issue 2, pp 67–71 Three Modes of Evolution by Natural Selection and Drift: A New or an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis? Marion Blute First Online: 07 April 2017 DOI: 10.1007/s13752-017-0264-8 Cite this article as: Blute, M. Biol Theory (2017) 12: 67. doi:10.1007/s13752-017-0264-8 Abstract According to sources both in print and at a recent meeting, evolutionary theory is currently undergoing change which some would characterize as a New Synthesis, and others as an Extended Synthesis. This article argues that the important changes involve recognizing that there are three means by which evolutionary change can be initiated (genetically, ecologically, and developmentally) and three corresponding modes of evolutionary drift. It compares the three and goes on to discuss Read More ›

From Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: The organizing committee for the Munich conference was chaired by Richard Dawid, a string theorist turned philosopher who has written a 2013 book, String Theory and the Scientific Method. For a fuller discussion of that book, see the linked blog post. To oversimplify, it makes the case that the proper way to react to string theory unification’s failure according to the conventional understanding of the scientific method is to change our understanding of the scientific method. Much of the Munich conference was devoted to discussing that as an issue in philosophy of science. … Silverstein begins her article explaining how physics at a very high energy scale can in principle Read More ›

From Charles Q. Choi at Inside Science: However, much remains unknown about when and how cyanobacteria evolved oxygenic photosynthesis. “The whole question of the origin of cyanobacteria has long been a mystery because they kind of just appeared out of the tree of life with this very advanced capability to do oxygenic photosynthesis without any apparent forebears,” said biochemist Robert Blankenship at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Until recently, all known cyanobacteria were photosynthetic members of class Oxyphotobacteria. But in 2013, researchers discovered a nonphotosynthetic class of cyanobacteria known as Melainabacteria. Now Fischer and his colleagues have discovered a second class of nonphotosynthetic cyanobacteria, the Sericytochromatia. The researchers suggest that both groups are clearly closely related to photosynthetic cyanobacteria, Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The existence of agents — beings with intentions and goal-oriented behavior — has long seemed profoundly at odds with the reductionist assumption that all behavior arises from mechanistic interactions between particles. Agency doesn’t exist among the atoms, and so reductionism suggests agents don’t exist at all: that Romeo’s desires and psychological states are not the real causes of his actions, but merely approximate the unknowably complicated causes and effects between the atoms in his brain and surroundings. Hoel’s theory, called “causal emergence,” roundly rejects this reductionist assumption. “Causal emergence is a way of claiming that your agent description is really real,” said Hoel, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University who first proposed the idea with Read More ›

But by now, so what? Apart from political issues (gaining power by manipulating fake science claims), all this stuff would be so long discredited that it would only survive as a branch of the “Cultural Studies Department.”  Anyway,t his stuff: Over 30 years ago, Leonard Martin, Sabine Stepper, and I (Strack et al., 1988) conducted two studies to test the “facial feedback” hypothesis (Darwin, 1872). At the time, the hypothesis itself, namely that facial expressions may affect emotional experiences, was well established and frequently tested (e.g., Leventhal and Mace, 1970; Laird, 1974). However, the underlying mechanism remained largely unexplored. … The resulting “pen study” was meant neither to demonstrate a cute phenomenon nor to identify a powerful intervention to improve Read More ›

From Chase Nelson at Inference Review: ORIGINALLY PROPOSED by Motoo Kimura, Jack King, and Thomas Jukes, the neutral theory of molecular evolution is inherently non-Darwinian.2 Darwinism asserts that natural selection is the driving force of evolutionary change. It is the claim of the neutral theory, on the other hand, that the majority of evolutionary change is due to chance. Each individual in a typical mammal population has two copies of its genome in almost every cell. The exact DNA sequences they contain may differ as the result of mutations, random copying errors in which one nucleotide letter is replaced by another. Other changes can also occur, such as the deletion or duplication of larger DNA segments. The result is genetic Read More ›

A friend writes to raise the question of Basener’s ceiling: From Robert Marks II at ENV: We show that no meaningful information can arise from an evolutionary process unless that process is guided. Even when guided, the degree of evolution’s accomplishment is limited by the expertise of the guiding information source — a limit we call Basener’s ceiling. An evolutionary program whose goal is to master chess will never evolve further and offer investment advice. More. William Basener is an artificial intelligence expert. Our friend writes “Complexity in evolutionary algorithms always stops at a certain point and never gets any better, which is predicted by Basener’s ceiling. He also notes that biological evolution seems to have no problem continuously generating Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: Fine-tuning of the universe is so unpleasant a subject for materialists that it cannot really become a controversy. The desired evidence favors a random universe, accidentally spilled. Differing points of view on the findings would, of course, be funded by the government. But the randomness would be agreed upon up front. On the other hand, if evidence matters, our universe appears fine-tuned. In the end it is not really an issue about the evidence. Help! we are drowning in evidence! The universe’s expansion speed is said to be just right for life, the Higgs boson seems to be fine-tuned, and Earth has a “unique” iron signature, just as a few examples. This Read More ›

These clips are taken from a video that was recently pointed to by CY and which I (with help of UD) embedded here. We need to ponder what is happening with our civilisation under the impact of evolutionary materialism and its fellow travellers up to and including cultural marxist agendas (also cf. here), so pardon some painful reading: How have we come to a pass such as this? Schaeffer (suitably modified) has a suggestion or two: Where also the seven mopuntains of influence perspective championed by Wallnau et al (again as adapted) may also help us see how the community is shaped by influences such as this branch of cultural marxism, aka “critical studies”: What should we then do? This Read More ›

What difference does evidence make, as opposed to piety, political correctness, or court judgments? Find out here: Bob’s interview with Julian Charles’s on “The Mind Renewed” about “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics”- Youtube: https://youtu.be/y3f-h08PGak , Podcast: http://themindrenewed.com/mp3/TMR_173_DrRobertJMarksII_Evolutionary_Informatics_128kbps.mp3 Bob’s essay at EN  “Top Ten Questions and Objections to Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics’” https://evolutionnews.org/2017/06/top-ten-questions-and-objections-to-introduction-to-evolutionary-informatics/ Winston’s “ID the Future” podcast #1 on “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics”  titled “Author of New Book Tells Why Evolution Simulations … Don’t” http://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2017/05/author-of-new-book-tells-why-evolution-simulations-dont/ Winston’s “ID the Future” podcast #2 on “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics” titled “Why Digital Cambrian Explosions Fizzle … Or Fake It” … http://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2017/06/why-digital-cambrian-explosions-fizzle-or-fake-it/ Granville’s EN “Intelligent Design Goes International — A Report from Istanbul” https://evolutionnews.org/2017/05/intelligent-design-goes-international-a-report-from-istanbul/ Bob’s essay in CNS News “Sorry Darwin: New Video Game Proves Adaptation Is Ubiquitous – Not Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at Space.com: 10. Nobody is transmitting. Instead, everybody may be listening. That’s basically how it is here on Earth. Apart from a few paltry efforts to broadcast strong signals over a narrow frequency band towards the stars above, we’ve barely made our presence known in the universe. In fact, if aliens have radio telescopes similar to what we have on Earth, our television and radio broadcasts would only be detectable up to 0.3 light-years away. That distance doesn’t even transcend the farthest reaches of our solar system. 11. Earth is deliberately not being contacted. On Earth, we have policies about contacting indigenous peoples; it’s possible that the same thing could be happening with us. Just like in Read More ›

Denyse recently linked to a presentation by Scott Minnich regarding the bacterial flagellum.  Minnich is probably among the dozen or so leading experts in the world on the bacterial flagellum.  Much of the information in his presentation will be familiar to followers of the issues, but a few points bear further examination. First a couple of bench-science items that jumped out at me: Minnich and his team discovered that DNA has a regulatory function in the form of a temperature switch.  Let me be clear, it is not that DNA codes for some molecular machine that is a temperature switch.  The DNA itself is the switch.  In simple terms, the coding portion that codes for a particular protein is bounded Read More ›

From Leonard David at LiveScience: The idea is that mathematics is as much a part of our humanity as music and art. And it is mathematics that might be understandable — even familiar — to extraterrestrial civilizations, allowing us to strike up star-speak repartee. Carl DeVito, an emeritus faculty in the mathematics department at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has proposed a language based on plausibly universal scientific concepts. He recently detailed his work at the Astrobiology Science Conference 2017, held from April 24 to April 28 in Mesa, Arizona. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life] Designing a signal that attracts attention and, on examination, is “clearly” the work of intelligence, is a complex problem, DeVito told Space.com. Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Scientists ran a meta-analysis of 63 studies and found that religious people tend to be less intelligent than nonreligious people. The association was stronger among college students and the general public than for those younger than college age, they found. The association was also stronger for religious beliefs, rather than religious behavior, according to the meta-analysis, published in 2013 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review. But why does this association exist? Dutton set out to find answer, thinking that perhaps it was because nonreligious people were more rational than their religious brethren, and thus better able to reason that there was no God, he wrote. But “more recently, I started to wonder if Read More ›

  Here re Controversy of the Ages: Why Christians Should Not Divide Over the Age of the Earth: Second, chapter 9 is worth the price of the whole book. Cabal notes that Christians need to have theological boundaries to protect the faith, but ought to draw them with charity and proper balance between inclusivity and restrictiveness. While he does have some criticisms for Reasons to Believe, the leading OEC organization, since they are committed to biblical inerrancy, he reserves his primary criticism for Answers in Genesis (AiG) and BioLogos. As for AiG, Cabal is concerned that they draw doctrinal lines to narrowly—including such things as a young earth, a flood-shaped geology, Neanderthals, and details about taxonomy in the definition of inerrancy. Read More ›