And it’s only August. A special issue of Interface Focus on New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives, organized by Denis Noble, Nancy Cartwright, Patrick Bateson, John Dupré and Kevin Laland is now available. The Royal Society journal is “devoted to a particular subject at the interface of the physical and life sciences.” Some of the articles in this edition are open access. One open access article is theoretical biologist Gerd B. Müller’s piece, Why an extended evolutionary synthesis is necessary: As can be noted from the listed principles, current evolutionary theory is predominantly oriented towards a genetic explanation of variation, and, except for some minor semantic modifications, this has not changed over the past seven Read More ›

Could two early life forms unite and pool information (endosymbiosis)? Lynn Margulis championed the idea but recently some have raised doubts. From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: Kurland and Harish lay out their case in the current Journal of Theoretical Biology in a paper titled, “Mitochondria are not captive bacteria.” In it they note that “97% of modern mitochondrial protein domains as well as their homologues in bacteria and archaea were present in the universal common ancestor. . . . and were distributed by vertical inheritance.” But a big problem is that the subject has been surprisingly little researched. Mazur notes that endosymbiosis  champion Lynn Margulis told her, A fine scientific literature on this theme (symbiosis) actually exists and grows every Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Mammalian perineal structure derived from septation of the cloaca is an important evolutionary innovation that allows myriad anatomical configurations, diverse reproductive strategies, and precise excretory control available only to mammals. The researchers were surprised to discover that, despite the perineum’s structural complexity, the muscles of the mammalian perineum show a reemergence of a simple pattern of body wall layering that dates back more than 360 million years ago — during the origin of tetrapods, the first vertebrates to move out of the water onto land. [color emphasis added] Basal vertebrates, such as fish, organize their body wall into two muscular layers that are important for swimming. However, with the transition from water to land, the body wall of Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A type of mouse widely used to assess how the human immune system responds to transplanted stem cells does not reflect what is likely to occur in patients, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The researchers urge further optimization of this animal model before making decisions about whether and when to begin wide-scale stem cell transplants in humans. Known as “humanized” mice, the animals have been engineered to have a human, rather than a murine, immune system. Researchers have relied upon the animals for decades to study, among other things, the immune response to the transplantation of pancreatic islet cells for diabetes and skin grafts for burn victims. However, the Stanford Read More ›

Along with massive but not total extinction of many other life forms. From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: The 2 minutes of darkness caused by the total solar eclipse earlier this week may seem momentous, but it’s nothing compared with the prolonged darkness that followed the dinosaur-killing asteroid that collided with Earth about 65.5 million years ago, a new study finds. When the 6-mile-wide (10 kilometers) asteroid struck, Earth plunged into a darkness that lasted nearly two years, the researchers said. This darkness was caused, in part, by tremendous amounts of soot that came from wildfires worldwide. Without sunlight, Earth’s plants couldn’t photosynthesize, and the planet drastically cooled. These two key factors likely toppled global food chains and contributed to the Read More ›

Lauren Frayer and Gokce Saracoglu report: At a news conference last month, Turkey’s education minister announced that new textbooks will be introduced in all primary and secondary schools, starting with grades 1, 5 and 9 this fall, and the rest next year. They will stop teaching evolution in grade 9, when it’s usually taught. “Evolutionary biology is best left to be taught at the university level,” Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz told reporters. “It’s a theory that requires a higher philosophical understanding than schoolchildren have.” That means students who don’t go on to university may never learn who Charles Darwin was. More. Huh? When Darwin’s publicists speak without thinking, they reveal their true concerns. The big problem, put starkly in the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In nature, plants engage in a never-ending battle to avoid being eaten. Unable to run away, plant species have evolved defenses to deter herbivores; they have spines, produce nasty chemicals, or grow tough leaves that are difficult to chew. For years, scientists have assumed that herbivores and plants are locked into evolutionary competition in which a plant evolves a defense, the herbivore evolves a workaround, and so on. New research led by the University of Utah challenges this paradigm of an evolutionary arms race. The study analyzed multiple species of Inga, a genus of tropical trees that produces defensive chemicals, and their various insect herbivores. The researchers found that closely-related plants evolved very different defensive traits. Additionally, their Read More ›

Laszlo Bencze, photographer and philosopher, asks us to reflect on the claim: I’ve just reread two marvelous books dealing with this topic. The first, Undeniable, by Douglas Axe explains in meticulous detail why the probabilities are so preposterously stacked against the creation of information by accident. He truly bends over backwards to make his point as simple as possible via analogy and easy math. The second, Genetic Entropy, is by John Sanford and details the work of many evolutionist geneticists who demonstrate that virtually all mutations are not only nearly neutral but also non selectable. As for positive mutations, if they exist at all, they exist in such small numbers as to not be capable of being shown on a Read More ›

From Phys.org: A commonly proposed solution to help diffuse the political and religious polarization surrounding controversial scientific issues like evolution or climate change is education. However, Carnegie Mellon University researchers found that the opposite is true: people’s beliefs about scientific topics that are associated with their political or religious identities actually become increasingly polarized with education, as measured by years in school, science classes, and science literacy. “A lot of science is generally accepted and trusted, but certain topics have become deeply polarizing. We wanted to find out what factors are related to this polarization, and it turns out the ‘deficit model’—which says the divisions are due to a lack of education or understanding—does not tell the whole story,” said Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: For many people today, post-modern science is more of a quest to express an identity as believer in science, irrespective of evidence. Cosmologist Paul Steinhardt got a sense of this in 2014, when he reported that some proponents of early rapid cosmic inflation “already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected.” It fulfilled their needs. In 2017, cosmologist George Ellis, long a foe of post-modern cosmology, summed it up: “Scientific theories have since the seventeenth century been held tight by an experimental leash. In the last twenty years or so, both string theory and theories of the multiverse have slipped the leash.” We have so Read More ›

From Jay Richards at Evolution News & Views: On August 21, we Americans get to see a total solar eclipse. As I mentioned in a previous piece, we can see solar eclipses only because our planet, our Moon, and our Sun sometimes come together in a straight line in space. When the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, those in the Moon’s shadow see an eclipse. But the story doesn’t end there. A rare alignment of events allows Earthlings to witness not just solar eclipses, but what we might call perfect solar eclipses. Our Moon just barely covers the Sun’s bright photosphere. Such an eclipse depends on just the right sizes, shapes, and relative distances of the Sun, Moon, Read More ›

Some friends and I drove up to Casper, which was in the exact center of the zone of totality of the eclipse.  The experience was indescribably spectacular.  It was even worth enduring the worst traffic jam of my life in which the normal four-hour drive back to Denver was stretched to ten hours. This morning I learned that Neil deGrasse Tyson‏ tweeted The divided United States of America will unite today, sharing a cosmic event predicted by the methods and tools of science. Most commenters have interpreted this as a dig at climate alarmism skeptics.  So, let’s play “Spot the Equivocation”! A.  The “methods and tools of science” used to predict the eclipse have been extremely well understood for hundreds Read More ›

My latest ‘Critic’s Corner’ post is now up. This one features the work of ID critic Sahotra Sarkar. Sarkar is one of the more sophisticated critics of ID so his work is worth engaging with. I have responded to some of his arguments in a previous post and plan to do more in the future:                          Critic’s Corner: Sahotra Sarkar     

Integrative biologist Kevin Padian reviews Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution by Jonathan B. Losos at Nature. He likes it but with quite a few qualifications: Early in Jonathan Losos’s Improbable Destinies, the narrative goes off the rails. Losos sets up the problem of historical contingency in evolution by repeating the story that 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, an asteroid smacked into Earth, killing off the dinosaurs and paving the way for mammalian success. Had the asteroid missed, he writes, dinosaurs would have continued their domination and we humans might never have evolved. The problem is much evidence has come to light in recent years that he dinosaurs were declining anyway and the Read More ›

From Meera Nanda, author of Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, at Butterflies and Wheels: Science studies, as I said, is not an ordinary academic discipline. It constitutes the beating heart of postmodernism, for it aims to “deconstruct” natural science, the very core of a secular and modern worldview. Since its inception in the 1970s, the discipline has produced a sizeable body of work that purports to show that not just the agenda, but even the content of theories of natural sciences is “socially constructed.” All knowledge, in different cultures, or different historical times – regardless of whether it is true or false, rational or irrational, successful or not in producing reliable knowledge – Read More ›