Laszlo Bencze writes to note this letter he wrote to American Scholar in 2004 in response to an article therein, one that does not seem to be online: Evolution, that good mother, has seen fit to guide us to the apple instead of the poison berry by our attraction to the happy sweetness of the apple, its fresh crispness, and, in just the right balance, enough tartness to make it complicated in the mouth. There are good and rational reasons why natural selection has made us into creatures with fine taste discernment—we can learn what’s good for us and what’s not. But this very sensible survival imperative, like the need to have sex to reproduce, works itself out through the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, the research’s leader, wrote in her report: “While domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, have been found to be skillful at social cognitive tasks and even some meta-cognitive tasks, they have not passed the test of mirror self-recognition (MSR).” She borrowed the pioneering ethological approach, called the “Sniff test of self-recognition (STSR)” proposed by Prof. Cazzolla Gatti in 2016 to shed light on different ways of checking for self-recognition, and applied it to thirty-six domestic dogs accompanied by their owners. This study confirmed the previous evidence proposed with the STSR by Dr. Cazzolla Gatti showing that “dogs distinguish between the olfactory ‘image’ of themselves when modified: investigating their own odour for longer when it had an additional Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Monkeys had higher confidence in their ability to remember an image when the visual contrast was high. These kinds of metacognitive illusions — false beliefs about how we learn or remember best — are shared by humans, leading brain and cognitive scientists to believe that metacognition could have an evolutionary basis. Actually, they merely assume that and rely on increasingly casuistical experiments to provide support. Instead of getting a reward right away — to eliminate decisions based purely on response-reward — the monkey next sees a betting screen to communicate how certain he is that he’s right. If he chooses a high bet and is correct, three tokens are added to a token bank. Once the token bank Read More ›

From Sara Reardon at Nature: Wallabies are kicking over scientific conventions surrounding mammalian placentas, the organ responsible for protecting and nourishing a developing fetus. A study finds that contrary to what scientists thought previously, mother tammar wallabies (Macropus eugenii) have both a functioning internal placenta and milk that performs some of the organ’s usual roles. Taxonomists usually separate marsupials — including kangaroos, wallabies and wombats — from placental mammals, also known as eutherians, such as mice and people. The separation is based partly on a supposed lack of a placenta in marsupials. But many researchers think that this distinction is incorrect, noting that marsupials develop simple, placenta-like structures during the end of pregnancy, just before the underdeveloped baby crawls from Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The fossils were discovered in sediment in the Corumbá region of western Brazil, near the border with Bolivia. The burrows measure from under 50 to 600 micrometres or microns (?m) in diameter, meaning the creatures that made them were similar in size to a human hair which can range from 40 to 300 microns in width. One micrometre is just one thousandth of a millimeter. Dr Russell Garwood, from Manchester’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said: ‘This is an especially exciting find due to the age of the rocks — these fossils are found in rock layers which actually pre-date the oldest fossils of complex animals — at least that is what all current fossil records would Read More ›

A friend writes: “When I discuss evolution in social media, some complain about the word Darwinism. They say, ‘Darwinism is a term I never hear outside of Christian circles.’ Is that so?” No, of course not. Another friend offers many citations, but just this, from 2005: Here: Even prominent Darwinist scientists use the term in their popular writings. Richard Dawkins writes that “There are people in this world who desperately want to not have to believe in Darwinism.” (The Blind Watchmaker, W.W. Norton, 1996 ed, pg. 250) The term “Darwinism” has over 20 entries in the index to Stephen Jay Gould’s magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. If Wilson is correct that “Scientists don’t call it Darwinism,” then apparently Read More ›

And the type catalogued. From ScienceDaily: More than a quarter of biomedical scientific papers may utilize practices that distort the interpretation of results or mislead readers so that results are viewed more favorably, a new study suggests. Their findings, published in PLOS Biology, found more than 26 percent of papers identified as systematic reviews or meta-analyses contained spin. This figure rose to up to 84 percent in papers reporting on nonrandomised trials. While spin was variably defined across the 35 studies, a wide variety of strategies to spin results were identified including: – making inappropriate claims about statistically non-significant results – making inappropriate recommendations for clinical practice that were not supported by study results – attributing causality when that was Read More ›

Wolf-Ekkehard Loennig, who studied mutations for 25 years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Koln, Germany, is now retired but still writes often on the topic of Darwinism and Intelligent Design. He is one of those old-school scientists who believes evidence matters even when it comes to questions of biological origins. Charles Darwin famously offered the following suggestion as to how his theory could be falsified: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Dr. Loennig has repeatedly offered examples which defy a gradualist explanation, for example, listen to this interview where Read More ›

Here. As we know, random changes and undirected natural processes routinely succeed in assembling functional equipment for a range of uses. Wait…it doesn’t work that way? The Revolutionary Behe website, at http://revolutionarybehe.com/, features more information about Dr. Behe’s research, other molecular machines, and evidence for intelligent design, and the stories of revolutionary scientists changing the evolutionary paradigm. See the documentary now and pass it along! Behe is the author of Darwin’s Black Box and Edge of Evolution Note: News posting light till later today due to other alternate night job. See also: How ID theorist Michael Behe forced Darwin’s faithful to start talking nonsense and Eric Metaxas on Michael Behe, Revolutionary

From Creation-Evolution Headlines: Will Brown bring Darwin’s Down House down? Look at the title of a paper in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics by Christopher J. Graves and Daniel M. Weinreich of Brown University: “Variability in Fitness Effects Can Preclude Selection of the Fittest.” The very title suggests that core concepts underlying neo-Darwinism (fitness and selection) are in trouble. Although the paper is behind a paywall, we get an idea of the trouble from the Abstract: Evolutionary biologists often predict the outcome of natural selection on an allele by measuring its effects on lifetime survival and reproduction of individual carriers. However, alleles affecting traits like sex, evolvability, and cooperation can cause fitness effects that depend heavily on Read More ›

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), philosophy professor at the University of California (Berkeley), sometimes said that what is termed science in one culture is called voodoo in another: To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts—their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, ‘objectivity,’ [or] ’truth’—it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.” Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975, 1993), 18-19. ) Just came across an interesting contrarian piece by John Horgan in Read More ›

From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: Nigel Goldenfeld applies the physics of condensed matter to understand why evolution was blazingly fast for the earliest life — and then slowed down. Cepelewicz So how can collective effects in physics inform our understanding of evolution? Goldenfeld: When you think about evolution, you typically tend to think about population genetics, the frequency of genes in a population. But if you look to the Last Universal Common Ancestor — the organism ancestral to all others, which we can trace through phylogenetics [the study of evolutionary relationships] — that’s not the beginning of life. There was definitely simpler life before that — life that didn’t even have genes, when there were no species. So we know Read More ›

Paper published in June in PLOS Biology: Environmental change drives accelerated adaptation through stimulated copy number variation From author summary: Stimulated copy number variation (CNV) operates at sites of preexisting copy number variation, which are common in eukaryotic genomes, and provides cells with a remarkable and unexpected ability to alter their own genome in response to the environment. pdf (public access) Abstract: Copy number variation (CNV) is rife in eukaryotic genomes and has been implicated in many human disorders, particularly cancer, in which CNV promotes both tumorigenesis and chemotherapy resistance. CNVs are considered random mutations but often arise through replication defects; transcription can interfere with replication fork progression and stability, leading to increased mutation rates at highly transcribed loci. Here Read More ›

From Abigail Beall at New Scientist: We thought electrons and their two mysterious siblings were fundamental particles. Now there are hints that we need to go smaller still to understand matter But the truly inexplicable thing about the electron is that it has two heavier siblings. The universe would tick along fine without these particles, which never hang around long anyway. So why do they exist? And why are there three siblings, not four or 104? More. There may be, we are told, “a hidden world buzzing beneath the surface of the electron – one that would force us to rethink all the fundamental building blocks of matter.” Interesting questions: Why do so many things come in threes? Stability? Also, Read More ›

Here: The conventional NeoDarwinian appraisal of evolution is based on corresponding pillars of random genetic variation and selection via differential fitness. In the 21st century, a salient question arises. Is this a sufficient evolutionary narrative? This Special Issue will offer several differing perspectives on evolutionary development and phylogeny that extend beyond Darwinian selection. The role of cellular cooperativity, cellular cognition, self-reference, niche construction, stigmergy, self-organization, epigenetic modifications, genetic transfer and mobility, endosymbiosis, hologenomics, and non-stochastic genetic mechanisms will be addressed. In particular, cell–cell communication and aspects of cellular/genetic self-engineering will be considered. Over many years, movement towards a substantial revision of the NeoDarwinian synthesis has gained slow momentum through many diverging approaches. This Special Issue will explore a variety of Read More ›