The main thesis of Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves, surrounds what Behe calls “poison-pill” mutations, which gives an organism a quick fix, but which can run the risk of being rendered incapable of utilizing future needed adaptations. IOW, breaking and blunting genes to adapt to new environments become changes that get locked in due to NS’ tendency to root out anything but what is the ‘fittest’ in any environment–and this can include even beneficial mutations being rooted out due to beneficial mutations being so rare and showing up way too late to modify the adapted organism. So, today at Phys.Org there is a PR (press release) about a study involving viruses. It turns out that even at the level of Read More ›

We live in a Kant-haunted age, where the “ugly gulch” between our inner world of appearances and judgements and the world of things in themselves is often seen as unbridgeable. Of course, there are many other streams of thought that lead to widespread relativism and subjectivism, but the ugly gulch concept is in some ways emblematic. Such trends influence many commonly encountered views, most notably our tendency to hold that being a matter of taste, beauty lies solely in the eye of the beholder. And yet, we find the world-famous bust of Nefertiti: Compare, 3400 years later; notice the symmetry and focal power of key features for Guinean model, Sira Kante : And then, ponder the highly formal architecture of Read More ›

Win a $50 VISA gift card for the deemed best answer to this question: Given the pervasive pattern of “sudden appearance” and “stasis” in the fossil record, does science need a Theory of Stasis or Theory of Conservation to better explain how nature actually functions. Explain. How would such a theory help to strengthen an inference to intelligent design? Feel free to hash out ideas here. For possible hints go to: Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen and Law Of Conservation Of Information vs Darwinism Last month’s question was How would you would respond to someone when they claim that Intelligent Design is merely an appeal to a “god-of-the-gaps”? Entry 6 was selected.

For centuries, researchers knew that Euglenids, a diversified family of aquatic unicellular organisms, could reshape their bodies in any number of elegant ways but no one knew why they did it. Some researchers think they now know: “Amongst biophysicists, metaboly was thought to be a way to swim in a fluid, where these cells live,” Arroyo said. “However, protistologists are not convinced by this function for metaboly, since Euglena can swim very fast beating their flagellum, as do many other cell types. Instead, the predominant view is that metaboly [body deformations] is a functionless vestige ‘inherited’ from ancestors that used cell body deformations to engulf large prey. Watching cells executing such a beautiful and coordinated dance, we did not believe Read More ›

They try but somehow the love story just won’t tell itself in a way that makes any sense: It may sound rational to conjecture that love is merely an emergent property of consciousness that has matured throughout the course of human evolution. But emergence is no less of a “god of the gaps” belief than Zeus’s lighting or Thor’s thunder. Zoe is a great film but it presents a storyline often used to show how inexplicable and ineffable love is in order to get me to believe that it isn’t. For example, the underlying dogma assumes reductionism (everything is material). Thus, the question addressed isn’t the obvious one, “Can a synthetic love a human?”; it is “Can a human love Read More ›

Researchers studied the thale cress (an Arabadopsis relative) which can have either a single or a double genome. Genome doubling is not good news: “It’s almost always a bad thing to have too much DNA, but we think that sometimes it makes for a ‘hopeful monster’ that just might flourish.” They seem to have found one: “These tough little plants can become little genetic adaptation machines which allows them to invade hostile environments and even thrive where others can’t. In fact, a large proportion of the most invasive plant species in the world are genome doubled, so we hypothesised that there are adaptations that occur as a result of genome duplication that we can focus on and find the genes Read More ›