David Tyler

Images of Neanderthal Man have changed over the years, but there has been a reluctance to portray them as our near-cousins. Neanderthals have been treated as a separate species within the Homo family, and usually described as slow and clumsy, with a limited capacity for creative thinking. The evolutionary context is typically presented in terms of Modern Man’s superiority, so that when Homo sapiens migrated from Africa into Europe, it was the Neanderthal population that died out. However, does the evolutionary approach provide the appropriate framework for understanding these events? Recent discoveries suggest that Neanderthals do not fit the descriptions found in the textbooks and the media, and that the evolutionary agenda is actually a negative influence. The presuppositions and Read More ›

Ever since Darwin, there has been a tension between the theory of biological transformation (stochastic tinkering) and the concept of progress. Two Italian biologists have scanned 67,413 scientific articles published between 2005 and 2010 in 16 top science journals. They were looking for examples of progressionist, pre-evolutionary language because they suspected that evolutionary biology has retained some cultural baggage implying a direction to evolutionary transformation. According to their thinking, the Great Chain of Being concept, historically known as the scala naturae, has a persistent unacknowledged influence over the minds of many in the research community. This concept assigns a place to every entity in the natural world, whether animate or inanimate, “from the lowest steps of the ladder occupied by Read More ›

It may come as a surprise to learn that evolutionists have a great deal of work to do to put their house in order. Although the title of Kevin Padian’s article refers to common misrepresentation of evolution in textbooks and the media, the abstract makes it clear that many of the problems are “confusingly discussed in the scientific literature” (meaning that professional evolutionists are also at fault). Nevertheless, textbooks are Padian’s main target, and we agree with his thesis that changes are long overdue. Nevertheless, the details of the proposed changes need to be considered critically. We cannot discuss in this blog all the issues raised by Padian, but we shall look at some in each of the three sections Read More ›

Insect eyes may be tiny but they belong to a “remarkably sophisticated class of imaging systems”. They have compound eyes, made up of hundreds or thousands of optical units or facets. Considered as optical systems, these facets are simpler than the vertebrate eye design because there are no moving parts to focus the light. “In the case of the ‘apposition’ eye of daylight insects, each facet is optically isolated from its neighbour and equipped with its own lens and set of photoreceptors. Because each facet accepts photons from only a small angle in space, the light sensitivity of apposition eyes is rather low and the spatial resolution is limited by the number of facets that can be packed on to Read More ›

Sixty years have passed since Watson and Crick unveiled the structure of the DNA double helix and tentatively explained how it encodes hereditary information. The Central Dogma of genetics soon followed: that “DNA makes RNA makes protein” makes cells and organisms. Once this “River out of Eden” was flowing, the story of life was deemed to be essentially understood. Genes were considered to provide the blueprint of life and the task of filling in the details had begun. The blueprint motif was prominent in media coverage of the Human Genome project – any who questioned its veracity were regarded as subverting science. But is the consensus position robust? At least one commentator (Philip Ball in Nature) is prepared to say Read More ›

This year marks the centenary of the death of Alfred Russel Wallace, sometimes portrayed as “Darwin’s goad”. However, as Andrew Berry argues, Wallace should be remembered as a “visionary scientist in his own right, a daring explorer and a passionate socialist”. He was awarded the Order of Merit, the highest honour that could be given by the British monarch to a civilian. He has left a – “- huge scientific legacy, which ranged from discovering natural selection to defining the term species, and from founding the field of evolutionary biogeography to pioneering the study of comparative natural history.” (page 162) For more, go here. Here’s the punchline: Whilst Berry is willing to respect Wallace’s integrity in departing from Darwin in Read More ›

Soft-bodied worms from the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia, Canada have been known for over 100 years. They are known by the name Spartobranchus tenuis and are considered one of the most abundant species in the Walcott Quarry community. However, only recently has a detailed examination of their characteristics been made, leading to the conclusion that they are ancient examples of acorn worms. One member of the research team was Christopher Cameron from the University of Montreal, who studies modern-day acorn worms. Identifying the fossils was not problematic: “Spartobranchus is clearly an acorn worm,” he said in an interview. “It’s almost like someone took a picture of a modern-day animal – it’s absolutely astonishing.” These Read More ›

People who love the countryside and open places tend to value biodiversity and rich ecosystems. There is a perception that a high species diversity helps to stabilise ecosystems by buffering the effects of environmental change, and in addition create ecosystems with greater functionality. According to MacDougall et al. (2013), “Biodiversity can stabilize ecological systems by functional complementarity, with different species thriving under different conditions.” However, scientific underpinning has lagged behind tacit knowledge and we are faced with the growth of monocultures in agricultural husbandry and commercial land use. Nevertheless, the situation is changing, and the benefits of biodiversity are being increasingly recognised. Researchers face the problem of complex patterns of human interventions. [snip] The punchline: If we start with evidence Read More ›

It is often said that the timescales for evolution are too long to allow speciation to be studied experimentally. Consequently, researchers look to the fossil record to provide the evidence base. However, this also has its limitations. With fossils, molecular analyses are not possible because soft tissues decay rapidly. Furthermore, the drivers of speciation are often a matter of speculation. Nevertheless, by selecting a depositional environment that provides a sequence of stratigraphical horizons that allow analysis of environmental factors, some informative studies are possible. “Long-lived lakes are virtually predetermined for these studies, because of their duration and relative stability, being therefore often called ‘islands of evolution’. Many studies have proven this fact repeatedly, including the papers on the impressive morphological Read More ›

It is not often that naturists complain to the BBC about people wearing clothes in one of their programmes. However, this has happened in the UK recently, after the broadcasting of scenes featuring early humans in the series “Andrew Marr’s History of The World“. A spokesperson said: “It is astonishing that the BBC, that once proud bastion of journalistic integrity, should be sacrificing its reputation for commercial reasons.” According to the Daily Telegraph’s report, “The group said that in the Exodus from Africa, Ancient Egypt, the Minoans, the Caribs, the Australian aborigines, and members of a contemporary South American tribe, the costumes were the product of the BBC censors, not history.” Instead of contesting the complainants, a representative from BBC Read More ›

The Central Dogma has had an enormous impact on the way genetics research has developed over the past 50 years. Basically, the dogma states that DNA genes encode mRNA, and mRNA allows proteins to be constructed, and proteins do all the work needed for cells to function. There is a linear logic here that fits into a view of the genome that is static throughout its life and provides a blueprint for life. This is how Franklin and Vondriska introduce their paper: “Arguably the greatest postmodern coup for reductionism in biology was the articulation of the central dogma. Not since “humors” were discarded from medical practice and logic and experiment instituted as the cornerstones of physiology (which they remain today) Read More ›

Words convey meaning, and the word pseudogene conveys the sense of a gene that is a sham, that is spurious, that is phoney. It is a word that is widely used in the literature on genetics, where pseudogenes are regarded as defunct relatives of functional genes. The dominant reason for studying them is because they “provide a record of how the genomic DNA has been changed without [. . .] evolutionary pressure and can be used as a model for determining the underlying rates of nucleotide substitution, insertion and deletion in the greater genome” (Source here). Recent research has challenged this assessment of these genetic elements and the textbooks need to be revised comprehensively. Nearly everything that has been widely Read More ›

New information has emerged to show that a prediction of neo-Darwinism has been falsified. Everyone knows that animals adapt to their environments. The surge of interest in climate change has stimulated research into morphological change in Galapagos finches, “Siberian warblers, English sparrows, cuckoos, cowbirds, red-winged blackbirds, and many others.” The message coming through is that the sizes and shapes of animals can change quickly in response to environmental constraints. These findings have been used as fundamental evidence to support mainstream thinking about organic evolution. As explained by Prothero et al.: “The classic neontological model of gradualistic evolution argues that organisms are sensitive to small environmental changes, and readily adapt to such changes through transformations of body size or morphology. Such Read More ›

Darwin’s solitary illustration of evolutionary branching has left a lasting impression in the minds of readers. From an ancestral form, speciation occurs and the diversity of descendants increases. This can be visualised as a cone of morphological variation, extending from the source. However, the Cambrian Explosion provides empirical evidence against this concept, as a large number of organisms appear abruptly. (For more, see here) Yet it has been tempting for Darwinists to interpret the Cambrian species in terms of a number of cones of increasing diversity that all have their origins deeper in the Precambrian. This was something Stephen Jay Gould attempted to counter by proposing an “inverted cone” model. But there is a need for a third model to Read More ›

The worm-like molluscs, the Aplacophoria, are not well known to most of us, and they are a difficult group to study because they live in deep waters. Their taxonomy has been somewhat controversial, with little agreement on their relationships with other molluscan groups. However, the consensus has been that they are the “most primordial molluscs to be found on earth”. There is an evolutionary story that helps to promote this understanding: the other molluscan groups appeared during the Cambrian Explosion, and they have armour of some kind. It is reasonable to postulate a simpler kind of mollusc that had no armour – which appears to be exactly what we have in the aplacophorians. New research, however, has brought a change Read More ›