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“5th Feb 2008 Dr Francis Collins discussed his views on science, faith, and the ease with which the two can be reconciled through a rejection of extremes, and an embrace of “harmony in the middle”. Collins emphasized that science does not provide us with the right instruments to prove the existence of God because God is outside of nature. Collins cited pointers to God in nature such as the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” and the precise tuning of physical constants during the Big Bang. Examples of such improbability suggest that there is a creator God. To justify a creator God that actually cares about humans, though, requires more than just science. Collins’ attack on Intelligent Design was one of the Read More ›

New Scientist February 16, 2008 Dan Jones Pg. 40-43 heavily edited. Full text here. “William Paley, who argued that the natural world is full of designed complexity which must have a creator, would have considered the bacterial flagellum an excellent example. The flagellum, with its intricate arrangement of interconnecting parts, looks no less designed than a watch. Modern biology, of course, has no need for omniscient designers. Evolution – Richard Dawkins’s blind watchmaker – is all that is needed to explain the origin of complexity in nature. The bacterial flagellum has become a focal point in science’s ongoing struggle against unreason. The study of complex molecular systems has been given added impetus by the ID movement. ID claims that such Read More ›

Michael Ruse on Richard Dawkins “The God Delusion” (heavily edited) “God is getting a bit of a bashing these days. Above all, there is the smash-hit best seller The God Delusion, by the brilliant science writer Richard Dawkins. Why this sudden enthusiasm for atheism? The new skeptics are writing brilliant works, bringing reason and evidence to bear on the God question, and showing in altogether new ways why religion is false and dangerous to boot. Dawkins is brazen in his ignorance of philosophy and theology (not to mention the history of science). Dawkins is entirely ignorant of the fact that no believer – has ever thought that arguments are the best support for belief. John Henry Newman wrote: “I believe Read More ›

For me, the importance of this piece in Nature is not so much that, by assuming what is to be proven, it is possible to demonstrate the obvious (that heavily spined fish will not have an advantage where there are no predators). The significance is that this trivial example of existing trait filtering and selection is then touted as a major discovery of Natural Selection at work in the fossil record. Is this not an admission that microevolution is the best that the fossil record ever shows? Evolutionary biology: Darwin in the fossils Andrew P. Hendry (heavily edited excerpts) “Although adaptation by natural selection is thought to drive evolution, it has been difficult to confirm this process in the fossil record. The evidence has been there Read More ›

Evolution of anatomy and gene control  Evo-devo meets systems biology. Georgy Koentges Nature Vol 451|7 February 2008  (excerpts only)

Since Darwin we know that we must explain organisms not only in mechanistic terms (of mutation, selection and adaptation on the population level) but also in historical terms, as ‘descent with modification’, evolution in phylogeny. All heritable morphological changes derive from developmental changes in molecular control hierarchies and networks.

Genetic control networks must have changed to create phenotypic diversity. Historians of life are interested in the specific succession of changes over evolutionary time.

Read More ›

In an excellent essay in NATURE, Kevin Padian gives his views and concludes (some editing) …  “Has any single individual made so many lasting contributions to a broad area of science as Darwin did to biology? Darwin moved intellectual thought from a paradigm of untestable wonder at special creation to an ability to examine the workings of that natural world, however ultimately formed, in terms of natural mechanisms and historical patterns. He rooted the classification of species within a single branching tree, and so gave systematics a biological, rather than purely philosophical, rationale. He framed most of the important questions that still define our understanding of evolution, from natural selection to sexual selection, and founded the main principles of the sciences Read More ›

  Portraits of Darwin created by a computer model of evolution acting on the painting top left. NATURE today published a piece by Kevin Padian entitled “Darwin’s enduring legacy”. The title page of the essay has this picture. I think the computer simulation of evolution has grossly degraded the CSI contained in the original picture in an irreversible manner. This is the type of thing that evolution is good at doing, and it is hardly a process I would let loose on biological systems if I were seeking improvements!

Do our beliefs about free will change our behavior? It seems they do. Here researchers primed some subjects to believe that our behavior is wholly determined by environment and genes, and that free will is a myth. (This is a theme of Dawkins who says that punishing a criminal is like kicking your car when it breaks down) Those subjects acted less ethically than those not primed. Beliefs influence behavior. What would a similar experiment show if the belief challenged was that there is Design behind the universe and life? Do people act the same after reading and believing “The God Delusion”? None of this addresses the actual truth of the belief, just whether believing it changes behavior. Fascinating!

 (Credit: Image courtesy of Rockefeller University) From ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2008) A cell’s membrane-bound nucleus uses hundreds to thousands of nuclear pores as its gatekeepers, selective membrane channels that are responsible for regulating the material that goes to and from a cell’s DNA. Rockefeller scientists have nailed down the first complete molecular picture of this huge, 450-protein pore and their findings provide a glimpse into how the nucleus itself first evolved. The group gathered and analyzed massive amounts of data to come up with a rough draft of the structure of the nuclear pore. The scientists’ results have given them a peek into the early evolution of eukaryotic cells. Compartmentalization was made possible by membranes and coating complexes, which act “like Read More ›

Two blind fish can make sighted offspring. “The offspring of crossbred blind cave fish see like their surface-dwelling cousins. The results in Current Biology 1, show that the two populations took different evolutionary paths to blindness. “We’ve basically shown that these different populations have converged upon the same outward appearance independently, and that they use different genes to do it”, says Richard Borowsky of New York University.” This is the type of thing that RM and NS can do. I would say that they lose different genes to become blind, not use different genes.

Nature wants all science organisations to preach the word of evolution by natural selection. “Evolution is a scientific fact, and every organization whose research depends on it should explain why. Three cheers for the US National Academy of Sciences for publishing an updated version of its booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism (see www.nap.edu/sec). The document succinctly summarizes what is and isn’t science, provides an overview of evidence for evolution by natural selection, and highlights how, time and again, leading religious figures have upheld evolution as consistent with their view of the world. For a more specific and also entertaining account of evolutionary knowledge, see palaeontologist Kevin Padian’s evidence given at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial (see http://tinyurl.com/2nlgar). Padian destroys the Read More ›

Plant study reveals a “deeply hidden” layer of transcriptome regulation. “Cells keep a close watch over the transcriptome – all parts of the genome that are expressed in any given cell at any given time. Before RNA transcripts can guide protein synthesis or take on regulatory functions, they have to undergo a strict mRNA surveillance system that degrades defective, obsolete, and surplus transcripts. By stopping the function of the exosome, a multi-unit complex molecular machine in charge of controlled RNA degradation, researchers found evidence for widespread exosome-mediated RNA quality control in plants and a ‘deeply hidden’ layer of the transcriptome that is tightly regulated by exosome activity. The common notion was that the exosome plays a central role in bulk Read More ›

“Creationist” Perspectives p37-45 selections from Science Evolution and Creationism NAP 2008  “A creationist is someone who rejects natural scientific explanations of the known universe in favour of special creation by a supernatural entity. Many believers as well as many mainstream religious groups accept the findings of science, including evolution. (Creationists) want to replace scientific explanations with their own religion’s supernatural accounts of physical phenomena. Views of creationists typically have been promoted by small groups of politically active religious fundamentalists who believe that only a supernatural entity could account for the physical changes in the universe and for the biological diversity of life on Earth. Old Earth creationists accept that the Earth may be very old but reject other scientific findings Read More ›

Ronald Meester    CLICK HERE FOR THE PAPER  Department of Mathematics, VU-University Amsterdam, “William Dembski (2002) claimed that the NoFreeLunch-theorems from op- timization theory render Darwinian biological evolution impossible. I argue that the NFL-theorems should be interpreted not in the sense that the models can be used to draw any conclusion about the real biological evolution (and certainly not about any design inference), but in the sense that it allows us to interpret computer simulations of  evolutionary processes. I will argue that we learn very little, if anything at all, about biological evolution from simulations. This position is in stark contrast with certain claims in the literature.” This paper is wonderful! Will it be published? It vindicates what Prof Dembski has been saying all the time Read More ›

HERE IS THE LINK  A taste “INTRODUCTION When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle’, I began patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts, which seemed to throw light on the origin of species. I have not been hasty in coming to a decision. I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed here on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. Although much remains obscure, I can entertain no doubt that the idea which I formerly entertained, that each species has been independently created, is erroneous. I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main, but not exclusive, means of modification.” We talk a lot Read More ›