In a human-dominated world, things happen faster, for better or worse. Should we still call it “evolution” if we did it?
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
Junk design arguments as junk science: The squid eye and the human eye
Funny that “junk” would develop twice like that, independently and be generally so useful. But people believe what they need to.
At Mind Matters News: Dogs understand many more words than we think
Of course, the dog is responding to words as signals, not as components of sentences.
Whitefly steals genes from plants; perhaps to detoxify plant defenses
If horizontal gene transfer turns out to be widespread, it will confound carefully worked out Darwinian claims about how “evolution” did this and that via natural selection acting on random mutation. With the whitefly, things didn’t happen that way at all.
Lizards “evolve” in just a few months?
Why should we believe that this change is a form of evolution at all, as opposed to an existing capacity to adapt to unusual conditions that occur now and then? If the lizard is a common species, it probably has such capabilities.
At Medium: Six scientific paradoxes on offer that will “blow your mind”
Dinelka: Imagine you are a time traveler. You decide to meet the great greek philosopher, Pythagoras of Samos, and introduce him to the fantastic relation among the three sides of the right-angled triangle. You introduce and you leave …
At Mind Matters News: Chimps who can’t crack nuts prove they are more like humans? Huh?
The fact that no chimpanzee figured out on its own how to crack a nut using a stone does NOT make them more like humans, rather less.
It just so happens that essential genes are protected from mutations
At The Scientist: Monroe and his colleagues found evidence of specific epigenetic characteristics such as cytosine methylation that prevent mutations from occurring in those regions, not unlike protective barriers. These structures and the variability in mutation rates within a single organism’s genome, Monroe says, suggest that “evolution created mechanisms that changed how evolution works.”
Present day Martian groundwater a mirage, researchers say
U Texas Austin: The researchers think their conclusion — volcanic rock buried under ice — is a more plausible explanation for the 2018 discovery, which was already in question after scientists calculated the unlikely conditions needed to keep water in a liquid state at Mars’ cold, arid south pole.
How much difference did meat-eating make to human evolution?
At Cosmos: … when you quantitatively synthesise the data from numerous sites across eastern Africa to test this hypothesis, as we did here, that ‘meat made us human’ evolutionary narrative starts to unravel.”
At Mind Matters News: Royal Society: Don’t censor misinformation; it makes things worse
It’s a fact that much COVID news later thought to need correction was purveyed by official sources, not blogs or Facebook or Twitter accounts.
Has a 243 year-old puzzle been solved via a “quantum solution”?
At Quanta: In a paper posted online and submitted to Physical Review Letters, a group of quantum physicists in India and Poland demonstrates that it is possible to arrange 36 officers in a way that fulfills Euler’s criteria — so long as the officers can have a quantum mixture of ranks and regiments.
Long after Dave Coppedge got the boot for discussing ID at JPL, JPL is paying a massive lawsuit for discrimination against other employees
Well, people who study the movements of the planets should know this: What goes around, comes around.
Another layer of protection for DNA that just happened to evolve…
Darwinism was easier back when cells were just blobs of protoplasm.
But Wasn’t Eugenie Scott PAID to Confuse People?
If Scott had so far forgotten her disinformation mission that she actually made distinctions between ID and creationism, she would end up triggering the thing she would most want to avoid: Serious reasons why a reasonable person might doubt Darwinism. Her organization’s mission was to prevent that.