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Sources note that, while Darwin stalwart Jerry Coyne has his hands full critiquing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, his colleague Eric Davidson … dismisses Coyne’s view of macroevolution as a “lethal error” and neo-Darwinism as “erroneously” assuming things, in E. Davidson, “Evolutionary bioscience as regulatory systems biology,” Developmental Biology 2011, in press: Of the first of these approaches (e.g., Hoekstra and Coyne, 2007), I shall have nothing to say, as mechanistic developmental biology has shown that its fundamental concepts are largely irrelevant to the process by which the body plan is formed in ontogeny.  In addition it gives rise to lethal errors in respect to evolutionary process.  

Intelligent design theorist Bill Dembski and and Christian Darwinist Karl Giberson at Patheos. Some of Giberson’s views are featured here and here. Details to come.

Some of the biggest names in textbooks. For example, the standards passed two years ago that permit keeping one’s brain in gear while listening to tales of evolution garnered: Biology Pre-Adoption Samples Chemistry Pre-Adoption Samples IPC Pre-Adoption Samples Physics-Pre-Adoption Samples Look ma!: No broomstick.

Following up his comments on the stunning half billion years of changelessness (stasis) demonstrated by the pterobranch, David Tyler now addresses the unchanging cricket, one of whose fossils was found from 100 million years ago: He comments on howthe fact that many life forms seem motionless in time is handled in the science literature: It is of interest to note how living fossils are described. Sometimes, they are “some of evolution’s greatest survivors”, and the splay-footed cricket is “obviously doing something right”. The Economist reporter says that the insect illustrates the “first rule of natural selection”: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” LiveScience took a different view, making the point that the animal has been “stuck in time for the Read More ›

Here’s the Web site for Jonathan Wells’ The Myth of Junk DNA . You can read an excerpt here, and articles here Here’s the Uncommon Descent interview with Wells. Here’s the vid.

  Maybe: ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2011) – A sky with two suns is a favourite image for science fiction films, but how would a binary star system affect life  evolving on an orbiting planet? Jack O’Malley-James of the University of St Andrews has studied what plants might be like on an Earth-like  planet with two or three suns and found that they may appear black or grey. [ … ] “If a planet were found in a system with two or more stars, there would potentially be multiple sources of energy available to drive photosynthesis. The temperature of a star determines its colour and, hence, the colour of light used for photosynthesis. Depending on the colours of their star-light, plants Read More ›

And the French react the way they do to British cuisine …

New Zealand journalist Suzan Mazur interviews French scientist Vincent Fleury, who investigates origin of form with experiments involving cellular flow. The topic of P.Z. Myers, dean of American Darwinism and darling of Nature, came up:

Suzan Mazur: PZ Myers, the Howard Stern of sciencebloggers, recently reviewed your paper Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, a physicist’s point of view, which was published in The European Physical Journal: Applied Physics. It appears Myers is increasingly doing a pas de deux with the physical approach to evolutionary science, trying to reposition himself now that a paradigm shift is afoot. In essence, so he can maybe say, well I knew it all the time.

[ … ]

Vincent Fleury: There are several issues. First of all, it’s the style of the man. When you read his blog, you read things like I’m a professor and if I had a student, I would have asked him to rewrite the paper in this and that way. Who is this man?

Suzan Mazur: Think Animal House and pimply adolescence. His audience, incidentally, includes some prominent evolutionary scientists — one of whom commented on your paper in the Pharyngula blog.

Vincent Fleury: Myers’ blog is constructed in a certain way. He writes reviews that are not that bad but then he opens it up to his hounds, half of whom are mad. Crazed! They finish the job. Read More ›

      Blogger Wintery Knight, a programmer by day, comments on neo-Darwinism’s view of how information gets encoded: Imagine a materialist CIO who thought that code was written by large numbers of monkeys pounding at keyboards instead of by engineers. He would be firing all the software engineers and replacing them with monkeys in order to generate better code. And he would call this method of generating new code “science”. It’s the scientific way of generating new information, he would say, and using software engineers to generate new code isn’t “science”. It’s what he learned at UC Berkeley and UW Madison! His professors of biology swear that it is true! It seems to me that there are incentives in Read More ›

“…liberals, when you mention Christ, they will bring up’Darwin.” True? False? No fair? On to something? Hat tip: Five Feet of Fury (“A blog. A lawsuit. A way of life. Posting daily since 2000. ‘Kathy Shaidle is one of the great virtuoso polemicists of our day’ – Mark Steyn.”)

On the other hand, … modern medicine owes nothing to Darwinism. For one thing, mortality from infectious diseases in the West began declining before 1859, due in large part to public health measures such as the provision of sewage disposal systems and safe water supplies.10 It also included personal hygiene, as the story of Hungarian obstetrician Ignác Semmelweis illustrates.While working in an Austrian hospital in 1847, Semmelweis noticed that the death rate of mothers from puerperal fever was much higher in wards run by medical students than in wards run by midwives. He also noticed that the medical students would go directly from the morgue tothe obstetric ward without washing their hands. By simply requiring the medical students to wash Read More ›

… we hope readers will agree with us that the relevant part of our origins is not the story of how we acquired the specific details of our body plan – ten fingers, two ears, one nose – or how we lack a marsupial pouch to carry our newborns, or why potty-training takes so long. Nothing about these details is critical to what makes us human. Our humanness is embedded more holistically in our less tangible aspects and could certainly be embodied in creatures that looked nothing like us. [ … ] Many may find this thought unsettling and strangely at odds with their understanding of creation, which celebrates that God created us “in his image.”We suggest that this is Read More ›

This paper in RNA argues the case:

Pseudogenes: Pseudo-functional or key regulators in health and disease? Read More ›

David Tyler reports that “The earliest pterobranch reveals stasis”: A modern-day pterobranch genus is Rhabdopleura. An informative description is provided here. Comparing the new fossil and Rhabdopleura leads to the exclamation: “You don’t look a day over 500 million years. You and Rhabdopleura could be sisters”. The detail has led to comments such as this from co-author Professor David Siveter: “Amazingly, it has exceptionally preserved soft tissues — including arms and tentacles used for feeding — giving unrivalled insight into the ancient biology of the group.” The significant finding is that the earliest fossil hemichordate zooid looks remarkably similar to Rhabdopleura.”Galeaplumosus abilus demonstrates stasis in pterobranch morphology, mode of coenecium construction, and probable feeding mechanism over 525 million years.” The Read More ›

From Britain’s Truth in Science, reviews of how evolution is taught in textbooks from such sources as Oxford and Cambridge. For example, about “Biological Science 1 & 2 – Cambridge University Press”, we learn, This textbook has frequent caveats and disclaimers when explaining evolution, but also has dogmatic assertions, which sometimes makes the text highly confusing.  Not everyone sympathetic to design will agree with all of their criteria, but it is a great resource for what to expect.

… Expelled The late Karl Popper, universally regarded as a referee of what constitutes a valid scientific theory, complained that Darwinian selection is not, strictly speaking, a scientific theory because it can neither make predictions nor be rigorously tested abve the micro-level, where it is a mere truism. Unlike Einstein’s theory of gravity, the idea of evolution by natural selection is in principle not falsifiable. No matter what the complexity of an organism, a Darwinist can always make up an “adaptive” story explaining its origin. And when pressed to explain a severe problem like the usefulness of incipient organs, he can take refuge in the unobservable. This was Darwin’s own tactic in later editions of the Origin , where he Read More ›