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Today? Looking back on the Darwin-in-the-schools wars from the vantage point of rethinking evolution, one calls to mind textbook author Douglas Futuyma’s dictum: Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx’s materialistic theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism Never Read More ›

Yes, that’s just what it sounds like. Every morning, the alarm clock rings, and there is a new theory of consciousness. Today’s contender is from Michael Graziano at Atlantic: Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it? The Attention Schema Theory Read More ›

From Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016): The grand river of life that has flowed on earth over the past four billion years has clearly not meandered slowly and steadily across some flat and featureless landscape, but tumbled constantly through a rugged landscape over endless cataracts and rapids. No matter how unfashionable, no matter how at odds with current thinking in evolutionary biology, there is no empirical evidence for believing that organic nature is any less discontinuous than the inorganic realm. There is not the slightest reason for believing that the major homologs were achieved gradually via functional continuums. It is only the a priori demands of Darwinian causation that have imposed continuity on a basically discontinuous Read More ›

An intriguing idea is introduced by Neel S. Patel at Inverse: The strangest thing about a black hole is that its edge, known as the event horizon, can’t be observed on account of light not being able to escape the gravitational pull. Physicists don’t really understand how an object just falls into the black hole there’s really no “in.” Everything just gets trapped in the dense gravitational flux of the surface. German physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Theoretical Physics have now created a new estimate of the amount entropy contained with a black hole — and that value suggests black holes are indeed two dimensions and not three. “We were able to use a more complete and richer Read More ›

In The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin,” Oxford’s Denis Noble explains to Suzan Mazur why our understanding of evolution needs to be replaced, not merely extended: The reasons I think we’re talking about replacement rather than extension are several. The first is that the exclusion of any form of acquired characteristics being inherited was a central feature of the modern synthesis. IN other words, to exclude any form of inheritance that was non-Mendelian, that was Lamarckian-like, was an essential part of the modern synthesis. What we are now discovering is that there are mechanisms by which some acquired characteristics can be inherited, and inherited robustly. So it;s a bit odd to describe adding something like that Read More ›

While we all sleep, our betters have plans for us. From Digital Journal: Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness. She made the assertion during a talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday. She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals. She told The Times of London: “One Read More ›

From New Scientist: No disease, no natural conception, no mind of your own. Excited? Imagine a world without sex and disease, and where all of our brains are networked. It sounds wonderful, but it will bring a new set of moral questions More. There’s also a special feature on the nature of nothingness. Party seriously? See also: New Scientist astounds: Information is physical Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: Scientists have compared genetic data with existing archaeological evidence and show that man’s best friend may have emerged independently from two separate (possibly now extinct) wolf populations that lived on opposite sides of the Eurasian continent. This means that dogs may have been domesticated not once, as widely believed, but twice. … Combined, these new findings suggest that dogs were first domesticated from geographically separated wolf populations on opposite sides of the Eurasian continent. At some point after their domestication, the eastern dogs dispersed with migrating humans into Europe where they mixed with and mostly replaced the earliest European dogs. Most dogs today are a mixture of both Eastern and Western dogs — one reason why previous genetic Read More ›

At: This is a case study in Darwinism beyond ridiculous, I noted “Monogamy” and “sibling co-operation” among humans are terms that are meaningful only among humans. They depend on the recognition of abstractions like “marriage” and “family.” Humans often do things, in recognition of relationships, that are not in their survival interests. It is not the same as in beetles and birds. commenter goodusername writes in response: I don’t think they’re claiming that the terms “monogamy” and “sibling co-operation” has any meaning to beetles. And I think people would care for their partners, and siblings would care for each other, even without “recognition of abstractions like ‘marriage’ and ‘family.’” No. First, when people make inferences about human relationships by referencing Read More ›

Because there is something fundamentally wrong with its typical view of life. Life forms are not merely matter in motion. From Jonathan Wells at Evolution News & Views on Third Way (for evolution) thinker Stephen L. Talbott: According to his profile at The Third Way of Evolution, Talbott spent many years working in the engineering organizations of computer manufacturers before he joined the Nature Institute in 1998 (the same year I joined Discovery Institute). He “attempts to show how our understanding of the organism and its evolution is transformed once we recognize and take seriously the organism as an intelligent agent meaningfully (though not necessarily consciously) pursuing its own way of life.” In his most recent article (the first in Read More ›

Science historian Darin Hayton eloquently fumes, Once again the internet is all excited by some scientists’ findings that solve a historical mystery. In this case, “UTA scientists use Planetarium’s advanced astronomical software to accurately date 2500 year-old lyric poem” (as the University of Texas at Arlington press announcement puts it). Unsurprisingly, UTA’s “press release” (by which I mean “propaganda”) misrepresents the article. Despite the link to the article in the “press release,” nobody at UTA—either in media relations or in the planetarium—apparently could be bothered to read the article. I shouldn’t, therefore, be surprised that most other people trafficking in this story have likewise ignored the article. While not surprised, I am disheartened to see that even purportedly reputable, pro-science Read More ›

Amazing! Human evolution is driven by Darwinism, right? Well, maybe not. From Colin Barras at New Scientist: Essentially, a few individuals can colonise new habitats and ecological niches thanks to their behavioural flexibility. Group culture then transmits the know-how of surviving on new resources and sets the group on a separate evolutionary track. “This is an extremely important piece of research,” says Hal Whitehead at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. “The results are fascinating. We now see how in killer whales, as in humans, culture is not only an important factor in the lives of the whales, but also [helps drive] genetic evolution.” “One of the main conclusions is that variation within killer whales, humans and likely many other species arises Read More ›

On monogamy and sibling co-operation, from ScienceDaily: In their paper, Professor David Westneat and his graduate student Jacqueline Dillard–both at the University of Kentucky–present three alternative explanations: Monogamy and sibling cooperation co-evolved, so that one trait increased the benefits of the other. Ecological pressures selected for both monogamy and sibling cooperation simultaneously, so that one trait does not depend on the other. The evolution of monogamy created new physiological and behavioral adaptations that may also be useful in sibling cooperation. “This is a case study demonstrating the importance of not boiling organisms down to simple traits,” says Dillard, who studies a socially monogamous group of Bess Beetles. She notes that the classic monogamy hypothesis considers a single link between the Read More ›

Erik Larson asks. Erik J. Larson is a Fellow of the Technology & Democracy Project at Discovery Institute, and he is Science and Technology Editor at The Best Schools.org. He works on issues in computational technology and intelligence (AI). He is presently writing a book critiquing the overselling of AI. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from The University of Texas at Austin in 2009. His dissertation was a hybrid that combined work in analytic philosophy, computer science, and linguistics and included faculty from all three departments. Larson’s Ph.D. dissertation served as the basis for the writing of a provisional patent on using hierarchical classification techniques to locate specific event mentions in free text. His work on supervised machine learning Read More ›

From Royal Society: Mid-Mesozoic kalligrammatid lacewings (Neuroptera) entered the fossil record 165 million years ago (Ma) and disappeared 45 Ma later. Extant papilionoid butterflies (Lepidoptera) probably originated 80–70 Ma, long after kalligrammatids became extinct. Although poor preservation of kalligrammatid fossils previously prevented their detailed morphological and ecological characterization, we examine new, well-preserved, kalligrammatid fossils from Middle Jurassic and Early Cretaceous sites in northeastern China to unravel a surprising array of similar morphological and ecological features in these two, unrelated clades. We used polarized light and epifluorescence photography, SEM imaging, energy dispersive spectrometry and time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry to examine kalligrammatid fossils and their environment. We mapped the evolution of specific traits onto a kalligrammatid phylogeny and discovered that these Read More ›