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For any of us who have spent considerable time here at UD in, for lack of a better word, dialogue with our Darwinist friends, each has certainly had the experience of running into a brick wall. What do I mean? Well, we studiously, carefully, energetically present an argument that seems, from a logical point of view, to be unassailable, only to have the Darwinist(s) we’re arguing with (did I say “argue” instead of “dialogue”?) simply dismiss the argument in ‘hand-wave’ fashion. It’s happened to me so many times and for so long, that I simply not call the other person a “true believer.” It’s my way of saying that there isn’t any further I can go: not in the face Read More ›

An article in Ecology letters, entitled: “Eco-evolutionary Dynamics in Response to Selection on Life-history,” deals with research conducted on “soil mites that were collected from the wild and then raised in 18 glass tubes.” The researchers found significant genetically transmitted changes in laboratory populations of soil mites in just 15 generations, leading to a doubling of the age at which the mites reached adulthood and large changes in population size. At Phys.Org, they write: Although previous research has implied a link between short-term changes in animal species’ physical characteristics and evolution, the Leeds-led study is the first to prove a causal relationship between rapid genetic evolution and animal population dynamics in a controlled experimental setting. Further, lead author Tom Cameron Read More ›

Here’s what we read in this PhysOrg blurb: It may seem logical, but the surprising part of this finding is how universal it is. “It is almost expected that the frequency of usage of any component is correlated with how many other components depend on it,” said Maslov. “But we found that we can determine the number of crucial components – those without which other components couldn’t function – by a simple calculation that holds true both in biological systems and computer systems.” For both the bacteria and the computing systems, take the square root of the interdependent components and you can find the number of key components that are so important that not a single other piece can get Read More ›

Over at PhysOrg.com, there’s a study being reported highlighting a 520 million year old fossil arthropod with a highly-developed brain. So soon in evolutionary time, and an already developed brain??? (To go beside the very complex eye of the Trilobites) Here’s what one scientist said: “No one expected such an advanced brain would have evolved so early in the history of multicellular animals,” said Strausfeld, a Regents Professor in the UA department of neuroscience. Sorry, Darwinists, but IDers would expect it. And, to add insult to injury for our Darwinist brethren, here’s this confirmation of “genetic entropy” and Behe’s QRB “rule”: “The shape [of the fossilized brain] matches that of a comparable sized modern malacostracan,” the authors write in Nature. Read More ›

At PhysOrg.com, here’s something hot off the press. Here are some delicious quotes from the PO blurb: Researchers, led by Dr David Ferrier of The Scottish Oceans Institute at the University of St Andrews, found that some modern-day animals like sponges, comb jellies and placozoans (a flat, splodge of an animal with no head, tail, gut or limbs) may have actually evolved by losing some genes and perhaps became simplified from a more complex ancestor, from which the entire animal kingdom evolved. Dr Ferrier and his team studied key genes, known as Hox and ParaHox, which are renowned for building the bodies of nearly all modern-day animals. They control where ribs develop in humans or where wings develop in flies, Read More ›

At PhysOrg they have a blurb about a paper showing that an organism that is 99.99% (!!) identical has, nevertheless, found a way of dealing with the presence of Uranium in completely different ways. Absolutely fascinating! Obviously we’re dealing with two very different environments—one is in a volcanic spring, and the other is atop a pile of uranium waste apparently. One is liquid-based, the other land-based. What I suspect has happened—keeping Behe’s Edge of Evolution in mind—is that two different parts of the genome have had to make their own respective a.a. substitutions (2? 3?), since the ‘solution’ in water most likely has different constraints than the ‘solution’ for an atmosphere-based form of the same organism. Only detailed whole-genome analysis Read More ›

We all know that Darwinists have junk for brains [ 😉 ]and this proves it. It appears that “long non-coding” RNA’s (lncRNA) play a role in the brain’s pineal gland, which is involved in circadian rhythms and such. This ‘junkiest’ of junk functions in activating, blocking or altering the activity of genes or influencing the function of the proteins, or acting as scaffolds for the organization of complexes of proteins. Here’s a quote from the senior author: “These lncRNAs come from areas of the genome that we thought were quiet, . . . “But current research in the field makes it unequivocally clear that the information-carrying capacity of the genome is a lot greater than we realized previously.” Ah, yes, Read More ›

Listen to this description: They first converted the book, program and images to HTML and then translated this into a sequence of 5.27 million 0s and 1s, and these 5.27 megabits were then sequenced into sections of nucleotides 96 bits long using one DNA nucleotide for one bit. The nucleotide bases A and C encoded for 0, while G and T encoded for 1. Each block also contained a 19 bit address to encode the block’s place in the overall sequence. Multiple copies of each block were synthesized to help in error correction. From PhysOrg.com we get the abstract: Digital information is accumulating at an astounding rate, straining our ability to store and archive it. DNA is among the most Read More ›

I just finished reading a blog entry at a website about high-energy physics. I won’t give the name; but you can easily google the quote. A very serious concern that I wanted to raise is that of the long-term danger that fundamental physics faces in the combination of string theory ideology and the possible “nightmare scenario” of the LHC finding nothing that disagrees with the Standard Model. For decades now the theoretical side of the subject has been dominated by one specific set of not very compelling ideas: 10d superstrings at the Planck scale, with a SUSY GUT at slightly lower scale, and low-energy SUSY explaining the supposed “hierarchy problem” created by the vast difference between those scales and the Read More ›

An very interesting study has now made the press cycle. Susanne Dobler and Anurag Agrawal studied the genetic mechanism employed by monarch butterflies to resist cardenolides, a powerful toxin which binds the cell’s sodium pump, and which is common to milkweed and foxgloves. They found that a single ” specific mutation — called N122H — of the Na,K-ATPase gene” was enough to confer resistance. They then looked in other insect lines to see what genetic mechanism was employed by these other lines. “Already knowing how monarchs deal with the toxin, we wanted to see if it was the same molecular solution used by beetles, flies and true bugs that are also resistant to cardenolides,” said Anurag Agrawal, a Cornell professor Read More ›

The title of this PhysOrg news summary really tells us all we need to know about the neo-Darwin/ID debate. Tacitly included is the assumption that only via known physical and mathematical laws can biologists attain an understanding of this particular ‘adaptation.’ This then would require that NS, via the ‘environment and climate change’ is able to produce innovations consistent with laws that were only discovered millions of years later. How is this possible? This can only become possible if the ‘environment’ is interacting with something that is capable of encoding and producing some form of mathematical/physical knowledge or information. This in turn begs the question: where did this ‘knowledge’ or mathematico/physico ‘information’ come from? Can we, in an intellectually honest Read More ›

Here it is: a mammalian/reptile vertebrate spine a hundred million years before it was to be fully used on land. A spine with multiple segments is a feature of land-dwelling animals but the discovery of the same anatomical feature in a 345-million-year-old eel suggests that this complex anatomy arose separately from, and perhaps before, the first species to walk on land. Tetrapods, which include the first species to walk on land as well as all modern mammals, reptiles, birds and humans, possess vertebrae organized into five distinct segments. From head to tail, the spinal vertebrae can be categorized into cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral and caudal sections, each with its own characteristic anatomy. By contrast, fish vertebrae are typically categorized anatomically Read More ›

In the latest Nature, scientists are now telling us that based on the radial positioning of the shoulder and hind limb areas, Ichtyostega very likely was NOT a true tetrapod. We conclude that early tetrapods with the skeletal morphology and limb mobility of Ichthyostega were unlikely to have made some of the recently described Middle Devonian trackways Of course, Tiktaalik is considered an “intermediate” to Ichthyostega, and, as such, previously thought to be the fabled “intermediate” to tetrapods; thus adding weight to the Darwinian narrative. This latest news seems to suggest that as far as this narrative is concerned, Tiktaalik is an “intermediate” on the way to a evolutionary dead-end. There was a big fuss when Tiktaalik was discovered. All Read More ›

(UD Editors:  We didn’t know what “SUSY” was.  It means “supersymmetry.”) When this happens within the corridors of high-energy physics, then science is in a bad way. Tomasso Dorigo, in a recent blog entry, chastens those who determinedly cling to SUSY despite no show of evidence for it at the LHC. Here’s what he says (but, of course, just plug in “Darwinism” where you see “SUSY”): What SUSY enthusiasts in fact do when they resort to the “Nature chose elsewhere to hide” argument is to manifest that their prior belief in SUSY being the correct theory of nature is 100%. This, in a Bayesian formalism, can be mathematically described as a “point mass” prior probability density function (PDF): a Dirac Read More ›

In today’s PhysOrg highlights, we hear about how yeast cells are able to communicate with one another via biochemical means. Using mathematical means to separate “noise” from information pathways. These beasts have “broadband”! “The mathematics provides variance decomposition techniques for dynamic systems,” said Dr Bowsher. “We were able to make rigorous connections between the concept of intrinsic noise in systems biology, the notion of information capacity used in communications engineering, and a correlation ratio introduced in the 1950s by Alfréd Rényi. We constructed a generalised signal-to-noise measure from the variance components to quantify the efficacy of information flow through a biochemical network.” Here’s a quote: The paper, which describes the application of this approach to yeast cells, shows that the Read More ›