Category: Darwinism
PBS’s American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade
| November 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Eugenics etc, Intelligent Design |
A friend writes to recommend it: American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen and I have watched many hundreds of them. As the movie documents, it started with Darwin, then moved on to Galton who spent his life developing the science of eugenics, then the American eugenics […]
Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne denounces Michael Behe’s forthcoming book unread
| November 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Books of interest, Cell biology, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
Of course, just now, one suspects that it is mainly the editors in Frisco who have pored over it. But now, Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne tells us,l Michael Behe, author of the intelligent-design (ID) creationist books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution, has a new book coming out next […]
A peek at Mike Behe’s new book Darwin Devolves
| November 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Books of interest, Darwinism, Evolution |
Here: While Stephen Colbert has called Michael J. Behe the “Father of Intelligent Design,” Behe’s arguments have been called, “close to heretical” by the New York Times Book Review, and Richard Dawkins has publicly taken him to task for his “maverick” views. Wherever he goes, Behe makes waves, but has remained singularly focused on doing […]
Moths use “acoustic camouflage” to evade bats
| November 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Their fuzz works like an acoustic panel to cut down the noise volume from their movements. From ScienceDaily: While some moths have evolved ears that detect the ultrasonic calls of bats, many types of moths remain deaf. In those moths, Neil has found that the insects developed types of “stealth coating” that serve as acoustic […]
Common coral species features unique immune strategy
| November 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Roughly 30 percent of the cauliflower coral’s (Pocillopora damicornis) genome was unique compared to several other reef-building corals. In this 30%, many of these genes were related to immune function. This diversity of genes related to immune function, the researchers say, may be important for the long-term survival of coral reefs as climate […]
Who knew that Bret Weinstein would be a bigger Darwinist than Richard Dawkins?
| November 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Religion |
Not Paul Nelson, if you go by his account of the discussion between Weinstein, the biology prof driven by “woke” students from Evergreen State University and iconic Darwinist Richard Dawkins: I witnessed something last week that I never thought I’d see. Richard Dawkins, pressed to affirm the explanatory power of Darwinian reasoning for human life, […]
Terror of Existence: Cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer loved, then loathed, Darwinism
| November 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
Last Sunday we noted a new book by psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, and writer Ken Francis, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd. They tackle the same topics in twin essays, as a Christian and an agnostic. Francis kindly sends us an excerpt from one of his essays featuring Jeffrey Dahmer (1960-1994), […]
Paleontologist Gunter Bechly live tonight on what the fossil record really tells us about common ancestry
| November 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution |
Jonathan McLatchie announces a live interactive webinar today, Saturday, at 8pm British time, featuring pro-ID paleontologist Dr. Gunter Bechly, who will be exploring the implications of the fossil record for common ancestry. (Time zones.) Gunter Bechly is a distinguished paleontologist, specializing in fossil dragonflies, exquisitely preserved in amber for tens of millions of years. After […]
The failed search for an evolutionary morality
| October 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Ethics, Evolution, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life, reviews James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s new book, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality There are many scientific problems with this project. Hunter and Nedelisky, however, only rarely point out the empirical difficulties. (They do […]
Might snakes provide a way of testing Dawkins’s selfish gene hypothesis?
| October 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
When researchers went to get a look at a cape cobra snake fight, it turned out to be one cobra swallowing another. They named the newly well-fed study animal NN011, otherwise “Hannibal.” Apparently, “Diner, meet Dinner!” is not an uncommon relationship among cape cobras so a study of the details ensued: Snake-eating, they found, was […]
Caterpillar “turns into” a snake
| October 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Design inference |
Larva of a sphinx hawk moth (Hemeroplanes triptolemus). Hat tip: Digg Also: Has anyone done probability calculations (not rhetoric or theorizing) for purely random evolution for this, via natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism)? Follow UD News at Twitter! See also: Orchids with monkey faces and A moth’s wings feature two flies picking at […]
J.P. Moreland on Darwinism and “reverse intelligent design”
| October 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Design inference, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion |
Our philosopher-photographer friend Laszlo Bencze sends us some thoughts on J. P. Moreland’s recent book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology: – (O’Leary for News) I just finished my reading of this book and I think it’s an excellent analysis of the issues which undergird evolution, namely that science and only […]
Why do Catholic intellectuals claim Thomas Aquinas would cozy up to Darwinism?
| October 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, theistic evolution |
Especially when it comes to a Darwinian approach to human beings? Man, the universal, does not really exist. According to the late Stanley Jaki, Chesterton* detested Darwinism because “it abolishes forms and all that goes with them, including that deepest kind of ontological form which is the immortal human soul.” And if one does not […]
Stephen Meyer’s approach in Darwin’s Doubt vindicated in recent fruit fly study
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Darwinism, Design inference, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
Steve Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt, is thought to be vindicated by a paper published in 2017, “Experimental test and refutation of a classic case of molecular adaptation in Drosophila melanogaster” (Nature Ecology and Evolution). The paper “begins with a perceptive statement about what ought to be required when establishing some genetic evolutionary pathway: Identifying […]
New findings challenge the “neutral” theory of evolution for 95% of human genome
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
The neutral theory of evolution holds that “most variation at the molecular level does not affect fitness and, therefore, the evolutionary fate of genetic variation is best explained by stochastic [random] processes.” From ScienceDaily: However, what scientist Fanny Pouyet and colleagues from the Group of Laurent Excoffier at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and […]
Dollo’s Evolution Law gets hit again: Stripes come and go
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: More than 1200 types of colourful cichlid can be found in the large African lakes Malawi, Victoria and Tanganjika. Not only are they very diverse in colours, they also have numerous colour patterns such as horizontal or vertical stripes. “But that’s not all” explains Axel Meyer, “cichlids are prime examples of evolution. They […]
Long held evolution theory countered: Birth canals differ worldwide
| October 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
Evolution theory held that women’s pelvises should have been shaped by the obstetrical dilemma (birthing babies with big heads safely) and thus should tend to be uniform. But The shape of a mother’s birth canal is a tug-of-war between two opposing evolutionary forces: It needs to be wide enough to allow our big-brained babies to […]
Epigenetics: Roundworm study focuses on health effects transmitted through sperm
| October 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Epigenetics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: For many years, it was thought that sperm do not retain any histone packaging and therefore could not transmit histone-based epigenetic information to offspring. Recent studies, however, have shown that about 10 percent of histone packaging is retained in both human and mouse sperm. “Furthermore, where the chromosomes retain histone packaging of DNA […]
Researchers: Nicotine effects persist through several generations of mice, via sperm
| October 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Epigenetics, Intelligent Design |
In a study of mice forced to inhale large doses of nicotine carried large epigenetics signatures that affected their offspring: The result might explain why the experiments also found the male mice’s offspring—and grandoffspring—exhibited abnormal behavior and learning impairments. “Until now, much attention had been focused on the effects of maternal nicotine exposure on their […]
Addressing the speciation mess: View species as models?
| October 22, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, speciation |
The abstract of a new paper, “Species as Models” by Jun Otsuka of Kyoto University (PhilSci Archive, 2018): This paper argues that biological species should be construed as abstract models, rather than biological or even tangible entities. Various (phenetic, cladistic, biological etc.) species concepts are defined as set-theoretic models of formal theories, and their logical […]
