Category: Darwinism
Reptile had bird-like head 100 million years before birds
| October 18, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
From Jake Buehler at Gizmodo: Imagine an animal with the body of a chameleon, the feet and claws of an anteater, the humped back of a camel, and a tail that is both flattened like a beaver’s, but also like that of a scorpion. If you’re thinking this sounds like someone just threw your local […]
New Mexico: Science standards changes draw protest
| October 17, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, science education |
From Stephen Sawchuk at Education Week: A standard dealing with the process of evolution deletes that word entirely, replacing it with a standard that asks students to construct an explanation based on evidence that biological diversity is “influenced by” things like competition for limited resources, the proliferation of organisms that are better equipped to […]
Rob Sheldon challenges zoo-ocentric thinking in evolution
| October 17, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Genomics, Tree of life |
In response to Jumpin’ Genes!: A quarter of cow DNA came from reptiles, our physics color commentator writes, This whole business of parasites transmitting retrotransposons from reptiles to cows is just so zoo-centric. What about plants? What about viruses? Don’t they get to originate DNA too? When are they going to admit that this whole […]
Jumping’ Genes!: A quarter of cow DNA came from reptiles?
| October 16, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Genomics, Intelligent Design, Tree of life |
From Ed Yong at The Atlantic: This jumping gene seems to have entered the cow genome from the unlikeliest of sources: snakes and lizards. Retrotransposons typically jump around within a single genome, but sometimes they can travel further afield. Through means that scientists still don’t fully understand, they can leave the DNA of one species […]
Uncommon Descent Contest: What should we call the reviewer of a book on evolution who seems to be shouting Amen! fifty times? — judged
| October 15, 2017 | Posted by News under Books of interest, Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Uncommon Descent Contest |
Here. Years ago, we pioneered the term noviewer, to describe people who review books without reading them. Now a friend has written to ask for a contest to come up with term to describe the reviewer who is the author’s public relations specialist. For example, the book is called Darwin was right and the reviewer […]
Alpbach Symposium: Another 1960s revolt by serious thinkers against Darwinism
| October 14, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Science historian Michael Flannery writes to tell us of another early revolt by serious thinkers against Darwinism: While this may be old news, I thought I’d share my belated discovery of the Alpbach Symposium held in March of 1968 edited by Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smythies. The title, Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the […]
Shock! Darwinism does not explain why old women exist
| October 13, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
Not even the “Grandma looks after the kids” pop sci filler buys this one. From Steve Fleischfresser at Cosmos: Jacob Moorad and Craig Walling from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh in the UK drew on one of the world’s most extensive sources of genealogical information: the Utah Population Database (UPDB), housed at the […]
Study: Darwinian fitness does not overcome mutational decay during tens of thousands of bacteria generations
| October 12, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
With comments by Michael Behe. The finding is a setback for origin of life theories that depend on conservation of favorable mutations. Creation-Evolution Headlines draws our attention to a very recent paper on the Lenski long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) which shows that, contrary to hopes, Darwinian fitness did not overcome mutational decay: “Here, we document […]
Are blind cave fish breaking the laws of evolution?
| October 12, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Epigenetics, Intelligent Design |
Some seem to be in a tizzy about that, according to Michael Le Page at New Scientist: We’ve found out why a Mexican cavefish has no eyes – and the surprising answer is likely to be seized upon by those who think the standard view of evolution needs revising. … It was assumed that these […]
From Biology Direct: Darwinism, now thoroughly detached from its historical roots as a falsifiable theory, “must be abandoned”
| October 12, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Evolutionary biology, we are told, does not need a master theory. Researchers should think in terms of “contemporary mainstream thinking.” From Arlin Stoltzfus at Biology Direct: Why we don’t want another “Synthesis” Abstract:High-level debates in evolutionary biology often treat the Modern Synthesis as a framework of population genetics, or as an intellectual lineage with a […]
Genomics is upsetting the classification of bird species
| October 12, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
Further to “Nineteen new “species” of gecko? Or 19 new fundraising opportunities…?,” now and then we see people confronting the problem. From Rebecca Heismann at Living Bird, What’s in a Name? How Genome Mapping Can Make It Harder to Tell Species Apart The biological species concept remains the most widely accepted standard among ornithologists for classification […]
Nineteen new “species” of gecko? Or 19 new fundraising opportunities…?
| October 10, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Genomics, Intelligent Design, speciation |
From Michael Le Page at New Scientist: The number of known species of geckos has just jumped upwards, with 15 new species being formally described this week. … The 19 species all live in a small area of Myanmar just 90 by 50 kilometres in size. “That’s the really amazing thing about it,” says Grismer. […]
Ouch! Scott Turner on “settled science”
| October 10, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science |
From J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, Traditionally, therapeutic bloodletting was justified by the need to release from the patient an excess of one vital humor that was out of balance with another. Release the excess humor, and the balance of humors would […]
Not just the Third Way or ID: The floodgates are opening against Darwinism
| October 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Books of interest, Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Philosophy |
A lot of people are now reading Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, and one of them is retired linguist Noel Rude (Native American languages). Turner’s challenge to Darwinism is the fact that life shows internal purpose, which cannot be accounted for by the […]
Darwinian philosopher asks: Do we need purpose in biology?
| October 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy |
J. Scott Turner’s recent Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It makes the case that life is not comprehensible without the concept of purpose and that Darwinism’s failure to explain is an “impending crisis.” Michael Ruse, author of many books on the triumph of Darwinism, tells us […]
J. Scott Turner on why we do not have a coherent theory of evolution…
| October 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
… without taking purpose into account, which he addresses through Biology’s Second Law, homeostasis. From J. Scott Turner in Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It: away. And the uncomfortable question is this: what if phenomena like intentionality, purpose, and design are not illusions, but are […]
Teach the Controversy: Science Teachers Say “Thank You!”
| October 7, 2017 | Posted by johnnyb under Darwinism, News, Science |
This is old news, but I only just learned about it, and I don’t think it was talked about when it happened. In 2006, the Ouachita Parish (i.e., county) School Board decided to allow a “teach the controversy” approach to science education. After the policy was enacted, the science teachers wrote a letter thanking the […]
“Darwin’s point”: A common ancestry myth that can’t just die
| October 6, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Günter Bechly at Evolution News & Views: In a recent post for Evolution News, we discussed vestigial structures as alleged evidence for evolution (Chaffee 2017). As an illustration, the article featured an image of the auricular tubercles or “Darwin’s ear points,” a bump-like thickening on the helix of the auricle (exterior ear) of many […]
Iconic Darwinian John Maynard Smith on teaching the controversy
| October 6, 2017 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From John Maynard Smith (1920–2004): I am convinced that a proper training in science requires that undergraduates are confronted by the problems of contemporary science. Only then can they see science as an activity, and not as a body of received doctrine. Evolutionary Genetics, 1989. p. v. But now, come on. Did Smith really think […]
You have to be pretty hard up for evidence of evolution if you think this is evolution
| October 5, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Chris Baraniuk at New Scientist: New York City mice may be evolving to eat fast food like pizza They examined the mice’s RNA to see if the rural and urban populations expressed different genes. Ultimately, they homed in on 19 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs): places in the genome where a single letter varies from […]
