Darwinism

Further to Build your own worm (and bring your own dirt too), from Ann Gauger at Evolution News & Views: offers, The white space in evolutionary thinking. When certain biologists discuss the early stages of life there is a tendency to think too vaguely. They see a biological wonder before them and they tell a story about how it might have come to be. They may even draw a picture to explain what they mean. Indeed, the story seems plausible enough, until you zoom in to look at the details. I don’t mean to demean the intelligence of these biologists. It’s just that it appears they haven’t considered things as completely as they should. Like a cartoon drawing, the basic Read More ›

We didn’t think so, but just for the record: From the Edge: One of the things that I’ve always done is not make a clear separation between books that are aimed at popularizing, books that are aimed at explaining things to other people, and books that explain things to myself, or explain things to my scientific colleagues. I think the separation between doing science and popularizing science has been overdone. And I have found that the exercise of explaining to other people, which I suppose I’ve been fairly successful at, is greatly helped by the fact that I first have to explain it to myself. And explaining it to myself … the biomorph program, which I originally wrote to explain Read More ›

Devolution? From ScienceDaily: A new study offers not only a sweeping analysis of how pollination has evolved among conifers but also an illustration of how evolution — far from being a straight-ahead march of progress — sometimes allows for longstanding and advantageous functions to become irrevocably lost. Moreover, the authors show that the ongoing breakdown of the successful but ultimately fragile pollination mechanism may have led to a new diversity of traits and functions. That’s well, but it can also lead to extinction. In evolution, the research shows, selection pressure or pure chance can break a functional relationship among such loosely related traits such as the one Leslie studied, even if that relationship has been working well. In fact, once Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: While other squid reproduce all at once late in their lives, vampire squid appear to alternate between reproductive and resting phases. It’s a pattern of multiple spawning more common among fish. The researchers have now characterized the reproductive status of more than 40 vampire squid females. They report that one female in the sample, despite being in a reproductive resting phase, had released at least 3,800 eggs yet still retained 6,500 viable oocytes for future spawning. Assuming an average batch size of 100 eggs, the researchers suggest that this one female had already spawned about 38 times, with eggs in reserve for another 65 or so spawning episodes. Dawinism did not predict this, but as readers will see Read More ›

From: Imagine a world of religions that naturalism might indeed be able to explain: Regarding the phenomenon of religion, here are two curious things: When naturalists (materialists) study religion, they get so many basic facts wrong, one wonders why they bother, except to bolster their own view. Second, they mainly study “revealed” religion, where the world is interpreted through a divine message (or some would say, an acute insight), revealing a higher order of reality. The recognized principal purpose of religion in that case is understanding of reality, not control over it. But it was not always so. Closing this series on the human mind, I would like to take you on a journey back to a time much closer Read More ›

Trivers. Vignette of Stephen Jay Gould here (a reluctant Darwinian, so Trivers doesn’t like him): As I left his office, I said to myself, this fool thinks he is bigger than natural selection. Perhaps I should have said, bigger than Darwin, but I felt it as bigger than natural selection itself—surely Stephen was going for the gold!! Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen personally thought he was something of an intellectual fraud precisely because he had a talent for coining terms that promised more than they could deliver, while claiming exactly the opposite. One example was the notion of “punctuated equilibria”—which simply asserted that rates of (morphological) evolution were not constant, but varied over time, often with periods Read More ›

Anyone remember Darwin’s finches? The clinch bird for Darwinian evolution? Except that “It’s been observed that the species of Darwin’s finches sometimes hybridise – Peter and Rosemary Grant have seen that during their fieldwork,” Prof Andersson told the BBC. “But it’s difficult to say what the long-term evolutionary significance of that is. What does it contribute?” What it contributes is that one would be hard pressed to show that there is any evolution going on, in the face of this much hybridization. Meanwhile, more surprises: Birds on the Galápagos Islands have developed new eating habits “We met some scepticism when we submitted the manuscript for our article. People simply didn’t believe it was possible. But it is — the birds Read More ›

In response to Science writer boilerplate Jonathan Wells writes to say, Based on my reading of thousands of Peer-Reviewed Articles in the professional literature, I’ve distilled a template for writing scientific articles that deal with evolution: 1. Darwinian evolution is a fact. 2. We used [technique(s)] to study [feature(s)] in [name of species], and we unexpectedly found [results inconsistent with Darwinian evolution]. 3. We propose [clever speculations], which might explain why the results appear to conflict with evolutionary theory. 4. We conclude that Darwinian evolution is a fact. Yes, it’s a fact, all right. About the mindset of the people who do that. Wells is the author of The Myth of Junk DNA, which is not short of examples on Read More ›

So claims writer Mark Strauss at Slate: Ridiculing astrobiologists is a favorite sport at the Discovery Institute, which complains on its news site that “hardly a month goes by lately when the science media fail to breathlessly report the discovery of a new planet, in some star’s ‘habitable zone,’ that might hypothetically be capable of supporting life.” The institute attributes the coverage in part to hype purposefully generated by “organized science” to shake down the government for grant money. But the creationists also see a more sinister agenda than naked greed. They place astrobiologists among the ranks of the “Darwin Brigades” who have always been “eager to undermine human exceptionalism,” since “the alleged ordinariness of the human race was vital Read More ›

Sir James Gray stated in a 1954 issue of *Nature *(v. 173; 227) that No amount of argument, or clever epigram, can disguise the inherent improbability of orthodox [Darwinian] theory; but most biologists feel it is better to think in terms of improbable events than not to think at all; there will always be a few who feel in their bones a sneaking sympathy with Samuel Butler’s skepticism. And why are those the only options? Essentially, Darwinian evolution is a cultural mood. Evidence isn’t really needed because it functions as a kind of religion for everyone from the biologists to the airheads on TV. From Dawkins: “My argument will be that Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining Read More ›

As an adaptation, if it is even that, here: But, some theorists argue, religion is actually a bad adaptation. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne attributes Americans’ doubt about Darwinian evolution theories to religious faith, which, he claims, correlates highly with social dysfunction. He goes on to claim that the United States is “one of the most socially dysfunctional First World countries.” That’s a tough contest to judge, considering the cutbacks riots and secularist-Islamist clashes that are increasingly common in secular post-modern Europe. And it is, in any event, difficult to discuss social dysfunction if societies do not even share basic values. These theories about religion (useful, useless, harmful) have two things in common: First, they typically spill forth with no real Read More ›

In the context, “evolution” typically means Darwinism, survival of the fittest. Anyway here: President David Alexander of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) sent a letter to the campus over the weekend, defending the decision to lay off tenured theology professor Thomas Jay Oord. Alexander said budget cuts necessitated the move. A professor in the school’s counseling department was also affected by the layoffs. Oord was notified of his firing by email while on break, which Alexander said lacked compassion. “I want to publicly apologize to Dr. Tom Oord for the way in which he learned of the change,” said Alexander in his email. “Discussions occurred via mail and email due to spring break and the March 31st notification deadline. That was Read More ›

Here: Evolutionary Science ‘Stuck’ on Wrong Track, Situation ‘Out of Control’ … František Baluška, a native of Slovakia, is founder and editor-in-chief of two scientific journals, Plant Signaling & Behavior and Communicative & Integrative Biology (Landes Bioscience, publisher) where more of his provocative thinking can be found. Freedom in science is crucial, he says, and we need “open-minded” journals. A decade ago Baluška began organizing international conferences on plant neurobiology as well. His thinking about “plant intelligence” has been partly inspired by Lynn Margulis, specifically her paper “The Conscious Cell.” The theme of plant intelligence was more recently explored in a magazine article by Michael Pollan in which Baluška is cited as well as Darwin’s 1880 observation that the plant Read More ›

And Mae-Wan Ho: Ho’s lucubrations on evolutionary biology, as revealed in an interview she gave to Suzan Mazur at PuffHo, are just as bad. The piece, “Mae-Wan Ho: No boundary really between epigenetic and genetic”, is replete with misstatements, errors, and distortions on the part of both interviewer and subject. Mazur, as you may recall, is a gonzo journalist driven by one Big Obsession: modern evolutionary biology is wrong and she’s going to show how rotten it really is. Mazur tried to win renown by reporting on the infamous “Altenburg 16,” a group of biologists who convened a meeting in Austria, originally intending to debunk the Modern Synthesis, but later retracted their claws and claimed only to “extend” the synthesis. Read More ›

A sendup of science journals How’s That Again? From the Los Angeles Times: In the muddy sediments beneath the deep sea, scientists have found ancient communities of bacteria that have remained virtually unchanged for 2.3 billion years. Researchers say these microscopic organisms are an example of “extreme evolutionary stasis” and represent the greatest lack of evolution ever seen. They may also, paradoxically, prove that Darwin’s theory of evolution is true. ? JPD At least some authors are suspected of ID links No problem. The Dumbdown police will be there shortly. Wherever is “there” these days… Follow UD News at Twitter!