Darwinism

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 is shouting Amen! fifty times. Or anyway, that is what it sounds like. Sounds like fun. Judged October 15. Free shipping [of a copy of J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It,] to postal address provided by winner. Here are the entries we received: At 1 full bore reviewer At 3 cheer-reader At 6 Read More ›

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 Life Sciences, is a fascinating collection from a wide range of scholars, even including the economist Frederich Hayek. Among the more interesting offerings is Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “Chance or Law.” Apparently Bertalanffy, generally regarded as the father of General Systems Theory (GST), was skeptical of neo-Darwinism (esp. natural selection) as an explanation for all of biology. He said, “I think the fact that a theory, Read More ›

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 University of Utah, and drawn from the family records of Mormon settlers to the state. The database contains information on more than eight million people. Moorad and Walling, using a subset of the UPDB for the first empirical test of the models, sought to discover if there is positive genetic correlation between “late-age lifespan and fitness” which is assumed in all three models. Such evidence Read More ›

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 the rapid genome decay of hypermutable bacteria even during tens of thousands of generations of sustained adaptation to a laboratory environment.” Abstract: Understanding the extreme variation among bacterial genomes remains an unsolved challenge in evolutionary biology, despite long-standing debate about the relative importance of natural selection, mutation, and random drift. A potentially important confounding factor is the variation in mutation rates between lineages and over Read More ›

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 fish became blind because mutations disabled key genes involved in eye development. This has been shown to be the case for some other underground species that have lost their eyes. But Aniket Gore of the US’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and colleagues haven’t found any disabling changes in the DNA sequences of eye development genes in the cavefish. Instead, the genes Read More ›

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 changing distribution of beliefs. Unfortunately, these flexible notions, used to negotiate decades of innovations, are now thoroughly detached from their historical roots in the original Modern Synthesis (OMS), a falsifiable scientific theory. The OMS held that evolution can be adequately understood as a process of smooth adaptive change by shifting the frequencies of small-effect alleles at many loci simultaneously, without the direct involvement of new Read More ›

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 decisions at the species level. But in the last five years, yet another revolution has rocked the world of avian classification. Gone are the days when ornithologists would labor for months to sequence just a few individual genes on their way to building an evolutionary tree. Today’s “high-throughput” or “next-generation” genome sequencing means a student in an evolutionary biology laboratory today can assemble an entire Read More ›

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. “They all come from such a small area.” It’s common to find lots of closely-related species of invertebrates like snails or insects in such a small area, but it is unprecedented for a backboned animal, say Grismer. “For lizards, it is remarkable.”More. A friend asks why no criteria are offered in the article as to how the scientists determined that the groups of lizards are Read More ›

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 be restored, as would be the patient to a state of health. The practice, indeed so much of medical practice in those times, probably killed more patients than it helped, but never mind, it was justified by sound and venerable teaching—the science was settled, we might say today. (K751-755) – Citing: R. G. DePalma, V. W. Hayes, and L. R. Zacharski, “Bloodletting: Past and Present,” Read More ›

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 mere declaration that it evolved in order to do so. Rude reflects, Someone ought to write a book titled, let me suggest, “Materialism and its Dissidents.”  Having recently read J. Scott Turner’s “Purpose and Desire,” I’m reminded of what a fellow linguist used to call “Aristotle’s anima.”  An ardent Darwinist, he nevertheless would tell me that Darwinism couldn’t work without the desire to live–something no completely Read More ›

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 at Big Questions Online: The answer is natural selection. So here we have the reason why final-cause talk is permissible and necessary. Thanks to the processes of evolution, organisms appear design-like, even though they are ultimately the result of random variations plus natural selection. In order to make sense of this fact, we often think and talk in terms of ends or purposes, although these Read More ›

… 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 quite real—are in fact the central attributes of life? How can we have a coherent theory of life that tries to shunt these phenomena to the side? And if we don’t have a coherent theory of life, how can we have a coherent theory of evolution? This is the hard nut that has to be cracked, and this leads me to the other theme I Read More ›

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 school board for their decision. Here’s what they said:
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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 people that is often claimed to be an atavistic vestige of the pointy ear tip found in monkeys. Evolutionists say the feature proves a shared ancestry of humans with lower primates. The bump was originally discovered by the celebrated British sculptor Thomas Woolner, who informed Charles Darwin about it. In The Descent of Man, Darwin (1871:15-17) cited this structure as probable evidence for common ancestry Read More ›

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 that or isn’t it more like he thought his own cherished views would never be challenged. 1989 was well before ID theorists, for example, started to apply information theory reasoning to Darwinian claims and long before Third Way challenges were anything more than a tolerated eccentricity. Darwinians have been on a tear against academic freedom ever since. Note: Among his major books were The Theory Read More ›