Darwinism

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 mouse to mouse. Several SNPs were in genes associated with digestion and other metabolic processes. One highlighted gene was used to produce omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. A version of this gene appears to have been selected for in humans as we moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture. The theory is that the urban vermin have “evolved” to supplement their diet on human food waste. Eureka! Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Cell signals that trigger wound healing are surprisingly complex The researchers were testing two prevailing hypotheses for the wound-response trigger. One is that damaged and dying cells release proteins into the extracellular fluid which surrounding cells sense, causing them to boost their internal calcium levels. This increased calcium concentration, in turn, triggers their transformation from a static to a mobile form, allowing them to begin sealing off the wound. The second hypothesis proposes that the trigger signal spreads from cell to cell through gap junctions, specialized intercellular connections that directly link two cells at points where they touch. These are microscopic gates that allow neighboring cells to exchange ions, molecules and electrical impulses quickly and directly. “What is Read More ›

Re “Evidence of life 3.95 billion years ago found in Canada,” Michael Marshall notes at New Scientist: His [spokesman Komiya’s] only evidence for the existence of life is the unusual ratio of carbon isotopes, and this may not be definitive. “There are many ways in which abiotic processes can produce such an imbalance, so to conclude that it is evidence for life is simply not justified,” says Sutherland. Sutherland says a set of chemical reactions known as the Fischer-Tropsch process could be responsible. This process makes organic compounds from hydrogen and carbon monoxide, and show a similar bias towards carbon-12. It is known to occur naturally, for instance in meteorites. Komiya’s team assumed these reactions were not responsible for their Read More ›

One after whom an informal logical fallacy is named, too. From Glenn Branch at National Center for Science Education: At a recent meeting of NCSE’s board of directors, Kenneth R. Miller was elected as president, replacing Francisco J. Ayala, whose term on the board expired. Miller is Professor of Biology and Royce Family Professor for Teaching Excellence at Brown University; his honors include the AAAS’s Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology as well as NCSE’s Friend of Darwin award. He testified for the plaintiffs in Kitzmiller v. Dover. His books include Finding Darwin’s God (1999) and Only a Theory (2008). More. A friend wrote to ask, But wait, isn’t Miller a creationist? [?] Oh yes, of course, the Read More ›

If we evolve at all, we are transient by nature and cannot live in a transient state forever by definition. Never mind, from ScienceDaily: As Charles Darwin explained, natural selection results in the fittest individuals for a given environment surviving to breed and pass on their genes to the next generation. The more fruitful a trait is at promoting reproductive success, the stronger the selection for that trait will be. In theory, this should give rise to individuals with traits which prevent ageing as their genes could be passed on nearly continuously. Thus, despite the obvious facts to the contrary, from the point of evolution ageing should never have happened. This evolutionary contradiction has been debated and theorised on since Read More ›

From Lorena Infante Lara at The Smithsonian: But we’re finding out that our DNA isn’t always set in stone. Now, a team of researchers from Northwestern University led by anthropology professor Thom McDade have shown that DNA can also be modified by your environment during childhood. What’s more, the authors conclude in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, those modifications can affect how or when you develop certain illnesses during adulthood. Their investigation followed more than 500 children in the Philippines and found that certain childhood situations can create modifications in genes associated with inflammation, which affects how prone we are to suffer from certain illnesses. Specifically, these factors included socioeconomic status, the prolonged absence of a Read More ›

From Jessica Hamzelou at New Scientist on a study in Iceland that shows that old fathers pass on more mutations than old mothers: “If a sequence is not present in the parents but is present in the child, then it’s new,” says Stefánsson. They discovered that 80 per cent of new mutations come from the father, and that the number of mutations increases in line with the age of the parents. … These mutations won’t all be harmful. We’re all born with at least 70 new mutations, and most of these don’t affect the way our bodies and brains work. “The vast majority of mutations don’t matter, says Leo Schalkyk at the University of Essex. “There might be the occasional Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The sauropod group of dinosaurs included the largest animals that have ever walked the Earth — up to 40 meters long and weighing as much as 90 tons. Evolutionarily speaking, they were obviously very successful, giving rise to a diverse and widely distributed array of plant-eating species. These forms were characterized by a small head, a long and highly flexible neck that allowed them — like modern giraffes — to graze the tops of the tallest trees, and a massive body that made mature specimens invulnerable to predators. The sauropods survived for well over 100 million years before succumbing to the meteorite that snuffed out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Era. However, the early representatives Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: You never know who’s going to turn up at Q&A with Jonathan Wells and John West. The Discovery Institute biologist and political scientist, respectively, answered questions from the audience following a performance of the play Disinherit the Wind in Hollywood, California – which was a pretty interesting event in itself. But then there stands up a biologist from a local university, unidentified, who proceeds to blow everyone away with an account of his experience as a younger man in a formerly Communist country. He explains that under the totalitarian culture of his youth, “Communism was literally welded to Darwinism.” We recorded his remarks and they form a new episode of ID the Read More ›

J. Scott Turner’s new book, Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It here: 1. J. Scott Turner writes, “I have come to believe that there is something presently wrong with how we scientists think about life, its existence, its origins, and its evolution. . . . What’s worse is that being forced to make the choice actually stands in the way of our having a fully coherent theory of life, in all its aspects, most notably its evolution. In other words, this bias is now hindering scientific progress” (p. xi). How does Turner’s claim here strike you? Do you resonate with it at all? Why or why not? 2. Turner describes Read More ›

Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent, is a sociologist who studies, among other things, the ID community. In a recent paper in European Management Journal, he reflects on the relationship between expert opinion in a field and the evaluations by educated outsiders. He opposes Brexit, but says, First, I consider Brexit in relation to my own long-standing anti-expertist approach to social epistemology, which in many ways makes me a kindred spirit to the Brexiteers. Next, I turn to the struggle of parliamentary elites which eventuated in the win for Brexit, focussing on the Brexiteers’ distinctive epistemic and ethical strategy with regard to public opinion. Finally, I consider the unforeseen emergence of a Rousseau-style ‘general will’ with regard to Brexit, which is where Read More ›

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Prize: A hardback copy of J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something Alive and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It Recently, a friend linked us to the fact that Amazon had deleted 900 reviews of US 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s new book, What Happened: Books get reviewed badly, and people leave reviews for books they didn’t read or products they’ve never used. These things happen. But of the book’s 1,600 or so reviews as of this morning, only 338 were from users with verified purchases of the book—that is, those who actually bought the item on Amazon.com. A person could conceivably buy a book in a store and then hate it so much she runs Read More ›

Further to word games around the term “Darwinism,” another friend writes to comment on another word game intended to subvert discussions of just how much information Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutation) can load into a life form within the probability bounds of our universe (micro- vs. macro- evolution): Another popular word game played by Darwinists is to claim that creationists invented the words microevolution and macroevolution. But the words were coined by Russian neo-darwinist Yuri Filipchenko and subsequently used by his student Theodosius Dobzhansky (also a neo-darwinist) in the 1930s: “There is no way toward an understanding of the mechanisms of macroevolutionary changes, which require time on a geological scale, other than through a full comprehension of the Read More ›

Recently, I (O’Leary for News) wrote, Darwinism is somewhat like the traditional notion of the spontaneous generation of life. It is never actually demonstrated, only propounded. In the case of Darwinian evolution by widely publicized piffling examples like Darwin’s finches, which, after all the science media hoopla, remain just finches, with varying adaptations from one cycle of seasons to the next. In response, Tim Standish, Senior Scientist at the Geoscience Research Institute, writes to correct me, pointing out that One difference between Darwinism and spontaneous generation is that spontaneous generation was a testable hypothesis. It may have taken quite a bit of testing before reaching a consensus that it doesn’t happen, but at least that was possible in principle. Darwinism Read More ›