Darwinism

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views: Stump your Darwinist friends by asking them to explain, in evolutionarily adaptive terms, biological features like the precise pattern of the maple leaf or of an angiosperm flower. “That’s a fantastically serious challenge to Darwinism,” says Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton in this brief but delightful video conversation — a “nightmarish scenario.” Why? Because Darwinism by definition must justify such features, including the taxa-defining novelties, as having been seized upon by natural selection because they were adaptive. I mean, that pattern specifically and not some other. It’s the specificity that’s the problem. More. Worse, Denton is too old to be denied a degree or fired. Note: Some friends will find the challenge Read More ›

At Quillette, Brian Boutwell defends the concept of “race”: Evolution, as it applies to the social sciences, would have also made the list some decades back. But pioneers like E.O. Wilson, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, David Buss, Margot Wilson, and Martin Daly (as well as a number of others) have absorbed many punches and blows for us younger generation of scholars. Their efforts produced a sizeable evidentiary base regarding the role that evolutionary processes have played (and continue to play) in sculpting human psychology. Debates still rage, and controversies still exist, but nowadays arguing that natural selection played some role in molding human psychology will no longer jeopardize your career. Huh? Far from thinking evolutionary psychology would jeopardize a career, Read More ›

It’s in the air. Talk of replacing Darwinism. See, for example: Don’t let zoologists hog the stage at the upcoming Royal Society rethink evolution meet. Long overdue for a serious discussion. That said, some cures really are worse than the disease. From Gatestone Institute, embedded in an article on the current bout of suppression of media in prospective EU member Turkey, Turkish law professor Ayse Isil Karakas, both a judge and elected Deputy Head of the ECHR, said that among all member states, Turkey has ranked number one in the field of violations of free speech. “619 lawsuits of freedom of expression were brought at the ECHR between 1959 and 2015,” she said. ” 258 of them — almost half Read More ›

From Rachel Feltman at the Washington Post: Neil deGrasse Tyson, science aficionado. With over 5 million Twitter followers and two television programs, NDT probably has a wider audience than any science communicator in the world. He’s a brilliant astrophysicist and a fantastic spokesperson for all things cerebral. Zounds. The planet just might make it through the catastrophe anyhow. It started with this tweet: From Feltman again: Miriam Kramer from Mashable chimed in with ducks, because duck sex is literally the most terrifying thing on the planet and pretty much the only argument it takes to disprove intelligent design. More. That would only be an argument against intelligent design if the system didn’t work well, but it does. Not that Kramer Read More ›

… at the Royal Society’s November meet on evolution. From Suzan Mazur interviews eminent ethologist Patrick Bateson at Huffington Post: Sir Patrick Bateson: Zoologists Should Not ‘Hog’ Upcoming Royal Society Evolution Meeting Suzan Mazur: When will the speakers for the November Royal Society event be announced? Patrick Bateson: Very shortly, I think. Suzan Mazur: Can you say what the subject of your talk will be? Patrick Bateson: I want to talk about a subject that has interested me for many years, namely how the organism plays an active role in the evolution of its descendants through its adaptability. When the challenge is one never previously experienced by the organism’s ancestors, the mechanisms generating the plasticity may be inherited but the Read More ›

Slowly making the public aware that a lot of those soapboxes are rotting. A bit at a time. From ScienceDaily, US National Institutes of Health wants us all to know this: Four ways inheritance is more complex than Mendel knew Today, we know that inheritance is far more complex than what Mendel saw in his pea plants. Our scientists who track progress in genetics research funded by NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences share some of the things researchers have learned about how traits are passed from one generation to the next. More. Listed are: 1. Some of our genes come only from Mom. 2. The environment may have the potential to trigger molecular changes that pass from generation to Read More ›

From Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, written by a couple of paleo types: Stop writing “scientists believe” This one is for journalists and other popularizers of science. I see a lot of people writing that “scientists believe” this or that, when talking about hadrons or hadrosaurs or other phenomena grounded in evidence. Pet peeve: believing is what people do in the absence of evidence, or despite evidence. Scientists often have to infer, estimate, and even speculate, but all of those activities are grounded in evidence and reason, not belief.1 Utter nonsense, and the author himself, Mike Taylor, adds in a footnote, in mouseprint type: I realize that I am grossly oversimplifying – evidence, reason, and belief can interact in Read More ›

From Templeton: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth who has spent decades bringing spiritual insight to the public conversation through mass media, popular lectures and more than two dozen books, has been awarded the 2016 Templeton Prize. … He also boldly defends the compatibility of religion and science, a response to those who consider them necessarily separate and distinct. “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean,” he wrote in his book, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning.More. Naturally, we wondered, so from our files, we found: Britain’s chief rabbi on the Brit riots: Restore civil Read More ›

From science writer Neel S. Patel at Inverse: “Survival of the fittest” is bigger than just evolutionary biology. You bet. The selfish gene even gives us medical advice. The word Darwinism has become a synecdoche for all the mechanisms implied by the Malthusian concept of “survival of the fittest” — the notion that the strongest members of a system survive to reproduce and pass their genetics on to progeny. But natural selection needn’t be limited to Darwin’s finches. When applying this idea to physics we get quantum Darwinism, the theory that the governing laws of biology apply to particles. It used to be the other way around (physics and chemistry govern biology), but on the eve of its extinction, there Read More ›

If you have a cold. From ScienceDaily: Research suggests that our selfish genes are behind the aches, fever The symptoms that accompany illness appear to negatively affect one’s chance of survival and reproduction. So why would this phenomenon persist? Symptoms, say the scientists, are not an adaptation that works on the level of the individual. Rather, they suggest, evolution is functioning on the level of the “selfish gene.” Even though the individual organism may not survive the illness, isolating itself from its social environment will reduce the overall rate of infection in the group. “From the point of view of the individual, this behavior may seem overly altruistic,” says Dr. Keren Shakhar, “but from the perspective of the gene, its Read More ›

From Sean Pitman (2016): Late last year there was an interesting debate on Premier Christian Radio, “Unbelievable” with Justin Brierley between Stephen Meyer and Charles Marshall over Meyer’s latest book,Darwin’s Doubt. Marshall, a UC Berkeley paleontologist, had published a review of the book in the journal Science a few months earlier and this was Meyer’s chance to respond to Marshall’s less than positive critique. For those interested, the radio debate is available by clicking on the following: (Link) What follows here is my own summery, followed by my own personal take, on the debate: More. See also: Listener’s guide and video series on the book Follow UD News at Twitter!

An earlier story here today mentioned Dan Graur: Plagiarism in science texts, not just journals? (Maybe, with enough publicity, a public explanation will be forthcoming…) From Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True blog, we learn the twelve truths of Darwinian evolutionary biology, and some other stuff as well: Dan Graur, who is Professor of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston, describes himself on Tw*tter as “A Very Angry Evolutionary Biologist, a Very Angry Liberal, and an Even Angrier Art Lover”. His Tumblr says he ‘has a very low threshold for hooey, hype, hypocrisy, postmodernism, bad statistics, ignorance of population genetics and evolutionary biology masquerading as -omics, and hatred of any kind.’ Anyway, yesterday he tw**eted a link to Read More ›

Someone must really do a word study sometime on the many tautologies associated with Darwinism. One that appears in quite a few science media releases is “adaptive.” Science philosopher Karl Popper noted, To say that a species now living “is adapted to its environment is almost tautological,” Popper wrote. “Adaptation or fitness is defined by modern evolutionists as survival value, and can be measured by actual success in survival. There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this.” [Popper, *Unended Quest* 1974, p. 168] A friend notes that R.C. Lewontin said something similar. He doubted that “adaptive” could be a useful term said so repeatedly in the late 1970s, for example, In order to make the Read More ›

From Paul Furber at Brainstorm: Wikipedia lost at least 300 million views in 2015, dropping it from the fifth most viewed website on the planet down to the tenth. This is a good thing for a number of reasons. It started as a good idea in 2001 — an encyclopaedia that anyone could edit. Unfortunately, it’s now a quagmire of bureaucracy, infighting, corruption and agenda-pushing. Try to edit any article that an established editor regards as their pet project and you’ll find your edits reverted in double quick time, regardless of whether you have reliable sources for your edit. Complain about this and you’ll get banned. You personally may be a reliable source, but that won’t matter: Wikipedia doesn’t even Read More ›

It’s no surprise that Coyne’s book is getting hostile reviews outside the new atheist community.  Closing off our religion coverage for the week, we note that prominent Darwinian evolutionist Jerry Coyne’s Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible is, unsurprisingly, receiving hostile reviews outside the new atheist community. But what’s curious is their focus. From Austin L. Hughes at New Atlantis: Coyne’s basic strategy is to contrast two monolithic entities that he calls “religion” and “science.” But he constructs his two monoliths in diametrically opposite ways. The “religion” monolith consists of everything that has ever been said by any person belonging to any religion whatever, lumping together official dogma, theological speculation, and popular belief… Coyne’s procedure for describing Read More ›