Darwinism

From Brendon Brewer at Quillette: I first encountered the second law as a teenager, while reading an issue of the fundamentalist Christian magazine Creation, given to me by my grandmother. Since the article’s author wanted to argue against biological evolution, it claimed that the second law of thermodynamics implies evolution is impossible. Its definition of the second law was that disorder always increases with time. At first glance, this does seem incompatible with evolution by natural selection, which can lead to more complex, “better designed” organisms over time.3 At the time, I thought it was unlikely that mainstream biology would flagrantly contradict mainstream physics, so I remained sceptical of this argument, even though I couldn’t understand the counterarguments I found Read More ›

Here. If you watch the Discovery Institute, you’ll discover they’re constantly playing games, trying to find that winning PR technique that will persuade the hapless ignorati. Some of them are effective, even if dishonest: “irreducible complexity” injected all kinds of misleading chaos into the brains of their followers, and “teach the controversy” was a potent slogan. They’ve been flailing about in recent years, trying to emphasize their pretense of scholarliness with tripe like West’s efforts to use pseudohistory to blame Darwin for Hitler, or Meyer’s farcical, long-winded distortions of modern biology in Signature in the Cell. Those haven’t worked so well. Etc. A friend thinks Myers watches too many political debates on TV. Baroque accompanies Michael Denton’s new book, Evolution: Read More ›

A reader writes to ask why Dr. Joseph Kuhn didn’t get the same treatment: at Baylor University Medical Center for a 2012 article, “Dissecting Darwinism,” as Bill Dembski got at Baylor U in 2000?: William Dembski was already a research fellow for the Seattle-based Discovery Institute when he was approached by Baylor University President Robert Sloan in 1996. Sloan had read some of Dembski’s work and thought that Dembski could help with his project of promoting the integration of faith and learning on campus. … But the honeymoon ended when the Polanyi Center established its website in January 2000. When “other groups with evolution-bashing agendas began linking up their Websites … An e-mail frenzy at Baylor spread to other schools. Read More ›

Laszlo Bencze Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze wrote late last week to say, Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about a Nashville record producer titled “Dave Cobb Puts the Live in the Studio” (February 10, 2016, (paywall)). Midway through the article he describes a technique he used with a country band “to break the ice and steer them toward unexpected sounds”: Mr. Cobb sent them on a hunt through the dollar bins of vinyl record stores. “He was like, ‘Pick out three or four records you definitely never heard or artists you never heard of,’” recalls Ms. Price. “We’d come in every day and we’d just drop the needle and see if any track or any groove inspired us. Read More ›

From the Darwin Correspondence Project, a new and improved capability: Read and search the full texts of more than 8,500 of Charles Darwin’s letters, and information on 6,500 more. Discover complete transcripts of all known letters Darwin wrote and received up to the year 1871. More. The letters to and from Darwin for the year 1871 are online for the first time. See also, in honor of Evolution Sunday, when churches going extinct celebrate their status, Why do “Darwinists for God” need to pretend that Darwin was not an atheist? “… one of the strangest characteristics of the public Darwin cult is the felt need to pretend that Darwin was some kind of believer in God. Here’s just such an Read More ›

“The Biology of the Baroque” is a documentary that explores the amazing patterns, order, and beauty in biology that go beyond what can be explained by Darwinian evolution. It features geneticist Michael Denton and is inspired by Denton’s new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016).   Note: Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016): Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,153 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #10 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Evolution #11 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Biology #83 in Books > Science & Math > Evolution In honour of Darwin Day, we note a review by “Charley Read More ›

Remember this? Bees and ants provide clue to human suicides? Those eusocial behaviors, understood as part of what is called inclusive fitness in evolutionary biology, are adaptive. “The idea is if you give up yourself, which would include your genes, it can be evolutionarily speaking ‘worth it’ if you spare or save multiple copies of your genes in your relatives,” Joiner said. “It’s a net benefit on the gene level.” However, when the researchers look at human suicide in a modern context, they surmise that suicide among humans represents a derangement of the self-sacrificial aspect of eusociality. More. Notice the huge assumption everyone is asked to accept up front, that humans and social insects think similarly. A thesis that bizarre Read More ›

Apparently, the folks at Darwin Day are getting U.S. politicians to declare Darwin Day in their jurisdictions: “Humanists Around the World Celebrate Darwin Day to Promote Science and Evolution … Since 2011, the American Humanist Association has worked closely with members of Congress to introduce the Darwin Day resolution. Introduced on December 3, 2015, by Rep. Jim Himes (CT-04) with 20 co-sponsors and counting, U.S. House Resolution 548 would officially recognize February 12, 2016, as a national celebration of Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution and the advances of scientists around the globe. The Secular Coalition for America, of which the AHA is a member organization, worked with Senator Richard Blumenthal (CT) in the U.S. Senate to introduce a companion Read More ›

From the Guardian: Richard Dawkins stroke forces delay of Australia and New Zealand tour … Management for the 74-year-old author of The God Delusion said he had suffered a “minor stroke” in the UK last Saturday but had already returned home from hospital. The health scare has caused him to postpone his tour, his management said in a message passed on to ticket holders on Friday. … The events were to be centred around his recently published second memoir and 13th book, Brief Candle in the Dark. His first book, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, has sold more than 1m copies. The God Delusion, the 2006 book for which he is best known, has sold more than 3m copies. Read More ›

The Darwinian begins to sound like an overconfident historian. From ScienceDaily: All it took was one mutation more than 600 million years ago. With that random act, a new protein function was born that helped our single-celled ancestor transition into an organized multicellular organism. This release features Prehoda’s lab’s work on choranoflagellates (featured here and here already). But then notice how it all gets qualified: Prehoda and colleagues then used ancestral protein reconstruction, a technique devised at the UO by co-author Joseph W. Thornton, a biologist now at the University of Chicago. By using gene sequencing and computational methods to move backward in the evolutionary tree, researchers can see molecular changes and infer how proteins performed in the deep past. Read More ›

Readers, I haven’t heard a single wherewherewheredoeshstandonevolution? from a deeply concerned blonde since before Wisconsin prez hopeful Scott Walker dropped out, some while back. I am agog! Am aghast! Has Bimbo read a book at last? Aw, you know the sort of thing I mean: Here, from Matt Vespa: Time magazine found Walker’s old science teacher–Ann Serpe–from high school to solve the evolution puzzle surrounding him. He was said to be accepting of all the lessons taught to him, according to Serpe (via Time): Huh? There is no evolution puzzle surrounding Walker. He has no more information than the average well-read person, and in the age of ISIS, evolution is really only of interest to those of us who were Read More ›

Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, interviews British philosopher of biology (U Exeter) John Dupré, on the upcoming Royal Society meeting, New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives, at Huffington Post: Since the upcoming Royal Society meeting on evolution paradigm shift is a public one, one of its organizers — British philosopher John Dupré — recently agreed to answer some of my questions about the event. This in itself is progress in science, considering the silly secrecy that surrounded “the Altenberg 16” Extended Synthesis conference of 2008 that two years later would produce a book timidly announcing: However, that is not what is expected from the Royal Society gathering in November, since Denis Noble, Read More ›

A friend draws our attention to Anthony O’Hear: Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, editor of the journal Philosophy, author of many books on the subject, and was formerly Government Advisor on Education and Teacher Training. He is a philosopher with a special interest in education. Friend offers some notes to the vid lecture (Fall, 2015) below: O’Hear discusses five internal problems to Darwin’s theory of evolution: 1. Darwin’s notion of progress 2. His stance on the creator 3. Knowledge of reality — i.e., Darwinism undermines its own claims to truth for if everything is “explained” by natural selection, how do we get to truth? 4. Darwin on human development (primitive/savage peoples) 5. Darwinism and social policy O’Hear’s conclusions: Read More ›

From BBC: The intentional selection of the qualities we like (such as flavour and size) in domesticated livestock and cultivated crops has led to descendent animals and plants that differ genetically from their ancestors. This change in gene frequency is evolution, and in this case has come about by a process called artificial selection. Natural selection is basically the same process. The difference is that instead of humans selecting individuals to breed, natural selection pressures such as predation, or the reluctance of females to mate with lower quality males, cause some individuals in a population to prosper and produce offspring while others fare poorly, leaving fewer offspring. If the trait that caused the parents to prosper has a genetic basis, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A provocative study by evolutionary biologists takes on one of Charles Darwin’s central ideas: that males adapt and compete for the attention of females because it is the females who ultimately choose their mates and the time of mating. Instead, new research using fruit flies as a representative species indicates that females do not have specific preferences, suggesting that 150 years of evolutionary theory around mating choice may need to be tossed out. “Darwin’s female-choice theory has become the foundation for explaining the presence of exaggerated secondary sexual traits in many males, such as the peacock’s tail feathers,” says evolutionary biologist Rama Singh, an author of a paper in the journal PLOS ONE that explains the findings. “It Read More ›