Design inference

From Luke Dunning at Conversation: Now a new study published in Science has looked at the last 18m years of horse evolution to ask whether the origin of new horse species was linked with rapid physical changes. As you would expect, horse evolution has seen bursts of diversification when there have been new ecological opportunities. These opportunities included increased food availability, which meant larger and more varied populations of horses could be sustained. … But the fossil record shows these bursts of horse diversification didn’t follow the rapid evolution of new physical traits such as body size and teeth shape. Horses didn’t need to change to be able to colonise the Old World, presumably because they were already adapted to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Evolution is often thought of as a gradual remodeling of the genome, the genetic blueprints for building an organism. But in some instances it might be more appropriate to call it an overhaul. Over the past 100 million years, the human lineage has lost one-fifth of its DNA, while an even greater amount was added, report scientists at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Until now, the extent to which our genome has expanded and contracted had been underappreciated, masked by its relatively constant size over evolutionary time. Humans aren’t the only ones with elastic genomes. A new look at a virtual zoo-full of animals, from hummingbirds to bats to elephants, suggests that many vertebrate genomes have Read More ›

I mentioned in my last post about featuring a ‘Critic’s Corner’ series on my blog. Another feature I will do is a ‘Quote of the Month’. This will be a good chance to interact and reflect on the quotation in question. This month’s quote is now up. Feel free to comment on the blog: William Dembski on the Process of Design

Philosopher Laszlo Bencze writes to tell us his reaction to Tom Bethell’s new book, Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates: Way back in February of 1985 I read an article, “Agnostic Evolutionists,” by Tom Bethell in Harper’s magazine which turned me from passively accepting evolution to being actively angry at the lies I had been fed by the evolution lobby. Until I read that article, I had assumed that many thousands of studies documenting the step by step evolution of various species filled the shelves of university libraries. I assumed that the bulk of these were doctoral theses bound in red and dull as federal regulations but filled with line drawings of the host of Read More ›

In Biological Theory (2015): There are currently three major theories on the origin and evolution of the genetic code: the stereochemical theory, the coevolution theory, and the error-minimization theory. The first two assume that the genetic code originated respectively from chemical affinities and from metabolic relationships between codons and amino acids. The error-minimization theory maintains that in primitive systems the apparatus of protein synthesis was extremely prone to errors, and postulates that the genetic code evolved in order to minimize the deleterious effects of the translation errors. This article describes a fourth theory which starts from the hypothesis that the ancestral genetic code was ambiguous and proposes that its evolution took place with a mechanism that systematically reduced its ambiguity Read More ›

Further to “Substantial evidence” claimed for universe as a hologram: From phyicist Chris Lee at Ars Technica: Universe neither confirms nor denies its holographic nature The standard approach makes use of quantum field theory, which, when simplified to the point of predictions, results in a range of “cold dark matter plus inflation” models. These models are already known to fit the data from Planck superbly. But in recent years, there has been substantial progress in calculating some of the more annoying parts of quantum field theory. These are referred to as loop corrections, and they can be very difficult. The researchers made use of an additional loop correction to constrain the parameters that go into the model, which resulted in Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A holographic universe, an idea first suggested in the 1990s, is one where all the information, which makes up our 3D ‘reality’ (plus time) is contained in a 2D surface on its boundaries. Professor Kostas Skenderis of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton explains: “Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions (and your perception of time) in fact emanates from a flat two-dimensional field. The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface, such as in the hologram on a credit card. However, this time, the entire universe is encoded!” Encoded? Funny that. What’s the deal here? Theoretical physicists and astrophysicists, investigating irregularities in Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A Japanese research team has discovered an evolutionary model for the biological function that creates carbon dioxide from glucose in photosynthesis. They found the mechanism in a primitive, non-photosynthesizing microbe. … By clarifying part of the primitive metabolic pathway for photosynthesis, these findings could help to reveal how the photosynthesis system formed during evolution, a mystery that scientists have so far been unable to solve. – Paper. (public access) Takunari Kono, Sandhya Mehrotra, Chikako Endo, Natsuko Kizu, Mami Matusda, Hiroyuki Kimura, Eiichi Mizohata, Tsuyoshi Inoue, Tomohisa Hasunuma, Akiho Yokota, Hiroyoshi Matsumura, Hiroki Ashida. A RuBisCO-mediated carbon metabolic pathway in methanogenic archaea. Nature Communications, 2017; 8: 14007 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14007More. Wait a minute. We’ve just learned that the mechanism existed Read More ›

As a sort of inoculation? From Natasha Lomas at Tech Crunch: Research conducted by social psychologists at Cambridge University in the UK, and Yale and George Mason in the US, offers a potential strategy for mitigating the spread of misinformation online — involving the use of pro-active warnings designed to contextualize and pre-expose web users to related but fake information in order to debunk factual distortion in advance. The researchers found that combining facts about climate change with a small dose of misinformation — in the form of a warning about potential distortion — helped study participants resist the influence of the false information. More. [link now fixed] Sounds like the usual motivated rubbish, actually. (That is: Give us JOBS Read More ›

From Wayne Rossiter, at Shadow of Oz blog: Today, I would like to deal with a couple of classic stances espoused by most theistic evolutionists, and then detail some very specific views and opinions that have come up recently. Perhaps most important among these items is the apparent shell-game at play when a theistic evolutionist excuses God’s direct intervention by pointing to His immanence as the sustainer of all things. For example, in a recent discussion with Doug Axe, Keith Fox offered an oft-used reason for rejecting the idea that God might directly act in the world: … Fox rejects “a God who finds that things aren’t just the way they should be and has to invent the miraculous, because Read More ›

From Ann Gauger at at Evolution News & Views: Yesterday started out as an ordinary Tuesday. Then I set out to read a recent paper published in the journal Cell, “Nuclear Localization of Mitochondrial TCA Cycle Enzymes as a Critical Step in Mammalian Zygotic Genome Activation,” by R Nagaraj et al. It reported something rather odd that caught my eye. Very early embryos (at the two- or four-cell stage in mouse or human respectively) undergo a critical transition: they have to go from relying on RNAs and proteins loaded into the egg before fertilization by the mother, to making their own RNA and protein. The phenomenon is called embryonic genome activation. In order to activate their genomes, embryos have to Read More ›

From Jernej Ule at RealClearScience, where he explains his team’s findings, then reflects, We’ve known for decades that evolution needs to tinker with genetic elements so they can accumulate mutations while minimising disruption to the fitness of a species. Our most recent research, published in the journal eLife, looked at over 6,000 Alu elements to show that our code does exactly this. The two forces are tightly coupled in evolution, so that as soon as any mutations make the ying stronger, the yang catches up and stops them. This allows the Alu elements to remain in a harmless state in our DNA over long evolutionary periods, during which they accumulate a lot of change via mutations. As a result, they Read More ›

From Shannon Hall at New Scientist: So where are these unseen universes in relation to ours? How many are there? What goes on inside them? And can we ever hope to visit one? Such questions might sound daft, particularly given the lack of observational evidence that the multiverse exists. And yet thanks to new ideas on where distant universes might be hiding or how to count them, physicists are beginning to get their bearings. Rather fittingly, though, there is not just one answer – depending on which version of the multiverse you’re navigating, there are many. (paywall) More. [colour emphasis added] Question: “New pics from Pluto, including strange, icy haloes” sounds like science, a matter of public interest. “How far away Read More ›

The abstract of a paper by Rene van Woudenberg of the Abraham Kuyper Center and Jeroen de Ridder, Design Hypotheses Behave Like Skeptical Hypotheses (or: Why We Can’t Know the Falsity of Design Hypotheses) It is often claimed that, as a result of scientific progress, we now know that the natural world displays no design. Although we have no interest in defending design hypotheses, we will argue that establishing claims to the effect that we know the denials of design hypotheses is more difficult than it seems. We do so by issuing two skeptical challenges to design-deniers. The first challenge draws inspiration from radical skepticism and shows how design claims are at least as compelling as radical skeptical scenarios in undermining Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: the top five big problems for evolutionary theory: namely, the fossil record, the origin of biological information, the necessity of early mutations in development, the existence of epigenetic information, and Dr. Axe’s recent contribution in his new book Undeniable, the universal design intuition. More. Here. See also: Darwinism: Replacement or extension? Follow UD News at Twitter!