Design inference

From forester Peter Wohlleben at Daily Mail: There’s increasing evidence to show that trees are able to communicate with each other. More than that, trees can learn. If that’s true — and my experience as a forester convinces me it is — then they must be able to store and transmit information. And scientists are beginning to ask: is it possible that trees possess intelligence, and memories, and emotions? So, to cut to the quick, do trees have brains? It sounds incredible, but when you discover how trees talk to each other, feel pain, nurture each other, even care for their close relatives and organise themselves into communities, it’s hard to be sceptical.More. No one familiar with the area now Read More ›

  Offered by author Bruce Buff via Evolution News & Views: For months, he and Alex Robertson had spent a nearly continuous stream of long nights toiling in secret, trying to crack what had to be the most extraordinary encryption ever devised. What they had encountered should have been unbreakable. It was remarkable that, through a series of astounding discoveries, they had gotten as far as they had, only to be stymied by a final puzzle that had defied solving. It was even more remarkable that the answer to hat last obstacle had suddenly come to him this morning. Realizing the implications of what they were about to obtain, he had decided to wait until he was certain what it Read More ›

From Ian Tattersall’s review of Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky at New York Review of Books: Around 300,000 years ago a conceptually new type of stone implement began to be made in both Africa and Europe… But significantly, in this time range there is only one putative—and hugely arguable—symbolic artifact known: a vaguely anthropomorphic lump of rock from the Golan Heights that may have been slightly modified to look more human. More. So, readers, is it an artifact? Is it an accident? Note: The copy quoted is behind a paywall. The whole article is worth the price because it is a good overview of the background to Tom Wolfe’s attack on Chomsky Read More ›

From the conclusion of Douglas Axe’s Undeniable: That the deepest questions in biology have not yet been answered means they are still asking to be answered. Anyone who cares to examine the facts carefully will see that the old answers were wrong. They have now been erased, in our minds anyway, and we must sit down to take the test again, with new minds and new resolve. Having learned much since Darwin’s day, we have every reason for optimism this time. Speaking as a scientist, I can’t think of a more attractive message to convey to young people of technical ability. Speaking as a human, though, I see something even more beautiful. Yes, the deepest questions in the scientific study Read More ›

Here: Science has made great strides in modeling space, time, mass and energy. Yet little attention has been paid to the precise representation of the information ubiquitous in nature. Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics fuses results from complexity modeling and information theory that allow both meaning and design difficulty in nature to be measured in bits. Built on the foundation of a series of peer-reviewed papers published by the authors, the book is written at a level easily understandable to readers with knowledge of rudimentary high school math. Those seeking a quick first read or those not interested in mathematical detail can skip marked sections in the monograph and still experience the impact of this new and exciting model of nature’s Read More ›

Here. Fire-Maker Book: How Humans Were Designed to Harness Fire and Transform Our Planet (The Privileged Species Series) Paperback – July 18, 2016 From computers to airplanes to life-giving medicines, the technological marvels of our world were made possible by the human use of fire. But the use of fire itself was made possible by an array of features built into the human body and the planet. In Fire-Maker, biologist Michael Denton explores the special features of nature that equipped humans to to harness the powers of fire and remake their world. This book is a companion to the documentary of the same name, available at www.privilegedspecies.com. See also: The whole vid online: Follow UD News at Twitter!

Statistician William M. Briggs reports an amazing medical case where the

“skull was filled largely by fluid, leaving just a thin perimeter of actual brain tissue.”
Here’s the kicker: And yet the man was a married father of two and a civil servant with an IQ of 75, below-average in his intelligence but not mentally disabled…

Read More ›

A clip from Flight: The genius of birds “Avian flight requires a cause that’s able to visualize a distant endpoint and bring together everything necessary to achieve that endpoint. Only intelligence is capable of that kind of causal process.” Paul Nelson, Philosopher of Biology More. At dusk on a winter evening in southern England a flock of 200,000 European starlings congregate to soar in breathtaking formations before roosting for the night. These incredible displays of aerial precision and biological engineering are captured in this memorable sequence from Flight: the Genius of Birds. See also: Genius of Birds: Embryonic development Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Eurekalert: A research team under Dr. Bo Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Paleobiology and Stratigraphy in Nanjing (China) worked together with paleontologists from the University of Bonn and other scientists from China, USA, France, and England to examine a total of 35 insects preserved in amber. With the aid of grains of sand, plant residue, wood fibers, dust, or even the lifeless shells of their victims, the larvae achieved camouflage to perfection. Some larvae fashioned a kind of “knight’s armor” from grains of sand, perhaps to protect against spider bites. In order to custom-tailor their “camo”, they have even adapted their limbs for the purpose. The larvae were able to turn their legs about 180 degrees, in Read More ›

Here is a press release via phys.org. They applied “biological evolution” to the history of cars and car makers in order to predict the future of electric car technology. It sort of makes you chuckle. “Cars are exceptionally diverse but also have a detailed history of changes, making them a model system for investigating the evolution of technology,” Gjesfjeld said. The team drew data from 3,575 car models made by 172 different manufacturers, noting the first and last year each was manufactured. “This is similar to when a paleontologist first dates a particular fossil and last sees a particular fossil,” Gjesfjeld said. And a little bit more: Alfaro said applying an evolutionary biology approach worked so well because the automotive Read More ›

Here is the abstract from a Nature Review: Genetics paper:

The recent increase in genomic data is revealing an unexpected perspective of gene loss as a pervasive source of genetic variation that can cause adaptive phenotypic diversity. This novel perspective of gene loss is raising new fundamental questions. How relevant has gene loss been in the divergence of phyla? How do genes change from being essential to dispensable and finally to being lost? Is gene loss mostly neutral, or can it be an effective way of adaptation? These questions are addressed, and insights are discussed from genomic studies of gene loss in populations and their relevance in evolutionary biology and biomedicine.

Many years ago, I predicted that modern genome sequencing would eventually prove one side of the argument to be right. This review article indicates that ID is the correct side of the argument. What they describe is essentially what ID scientist, Michael Behe, has termed the “First Principle of Adaptation.” (Which says that the organism will basicaly ‘break something’ or remove something in order to adapt) This paper ought to be the death-knell of Darwinism, and, of course, “neo-Darwinism,” but, even the authors who report this new “perspective” have not changed their Darwinian perspective. Somehow, they will find a way to tell us that the Darwinian ‘narrative’ always had room in it for this kind of discovery. As Max Planck said, and I paraphrase, “a theory does not prove itself right; it’s just that the scientists who opposed it eventually die.” Read More ›

The following story is excerpted from chapter 2 of my new book Christianity for Doubters. As the title indicates, much of this book is explicitly theological, but the first two chapters are about intelligent design. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. In the current debate between Darwinism and intelligent design, the strongest argument made by Darwinists is this: in every other field of science, naturalism has been spectacularly successful, why should evolutionary biology be so different? Joseph Le Conte, professor of Geology and Natural History at the University of California, and (later) president of the Geological Society of America, provides an insight into the way most scientists think about evolution, in his 1888 book Evolution. In reviewing the Read More ›

From Sarah Emerson at Motherboard: A team of geneticists from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine and the Centre for Genomic Regulation discovered that several billion years ago, the genetic code reached a point of self-preservation. Namely, it could continue evolving and risk mutating the building blocks of life it was responsible for creating, or it could remain limited, albeit functional. That was a really big decision an the genetic code must have been really mature to make it. Explorations into both primordial history and our genetically altered future can open the door for exciting innovations in the field of genetics. Evolution’s successes and failures can tell us more about our tenure as a species than any science-fiction manifesto. But Read More ›

“Directed mutations” means that the cell alters its own genome for its own protection, rather than simply being the recipient of random interventions. Here: APOBEC enzymes are thought to defend human cells against viruses by mutating them so they don’t work any more. Pinto et al. wondered if there might be evidence of APOBEC enzymes acting on human and ape genomes as well. Think of it as a sort of “collateral damage” in the war against viruses. In their survey, they found eight thousand unique clusters of mutations that look like APOBEC mutations in the human genome, as well as the genomes of Neandertal and Denisovans. They found almost a half million that were unique to the entire genus Homo. Read More ›

Or something like that. From Priceonomics: The Independent Discovery of TCP/IP, By Ants After years of watching ant colonies in the Arizona desert, Stanford biologist Debra Gordon made a discovery: harvester ants, the species she was studying, had a very particular foraging technique. … Theydidn;twaste a lot of ants in hard times. But when Gordon showed her data to Prabhakar to model computationally, he had a revelation. “The algorithm the ants were using to discover how much food there is available is essentially the same as that used in the Transmission Control Protocol,” he said. … If we consider that the ant colony’s goal is to collect more food and expend fewer ants, and a server’s goal is to send Read More ›