Steve Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt, is thought to be vindicated by a paper published in 2017, “Experimental test and refutation of a classic case of molecular adaptation in Drosophila melanogaster” (Nature Ecology and Evolution). The paper “begins with a perceptive statement about what ought to be required when establishing some genetic evolutionary pathway: Identifying […]
Design inference
Soft tissue find shows dinosaurs had birdlike lungs
Turns out we didn’t need Jurassic Park: The lungs and feathers of a bird that lived 120 million years ago had some of the same characteristics found in today’s birds, researchers reported yesterday (October 18) in PNAS… They examined a sample with scanning electron microscopy and found an extremely subdivided structure much like that enabling […]
Does information theory support design in nature?
Eric Holloway argues at Mind Matters that design theorist William Dembski makes a convincing case, using accepted information theory principles relevant to computer science: When I first began to look into intelligent design (ID) theory while I was considering becoming an atheist, I was struck by Bill Dembski’s claim that ID could be demonstrated mathematically […]
Berlinski and Denton, agnostics who doubt Darwin, offer their reasoning
David Berlinski and Michael Denton feature in a podcast: For Berlinski, a mathematician and author of The Deniable Darwin, the problem is quantitative and methodological. For Denton, a geneticist and author of the new Discovery Institute Press book Children of Light: The Astonishing Properties of Light that Make Us Possible, the problem is empirical. Don’t miss […]
Food, sex, and memory in one-celled algae, once again
Recently, we looked at the claim that diatoms (one-celled algae with glassy shells) demonstrate the ability to make choices. That seems hard to account for in the absence of a brain (though the researchers were convinced they saw it happen). Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon writes to clarify a point about the diatoms: The […]
Researchers: Diatoms demonstrate “behavioral biology”
From ScienceDaily: Unicellular diatoms are able to adapt their behavior to different external stimuli based on an evaluation of their own needs. This was discovered by scientists of the Friedrich Schiller University and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, together with partners from Belgium. The algae depend on nutrients in order […]
Cell behaviour can show “purposeful inefficiency”? What next?
We thought “purposeful efficiency” was enough to get a researcher fired, but read on: From ScienceDaily: The steps cells take in response to challenges are more complex than previously thought, finds new research published in the journal eLIFE. The study investigates a system relevant to cancer, viral infection, and diabetes as well as Parkinson’s and […]
“Undeniable” author Doug Axe on the recent “directed evolution” Nobel for chemistry
Doug Axe, Intro of recalls current CalTech winner Frances Arnold: In a conversation in her office one day, I said that I wanted to do work on protein evolution. She was skeptical, for pragmatic reasons. “Is that the kind of work that people will want to fund?”, she asked. I smile recalling that, but up […]
Plants use flashes of fluorescent light to warn leaves against insects
From ScienceDaily: In one video, you can see a hungry caterpillar, first working around a leaf’s edges, approaching the base of the leaf and, with one last bite, severing it from the rest of the plant. Within seconds, a blaze of fluorescent light washes over the other leaves, a signal that they should prepare for […]
Nathan Lents is still wrong about sinuses but is still writing about them
He is the author of a “bad design” book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes: Earlier this year writers for Evolution News posted responses to Dr. Lents, who teaches at John Jay College and wrote a recent book, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to […]
Prime numbers are not “nearly as scattershot” as previously thought
From researchers at Princeton: The seemingly random digits known as prime numbers are not nearly as scattershot as previously thought. A new analysis by Princeton University researchers has uncovered patterns in primes that are similar to those found in the positions of atoms inside certain crystal-like materials. The researchers found a surprising similarity between the sequence of […]
Warning: Watching this video may cause you to lose the ability to see randomness
From David Nguyen: Why Tumor Biologists Should Never See Randomness But Only Degrees of Disorder See also: What is Randomness? Part 1, with David Nguyen
The standard genetic code is “optimized” to reduce costly errors
An interesting new paper on how the genetic code minimizes the impact of mistranslations: Statistical and biochemical studies of the standard genetic code (SGC) have found evidence that the impact of mistranslations is minimized in a way that erroneous codes are either synonymous or code for an amino acid with similar polarity as the originally […]
Decidedly unDarwinian admissions re proteins
Philip Cunningham writes to note for us such moments in the literature: Abstract: (open access) Why life persists at the edge of chaos is a question at the very heart of evolution. Here we show that molecules taking part in biochemical processes from small molecules to proteins are critical quantum mechanically. Electronic Hamiltonians of biomolecules […]
Researchers: Program for limb development may have been in “in the bilaterian common ancestor”
What? Doug Axe draws attention to a new paper at Evolution News and Science Today which suggests that “the genetic program for limb development predates limbs.” Abstract: Cephalopod mollusks evolved numerous anatomical innovations, including specialized arms and tentacles, but little is known about the developmental mechanisms underlying the evolution of cephalopod limbs. Here we report that […]