Category: Ecology
Can beavers contribute to evolution by transforming the tundra?
| December 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Anyone familiar with beavers will know that the big busy rodents can transform roads into ponds. They are making a comeback in Alaska: Beavers may be infiltrating the region for the first time in recent history as climate change makes conditions more hospitable, says Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Or […]
Researcher: Human impact is a “reshaping of the tree of life”
| November 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Sarah Otto, a University of British Columbia researcher, tells media about her research, Her paper is replete with examples from bird species slowly forgetting to migrate to mosquito breeds adapted specifically to underground subway tunnels. Backyard bird feeders are behind changes in the beak shape and strength of house finches. Different mammals are becoming nocturnal as […]
News: Anthropologist does not see chimpanzees as fuzzy humans
| November 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Ecology, Intelligent Design |
It’s great to see concern for primate apes taking a rational turn that can actually be in their interests: In recent years, wildlife sanctuaries, conservation organizations, and animal rights groups have told the public to stop touching chimpanzees and other wild animals. National Geographic, PETA, and even Instagram draw explicit links between human touch and […]
Assumed extinct, tree kangaroo reappears
| October 22, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, extinction, Intelligent Design |
The wondiwoi was spotted by an expedition led by amateur botanist Michael White, who spends vacations looking for rare flora: The Wondiwoi tree kangaroo had not been collected, seen, or reported since that first sighting [in 1928]. Despite weighing up to 35 pounds, tree kangaroos are remarkably cryptic, often remaining totally hidden high in the […]
New Scientist: Monkeys “look like” they are domesticating wolves
| October 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Ecology, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
Then that is the monkeys’ mistake, not the wolves’: In the alpine grasslands of eastern Africa, Ethiopian wolves and gelada monkeys are giving peace a chance. The geladas – a type of baboon – tolerate wolves wandering right through the middle of their herds, while the wolves ignore potential meals of baby geladas in favour […]
Researchers: As soon as macroscopic life evolved, it formed communities
| September 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, Ediacaran, Intelligent Design |
In short, there was no long, slow, Darwinian development of complex communities. We need a word for this: How about… ecological creationism?
Plants use flashes of fluorescent light to warn leaves against insects
| September 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Ecology, Intelligent Design, Plants |
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 […]
Humans lived in Madagascar 6000 years earlier than thought
| September 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, extinction, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
And probably did not kill off all the elephant birds, as often claimed, say researchers: Analysis of bones, from what was once the world’s largest bird, has revealed that humans arrived on the tropical island of Madagascar more than 6,000 years earlier than previously thought—according to a study published today, 12 September 2018, in the journal […]
Contra stereotype, some sharks eat seagrass
| September 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, Intelligent Design |
Just when we thought we had these thing figured out. Intro of topic Sharks are infamous meat-eaters. The ocean’s buffet of fish, crabs, mussels, shrimp and krill fill the legendary predators’ stomachs and give them sustenance. Now researchers have discovered that one particular species, bonnethead sharks, also dine on seagrass to meet their nutritional needs. […]
Another academic freedom meltdown in science, this time re GMOs
| June 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, Genetics, Intelligent Design, Science |
From Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health: Pro-GMO Professor Fired for Endorsing Glyphosate David Zaruk is an expert in European Union regulations and risk communication. He writes a blog, titled The Risk-Monger, which largely examines regulatory issues involving biotechnology, such as GMOs and glyphosate. For nearly a decade, he also was an […]
Butterfly “extinction” that wasn’t
| May 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, Evolution, extinction |
From ScienceDaily: The evolution of wild species, adapting them to human management practices, can cause localised extinctions when those practices rapidly change. And in a new study published in Nature, Professors Michael C. Singer and Camille Parmesan have used more than 30 years of research to fully document an example of this process. A large, […]
Biogeography: Life before ecology, when Canadian beavers overran Tierra del Fuego
| May 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Ecology, Intelligent Design |
A long time ago, everyone thought that nature was just a big, easily tinkered machine, there was a fad for transporting awesomely successful life forms across the globe (which they would not usually do themselves*). From Daniel Martins at the Weather Network: If you’re wondering what in blazes Canadian beavers are doing so far away from […]
Urban fish differ from rural fish but is that really “evolution”?
| May 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From Brian Langerhans and Mick Kulikowski at NC State University: A North Carolina State University study examining the effects of urbanization on the evolution of fish body shape produced both expected and surprising results: One fish species became more sleek in response to urbanization, while another species became deeper bodied in urban areas. Generally, urbanization […]
Researchers: Paleontologists are naming too many species
| March 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, Evolution, Genomics, Intelligent Design, speciation |
What? Someone noticed? From Manchester University: A comprehensive new study looking at variations in Ichthyosaurus, a common British Jurassic ichthyosaur (sea-going reptile) also known as ‘Sea Dragons’, has provided important information into recognizing new fossil species. Professor Judy Massare (SUNY College at Brockport, NY, USA) and Dean Lomax (The University of Manchester) have studied hundreds […]
Coffee!!: Millions of missing penguins found
| March 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Ecology, Intelligent Design |
From Erik Lief at ACSH: The researchers, from the well-known Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, discovered more than 750,000 nesting pairs of the Adélie penguin – or more than 1.5 million in all – on the Danger Islands archipelago, which consists of nine, small land masses spanning 35 kilometers on Antarctica’s northern tip, facing South America. […]
Peter Ridd: Coral reef expert hounded for failing to produce apocalypse NOW!
| March 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, Intelligent Design |
From Sarah Chaffee at ENST: Professor Peter Ridd heads up the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia. He has over a hundred scientific papers to his name and has spent thirty years studying the Great Barrier Reef. But he wrote a chapter in the volume Climate Change: The Facts 2017 for a […]
Long term evolution experiments (LTEE) reveal too much complexity to be “disentangled”
| October 25, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Darwinism, Ecology, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
So much for Darwinism. Joshua B. Plotkin writes at Nature: Ecological interactions emerge spontaneously in an experimental study of bacterial populations cultured for 60,000 generations, and sustain rapid evolution by natural selection. (paywall) Yes, that’s the abstract. It’s a model of economy. This is from the article: The authors’ most profound discovery is the spontaneous […]
Can environment change accelerate adaptation: Mechanism proposed
| September 11, 2017 | Posted by News under Ecology, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Paper published in June in PLOS Biology: Environmental change drives accelerated adaptation through stimulated copy number variation From author summary: Stimulated copy number variation (CNV) operates at sites of preexisting copy number variation, which are common in eukaryotic genomes, and provides cells with a remarkable and unexpected ability to alter their own genome in response […]
How plant architectures mimic subway networks
| July 26, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Design inference, Ecology, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Using 3D laser scans of growing plants, Salk scientists found that the same universal design principles that humans use to engineer networks like subways also guide the shapes of plant branching architectures. The work, which appears in the July 26, 2017, issue of Cell Systems, could help direct strategies to increase crop yields […]
Intelligent design makes it into Nature journal
| May 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Ecology, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Or so one would assume. From Sarah Zhang at the Atlantic: In “The Energy Expansions of Evolution,” an extraordinary new essay in Nature Ecology and Evolution, Olivia Judson sets out a theory of successive energy revolutions that purports to explain how our planet came to have such a diversity of environments that support such a […]
