But still we hear, “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.” Darwin, “Life and Letters,” i, p. 278 ? Hadn’t the Darwinists better change their story a bit?
Ecology
Are there universal laws of ecology?
Sounds promising. If physics depends on mathematics and chemistry depends on physics and biology depends on chemistry, why could not be laws be derived that help us understand ecology? But then Malthus betrays the authors, as he misled Darwin.
Feathered polar dinosaurs really existed
Sure, though it does feel odd to see the words “feathered” + “polar” + “dinosaur” in the same sentence. 😉
Early humans lived in a different ecosystem, researchers say
Most interesting. If that’s true, claims that our behavior stems from challenges faced by our ancestors may need to be scrutinized. Our ancestors may not have faced the same challenges.
Want more aggressive spiders? Look for hurricanes
Mainly fun. But seriously, the main question is, when the weather calms down, won’t the spiders tend to just stop being so aggressive? It’s interesting if this is what is meant by “robust evolutionary responses.”
Who knew bacteria could trap light without chlorophyll?
We are “trained,” if you like, to expect certain discoveries (dark matter, for example). Then we learn something significant that really surprises us and allows for new thinking about, for example, ecology.
AI will save Gaia, says James Lovelock at nearly 100 years of age
The Gaia hypothesis started out as science, then discovered weed. But a digital Gaia movement for the 21st century will not, one suspects, be hippies. Maybe not as nice.
The incorrect insect egg model relied too much on model organisms
Krauze: the organisms we have chosen to represent invertebrates, like C. elegans and D. melanogaster, are simpler than the average invertebrate. And this means that we’re likely underestimating the complexity of the last common ancestor of animals (Metazoa). … Attempts to correct for this bias has found that the last common Metazoan ancestor was surprisingly complex, seemingly ‘overdesigned’ for its simple morphology.
At Nature: Researcher smashes conventional evolution doctrine about insect egg shapes
The new findings almost put the egg in charge of its own shape, not what anyone expected to hear.
Fungus found that can oxidize gold
Imagine. Non-reactive gold does all that for fungus. Is there anything is nature that is absolutely useless?
Researchers: Rare ocean life forms breathe arsenic in low oxygen environments
What’s amazing is the way life, once started, exploits every avenue, and yet how DOES it get started?
DNA as a “master of resource recycling”
The researchers say that their results “challenge the notion that DNA replication is uniform and consistent”
Is the Australian wild dog, the dingo, really a “unique species”?
They want to protect the dingo, mainly for Australian cultural reasons. Fine. Why not just admit that instead of cooking up some nonsense about “speciation”?
Gaia needs a reboot and New Scientist is here to explain
A machine built from scavenged parts from Britain’s Royal Air Force started randomly but ended in equilibrium. Can it boost the Gaia cult?
Insectologists swat insects-are-doomed paper
The temptation for some seems to be to resort to apocalypse voodoo to demonstrate a crisis, at the expense of the methods that make scientists worth listening to, as an alternative to supermarket tabloids. File this one with: The real reasons people don’t “trust science”