Category: Ecology
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 […]
Fire nature and hire a different one
| August 21, 2016 | Posted by News under Ecology, News |
Fracking edition. From Hot Air: The draft report on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) from the EPA is nearing the end of its more than five year journey and the findings were a major blow to the green energy crowd. Try as they might, there simply was no evidence of systemic contamination to ground water or other […]
Forests challenge ecosystem claims
| July 11, 2016 | Posted by News under Ecology, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: It turns out that forests in the Andean and western Amazonian regions of South America break long-understood rules about how ecosystems are put together, according to new research. … They discovered that the leaf economics of forests are not as straightforward as scientists once believed. “We found that Andean and Amazonian forests have […]
Meeting the scientific outcasts and mavericks
| June 4, 2016 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Ecology, News, Science |
Mathematicians and scientists who study evidence for design in nature are hardly the only ones! Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health offers some others, including Mark Davis. In an editorial for Nature, Davis and 18 of his colleagues made the case to stop vilifying invasive species. They argue that invasive species are […]
Think Green only if you’re seen?
| April 4, 2016 | Posted by News under Ecology, Intelligent Design, News, Psychology |
From Daily Caller: The research concludes that when people purchase an electric car or install rooftop solar, that decision is often heavily motivated by a desire to appear trendy and fashionable to their peers, which researchers dub as “conspicuous conservation.” Economists previously calculated that car dealerships and manufacturers can charge an extra $7,000 for a […]
Researchers: Humans “speeding up” evolution
| March 1, 2016 | Posted by News under Ecology, Evolution, extinction, News |
Depending on how we define species, extinction, as well as hybridization and evolution. From ScienceDaily: New research from UBC shows that when humans speed up the usually slow process of evolution by introducing new species, it can result in a lasting impact on the ecosystem. The phenomenon is known as reverse speciation and researchers witnessed […]
The ocean’s microbiome resembles the human gut’s microbia
| June 26, 2015 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Ecology, News |
From New Scientist: The biome of the ocean resembles that of the human gut We’re a step closer to understanding the microbial community that inhabits the ocean – and it has some striking similarities to the community that lives inside our guts. The microbiome of the world’s biggest ecosystem and one of the smallest appear […]
A new ocean mystery: Bacterium allegedly doesn’t make sense
| April 28, 2015 | Posted by News under 'Junk DNA', Cell biology, Ecology, News |
Life forms always make sense. Some theories do not. From Phys.org: By sequencing multiple Trichodesmium genomes—and using a wide variety of samples to ensure that there was no error—researchers found that only about 63 percent of the bacteria’s genome is expressed as protein. That’s an incredibly low amount for a bacterium and unheard of for […]
Ecology explains less and less?
| September 4, 2014 | Posted by News under Ecology, News |
Researchers were “dismayed” to discover that “R2—a more informative statistical indicator—has been on the decline.”
New fossil discovery: Get lost, tyrannosaur punk. The Seeatch just spotted you!
| November 25, 2013 | Posted by News under Ecology, Evolutionary biology, News |
Let’s not lose sight of this: Before the Siats fossil was found, a whole narrative existed of late Cretaceous ecology that got started entirely in ignorance of this top predator. That would be like trying to understand the northern wilderness without the wolf or the bear.
