A new study seems to substantiate Max Planck’s quip that new paradigms arise when the supporters of the old ones die.
Evolution
Gunter Bechly: Farewell, says the apeman
Why wave goodbye? Because if this skull is a guide, the transition from not-really-Lucy to a-bit-like-Lucy to almost-Lucy to Hi, Lucy!! never really happened.
If we can’t find aliens Out There, we can always declare local life forms to be aliens
The obvious problem the comb jelly (ctenophore) raises is that complex systems had to arise twice, not once, by alleged Darwinian chance. If you doubted chance before, you just doubled your chances of doubting it.
Researchers: Original animals were all carnivores
The researchers think the original animals preyed on protists or one-celled animals (a shell eat cell world?).
Birds must choose between big brains and big guts
This is further indirect evidence— not, of course, drawn out here—that the human brain did not develop the way it did simply to enable survival.
Straw in the wind? Darwin’s random variation is discredited in a recent paper
They propose “nonrandom variation”. Later: “Darwin’s idea that variation is generated randomly has largely been taken for granted rather than tested, representing a fundamental gap in our understanding of evolution.”
So creationism works—but only for genes?
So 2/3 of the time, we have “ de novo emergence from ancestral non-genic sequences, such that homologues genuinely do not exist?” Okay. Somebody better go put their arm around the Selfish Gene. It’s tough being the Last Darwinian. Gene, we did not do this to you. Francis Collins and Craig Venter did this to you. Honest.
In a science media release: “Nature does everything for a reason…
… and the presence of negative differential response in living organisms is no exception”
Is it getting to the point where you can say things that murder Darwin’s kid and no one cares?
Listen to the “symphony of genes” in animal evolution…
So if all this complexity got started in something like the twinkling of an eye, are we looking at an argument for creationism? Or what? What exactly is the source of all this very complex, very early information?
Claim: Turtle embryos can choose their sex
What’s fascinating is how complex it all turns out to be, yet there always seem to be enough turtles of each sex.
The College Fix LISTENS TO David Gelernter on Darwin!
It’s almost as though people are “getting it” that Darwinism now functions as an intolerant secular religion. Evolution rolls on oblivious but, here and there, heads are getting cracked over the differences between what really happens and what Darwinians insist must happen.
Even viruses have complex origins now
Well, this is interesting, for sure: “The findings show that this broad class of single-stranded DNA viruses, which infect all three cellular domains of life, have acquired their genetic components through complex evolutionary processes not traceable to a single ancestral event.” Maybe there wasn’t a “single ancestral event” for cells either. Also: The hope is to “resolve the question of how cell-based life came to co-exist with the planet’s staggering array of viruses (dubbed the virome).” One commonly heard hypothesis is that viruses are degraded cells. It will be interesting to hear alternative theses.
Researcher: Hidden variations enable rapid evolution
It sounds a lot like this “fat savings account” of potential variations in evolution is preprogrammed, which would certainly make sense from a design perspective. Not that the people at Santa Fe mention it.
They didn’t find the parenting switch…
They didn’t find anything like a “parenting switch” that applied across frog and mouse species, they noted. But parenting behavior, however caused, may be very much older that we used to think (the rise of amphibians about 360 million years ago?). And yet many later life forms don’t care for their offspring. The more evolution becomes a history, the more it features puzzling complexities that can’t be resolved by a fatuous appeal to an “ism”.
Eggbound baby gulls warn nestmates of threats
Well, if the embryos are shaping their development in response to warning cries, that puts a whole new spin on “evolution.”