Category: Evolution
Jonathan McLatchie and Gunter Bechly on conflicting evidence re common ancestry
| November 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design |
See also: Paleontologist Gunter Bechly live tonight on what the fossil record really tells us about common ancestry
Devolution: African elephants survive by shedding their tusks
| November 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
A classic in devolution, actually. In Mozambique, it is estimated that 90% of the elephants have been slaughtered for ivory to finance a civil war that ended in 1992. But tuskless elephants seem more likely to survive: Hunting gave elephants that didn’t grow tusks a biological advantage in Gorongosa. Recent figures suggest that about a […]
New life form more different from others “than animals are from fungi”
| November 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Hemimastigotes: Like animals, plants, fungi and ameobas — but unlike bacteria — hemimastigotes have complex cells with mini-organs called organelles, making them part of the “domain” of organisms called eukaryotes rather than bacteria or archaea. About 10 species of hemimastigotes have been described over more than 100 years. But up until now, no one had […]
Huge study shows yeasts evolve by reducing their complexity
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Not by adding to it. Everyone seems to be talking about devolution (“reductive evolution”) these days. From ScienceDaily: “This is the first large genome project like this that actually looks at hundreds of different eukaryotic species, not different individuals or isolates of the same species,” says Chris Todd Hittinger, a UW-Madison genetics professor and one […]
John Sanford gives lecture at NIH on mutations and human health
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
Geneticist John Sanford is also the author of Genetic Entropy: and one of the editors of Biological Information: New Perspectives: Proceedings of a Symposium Held May 31 Through June 3, 2011 at Cornell University Note: In a distinctly unsavoury move, devout Darwinians managed to get Biological Information dropped by Springer. It is all the more […]
A peek at Mike Behe’s new book Darwin Devolves
| November 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Books of interest, Darwinism, Evolution |
Here: While Stephen Colbert has called Michael J. Behe the “Father of Intelligent Design,” Behe’s arguments have been called, “close to heretical” by the New York Times Book Review, and Richard Dawkins has publicly taken him to task for his “maverick” views. Wherever he goes, Behe makes waves, but has remained singularly focused on doing […]
Theorists debate: How “neutral” is evolution, really?
| November 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Neutral evolution, intended to cover for the failures of Darwinian evolution (natural selection), is now being challenged by selectionists: Selection isn’t in doubt, but many scientists have argued that most evolutionary changes appear at the level of the genome and are essentially random and neutral. Adaptive changes groomed by natural selection might indeed sculpt a fin […]
Moths use “acoustic camouflage” to evade bats
| November 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Their fuzz works like an acoustic panel to cut down the noise volume from their movements. From ScienceDaily: While some moths have evolved ears that detect the ultrasonic calls of bats, many types of moths remain deaf. In those moths, Neil has found that the insects developed types of “stealth coating” that serve as acoustic […]
Common coral species features unique immune strategy
| November 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Roughly 30 percent of the cauliflower coral’s (Pocillopora damicornis) genome was unique compared to several other reef-building corals. In this 30%, many of these genes were related to immune function. This diversity of genes related to immune function, the researchers say, may be important for the long-term survival of coral reefs as climate […]
Study of baby Diplodocus skull prompts new theories of dinosaur behavior
| November 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
We are starting to get so much more information now: Andrew had a short narrow snout, whereas his parents had wide, square snouts. His snout was suited to forests, but his parents would be grazing the ground in open areas. But if adults fed their babies, why would they need to have different teeth and snouts? […]
Paleontologist Gunter Bechly live tonight on what the fossil record really tells us about common ancestry
| November 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution |
Jonathan McLatchie announces a live interactive webinar today, Saturday, at 8pm British time, featuring pro-ID paleontologist Dr. Gunter Bechly, who will be exploring the implications of the fossil record for common ancestry. (Time zones.) Gunter Bechly is a distinguished paleontologist, specializing in fossil dragonflies, exquisitely preserved in amber for tens of millions of years. After […]
Researchers: Reproductive stem cells have system to fight off jumping genes
| November 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Whose triumph would create “catastrophic genomic instability”: Since Carnegie Institution’s Barbara McClintock received her Nobel Prize on her discovery of jumping genes in 1983, we have learned that almost half of our DNA is made up of jumping genes—called transposons. Given their ability of jumping around the genome in developing sperm and egg cells, their […]
Does intelligent design oppose common descent?
| November 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Not in principle, according to Ann Gauger, of the Biologic Institute. A reader wrote to ask, “I was just wondering why some fellows at Discovery believe in ID but still hold to common descent. Science knows that the genetic code is not universal.” From her reply: I first need to make clear that living things […]
The failed search for an evolutionary morality
| October 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Ethics, Evolution, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life, reviews James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s new book, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality There are many scientific problems with this project. Hunter and Nedelisky, however, only rarely point out the empirical difficulties. (They do […]
Might snakes provide a way of testing Dawkins’s selfish gene hypothesis?
| October 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
When researchers went to get a look at a cape cobra snake fight, it turned out to be one cobra swallowing another. They named the newly well-fed study animal NN011, otherwise “Hannibal.” Apparently, “Diner, meet Dinner!” is not an uncommon relationship among cape cobras so a study of the details ensued: Snake-eating, they found, was […]
New findings challenge the “neutral” theory of evolution for 95% of human genome
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
The neutral theory of evolution holds that “most variation at the molecular level does not affect fitness and, therefore, the evolutionary fate of genetic variation is best explained by stochastic [random] processes.” From ScienceDaily: However, what scientist Fanny Pouyet and colleagues from the Group of Laurent Excoffier at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and […]
Dollo’s Evolution Law gets hit again: Stripes come and go
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: More than 1200 types of colourful cichlid can be found in the large African lakes Malawi, Victoria and Tanganjika. Not only are they very diverse in colours, they also have numerous colour patterns such as horizontal or vertical stripes. “But that’s not all” explains Axel Meyer, “cichlids are prime examples of evolution. They […]
Soft tissue find shows dinosaurs had birdlike lungs
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
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 […]
Tortoise study does not support textbook “island rule” for evolution
| October 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: The fact that all living giant tortoises are insular may suggest that their evolution followed the so-called island rule: a trend toward dwarfism of large animals and gigantism of small animals on islands… In a recent study in the journal “Cladistics,” Dr Evangelos Vlachos from the Paleontological Museum of Trelew, Argentina, and Dr […]
Might Earth’s deep subsurface be “brimming with life”?
| October 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Geobiologist Alexis Templeton thinks it matters: We humans tend to see the world as a solid rock coated with a thin layer of life. But to scientists like Templeton, the planet looks more like a wheel of cheese, one whose thick, leathery rind is perpetually gnawed and fermented by the microbes that inhabit its innards. […]
