Researcher: “I do not think it is a coincidence that the HbS mutation, which provides protection against malaria, originates de novo more frequently in sub-Saharan Africans than in Europeans,” Livnat says. “I also do not think it is a coincidence that it originates more frequently in the gene where it provides this protection compared to the nearly identical nearby delta globin gene, where precisely the same mutation could happen but would not provide protection.”
Evolution
Neil Thomas on “Evolutionary Theory as Magical Thinking”
Thomas: The shaky logical basis of Darwin’s thinking has not gone entirely unremarked. The notion of a supposedly unintelligent yet remarkably independent “self-evolving” biosphere (like the postulation of a self-creating cosmos) presents, when dispassionately considered, an offense to logic great enough to invite attempts to square the circle.
Ant can create pain in mammals – “evolution” story assumed
Curiously, we actually don’t know that this extreme targeted pain defense “evolved.” No evolutionary pathway is indicated. It could have been natural selection or horizontal gene transfer. Which? Or maybe the ant was always like that.
Mutations and macroevolution: The Central Dogma of biology turns out to be… unsupported?
Meanwhile, in the United States, and doubtless in many other places, righteous science activists could probably get a court order against anyone teaching in a publicly funded school that evidence for macroevolution is missing. The fact that it is missing is an Unfact, so to speak.
Researchers: Horizontal gene transfer from invertebrates to snakes helps solve Australian snake mystery
Just think of all the Darwinism that would have been thrown at this transition decades ago. If the account holds up, it’s another instance of a less neat but more accurate picture of the history of life.
The Khan Academy markets 1980s Darwinism
From back when all official “evolution” claims were expected to be reverently accepted by everyone. Luskin: “But in the famed series, the horse fossils don’t evolve in a straight line, nor are they found in the same place, nor do they show a continuous direction of change.”
Did low oxygen levels limit evolution for billions of years?
Probably. The researchers propose 800 mya as the point at which oxygen increased. That’s when other researchers say they can identify chromosomes. Sounds like a rollout…
At Scientific American: Salamander “junk DNA” challenges long-held view of evolution
Douglas Fox at SciAm: The salamanders would be on death’s door if they were human. “Everything about having a large genome is costly,” Wake told me in 2020. Yet salamanders have survived for 200 million years. “So there must be some benefit,” he said. The hunt for those benefits has led to some heretical surprises, potentially turning our understanding of evolution on its head.
Everything is Coming Up “Non-Random”!
On January 12, 2022, Phys.Org had a PR on an article documenting “non-random” mutations found in wild tobacco plants, published by a team from UC Davis. Now, three weeks later (Feb 1, 2022), we have another paper, working with human populations in Africa, and which, according to a team from the University of Haifa, “surprisingly” Read More…
Interview with historian Richard Weikart: Is evolution racist?
In connection with Weikart’s new book, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.
More examples of human-made “evolution,” which are changing the way evolution is seen
“We have come a long way from the old view of evolution as a slow process to the point where we are now realizing that everything is evolving all around us all the time,” says Andrew Hendry, a Professor of Biology at the Redpath Museum of McGill and the co-senior author on the paper recently published in Molecular Ecology.
Lizards “evolve” in just a few months?
Why should we believe that this change is a form of evolution at all, as opposed to an existing capacity to adapt to unusual conditions that occur now and then? If the lizard is a common species, it probably has such capabilities.
Water bears (tardigrades) create a puzzle re evolution of walking
At Ars Technica: Specifically, as the tardigrades sped up, they would transition between having five legs on the ground, then four legs on the ground, then three legs on the ground—just like insects and arthropods, despite a 20-million-year evolutionary gap between them. “
100 million years before the dinosaurs, the biggest known bug
A fluke discovery. And we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the remarkable stuff that’s out there.
Could newly hatched pterosaurs fly?
The big mystery isn’t why early, easy escape would be an advantage but why birds and bats never found a way to do it. But we shall see.