At New Scientist: “‘Maybe, evolution is less about out competing others and more to do with co-creating knowledge,’ says Watson.” That really is a radical idea. Radical yes, but it really is a good idea. We find it hard to improve on. The only thing we can think of is, keep the “intelligent” part in your description of nature and add “design.”
Evolution
SwiftKey co-founder: Computers can’t just “evolve” intelligence; cites James Shapiro’s self-organization
In a still-interesting 2017 paper, Ben Medlock talks about the way life forms self-organize: (which computers don’t, really).
At New Scientist: We must rethink the (Darwinian) theory of nature
If by “our greatest theory of nature,” the writers mean textbook Darwinism, well the new concepts they list are destroying it. What becomes of “natural selection acting on random mutation” if a variety of means of evolution are “natural,” mutations are not necessarily random, genes aren’t selfish and don’t come only from parents, and the fittest don’t necessarily survive? Just for a start…
Behe’s First Rule Writ Large
There’s a new study reported on at Phys.Org. This was a few weeks back. It seems that a “cousin” of a shark had a bony structure. And it appears that sharks FIRST had a bony structure and only subsequently developed a cartilagineous structure. The lead researcher Dr. Martin Brazeau, from the Department of Life Sciences Read More…
Eric Holloway: Evolution and artificial intelligence face the same basic problem
Eric Holloway looks at the discussions at the Wistar Institute—which fell down the memory hole in 1967—and recovers Marcel-Paul Schutzenberger (1920–1996)’s main point, that you can’t actually get there from here.
Very well preserved ice age cave bear found in Siberia
Sources say there is a cub too that hasn’t yet been announced. Researchers are confident that they can extract readable DNA. Too bad we don’t have dinosaurs like that. Just think of all the speculation that would be circumvented.
At Smithsonian Magazine: Why birds survived but not dinosaurs
Researchers: Beaked birds had the advantage that they could live on seeds from destroyed forests until new vegetation grew again.
The Babylon Bee stings its way into the evolution debate
Hey, Snopes! “Fact check ”this: Evolution: It all began when a guy sailed to an island and saw a bunch of birds with different sizes of beaks which of course can only mean God is dead.
Michael Flannery’s book on Alfred Russel Wallace has been revised and updated
Wallace, as Darwin’s co-theorist, disappeared because he was not useful to the cause of naturalism. We’ll try to help make sure he doesn’t disappear again.
Insects were mimicking lichens 165 million years ago
Whoever wrote the media release was very, very light on the Darwinblather. Mind you, claiming that it all happened via endless iterations of natural selection acting on random mutations wears a bit thin when the time Darwinians thought they had has been sharply reduced.
Mike Behe’s Darwin Devolves thesis aired at Quanta?
The thesis of Darwin Devolves is that most adaptation/evolution is due to loss of genes (devolution). The Quanta article seems to agree that loss of genes is a major means of the development of life.
A new theory about how ancient life forms crossed the sea on rafts
Driftwood rafts can apparently last as long as 20 years.
Huge lizard found in ichthyosaur’s stomach establishes that the latter was a big time predator
Blunt teeth were no deterrent, as it turns out. Of course, for the ichthyosaur, unlike the paleontologist, eating wasn’t a theory. The more we learn, the more many of our assumptions will be challenged.
New paper: Multicellularity did not follow a simple straight path
From the paper: “For example, do all lineages and clades share an ancestral developmental predisposition for multicellularity emerging from genomic and biophysical motifs shared from a last common ancestor, or are the multiple origins of multicellularity truly independent evolutionary events?” Stuart Newman is one of those The Third Way scientists seeking an alternative to sterile Darwinism.
A University of Arizona prof works hard to make Darwinism coincide with the history of life
She does a good job of pointing out how much of the history of life is really stasis. But then what about Darwin’s claim about nature daily, hourly adding stuff up, subtracting the bad, retaining the good… Apparently not.