Category: Evolution
Special issue of Biology: Evolution Beyond Selection will be open access
| September 10, 2017 | Posted by News under Biology, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Here: The conventional NeoDarwinian appraisal of evolution is based on corresponding pillars of random genetic variation and selection via differential fitness. In the 21st century, a salient question arises. Is this a sufficient evolutionary narrative? This Special Issue will offer several differing perspectives on evolutionary development and phylogeny that extend beyond Darwinian selection. The role […]
What? Questioning evolution is not science denial?
| September 8, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, science education |
What pre-extinguished boffin said that? From Fern Elsdon-Baker at Guardian: We clearly need to be careful not to assume that when people say they are rejecting “evolutionary science”, they are rejecting all scientific research or indeed all of what we might think of as evolutionary science. ‘Evolution’ as a term has gained a mishmash of […]
Darwin’s icons morph into zombies! Only intelligence kills really nasty zombies
| September 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Books of interest, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, science education |
From Salvo online: Zombie Killer: The “Icons of Evolution” Have Joined the Ranks of the Undead: You cannot kill all zombies simply by destroying their brains. Only intelligence will kill the really nasty ones. About fifteen years ago, I read Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution (2000). The sheer brazenness of the outdated information that continued […]
Origin of mitochondria a “unique and hard” evolutionary problem
| September 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From an article in Biology Direct, Breath-giving cooperation: critical review of origin of mitochondria hypotheses: Major unanswered questions point to the importance of early ecology: Abstract: The origin of mitochondria is a unique and hard evolutionary problem, embedded within the origin of eukaryotes. The puzzle is challenging due to the egalitarian nature of the transition […]
The story changes re how fish moved to land
| September 6, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Colin Barras at New Scientist: The evolutionary story we have written to explain our ancestors’ move from sea to land may need a rethink. A fossil fish from this era has been discovered with several of the features of land animals – yet it was only distantly related to them. Roughly 360 million years […]
Repositioning of ray-finned fish sends shock waves through fish family tree
| September 5, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: For several decades, scientists have placed polypterids down near the base of the family tree of ray-finned fish, a large group believed to have originated around 385 million years ago. But a new study that used CT scans to probe three-dimensionally preserved fossil fish skulls shakes up the fish family tree by concluding […]
Mitochondria have their own ribosomes as well as their own DNA
| September 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Mitochondria, which exist within human cells but have their own DNA, need many different proteins to function — but the process of how they get these has never been imaged in detail. Now a study led by Dr Vicki Gold, of the University of Exeter, has shown that some ribosomes — the tiny […]
Symbiosis found in Cambrian fossil worms
| September 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, stasis |
From ScienceDaily: Symbiotic relationships, which involve two different kinds of organism interacting with close physical contact, are common in nature. However, few prehistoric examples involve soft-bodied animals because they are normally not fossilized. Although fossils of the two species of marine worm, Cricocosmia jinnigensis and Mafangscolex sinensi, have been found before, these are the first […]
From LiveScience: What is the oldest continuous living thing in the world?
| September 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
As Stephanie Pappas writes, it’s much more complex than we might think: In 2013, researchers from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program reported at the annual Goldschmidt Conference in Italy that they’d found microbes in 100-million-year-old sediments in the floor of the deep sea, according to the BBC. The microbes were reproducing once every 10,000 years, […]
What beliefs about the universe can Christians not compromise?
| September 3, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Religion, theistic evolution |
Here: In this wide-ranging conversation, they discuss how the doctrine of creation makes sense of human dignity, racial equality, true peace and justice, purpose and meaning in life, and more. They also consider recent debates over the historicity of Adam and Eve. See also: Michael Chaberek: Darwinian theory is past its best-before date
Science education: Keep on marchin’ marchin’ — into oblivion, unfortunately
| September 2, 2017 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Atheism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From an op-ed at Nature: Scientists might have made a difference, had they protested against laws that now threaten what can be taught in our classrooms, argues Brandon Haught Haught is complaining about an academic freedom law in Florida that restricts the use of science courses for propaganda purposes: Advocates of the law were widely […]
Claude Shannon: the man who failed to transform our understanding of information
| August 31, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Information |
Well, Columbia’s Rob Goodman thinks he did, at Aeon: Shannon’s ‘mathematical theory’ sets out two big ideas. The first is that information is probabilistic. We should begin by grasping that information is a measure of the uncertainty we overcome, Shannon said – which we might also call surprise. What determines this uncertainty is not just […]
Study: Global patterns in human epigenetics show strong methylation-mRNA-genotype links
| August 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Epigenetics, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Ashley Yeager at the Scientist: A study of five far-flung human populations gives clues to adaptations to environmental pressures. The results revealed a strong link between population-specific DNA methylation, mRNA levels, and genotypes. However, the CpG sites where methylation occurred that had the highest degree of population specificity were more strongly associated with a […]
Self-organization: New James Shapiro paper on the Read-Write genome
| August 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, Self-Org. Theory |
From U Chicago’s James Shapiro at Pub Med: Biological action in Read-Write genome evolution. Many of the most important evolutionary variations that generated phenotypic adaptations and originated novel taxa resulted from complex cellular activities affecting genome content and expression. These activities included (i) the symbiogenetic cell merger that produced the mitochondrion-bearing ancestor of all extant […]
Philosopher of biology: Darwinian natural selection is a poor predictor of evolutionary success
| August 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Bengt Autzen at the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science: Musing on Means: Fitness, Expectation and the Principles of Natural Selection How to measure fitness in the theory of natural selection? A fitness measure that has been proposed in both the biological and the philosophical literature is the expected relative reproductive success. The […]
The changing strategies of the dinosaurs’ PR agents
| August 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design |
We’ll probably never know what dinos were really like inthe sense that we can know what horses are like but we learn from Will Tattersdill at H-Sci-Med-Tech about the different ways we have understood them. Reviewing Dinosaurs Ever Evolving: The Changing Face of Prehistoric Animals in Popular Culture by Allen A. Debus, (1926–2009), he writes […]
A. N. Wilson on Darwin in the London Times
| August 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Media |
Here: In Darwin’s scheme of things, the Victorian rich were the perfect expression of evolution. In perfecting itself, nature started with amoebas, and moved on through dinosaurs and flying lizards, fish, fowl and mammals until it came to the apes, so obviously like the poor savages of Tierra del Fuego or Papua New Guinea. Above […]
Philip Cunningham on Darwinism as pseudoscience
| August 25, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Supporting documentation See also: The second advent of the Royal Society’s evolution rethink last November?
Royal Society: What has the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis missed?
| August 25, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From John S. Torday at Royal Society on the special issue edition on the (failures of) current Darwinism (aka the Modern Synthesis): The Modern Synthesis, merging population genetics and Darwinian evolutionary gradualism, was formulated in 1942. That was long before biologists learned about the Double Helix, the role of epigenetics in embryonic development, or the molecular […]
The second advent of the Royal Society’s evolution rethink last November?
| August 25, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science |
And it’s only August. A special issue of Interface Focus on New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives, organized by Denis Noble, Nancy Cartwright, Patrick Bateson, John Dupré and Kevin Laland is now available. The Royal Society journal is “devoted to a particular subject at the interface of the physical and […]
