Evolution

Vid with Gunter Bechly The fossil record is dominated by abrupt appearances of new body plans and new groups of organisms. This conflicts with the gradualistic prediction of Darwinian Evolution. Here 18 explosive origins in the history of life are described, demonstrating that the famous Cambrian Explosion is far from being the exception to the rule. Also the fossil record establishes only very brief windows of time for the origin of complex new features, which creates an ubiquitous waiting time problem for the origin and fixation of the required coordinated mutations. This refutes the viability of the Neo-Darwinian evolutionary process as the single conceivable naturalistic or mechanistic explanation for biological origins, and thus confirms Intelligent Design as the only reasonable Read More ›

Here: On this episode of ID the Future, guest host Robert J. Marks talks with Dr. Winston Ewert about Ewert’s groundbreaking new hypothesis challenging Darwin’s common descent tree of life. The new model is based on the well-established technique of repurposing software code in different software projects. Ewert, a senior researcher at Biologic and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, describes the nested hierarchical pattern of life and how any credible theory of life’s origin and diversity must explain it. He then describes how Darwin’s basic theory fits, and doesn’t fit, the pattern, and the various ancillary mechanisms invoked to close the gaps. These patches include horizontal gene transfer, convergent evolution, and incomplete lineage sorting. Ewert then cues up what he argues Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have discovered a gene that appears to play a vital role in pheromone sensing. The gene is conserved across fish and mammals and over 400 million years of vertebrate evolution, indicating that the pheromone sensing system is much more ancient than previously believed. This discovery opens new avenues of research into the origin, evolution, and function of pheromone signaling. Most land-dwelling vertebrates have both an olfactory organ that detects odors and a vomeronasal organ that detects pheromones, which elicit social and sexual behaviors. It has traditionally been believed that the vomeronasal organ evolved when vertebrates transitioned from living in water to living on land. New research by Masato Nikaido and Read More ›

Dust this off, spruce it up and put it in a museum of popular culture: Getting back to evolution, it is amazing that 150 years after the scientific theory was proposed and generally accepted by the scientific community, it is still controversial in many segments of the public. In the US we have made some modest gains, but belief in pure creationism remains high at 38%, with a further 38% believing that life evolved but with God’s help, and only 19% accepting pure evolution. This puts the US near the bottom, only above Turkey. So recent reports of the teaching of evolution being opposed in Turkey is not surprising. It is more so in Israel, as those of Jewish faith Read More ›

Matti Leisola, author of Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design, offers some thoughts on the recent announcement: I am an enzyme bioengineer, so I greeted with enthusiasm Wednesday’s announcement… that part of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a fellow enzyme bioengineer. She is Frances H. Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech. … There is one point of confusion in descriptions of this year’s prize winners. It’s the talk of “directed evolution.” The Nobel Prize organization itself has encouraged such talk. If it is “directed” by researchers engineering the rates for specific purposes, sorting according to specific goals, it isn’t “evolution” in the usual schoolbook sense at all. It is more like plant breeding. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: How do the large-scale patterns we observe in evolution arise? A new paper in the journal Evolution by researchers at Uppsala University and University of Leeds argues that many of them are a type of statistical artefact caused by our unavoidably recent viewpoint looking back into the past. As a result, it might not be possible to draw any conclusions about what caused the enormous changes in diversity we see through time. The diversity of life through time shows some striking patterns. For example, the animals appear in the fossil record about 550 million years ago, in an enormous burst of diversification called the “Cambrian Explosion.” Many groups of organisms appear to originate like this, but later on Read More ›

Rather, he thinks, it is an unknown type of life form, which belonged to “an alien clade,” not certainly related to later life forms. Readers will recall that fats (sterols) were recently recovered from a 558 million-year-old fossil entity, Dickinsonia, which was previously uncertainly classified but is now classified as an animal as a result. Bechly writes, Although we know many well-preserved specimens of Dickinsonia, its affinities in the supposed tree of life have remained extremely controversial for more than 70 years since its description (Shu et al. 2014, Budd & Jensen 2015). This resulted in its wandering across nearly every kingdom and many phyla of life. In 1992 seven authorities among paleontologists were asked by evolutionary biologist Rudolf Raff Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Many wild and cultivated plants arise through the combination of two different species. The genome of these so-called polyploid species often consists of a quadruple set of chromosomes — a double set for each parental species — and thus has about twice as many genes as the original species. About 50 years ago, evolutionary biologists postulated that this process drives evolution, leading to new species. Due to the size and complexity of such genomes, however, proving this theory on a genetic level has been difficult. Arabidopsis kamchatica arose through the natural hybridization of the two parental species A. halleri and A. lyrata between 65,000 and 145,000 years ago. With 450 million base pairs, its genome is somewhat small Read More ›

At Biology Direct: Abstract: This essay highlights critical aspects of the plausibility of pre-Darwinian evolution. It is based on a critical review of some better-known open, far-from-equilibrium system-based scenarios supposed to explain processes that took place before Darwinian evolution had emerged and that resulted in the origin of the first systems capable of Darwinian evolution. The researchers’ responses to eight crucial questions are reviewed. The majority of the researchers claim that there would have been an evolutionary continuity between chemistry and “biology”. A key question is how did this evolution begin before Darwinian evolution had begun? In other words the question is whether pre-Darwinian evolution is plausible. Marc Tessera, “Is pre-Darwinian evolution plausible” at Biology Direct The paper is open Read More ›

Readers will remember science writer David Quammen’s new book, The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life, a biography of Carl Woese, who first identified the Archaea (and doubted Darwinism). They will also doubtless remember Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who does not life Tangled Tree, and… Well, he still doesn’t like it and has been holding forth of late: Most of the publicity about the book—to be sure, publicity pushed by Quammen himself—centers on HGT. It is, we’re told, something that radically overturns Darwin’s view of the “tree of life” and of evolution, and even revises our own view of “what it means to be human” (after all, we’re also told, a substantial part of our genome is dead, Read More ›

Recently, some readers asked whether the recent Dickinsonia fossil “fats” find from 558 mya featured cholesterol. Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon explains further: Cholesterol was not found by these researchers, nor did they make announcements of soft tissue in a fossil. What they did find were the breakdown products of cholesterol called “sterols”. Plants make phytols that break down similarly. There might be hundreds to thousands of breakdown products of these biochemicals. When these materials are run through a mass spectrometer, the device sorts them by chemical weight. Really good mass specs (like the ones I used to design for NASA) can even separate isotopes of carbon and hydrogen. Then a simple molecule like CH4 might have four or five Read More ›

Yes, you read that right and our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon explains why it was possible below. From ScienceDaily: Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) and overseas have discovered molecules of fat in an ancient fossil to reveal the earliest confirmed animal in the geological record that lived on Earth 558 million years ago. The strange creature called Dickinsonia, which grew up to 1.4 metres in length and was oval shaped with rib-like segments running along its body, was part of the Ediacara Biota that lived on Earth 20 million years prior to the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of modern animal life. … “The fossil fat molecules that we’ve found prove that animals were large and abundant 558 million years Read More ›

We’ve been talking about intelligence in termite mounds. Not “of” termite mounds but “in” them. From a review of The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior, by plant biologist Stefan Mancuso, To overcome the human bias toward brain-centered intelligence, Mancuso writes, one must consider that, unlike animals, plants can’t move. Being anchored in one spot required that plants evolve entirely different solutions to short- and long-term threats like predators, fire and drought. (Animals do not solve problems, notes Mancuso, they avoid them.) The plant solution is decentralization: Rather than having a brain, kidneys or other organs that would be points of vulnerability, plants are modular. Functions that would be carried out by organs in an Read More ›

J. Scott Turner, author of Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, features in a long read about his specialty, termites. For a time, superorganisms were all the rage. The concept dealt neatly with what Charles Darwin had called the “problem” with social insects. Darwin’s theory of evolution proposed that natural selection worked on individuals and the fittest individuals bred with others similarly fit to their ecological niche, while the less fit were less likely to reproduce. The problem with social insects was that while single termites seem to be individuals, they do not function as such. Only the queen and king of a colony breed, so who was the “individual”? Read More ›

Now they tell us. But how did his followers get it so wrong? Or were they just funning us all these years? Re Revisiting the Origin of Species: The Other Darwins (Thierry Hoquet, CRC Press, August 13, 2018): Contemporary interest in Darwin rises from a general ideal of what Darwin’s books ought to contain: a theory of transformation of species by natural selection. However, a reader opening Darwin’s masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, today may be struck by the fact that this “selectionist” view does not deliver the key to many aspects of the book. Without contesting the importance of natural selection to Darwinism, much less supposing that a fully-formed “Darwinism” stepped out of Darwin’s head in 1859, this Read More ›