Evolution

From Sarah Chaffee and Granville Sewell at The Spectator:  Whether the standard neo-Darwinian mechanism fully explains the origins of biological novelties is a question that scientists themselves increasingly contest. Yet for the media, evolution is the holy Kaaba of science. Resistance verging on hysteria greets attempts to allow teachers to introduce mainstream controversies found in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Just look at media coverage about Arizona’s state science standards, currently being revised, where minor changes were decried as a wholesale “attack” on evolution. Louisiana passed its academic freedom law, the Louisiana Science Education Act, in 2008 and critics have been denouncing it ever since, dishonestly, for sneaking in instruction about “intelligent design” or “creationism.” Tennessee passed a similar law in 2012, Read More ›

Fr. Michael Chaberek author of Aquinas and Evolution, has built a website, Aquinas/Design to advance a philosophically responsible Catholic view on the question of design in nature: Thomistic evolutionists maintain that Aquinas’s philosophy/theology is incompatible with the modern theory of intelligent design (ID). At the same time they say it can be reconciled with neo-Darwinism. This may seem odd even for a non-Christian. There may be different reasons why Thomistic evolutionists chose to counter ID: Some may be ignorant of it, some may fear “the scientific community” and “the scientific consensus.” Still others may actually believe that arguments for ID somehow threaten the old Thomistic arguments for God’s existence known as the Five Ways. However, Thomistic evolutionists have never worked Read More ›

From Cornelius Hunter at Evolution News and Science Today: A recent paper in the journal BIO-Complexity, authored by Winston Ewert, uses a dependency graph approach to model the relationships between the species. This idea is inspired by computer science which makes great use of dependency graphs for packaging of software and optimization of software architecture. Complicated software applications typically use a wealth of lower level software routines. These routines have been developed, tested, and stored in modules for use by higher level applications. When this happens the application inherits the lower-level software and has a dependency on those modules. … What Ewert has developed is a model to explain the pattern of similarities in different organisms that mimics how computer Read More ›

From science fiction writer Vox Day at Vox Popoli, responding to Fred Reed, Fred has landed on precisely the aspect of evolutionary theory that made me into a strong TE(p)NSBMGDaGF skeptic. What many people who have not thought seriously about the issue don’t realize is that biologists are literally so stupid, and so innumerate, and so illogical, that they don’t understand the problems that quantification creates for their many unfounded assumptions. We will pass over the further things that Mr. Day has to say about biologists as “confused” and “least intelligent of the STEM field graduates,” as you can read that for yourself at his blog. But then: For example, it is particularly amusing to note that I have encountered Read More ›

From Fred Reed, an “evolution skeptic” at UNZ: Recently I wrote a column about the theory of Intelligent Design, which holds that that life, both in its origins and its changes over time, are the result of design instead of chance. Several hundred comments and emails arrived, more than I could read. This was not surprising as there seems to be considerable public interest in the question, while a virulent political correctness prevents discussion in most forums. In particular the major media prevent mention of Intelligent Design except in derogatory terms. Interesting to me at any rate was that the tone of response was much more civil and thoughtful than it was say, a decade ago. That may partly be Read More ›

Including things you didn’t know about Archaea discoverer, Carl Woese. From a review of The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen (Simon & Schuster, 2018): In The Tangled Tree, celebrated science writer David Quammen tells perhaps the grandest tale in biology: how scientists used gene sequencing to elucidate the evolutionary relationships between living beings. Charles Darwin called it the ‘great Tree of Life’. But as Quammen reveals, at the molecular level, life’s history is more accurately depicted as a network, a tangled web through which organisms have been exchanging genes for more than 3 billion years. This perspective is indeed radical, and he presents the science — and the scientists involved — with patience, candour and Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Research on evolution typically focuses on the importance of social interactions, including parent-offspring bonding, competition for resources, and courtship and mating rituals. But Nathan Bailey at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and his colleague Allen Moore at the University of Georgia realized that isolation must then be an extreme condition worthy of equal attention. “The environment an animal experiences can influence which genes it expresses, when, and how much, so conditions of social isolation might cause expression of different traits,” says Bailey. “This in turn could affect responses to natural selection in terms of survival and reproduction, which has evolutionary consequences. For some species, it might even mean that temporary social isolation is favorable.” The invasive Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A concept known as ‘percolation’ is helping microbiologists explain how communities of bacteria can effectively relay signals across long distances. Once regarded as a simple cluster of microorganisms, communities of bacteria have been found to employ a strategy we use to brew coffee and extract oil from the sea. Percolation helps the microscopic community thrive and survive threats, such as chemical attacks from antibiotics. … Biofilm communities inhabit locations all around us, from soil to drain pipes to the surface of our teeth. Cells at the edge of these communities tend to grow more robustly than their interior counterparts because they have access to more nutrients. To keep this edge growth in check and ensure the entire community Read More ›

Explaining how to overthrow a theory in science via better explanations, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel offers advice at Forbes, including advice re Darwinism: Want to go beyond Darwin’s evolution? You still need to explain the emergence of biological diversity, the response to selection pressures, and how inheritance works, among others. More. First, it is interesting to hear an admission that anyone might want to go beyond Darwin’s theory, touted elsewhere as the single best idea anyone ever had. Yes, well, things do get oversold at times… But if the bar is actually set at a better explanation, in the sense of an explanation that explains more of what we see more cogently and provides better predictions, ID theorists might be able Read More ›

Here’s an inventive turn of phrase from Nature: “Eye evolution came easy for simple sea creatures Family tree shows that jellies and their relatives evolved eyes independently at least eight times.” Jellyfish and their kin have no brains and make do with rudimentary nervous systems. But an analysis now shows that these simple sea creatures evolved eyes multiple times, transforming basic precursor cells into a wide range of useful visual systems. Curr. Biol. (2018), “Eye evolution came easy for simple sea creatures” at Nature Nothing like a bold approach to the problems of irreducible complexity! Imply, without stressing the point, that if the creatures were “simple,” the process must have been “easy” and therefore wthin the range of random Darwinian Read More ›

From Jillian Mock at Audubon: Hummingbirds come in a jewel-like assortment of colors and are so dexterous, they can hover still for seconds and fly backward. They also have one of the most diverse avian families in the world, boasting about 350 known species across North and South America. Sunbirds, the prime nectar-feeding birds of the Old World, have fewer than 150. But once upon a time, tens of millions of years ago, hummingbirds did zip around the hills and forests of Europe. According to Jim McGuire, it all started about 42 million years ago, when hummingbirds broke away from the swifts, their closest living relatives. McGuire, an integrative biologist at University of California Berkeley, calculated this date by examining Read More ›

With an interesting chapter on carnivorous plants. At Oscillations, Suzan Mazur takes note of the new book by structuralist Antonio Lima de Faria, now an emeritus professor at Lund University, whom she describes as “one of the Osaka Group of ‘structuralists,’ whose other members included Brian Goodwin, Mae-Wan Ho, Peter Saunders et al.” The main theme of Periodic Tables Unifying Living Organisms at the Molecular Level: The Predictive Power of the Law of Periodicity is that “the recurrence of form and function in biology makes possible a periodic table similar to the periodic table of chemical elements (a subject first explored in his 1983 book) and reveals the “law of biological periodicity.” Carnivorous plants have long been an evolutionary puzzle: In the section “Periodicity of Plant Carnivory,” Lima-de-Faria makes Read More ›

Sometimes. From Helen Gordon at Wired: Long thought an impossible dream, the emerging field of palaeocolour is revolutionising our view of the prehistoric world, turning it from black-and-white into glorious technicolour. So far only a handful of dinosaurs, insects and reptiles have been studied but, as Johan Lindgren, a scientist from the University of Lund, says, “We’re only just scratching on the surface.” Finding evidence of colour in the fossil record will do much more than simply tell us what hue to paint a T-Rex. Bones can fossilise. but behaviour does not. “When we look at the animals and plants we see in the world around us we see striking colours and colour patterns,” says Maria McNamara from the University Read More ›