Evolution

Spiders evolving disguises separately, in parallel, are another problem for Darwinism Not that one can directly admit it. From Catherine Offord at The Scientist: The Hawaiian stick spider has evolved the same three color morphs on multiple different islands in parallel, according to research led by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley. The team’s findings, published today (March 8) in Current Biology, provide a rare example of evolution producing the same outcome multiple times and could throw light on the factors constraining evolutionary change. “The possibility that whole communities of these spiders have evolved convergently is certainly exciting,” Ambika Kamath, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who didn’t take part in the study, tells Read More ›

From Adam Hargreaves at New Scientist, No doubt you have heard of dark matter, which is thought to make up over a quarter of the universe. We know it’s there; we just haven’t been able to detect it. Well, something similar is afoot in the genome. My colleagues and I have dubbed this elusive genetic matter “dark DNA”. And our investigations into the sand rat are starting to reveal its nature. The discovery of dark DNA is so recent that we are still trying to work out how widespread it is and whether it benefits those species that possess it. However, its very existence raises some fundamental questions about genetics and evolution. We may need to look again at how Read More ›

From at ScienceDaily: Ancient microbes may have been producing oxygen through photosynthesis a billion years earlier than we thought, which means oxygen was available for living organisms very close to the origin of life on earth. In a new article in Heliyon, a researcher from Imperial College London studied the molecular machines responsible for photosynthesis and found the process may have evolved as long as 3.6 billion years ago. … One surprising finding was that the evolution of the photosystem was not linear. Photosystems are known to evolve very slowly — they have done so since cyanobacteria appeared at least 2.4 billion years ago. But when Dr. Cardona used that slow rate of evolution to calculate the origin of photosynthesis, Read More ›

From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: All of viral evolution is murky: Different groups of viruses likely had very different origins. Some may have been degenerate “escapees” from cellular genomes, while others descended directly from the primordial soup. “Still others have recombined and exchanged genes so many times in the course of evolution that we will never know where they originally came from,” Fischer said. As examples of this diversity, giant viruses could help illuminate more about how viruses operate and evolve. But even their own origins and evolutionary path are unsettled. One side holds that the giant viruses evolved from smaller viruses over 2 billion years by adding genes, through processes such as horizontal gene transfer and gene duplication. The Read More ›

Whatever that means. From Kerry Grens at the Scientist: The administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, said that evolution, at least as it concerns the origins of humans, is a philosophical and not scientific matter, according to audio from a 2005 radio show unearthed by Politico. “There aren’t sufficient scientific facts to establish the theory of evolution,” Pruitt said. More. What exactly is the “theory of evolution”? Efforts to establish it seem to end either in tautologies like “survival of the fittest” or advertisements for atheism/Christian atheism, none of which are part of Pruitt’s remit anyhow. Apparently, Pruitt’s boss Donald Trump gets evolution wrong too: Human evolution has a public relations problem. That isn’t just because Read More ›

From Peggy Fletcher Stack at Salt Lake City Tribune: Mormons should be as friendly to evolution as any people on Earth, a Brigham Young University biologist unequivocally declared this week. They believe in “eternal progression,” for example, and that the universe was organized from pre-existing matter, Steven L. Peck told a packed audience Thursday on the Utah Valley University campus. Those are ideas embraced by evolutionary biologists, too. Hmmm. Typical Mormons probably don’t believe what 78% of evolutionary biologists believe: No God and no free will. Could that matter? There certainly are surprises in the development of complex structures, he said. “Things that occur on one level — like DNA mutations — are truly random. And they can bubble up Read More ›

From Catherine Offord at the at The Scientist: In one recent project, for example, Schroeter and her advisor Mary Schweitzer extracted and analyzed collagen peptides from just 200 mg of an 80-million-year-old fossil of a Cretaceous-era herbivore, Brachylophosaurus canadensis, excavated in Montana. The amino acid sequences of those peptides, published last year, placed the dinosaur on a branch of the phylogenetic tree between crocodiles and basal birds such as ostriches.1 What’s more, the team’s collection of analyzable peptides from the ancient specimen suggests that there might be other fossils out there with similar molecular information hidden in them. Although the findings were controversial—some researchers still doubt that proteins can resist degradation for tens of millions of years—Schroeter is one of a Read More ›

As Peter Dockill explain at Science Alert, Scientists have discovered two new kinds of virus in Brazil that display such size and genetic complexity we may need to rethink exactly what viruses are, scientists say. The two new strains – dubbed Tupanvirus, after the Brazilian thunder god Tupã in Guaraní mythology – are as prodigious as their namesake, and while they’re not a threat to humans, their existence further challenges the scientific boundaries that define what a virus is. Tupanvirus soda lake and Tupanvirus deep ocean, both named in relation to the extreme aquatic habitats in which they were discovered, aren’t just among the largest viruses ever found – they also contain the most protein-making machinery of any virus discovered Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: How do fish end up in isolated bodies of water when they can’t swim there themselves? For centuries, researchers have assumed that water birds transfer fish eggs into these waters — however, a systematic literature review by researchers at the University of Basel has shown that there is no evidence of this to date. … To objectively measure the lack of evidence, the Basel research team conducted a systematic literature review. The result shows that no in-depth scientific studies exist to prove that water birds disperse fish eggs. To rule out the possibility that the unsuccessful search was due to their method, the researchers also used the same approach to look for evidence of the dispersal of aquatic Read More ›

We’ve heard plenty from the transhumanists and the pillpushers who think we can medicate our way to eternity. But now this, from Peter Hoffmann at Nautilus: Nanoscale thermal physics guarantees our decline, no matter how many diseases we cure. There is a vigorous discussion inside the aging research community about whether to classify aging as a disease. Many researchers studying specific diseases, cellular systems, or molecular components would like to see their favorite research subject take the mantle of “the cause” of aging. But the sheer number of possibilities being put forward refutes the very possibility. They can’t all be the cause of aging. Leonard Hayflick, the original discoverer of cellular aging, pointed out in his provocatively titled article “Biological Read More ›

It’s not like the United States put a man on the moon and then brought him back or supervised mapping the human genome or anything useful like that. So it stands to reason that anyone at all, including people who live in countries where witchcraft is a capital offense, are free to fret about Florida classrooms. The beauty of pomo (post-modernism) is that it never needs to make sense, just make complaints. From Giorgia Guglielmi at Nature: Education bills would allow people who live in the state to review and recommend instructional materials to be used in schools. That’s shocking, especially when you consider that the people who live in the state are forced to pay for the schools and Read More ›

Ah, start the day with fond memories. Most people who were kids in the mid-twentieth century grew up with the icons of horse evolution, starting with grubby little Eohippus and ending with Black Beauty. Of course, the story didn’t need to be true and as Jonathan Wells pointed out in Icons of Evolution, it wasn’t really true, at least not in a factual way. It was more the idea of evolution that was supposed to sink in for us. As CS Lewis has pointed out, Darwinian evolution was a great story, not necessarily to be confused with facts of nature. Meanwhile, at ScienceDaily: There are no such things as “wild” horses anymore. Research published in Science today overturns a long-held Read More ›

Saturday 24th February 2018 – 02:30 pm Seems to be up now in EST. Audio:Premier Christian Radio: A bacterial flagellum acts as the outboard motor on a bacteria. But is the complex arrangement of parts that enable it to do its job a result of design or evolution? Michael Behe first opened the debate on the ‘irreducible complexity’ of biochemical machines in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box. Intelligent Design proponent Jonathan McLatchie and theistic evolutionist Keith Fox debate whether Behe’s theory has stood the test of time, the bacterial flagellum and whether ID is a science stopper or theologically helpful. More. Comment: Given that most traditional science greats believed that they lived in a meaningful universe that showed evidence Read More ›

Culturally that’s a big one. From Carolyn Gramling at ScienceNews: The once-lengthy list of “definitely a dinosaur” features had already been dwindling over the past few decades thanks to new discoveries of close dino relatives such as Teleocrater. With an April 2017 report of Teleocrater’s skull depression (SN Online: 4/17/17), yet another feature was knocked off the list. … “I often get asked ‘what defines a dinosaur,’ ” says Randall Irmis, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City. Ten to 15 years ago, scientists would list perhaps half a dozen features, he says. “The only one to still talk about is having a complete hole in the hip socket.” The abundance of recent discoveries Read More ›

From Robert D. McFadden at the New York Times: Günter Blobel, a molecular biologist who was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering that proteins in any living cell have virtual ZIP codes that guide them to where they can help regulate body tissues, organs and chemistry, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 81. … The mystery Dr. Blobel confronted was how cells control their internal traffic, so that large proteins can get through tightly sealed membranes surrounding their birthplace and then travel to sites within the cell, or even through cell walls on intercellular trips through the body, where they can find specific worksites, called organelles (little organs) and penetrate them to perform assigned tasks. More. Read More ›