Evolution

From ScienceDaily: While it is accepted that humans appeared in Africa some 200,000 years ago, scientists in recent years have placed the approximate date of human settlement in Australia further and further back in time, as part of ongoing questions about the timing, the routes and the means of migration out of Africa. Now, a team of researchers, including a faculty member and seven students from the University of Washington, has found and dated artifacts in northern Australia that indicate humans arrived there about 65,000 years ago — more than 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. A paper published July 20 in the journal Nature describes dating techniques and artifact finds at Madjedbebe, a longtime site of archaeological research, that Read More ›

Maybe Darwin and Steve Meyer aren’t the only ones who claim the right to honest doubt. Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25,107 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #6 in Books > Science & Math > Evolution > Organic #6 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Paleontology #8 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology > Creationism

Dan Graur is on a crusade against ENCODE – the NIH project that is showing that, at least in general, the entire genome is functional. Unfortunately, his commitment to the neo-Darwinian view of mutations is blinding him.
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From Dean Burnett at the Guardian: There are competing theories about this, but the point is that most other species’ young can do a lot more of the work when it comes to feeding. Human babies can latch, but not much else, so the mother has to essentially do everything. Sometimes that’s totally fine. Other times it’s like trying to insert a water balloon into a wine bottle. A soft, constantly moving, unfathomably precious wine bottle that eventually grows teeth. And the water balloon is incredibly sensitive. And you have to do this a dozen times a day. Even when you’re meant to be sleeping. It may be natural, but breastfeeding isn’t as easy a process for humans as it Read More ›

From Abby Olena at the Scientist: For more than 50 years, scientists have taken for granted that all snakes share a ZW sex determination system, in which males have two Z chromosomes and females have one Z and one W. But a study, published today (July 6) in Current Biology, reveals that the Central American boa (Boa imperator) and the Burmese python (Python bivittatus) use an XY sex determination system, which evolved independently in the two species. If a f fundamental change like that could evolve independently, something other than Darwin’s nature “hourly adding up” must be at work. But what? An internalized library of possible solutions, as Lee Spetner suggests? Gamble agrees that the next step is exploring other Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: “Because of the animal’s decomposition, it is difficult to be certain what this animal may have been,” John Hyde, a program leader of fisheries genetics at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California, told Live Science in an email. “However, it does resemble a black sea hare (Aplysia vaccaria) that are fairly common in this area.” Sea hares, a group of sea slug species,fall within the class of gastropoda. If the strange animal were a black sea hare, that could explain its large size: A. vaccaria is the largest gastropod in the world — it can weigh as much as 30 lbs. (13.6 kg) and grow as long Read More ›

Re J. Scott Turner’s forthcoming Purpose and Desire: From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views, His book, Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, underlines that Turner is not an “anti-Darwinist.” On the contrary, he explains that “I want deeply for it” – meaning the modern theory of Darwinian evolution – “to make sense.” The reasons for his disillusion, which he outlines in this fascinating contribution to the evolution debate, turn upon long-ignored problems with the theory, and counterevidence from the mysterious nature of life itself. It is still a couple of months too early for reviews of Purpose and Desire, but Kirkus welcomes it with a pre-publication starred review Read More ›

From Joel Shurkin at InsideScience: It’s hard to think of dinosaurs as being loving, caring parents, but scientists have found some of them may have been just that. Take the oviraptorosaurs, a group of feathered creatures that look as if they were constructed by a malignant committee from spare bird parts. By studying fossilized oviraptorosaur eggs, researchers from France and China have found that oviraptorosaurs lay across those eggs in nests and warmed them with body heat just as modern birds do. Paleontologists had previously theorized that oviraptorosaurs incubated their eggs, but the French-Chinese team came up with the numbers. They also added to the theory that at least some dinosaurs were warm-blooded reptiles. More. With dinosaurs, as with Neanderthal Read More ›

From Brian Gallagher, Nautilus blog editor, at Nautilus:  In 2008 in Louisiana, and then in 2012 in Tennessee, laws passed allowing teachers to discuss the supposed “weaknesses” of evolutionary theory—a loophole, some science-education advocates said, through which creationism would creep in. And there’s good reason to think that it is: A 2008 nationally representative survey of U.S. high school biology teachers found that nearly half of the responders agreed or strongly agreed that creationism or intelligent design was “a valid, scientific alternative” to evolution, just over 15 percent reported adhering to young-Earth creationism, and 18 percent said they either explicitly advocated creationism in class or endorsed it in passing. … How to fix this? They argue the U.S. needs its prospective Read More ›

Here. Well over a hundred research talks from the joint 2017 conference of the American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the Society of Systematic Biologists mid-June in Portland, Oregon. Never mow the lawn again. For example: See also: What the fossils told us in their own words

Rob Sheldon’s book is The Long Ascent: Genesis 1–11 in Science & Myth, Volume 1 (Wipf & Stock). The book tries to probe the minds of early biblical characters struggling to understand nature in the absence of any formal body of science knowledge. Order here. As “Part I” suggests, he is working on another installment in the series.

From Will Sullivan at PBS Nova Next: While the single-celled organisms that dominated early Earth’s oceans didn’t have much need for teeth, they did find some evolutionary advantage in making their own minerals. According to research published last week, life has been making its own hard parts for at least 810 million years, about 200 million years longer than previously thought. It’s the first occurrence of what scientists call biomineralization, and it could give us deeper insight into both the evolution of living things and Earth’s early climate. More. It also reduces the time for purely Darwinian evolution to work. See also: Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen

From Fritz Burnett at National Geographic: I’ll never forget this nodosaur fossil discovery for a few reasons. To start, it’s one of the best preserved armored dinosaur fossils ever found. I have to admit that seeing bones alone has never fully satisfied my curiosity about the creatures that walked the earth millions of years ago. However, seeing a fossilized foot, scales, and even a bit of skin is amazing. It gives a more complex picture of how this type of dinosaur once looked and lived. More. Here. See also: Dinosaur found with preserved tail feathers, skin

Down Graur, a critic of the ENCODE project, has doubled down on his statement that the genome is mostly non-functional. Graur has gone further to state that not only does he think that most of the genome is non-functional, he thinks that he has proven it to be a mathematical certainty.
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From ScienceDaily: The researchers discovered that wtf genes poison their prey. “The strategy that wtf selfish genes employ is to poison all the developing gametes, but then keep the antidote for themselves,” says Zanders, a Stowers assistant investigator. “The gametes that inherit the selfish genes are also exposed to the poison, but they don’t succumb to it because they have the antidote. And the gametes that don’t inherit the selfish gene are destroyed.” Zanders likens the mechanism to a dinner party in a murder mystery novel, in which everyone, including the host, is poisoned, but the host has the antidote. … The findings are particularly interesting from an evolutionary perspective, Zanders says. “The wtf genes make a poison that has Read More ›