Evolution

Last night we noted that even New Scientist now seems to accept that it’s time to rethink how evolution works. The author of the New Scientist article is St. Andrews’ Kevin Laland, whose 2015 paper (with colleagues) is here (public access): Scientific activities take place within the structured sets of ideas and assumptions that define a field and its practices. The conceptual framework of evolutionary biology emerged with the Modern Synthesis in the early twentieth century and has since expanded into a highly successful research program to explore the processes of diversification and adaptation. Nonetheless, the ability of that framework satisfactorily to accommodate the rapid advances in developmental biology, genomics and ecology has been questioned. We review some of these Read More ›

But that is ridiculous. No, we don’t mean New Scientist-type ridiculous. We mean serious ridiculous. Stuff we can’t just ignore. New Scientists, get back to your script! You’re supposed to be explaining why Darwinism prevents a plague of disembodied space brains from taking over the world and why information is physical. Whatever happened to the days when we could raise money just by fronting all the nonsense you people put forward? It’s fundraising season! Look. We’ll even give the New Scientist employees a bonus if they can come up with another completely risible idea. But now look at how far they may have strayed beyond the selfish gene: From Kevin Laland, For more than 150 years it has been one Read More ›

Our valued contributor Niwrad send in this post, on recent claims that cancer disproves ID: — Evolutionism is systematic negation of reality and inversion of truth. So we must be prepared to listen to ever more unbelievable things from evolutionists. Here I will examine an example that seems particularly meaningful. Cancer has universally been considered to be biological degeneration. Something in the cellular machinery goes wrong, a proliferation of defective cells grows, leading to a destructive dynamic in the diseased organism. It all starts in the genome, so cancer is an issue of bio-informatics, of programming. In fact, we learned recently that “Microsoft will ‘solve’ cancer within 10 years by ‘reprogramming’ diseased cells.” Conceptually, bugs that start the cancer appear Read More ›

Further to Goalposts? What goalposts? From Evolution News & Views: Computer Scientist Joshua Swamidass Argues: Cancer “Casts Serious Doubt” on Intelligent Design In what way does cancer, a destructive disease, have anything to do with evolving new species? Cancer involves single cells, not whole organisms, and it doesn’t build new features, it tears down existing ones. The argument from cancer doesn’t hold up. It doesn’t even make sense. “If many ID arguments in molecular biology were true, then cancer as we know it would be mathematically impossible,” writes Swamidass. Either that or it would “regularly require the direct intervention of God to initiate and be sustained.” Not at all. “Things fall apart.” That is the natural way, which needs no evolutionary Read More ›

Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, offers a response to a claim by Washington University (St. Louis) Joshua Swamidass that design in nature cannot be demonstrated (here.): He [Swamidass], like most others, chooses willfully to equivocate on the term and repeatedly move the goal posts. Goalposts? Who told Rossiter there were goalposts? Swamidass writes, “Rather, if specific mechanisms of evolution are true, they make testable predictions about how biological systems behave today. We can test these predictions in biological systems experimentally, and there is an immense body of work that does just this, finding that predictions from some mechanisms are wrong (e.g. neo-Darwinian positive-selection dominated change) and of others are correct (e.g. neutral Read More ›

Imagine if atheistic materialism was actually true and humans are nothing more than biological automatons – complexly programmed and reactive robots that behave and think in whatever manner happenstance chemical interactions dictates at any given time.  Let’s think about what would actually mean. There would be no way for a biological automaton to determine whether or not any statement was in fact true or not since all conclusions are driven by chemistry and not metaphysical “truth” values; indeed, a biological automaton reaches conclusion X for exactly the same reason any other reaches conclusion Y; chemistry.  If chemistry dictates that 1+1=banana, that is what a “person” will conclude. If chemistry dictates they defend that view to the death and see themselves Read More ›

Before we get back to our sober coverage, from Ewen Callaway at Scientific American: Geneticists have traced the history of beer’s most important ingredient: yeast. By sequencing the genomes of nearly 200 modern strains of brewer’s yeast, the research reveals how, over hundreds of years, humans transformed the wild fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae into a variety of strains tuned for particular tipples. An evolutionary tree of the yeast strains revealed distinct families of yeast used for making wine, bread and saké, and two distantly related groups of ale yeast, including strains from Belgium, Germany, Britain and the United States. More. Genomics will be used to produce new strains. Evolution goes really fast when there is design and purpose involved. And who Read More ›

From the conclusion of Douglas Axe’s Undeniable: That the deepest questions in biology have not yet been answered means they are still asking to be answered. Anyone who cares to examine the facts carefully will see that the old answers were wrong. They have now been erased, in our minds anyway, and we must sit down to take the test again, with new minds and new resolve. Having learned much since Darwin’s day, we have every reason for optimism this time. Speaking as a scientist, I can’t think of a more attractive message to convey to young people of technical ability. Speaking as a human, though, I see something even more beautiful. Yes, the deepest questions in the scientific study Read More ›

Here: Science has made great strides in modeling space, time, mass and energy. Yet little attention has been paid to the precise representation of the information ubiquitous in nature. Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics fuses results from complexity modeling and information theory that allow both meaning and design difficulty in nature to be measured in bits. Built on the foundation of a series of peer-reviewed papers published by the authors, the book is written at a level easily understandable to readers with knowledge of rudimentary high school math. Those seeking a quick first read or those not interested in mathematical detail can skip marked sections in the monograph and still experience the impact of this new and exciting model of nature’s Read More ›

Okay, dead leaves: See also: A moth’s wings feature two flies picking at a pile of bird dropping. It should be harder to be a Darwinist than our culture makes it. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: This week in the journal Nature, a team of researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom shows that fossils of the 360 million-year-old tetrapod Acanthostega, one of the iconic transitional forms between fishes and land animals, are not adults but all juveniles. This conclusion, which is based on high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scans of fossil limb bones performed at the ESRF sheds new light on the life cycle of Acanthostega and the so-called conquest of land by tetrapods. The tetrapods are four-limbed vertebrates, which are today represented by amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Early tetrapods of the Devonian period (419-359 million years ago) Read More ›

From Michael Greshko at National Geographic: That fossil, recently described in Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments, is only the second of its kind ever found, revealing three levels of an ancient food chain nested one inside the other in paleontology’s version of Russian nesting dolls—or its culinary equivalent, a turducken. More. This is interesting but what is even more interesting is when life forms choose to live inside other life forms, abandoning machinery that creates independence—devolution: Sometimes, devolution offers an apparent advantage. Many plankton microbes eliminated the genes for producing key vitamins, and now outsource the function. One account suggests, “… most of the time, the fitness advantages of smaller genomes and lower cell replicating costs offset the potential fitness gains that Read More ›

From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary for survival, but also the evolution of animals. Today the so-called animal kingdom is an animal colony and we own it. It exists only at our sufferance. If we were foolish enough and could get the cooperation of people all over the earth, in six months we could exterminate every animal that sticks up more than a half inch above the ground. Already all cattle, chickens, and sheep in the world and the vast majority of pigs, horses, and turkeys—we hold the whole huge gaggle of them captive, all of them… to do with as we wish. (pp 262-263, Read More ›

Again: From Science 2.0: Redefining Homo — Does Our Family Tree Need More Branches? … Is it brain size; limb, hand and foot proportions; the ability to communicate or use tools? How do the added complexities of new Homo species found in Asia further rewrite the history of the genus and other hominins? In the September issue, EARTH Magazine delves into the challenges that have arisen as scientists still ask, “What makes a human, human?” Read at: http://bit.ly/2bC63Yf.More. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: The take-home points from this review are that the sex difference in sports interest is (1) substantial and widespread, (2) partly due to evolutionary pressures that differentially affected males and females, and (3) unlikely to be fully overturned by socialization. These points challenge the bedrock assumptions of many scholars and policy makers. Most notably, Title IX is a U.S. law that prohibits sexual discrimination in educational opportunities, including sports, and Title IX is generally implemented under the assumption that females’ sports interest is intrinsically equal to that of males. The present research indicates that this implementation may require revision. More. (paywall) Paper. – Robert O. Deaner, Shea M. Balish, Michael P. Lombardo. Sex differences in sports interest and Read More ›