Evolution

From ScienceDaily: The maneuvers of flying insects are unmatched by even the best pilots, and this might be due to the fact that these critters don’t obey the same aerodynamic laws as airplanes, a team of New York University researchers has found. “We’ve known for quite a while that the aerodynamic theory for airplanes doesn’t work so well in predicting the force of lift for flapping wings,” says Leif Ristroph, an assistant professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences who directed the study. “We found that the drag or wind resistance also behaves very differently, and we put together a new law that could help explain how insects move through the air.” “To double its flight speed, an airplane Read More ›

Someone found out that lichens involve more than one fungus with the algae?: “The findings overthrow the two-organism paradigm,” says Sarah Watkinson from the University of Oxford. “Textbook definitions of lichens may have to be revised.” “It makes lichens all the more remarkable,” adds Nick Talbot from the University of Exeter. “We now see that they require two different kinds of fungi and an algal species. If the right combination meet together on a rock or twig, then a lichen will form, and this will result in the large and complex plant-like organisms that we see on trees and rocks very commonly. The mechanism by which this symbiotic association occurs is completely unknown and remains a real mystery.” More. If that’s Read More ›

At “New Scientist peddles Darwinism even now. Weeds grow,” we learned, The work of Charles Darwin showed, irrefutably, that humans are just another animal occupying a small branch on a vast tree of life. No divine spark is needed to explain our existence and traits. bornagain77 writes, Perhaps by irrefutable proof’ he means the fact that Darwinian evolution is impervious to falsification by empirical evidence since it has no demarcation criteria based in mathematics to make it scientific? With no demarcation criteria you simply can’t straight out refute Darwinian evolution by empirical observation! i.e. it is irrefutable! Yes. And in sociologist Steve Fuller‘s memorable phrase, Darwinism is beginning to collapse into the mess that floored astrology. It is principally a Read More ›

  People know American author Tom Wolfe best for Bonfire of the Vanities and Radical Chic. He coined phrases for people who sense that something is wrong with the decades-long descent. Many probably don’t know that he doubted Darwin’s hegemony would last ages before the Royal Society began to wonder. He gave it forty years. A trend spotter, he has a nose for that kind of thing. From his forthcoming book promo, The Kingdom of Speech: The maestro storyteller and reporter provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong. Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. THE KINGDOM OF SPEECH Read More ›

From Economist: The two researchers therefore looked at samples of sea-floor sediment taken from a site on Blake Ridge in the north-western Atlantic Ocean. They knew from the work of others that some foram shells in this sediment have remained translucent while others have become opaque, permitting the two sorts from the same sedimentary layer to be compared and contrasted. The contrasts, they found, are huge. Radiocarbon dating suggests the opaque shells are a lot older than the translucent ones. In one sample, collected from a depth of 71-73cm below the sea floor, the translucent shells clocked in as being between 14,030 and 17,140 years old, while the opaque shells seemed to be aged between 26,120 and 32,580 years. Another Read More ›

At Phys.Org there is an article describing the work of some scientists with the “chordate” Oikopleura dioica which does not have the genes for Retinoic Acid (RA), which all other chordates have. RA is a form of Vitamin A and is needed in the development of the heart. In this organism, the heart develops but without the presence of RA. How can this happen? Answer: “Regressive Evolution.” All the genes for RA have been lost, and lost in a non-random fashion. You would be hard-pressed to identify the above organism (a planktonic organism) as a “chordate,” but developmentally, it is one—you know, the chordate “body-plan” allows it to be identified as one. Now, this O. dioica cannot be the LCA Read More ›

Recently, one of our star commenters, Sandwalk’s Larry Moran, mooted that the Royal Society meeting on assessing where we are with evolution maybe should be cancelled. Then he said he doesn’t want it to be cancelled but “they may cancel the meeting because the IDiots and the kooks are gloating about destroying evolution.” We hadn’t heard much from people who are gloating about destroying evolution but we’ve heard plenty from people who can do without the Darwin lobby running the field into the ground. Some of the episodes we’ve noted are pretty crazy. The University of Kentucky had to settle with astronomer Martin Gaskell for $125,000 because one of his colleagues was obsessing with a Darwin-in-the-schools lobbyist about his possible support Read More ›

From National Geographic: New research published in Behavioral Ecology suggests that the small reef fish, no more than three inches long, may switch sex roles with their partner up to 20 times each day. Chalk bass use a reproductive strategy known as “egg trading,” wherein they subdivide their daily egg clutch into “parcels” and alternate sex roles with their mating partner throughout a sequence of spawning bouts. More. This suggests that what sex even is in the fish is different from what we find in mammals or birds. See also: Can sex explain evolution?

In response to a claim at New York Times that there is no scientific method. From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: There are lots of different ways to do science that are equally valid; one scientific method does not necessarily fit all cases. In astronomy, experiments are virtually impossible, as all you can do is make observations of what the Universe gives us. In the early days of quantum physics, the results were so surprising that it took many years before it was even possible to hypothesize in a sensible fashion, as the rules defied intuition. And in many fields, there are too many variables at play to accurately model the system even when all the underlying, governing equations are 100% Read More ›

Further to Larry Moran wants Royal Society evo meeting cancelled!, here’s what he said: It looks to me like the organizers of this meeting didn’t think very carefully about the can of worms they were opening. When you have speakers like Denis Noble and Jim Shapiro you are just inviting trouble. When you try to lecture Suzan Mazur about paradigm shifting you are bound to regret it. I’m beginning to think this meeting isn’t going to happen. The Royal Society is going to end up looking very bad and there’s no easy way to fix the problem short of cancelling the meeting. More. Now he insists he doesn’t want the meeting cancelled. Larry Moran (me) does not want the meeting Read More ›

PZ Myers is incensed at the publication of a Bible tract by Ray Comfort, who argues that it’s just as absurd to believe that the human body evolved by chance as it is to believe that chance processes could generate a can of Coke, such as the one pictured above (public domain image, courtesy of Wikipedia). Over at Pharyngula, Myers wastes no time in demolishing this argument: The thing is, we know how coke cans (and bible tracts) are made: these are objects that are constructed by human beings. They do not have an independent capability to replicate. We also know that that is not how biological organisms are made. If we see something like, say, a rabbit, we know Read More ›

From Discovery Institute: As Americans celebrate their country’s freedom this week, a new survey reveals that an overwhelming 93 percent of American adults agree that “teachers and students should have the academic freedom to objectively discuss both the scientific strengths and weaknesses of the theory of evolution.” And 88 percent agree that “scientists who raise scientific criticisms of evolution should have the freedom to make their arguments without being subjected to censorship or discrimination.” More. Some of us wonder at times about the use of the term “dissent,” as if it were something special. Dissent is, in general, evidence of thinking. There is little dissent among a herd of cows about anything that pertains to being a cow. See also: Read More ›

At his blog Sandwalk, one of our favourite commenters, Larry Moran, who has wracked up a ton of loyalty points in terms of free ID literature, points out that various people have made a mistake in writing to Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, complaining about the Royal Society’s go-slow on the new reno (Darwin replacement). It looks to me like the organizers of this meeting didn’t think very carefully about the can of worms they were opening. When you have speakers like Denis Noble and Jim Shapiro you are just inviting trouble. When you try to lecture Suzan Mazur about paradigm shifting you are bound to regret it. I’m beginning to think this meeting isn’t going to happen. The Read More ›

In an attempt to frustrate rethinking evolution. From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: Six months after announcing the November 2016 Royal Society evolution meeting on this page and a half dozen or so stories later, over one-third of the seats for the event still remain vacant — and the tickets are free! But that’s easily explained, because the zoologists ultimately decided to “hog” the show. It didn’t have to be so. A lineup of speakers who truly represent the paradigm shift underway in evolution science would have quickly filled up the house. Instead, organizers went with essentially an evo-devo reunion on plasticity and niche construction — rehashed themes of Altenberg! from eight years ago minus most of the stars of Read More ›

From Phil Plait at Slate: I was wrong. I underestimated just how thoroughly the GOP had salted the Earth. Philosophical party planks of climate change denial, anti-evolution, anti-intellectualism, intolerance, and more have made it such that Trump can literally say almost anything, and it hardly affects his popularity.More. Izzatso? Trump was the first candidate in modern history to exploit the fact that no one now cares what legacy media, including Slate, think. When I travel the Toronto-Ottawa rail corridor in Canada, almost everyone is using a handheld to reach whoever or whatever they want anywhere on the planet. That can’t be stuffed back into a bottle. Trump spent almost nothing on publicity, trusting that the full pack cry against him Read More ›