Evolution

From Jessica Riskin at ABC: Since Weismann’s [a 19th century German biologist] refutation of Lamarckism was obviously false, you might think it couldn’t have had much influence. On the contrary. Weismann actually had a huge influence on Darwinism that has lasted until the present day. Today’s neo-Darwinists—people such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—are really Weismannians (in fact, Dawkins has called himself an ‘extreme Weismannian’). Even outside of evolutionary biology, some of the most influential thinkers and writers in biology and cognitive science today have adopted the Weismannian view that living organisms are essentially passive, made of dumb and inert mechanical parts. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker is an example: he has written that the human mind can be reduced to Read More ›

Michael Denton does not quarrel with common descent in principle but finds that there is no good evidence for the continuous series of small changes over time that Darwin’s theory of evolution requires. Rather, after summarizing the evidence in Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016), he writes, There is a tree of life. There is no doubt that all extant life forms are related and descended from a primeval ancestral form at the base of the tree. But there is no evidence to support the Darwinian claim that the tree is a functional continuum where it is possible to move from the base of te trunk to all the most peripheral branches in tiny incremental adaptive steps. On the Read More ›

From Nicholas Kristof at New York Times, who has just discovered  that most “liberals” don’t agree that close-mindedness is a bad thing (he wrote about it recently, and now follows up): Third, when scholars cluster on the left end of the spectrum, they marginalize themselves. We desperately need academics like sociologists and anthropologists influencing American public policy on issues like poverty, yet when they are in an outer-left orbit, their wisdom often goes untapped. In contrast, economists remain influential. I wonder if that isn’t partly because there is a critical mass of Republican economists who battle the Democratic economists and thus tether the discipline to the American mainstream. I’ve had scores of earnest conversations with scholars on these issues. Many Read More ›

Priceless: Perhaps no topic appears as potentially threatening to evangelicals as evolution. The very idea seems to exclude God from the creation the book of Genesis celebrates. Yet many evangelicals have come to accept the conclusions of science while still holding to a vigorous belief in God and the Bible. How did they make this journey? How did they come to embrace both evolution and faith? Here are stories from a community of people who love Jesus and honor the authority of the Bible, but who also agree with what science says about the cosmos, our planet and the life that so abundantly fills it. Among the contributors are Scientists such as … More. Just think. The rest of the Read More ›

At Hump of the Camel: Not that Denton’s thesis is entirely new. Perhaps the simplest summary is that it is a re-affirmation of his first book questioning the Neodarwinian Synthesis thirty years ago, now strengthened by much work in biology since, combined with a new structuralist viewpoint which he inherits from Richard Owen before and during Darwin’s time. I might add (because Denton doesn’t stress it) that structuralism – the idea that much of biological form depends on lawlike constraints, rather than adaptive contingency – was the prevalent theory of evolution, in the form of orthogenesis, at the time when Darwinism was found wanting in explanatory power at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was only the Neodarwinian Synthesis Read More ›

Well, this’ll be interesting. Darwin vs. Boyle. From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: — In an attempt to do damage control, one of the organizers of the Royal Society paradigm shift meeting (not Denis Noble) sent me an email, which follows, asking that I stop referring to the Royal Society meeting as such. Why? Because he speaks for scientists who think they can control the scientific discourse as it was controlled at the time of Darwin. They are embarrassed. They don’t want to be seen as sitting on scientific evidence and feeding the public old science — which they are — and so they circle the wagons and deride those outside the circle who dare to point out that there is Read More ›

After devastating extinction. From the Guardian: The discovery of a toothless animal with a short snout and a long tail that roamed the seas around 247 million years ago, suggests early marine reptiles evolved more rapidly than previously thought after the the most devastating mass extinction event the planet has ever experienced, scientists have revealed. Dubbed Sclerocormus parviceps, a name that nods to its rigid body and small skull, the ichthyosauriform was unearthed by fossil hunters in China. But its appearance has surprised researchers. Sclerocormus is lacking a host of features seen in closely related marine reptiles: many ichthyosaurs had a long snout, teeth and a tail with big fins – none of which are present in the new find. Read More ›

From Jonathan Webb at New Scientist: Ten years earlier again, Dawkins’ pioneering account of the “gene-centric” view of evolution, The Selfish Gene, also won huge acclaim. It crystallised an argument that had been brewing since Watson and Crick’s beautiful DNA structure marked a new peak in our understanding of inheritance: these sequences would tend to accumulate and propagate mutations that were beneficial to the gene itself. Any given gene “wants” to be passed on to as many future offspring as possible. Forty years on, however, this concept faces some opposition among today’s biologists. More. Um, now that you mention it … But Dawkins sees no need to rethink evolution in the light of modern developments: Perhaps the most popular challenge raised Read More ›

More on Doug Axe’s Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed: Undeniable will be published on July 12 by HarperOne, but you can pre-order before then and participate in an exclusive, private conference call with Dr. Axe and talk-show host Michael Medved. Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #12,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #2 in Books > Science & Math > Evolution > Organic #2 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology #3 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology > Creationism

From Arizona State University, a classic in propaganda masquerading as research: In a first-of-its kind study, scientists from Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences have found that a majority of professors teaching biology in Arizona universities do not believe that helping students accept the theory of evolution is an instructional goal. In fact, a majority of study participants say their only goal is to help students understand evolution. researchers at work School of Life Sciences assistant professor Sara Brownell (left) and graduate student Elizabeth Barnes are studying the perceived conflict in the classroom between evolution and religion. According to the study’s authors, this finding was surprising. The exploratory research, published May 18 in the scientific journal CBE—Life Sciences Education, Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: The Royal Society science office says the suspense will soon be over. It will announce presenter names/topics for the November evolution paradigm shift conference within two weeks — democratically, by email to all those registered to attend the public meeting. What’s more, it has added to its original list of invitees. Zoologists perhaps at last conceding viruses belong in the tent? More politics than the UN, one guesses. However, grumblings about paradigm shift are coming not only from “the enemies,” i.e., the usual suspects (who are likely to send their disruptive “representatives” to the London gathering) — but from more measured, responsible voices like Indiana University biologist Michael Lynch. Lynch recently responded to my Read More ›

Say Brian Boutwell and J.C. Barnes at Nautilus: That’s right, the most compelling evidence for transgenerational epigenetics is in rodents, not humans. We are fans of animal research, but as Pinker noted, the strengths of it (fast reproductive cycles allowing for the study of numerous generations in a short window of time) may also curtail its applicability to humans in this particular case. Additionally, scientists can randomly manipulate a rodent pup’s exposure to different parenting/rearing strategies. But doing this with human babies would never fly with a university ethics committee. When you can’t do experiments, you have to be very careful about something called confounding. Confounding is a pernicious problem that can make one thing look like it’s causing something Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers chart landscape of genetic, epigenetic regulation in plants New findings yield insights into how plants get their traits. Revealing a landscape of protein-binding zones on DNA, collectively dubbed the “cistrome,” shows how plants control where and when genes are expressed. Previous methods for mapping the cistrome in plant cells were difficult and slow, but the new approach, say authors, overcomes those hurdles to offer a sweeping view of this critical aspect of genetic regulation. … Lots of information in plant and animal cells is contained in “coding” stretches of DNA that have the instructions to make proteins, the physical workhorses of cells. But researchers are increasingly realizing that other sections of the genome have elements that control Read More ›

From the Guardian: Fossils from China are said to prove that multi-cellular organisms evolved as early as 1.5bn years ago – but some experts dismiss findings “Our discovery pushes back nearly one billion years the appearance of macroscopic, multi-cellular eukaryotes compared to previous research,” said Maoyan Zhu, a professor at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology. The fossils were uncovered in the Yanshan region of Hebei province in China. Zhu and colleagues said they had found 167 measurable fossils, a third of them in one of four regular shapes – an indication of complexity. The largest measured 30cm by 8cm. Taken together they were “compelling evidence for the early evolution of organisms large enough to be visible with the Read More ›

From an interesting 2013 paper: on peafowl courtship: Conspicuous, multicomponent ornamentation in male animals can be favored by female mate choice but we know little about the cognitive processes females use to evaluate these traits. Sexual selection may favor attention mechanisms allowing the choosing females to selectively and efficiently acquire relevant information from complex male display traits and, in turn, may favor male display traits that effectively capture and hold female attention. Using a miniaturized telemetric gaze-tracker, we show that peahens (Pavo cristatus) selectively attend to specific components of peacock courtship displays and virtually ignore other, highly conspicuous components. Females gazed at the lower train but largely ignored the head, crest and upper train. When the lower train was obscured, Read More ›