Evolution

From HarperCollins, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed (July 12) Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the “design intuition”—the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can only be accomplished by someone who has that knowledge. For the ingenious task of inventing life, this knower can only be God. Starting with the hallowed halls of academic science, Axe dismantles the widespread belief that Darwin’s theory of evolution is indisputably true, showing Read More ›

The following story is excerpted from chapter 2 of my new book Christianity for Doubters. As the title indicates, much of this book is explicitly theological, but the first two chapters are about intelligent design. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. In the current debate between Darwinism and intelligent design, the strongest argument made by Darwinists is this: in every other field of science, naturalism has been spectacularly successful, why should evolutionary biology be so different? Joseph Le Conte, professor of Geology and Natural History at the University of California, and (later) president of the Geological Society of America, provides an insight into the way most scientists think about evolution, in his 1888 book Evolution. In reviewing the Read More ›

Carl Woese (1928-2012), the discoverer of the third kingdom of life, the archaea, told Suzan Mazur that he felt Darwin had grabbed the spotlight, unearned: I’ve maintained for a long time up until the end of the 20th century that the problem of the evolutionary process is a problem before its time. Darwin was trying to get personal credit by barging in. Conceptual thought about evolution was laid down first by people like Buffon and Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin — whom Darwin never mentions in the Origin of Species, except in a footnote when he was forced in the third edition to add it to the footer of the preface. He named him in a dismissive way. He basically said, oh Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Venus flytraps have fascinated biologists for centuries, however, the molecular underpinnings of their carnivorous lifestyle remain largely unknown. Researchers have now characterized gene expression, protein secretion, and ultrastructural changes during stimulation of Venus flytraps and discover that common plant defense systems, which typically protect plants from being eaten, are also used by Venus flytraps for insect feeding. … “Contact with chitin normally means danger for a plant — that insects will eat the plant,” corresponding author Rainer Hedrich from the University of Würzburg said. Comparing the global gene expression changes during insect capture and digestion to the stress response of the model organism, Arabidopsis, the researchers found several commonalities. Jasmonic acid (JA), which is produced by non-carnivorous plants Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In 2014, scientists discovered a bizarre fossil–a crocodile-sized sea-dwelling reptile that lived 242 million years ago in what today is southern China. Its head was poorly preserved, but it seemed to have a flamingo-like beak. But in a paper published today in Science Advances, paleontologists reveal what was really going on–that “beak” is actually part of a hammerhead-shaped jaw apparatus, which it used to feed on plants on the ocean floor. It’s the earliest known example of an herbivorous marine reptile. … “It’s a very strange animal,” says Olivier Rieppel, Rowe Family Curator of Evolutionary Biology at The Field Museum in Chicago. “It’s got a hammerhead, which is unique, it’s the first time we’ve seen a reptile like Read More ›

From Washington Post: These ancient Asian primate fossils might be the missing pieces of a major evolutionary puzzle In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, Beard and his colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing report on an “incredible cache” of fossils from 10 previously unknown species uncovered in China’s Yunnan province. These fossils help illuminate a new story of our evolution: one in which our primate ancestors evolved in Asia, sailed across a narrow sea to Africa, then were pushed to extinction on their home continent because of drastic climate change. Some of the only primates that survived were the ones whose fossils were just uncovered — primitive creatures that were closer to lemurs than Read More ›

From “Intelligent Design: a Theological and Philosophical Analysis” by Erkki Vesa Rope Kojonen the Journal of Analytic Theology Abstract: “The “God of the gaps” critique is one of the most common arguments against design arguments in biology, but is also increasingly used as a critique of other natural theological arguments. In this paper, I analyze four different critiques of God of the gaps arguments and explore the relationship between gaps arguments and similar limit arguments. I conclude that the critique of the God of the gaps is substantially weaker than is commonly assumed, and dismissing ID́s biological arguments should rather be based on criticizing the premises of these arguments.” Full text. Good luck with that. The main purpose of God Read More ›

Structuralism is a reasonable approach to biology, according to which many patterns in life forms are not the result of Darwinian selection but rather underlying constraints of nature. Functionalism is best represented by Darwinism: The forms life takes are due to survival of the fittest. Contrary to what one hears from Darwinists, there are good arguments for structuralism. In terms of the debate between structuralists and functionalists, Denton is a structuralist. From Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016): Although this book is primarily a critique of Darwinian incremental functionalism, as was Evolution, it is also—much more than my original book—a systematic defense of typology. Obviously, if the Darwinian enterprise fails ad the taxa-defining homologs cannot be approached Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur’s The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin”: Scientists remain divided in their assessment of whether origin of life and evolution are linked. One investigator I’ve discussed this with for The Paradigm Shifters, Eugene Koonin, an expert in viruses and microbes, comments: “So, in a sense, you cannot help thinking the origin is a boundary, so there is something distinct in the origin problem from the rest of evolution.” Koonin also thinks paradigm shift is crucial since viruses and microbes, which transfer “genetic” information nonlinearly (non-Darwinian) and are the largest part of the biomass, were left out of the Modern Synthesis. And, says Koonin further, “in nature, any multicellular organism – animal, fungus, or Read More ›

There is a reason why explorers have always gone forth—they are rewarded. And so not surprisingly there have been many rewards for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Okeanos Explorer which is exploring the ocean floor, several miles beneath the surface, near the Marianas Trench. In this far away land the mission has found all manner of strange life forms never before seen. You can watch the video live and, as one report put it, “The video makes for strangely addicting viewing. There’s a constant cliffhanger: What will they find next?”  Read more

From Sarah Emerson at Motherboard: A team of geneticists from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine and the Centre for Genomic Regulation discovered that several billion years ago, the genetic code reached a point of self-preservation. Namely, it could continue evolving and risk mutating the building blocks of life it was responsible for creating, or it could remain limited, albeit functional. That was a really big decision an the genetic code must have been really mature to make it. Explorations into both primordial history and our genetically altered future can open the door for exciting innovations in the field of genetics. Evolution’s successes and failures can tell us more about our tenure as a species than any science-fiction manifesto. But Read More ›

The toxic and invasive cane toad (fossil found from Miocene era, 23 to 5 mya) is offered as an example. From ScienceDaily: The researchers looked at over 600 species from all classes of vertebrates worldwide and did a phylogenetic analysis to consider the evolutionary relationships between species. They tested for an effect on geographic location; reproduction mode; newborn dependence behavior; body size; and color variations between individuals of the same species. They found that species with varying colored individuals; those that give birth to live young; and/or those that live at low latitudes, were the most resilient to past environmental changes. Species found at higher latitudes tended to be younger because extinction rates are greater at high latitudes, while low Read More ›

To avoid controversy. No guff. As Suzan Mazur, author of The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin,” tells it at Huffington Post: The Big Questions are these: What exactly is the extended evolutionary synthesis (“ES”) John Templeton Foundation has recently funded with $8M (and $3M more going to ES from institutional contributions)? What good is an extended synthesis without the largest part of the biosphere — viruses — factored in? Why fund now, when ES has been kicking around ever since it was born at “Altenberg!“ eight years ago? Paul Wason, Science and Religion chief at Templeton simply won’t say, declining my request for an interview and emailing that he “would prefer not to be involved Read More ›

Wow. Nicholas Baumard here: Christianity’s success is often attributed to its supposedly unique message. Unlike earlier religions, it exhorted people to be good and promised to reward them for their goodness in the afterlife. That is still how most people conceptualise the Christian message: helping others, working hard, controlling one’s sexuality and believing that people who don’t do so will be punished. In other words, a moralising religion. More (paywall) . If Baumard and NS got everything about Christianity so wrong in the second free paragraph (and the topic was their choice), one can hardly recommend paying to read the rest and finding out what “evolution” has to do with it. The main selling point of Christianity through the ages Read More ›

From Michael Denton, in Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016): Incongruous thought it might seem (in the context of the evolutionary propaganda machine and especially to a reader outside of academia), it remains true, as I point out in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), that the vast majority of all taxa are indeed defined by novelties without any antecedent in any presumed ancestral forms. The empirical facts make it possible—to paraphrase Dawkins—to be an intellectually satisfied typologist. (p. 56) The vast majority of Westerners are educated under the loving guidance of pressure groups for Darwin and, as with so many other things, they would be very surprised to know the extent to which it hangs together but just Read More ›