Evolution

Recently, a reader wrote to me concerning Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen. Reader asked, Concerning horseshoe crabs and coelecanths, could it be possible that marine-environment organisms are under less pressure to change/evolve than terrestrial organisms? I replied, — Thank you very much for your thoughts! You could of course be correct. And then we face several conceptual tasks prior to research: 1. Specifying testable hypotheses as to why the longest-conserved marine life forms were under less pressure to change/evolve. We must not fall into the trap of assuming that they must be under less pressure because they didn’t evolve. We don’t know for sure that pressure has much to do with it. That is, we assume Read More ›

‘Twas ever thus: A nasty little 66-million-year-old family secret has been leaked by a recently unearthed tyrannosaur bone. The bone has peculiar teeth marks that strongly suggest it was gnawed by another tyrannosaur. The find could be some of the best evidence yet that tyrannosaurs were not shy about eating their own kind. … Serrated teeth rule out crocodiles and point directly to a theropod dinosaur like T. rex. The fact that the only large theropods found in the Lance Formation are two tyrannosaurs –Tyrannosaurus rex or Nanotyrannus lancensis — eliminates all interpretations but cannibalism, explained McLain, who will be presenting the discovery on 1 Nov. at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Baltimore. … Even Read More ›

Here: Major scientists from a dozen countries present evidence that a paradigm shift is underway or has already taken place, replacing neo-Darwinism (the standard model of evolution based on natural selection following the accumulation of random genetic mutations) with a vastly richer evolutionary synthesis than previously thought possible. About The Author Suzan Mazur is the author of two previous books, The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry and The Origin of Life Circus: A How To Make Life Extravaganza. Her reports have appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Astrobiology, Connoisseur, Omni, Huffington Post, Progressive Review, CounterPunch, Scoop Media and other publications, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been Read More ›

Here: The issue is that most people understand common descent entirely from a Darwinian perspective. That is, they assume that the notion of natural selection and gradualism follow along closely to the notion of common descent. However, there is nothing that logically ties these together, especially if you allow for design. In Darwinism, each feature is a selected accident. Therefore, Darwinian phylogenetic trees often use parsimony as a guide, meaning that it tries to construct a tree so that complex features don’t have to evolve more than once. The ID version of common descent, however, doesn’t have to play by these rules. Okay, but first: The immense significance of genome mapping to discussions of common descent is not appreciated as Read More ›

Here: When performing the autopsy on the mummy, the team got a few hints as to what might have caused her untimely death. … Chagas disease, apparently. But When the researchers got to the gut of the body, they took every precaution to prevent contamination. Here they found that the gut was dominated by Clostridium species, while the paleofeces mainly consised of Turicibacter. In addition to this, they also found evidence of some strains of human papillomaviruses. But what surprised the researchers the most was the discovery of putative antibiotic resistant genes, like penicillin-binding proteins and multi-drug transporters that help shuttle compounds out of the cell. These findings suggest that the genes necessary for bacteria to resist antibiotics were already Read More ›

Darwinians must technically say no, as life is not about anything and does not progress to any purpose. But here are some predictions offered by Michael Ruse, Joseph Graves, Briana Pobiner, Stephen Stearns, and Chris Stringer: The scientists we spoke to uniformly withheld from making specific predictions, but they were all agreed that evolution hasn’t stopped. “It’s definitely happening,” asserts Professor Graves, “but as human beings, we’re not in a lab setting. There are just too many complexities to make a scientifically meaningful prediction.” So evolution is happening, they say. They also say there is no way to know. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: Ancient wild ox genome reveals complex cow ancestry The ancestry of domesticated cattle proves more complex than previously thought, reports a paper published in the open access journal Genome Biology. … The team of researchers discovered clear evidence of breeding between wild British aurochs and early domesticated cattle. David MacHugh, senior author on the study from the School of Agriculture and Food Science at University College Dublin, said: “Our results show the ancestors of modern British and Irish breeds share more genetic similarities with this ancient specimen than other European cattle. This suggests that early British farmers may have restocked their domesticated herds with wild aurochs.” More. Rob Sheldon writes, What is being done in this paper is Read More ›

At least, translated from Newspeak, that’s what this science PR seems to be saying: From ScienceDaily: Advances in genetic studies of birds are changing ornithology research Because high-throughput sequencing data looks at many genes instead of just a few, it makes it easier to identify very subtle genetic differences between populations, such as the genetics underlying small differences in plumage patterns between different subspecies of Wilson’s Warbler. It can also provide a fresh look at the genetic changes that occur in “hybrid zones,” where the ranges of closely related species overlap and members of the species breed freely with each other, such as where Black-capped and Carolina Chickadees meet in Pennsylvania. The process of one species splitting into two, such Read More ›

Note: This is a guest post by Virgil Cain. I have left it as is, with just a couple of typographical corrections. See my brief comments and caveats at the end. —– By Virgil Cain In 1997, “Not By Chance” by Lee Spetner was published. In it he argued for a “non-random evolutionary hypothesis” which had a mechanism of “built-in responses to environmental cues” at its heart. Some mutations happened just when they were needed. And some happened at just the right place to be effective. And even others, called transposons aka jumping genes, carried within its DNA coding sequence the coding for two of the enzymes required for it to be able to move around. A transposon has in Read More ›

From the Interface Focus special issue: ‘Are there limits to evolution?’, organized by Simon Conway Morris, Jennifer F. Hoyal Cuthill and Sylvain Gerber: Introduction is Open access: Abstract The 11 contributions to this thematic volume touch on a large range of issues concerning the landscape of biological possibilities and the manner by which it may be traversed by evolving life forms. The contributors also consider how this landscape might be mapped by evolutionary biologists, with an emphasis on how one might identify the limits of such maps. While some agreements emerge on the question of limits on evolution, not surprisingly few contributors look towards the same horizons. Rather than providing a potted summary of the 11 papers, our aim in Read More ›

 We asked them, and we learned a lot, including: Common ancestry was at one time mainly a religious dispute. Everyone thinks they know what happened at the iconic Scopes “Monkey” Trial (they don’t, actually). But now, since genome mapping became routine, the unthinkable has happened: Actual genomes do not demonstrate the Tree of Life in the neat and orderly way that underlies Darwinian accounts of evolution. They could hardly be expected to do so, given the creativity many life forms exhibit with their own genes via natural genetic engineering, horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and a crowd of other mechanisms. The Tree of Life has become a bush or a circle of life. Finally, when we add up all the demonstrable Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: One of biology’s long-standing puzzles is how so many similar species can co-exist in nature. Do they really all fulfill a different role? Massive data on beetles now provide strong evidence for the idea that evolution can drive species into groups of look-a-likes that are functionally similar. What does it mean to say that “evolution can drive species into” … Isn’t evolution just the sum total of what happens? For whatever reason, the article doesn’t use the term convergent evolution, though that is clearly what it is discussing: While it is clear that species fulfill many different roles in ecosystems, it has also been suggested that numerous species might actually share the same function in a near neutral Read More ›

One of the primary things keeping traditional evolutionary theory afloat is not the mountain of evidence supposedly existing in its favor, but the way in which the evidence is interpreted in the context of the pre-existing Darwinian paradigm. The key is the way evolutionary theorists tend to proceed from an observation to a series of conclusions. When you are steeped in evolutionary thought, when no alternative explanations are permitted as a matter of fiat, when the only possible interpretation open to you is a purely naturalistic and materialistic explanation, the conclusions seem to follow naturally. To paraphrase Philip Johnson’s wry (and somewhat sarcastic) observation: Evolution is really easy to prove. Since “evolution” means both tiny changes and the whole grand Read More ›

Strikes blow against “ominous specter of irreducible complexity” Archaeal ancestors of eukaryotes are not so elusive any more, says Eugene V. Koonin, Thus, eukaryotes show a qualitatively different level of cellular organization from that of archaea and bacteria, and there are no detectable evolutionary intermediates. Comparative analysis of eukaryotic cells and genomes indicates that the signature advanced functional systems of the eukaryotic cells were already present in the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA). These ancestral features include the actin and tubulin-based forms of cytoskeleton, the nuclear pore, the spliceosome, and the ubiquitin signaling network, to mention only several aspects of the inherent organizational complexity of eukaryotic cells [12]-[16]. The emergence of these fundamental facets of advanced cellular organization presents a Read More ›

A couple of weeks ago a friend forwarded me a link to this recent article about “ongoing research to record the interaction of environment and evolution” by University of California, Riverside biologist David Reznick. Reznick’s team has been studying adaptive changes in guppies. Reznick’s work focuses on tracking what happens in real-world situations in the wild, rather than the somewhat artificial environments in the lab. As a result, Reznick has gathered some of the more trustworthy and definitive data about changes over time in a real-world environment, largely free from the intervention and interference of the coated lab worker. The article states: The new work is part of research that Reznick has been doing since 1978. It involved transplanting guppies Read More ›