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Evolutionary biology

Dinosaurs from birds?

How well neoDarwinian evolution is established and the universal “consensus” over it is demonstrated by:
Bird-from-Dinosaur Theory of Evolution Challenged: Was It the Other Way Around?

ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2010) — A new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides yet more evidence that birds did not descend from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs, experts say, and continues to challenge decades of accepted theories about the evolution of flight. Read More ›

How were RNA gene repeats, “essential” to DNA repair, formed?

RNA replications have now been discovered to be “essential” to DNA error correction systems. If they are “essential”, how could they arrive by random mutation and “selection”? On what basis does neoDarwinism predict error correction in the first place?

From Intelligent Design, methodology one expects to see evidence of design in complex biochemical systems. From engineering design, I posit a foundational ID principle to be:
“Design systems to protect their design” Read More ›

California Lawmaker demands answers over museum censorship

Apparently round two of the controversy over the California’s Science Center’s cancellation of Darwin’s Dilemma is getting ready to take place. This was reported and discussed here back in October, as well as here and here in December.

Now, a California State Senator is calling the constitutionality of the censorship into question. Read More ›

Why anyone takes evolutionary biology seriously after this, I will never know …

I mean this: A complete inability to predict anything, using current assumptions. I am not saying it’s not worthwhile. Mental health studies may be worthwhile too, even if you can’t predict when someone goes postal …. It’s another thing for people to use laws to force this stuff on the school system. Remember, the One Big Rule is: There is no design in nature. Design in nature: Precisely what most people believe and most evolutionary biology tax burdens* deny. *tax burden – a legacy from the days when being a professor meant that a guy knew something, so people helped pay his salary through their taxes. It is becoming less and less obvious that this is a good proposition. Note: Read More ›

Editing the Tape of Evolutionary History Yet Again

The late Stephen J. Gould once wrote “Replay the tape [of evolution] a million times from a Burgess [the Burgess Shale fossils]beginning, and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.” (Gould, Stephen J. [Professor of Zoology and Geology, Harvard University], “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History,” [1989], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.289. Well, maybe we wont’ have to replay the tape, because the tape of evolutionary history is getting replayed all the time, in the sense that lately it seems that every new discovery forces a complete re-write (re-wind?) of evolutionary history. Now we have a recent fossil discovery about to be reported in Nature shows that tetrapods may have crawled out of the seas way earlier than previously thought.

According to the article Read More ›

More coffee!! Your doctor needs to know what would have worked for someone’s hypothetical reconstruction of Stone Age man before she can treat you effectively …

Apparently, evolutionary biologists/psychologists (if there is any difference, I would be glad to know*) are trying to get jobs adding to the cost burden of medical schools, fronting their speculations to doctors in training, a friend advises. See this story by Daniel Cressey (“Groups say med school training must evolve,” Nature Medicine 15, 1338 (2009) doi:10.1038/nm1209-1338a, paywall, of course):

Medical training must adapt to include coursework covering evolutionary biology, according to a group of leading researchers.Momentum for such change seems to be building.

I bet. In an age of skepticism about all the nonsense evolutionary biologists front, they need to attach themselves to a system that people are still willing to fund.

“The case for ensuring that physicians and medical researchers are able to use evolutionary biology just as fully as other basic sciences is compelling,” says Randolph Nesse, of the University of Michigan, lead author of the paper. “The constraints that inhibit change are severe, however. Most medical schools do not have a single evolutionary biologist on the faculty.”

Nesse’s paper cites examples of where evolutionary knowledge can benefit those working in medicine. An awareness of why humans have evolved the fever response, for example, could help doctors understand when it is safe to use drugs to block fever.

Rubbish. Pharmaceutical studies on living patients in real time do that. No one proposes to give the drugs to Old Stone Age Man, but rather to a toddler, an overworked near-retirement executive, or a frail older senior. The latter two would not even have been alive in the Old Stone Age.

As I have written to friends, Read More ›