Evolutionary biology

Here is the abstract from a Nature Review: Genetics paper:

The recent increase in genomic data is revealing an unexpected perspective of gene loss as a pervasive source of genetic variation that can cause adaptive phenotypic diversity. This novel perspective of gene loss is raising new fundamental questions. How relevant has gene loss been in the divergence of phyla? How do genes change from being essential to dispensable and finally to being lost? Is gene loss mostly neutral, or can it be an effective way of adaptation? These questions are addressed, and insights are discussed from genomic studies of gene loss in populations and their relevance in evolutionary biology and biomedicine.

Many years ago, I predicted that modern genome sequencing would eventually prove one side of the argument to be right. This review article indicates that ID is the correct side of the argument. What they describe is essentially what ID scientist, Michael Behe, has termed the “First Principle of Adaptation.” (Which says that the organism will basicaly ‘break something’ or remove something in order to adapt) This paper ought to be the death-knell of Darwinism, and, of course, “neo-Darwinism,” but, even the authors who report this new “perspective” have not changed their Darwinian perspective. Somehow, they will find a way to tell us that the Darwinian ‘narrative’ always had room in it for this kind of discovery. As Max Planck said, and I paraphrase, “a theory does not prove itself right; it’s just that the scientists who opposed it eventually die.” Read More ›

Former Templeton Fellow John Fellow asserts: Why Teleology Isn’t Dead

Conway Morris argues that in the grand scheme, evolution will not be reduced to chance: constraints built into life at the most fundamental level guarantee that life is going to follow the same evolutionary pathways to achieve limbs, respiration, vision, balance, an immune system, indeed all the remarkable features we associate with living things across the great spectrum of life.

Morris begs the question by assuming a stochastic origin of these “constraints built into life”. 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

My friend Steve used to have an old Pontiac that was in shambles. Somewhere along the line the front bumper had fallen off, and somebody welded on an I-beam as a replacement. It was a rust bucket that was literally falling apart, but the funny things was, that old car just kept on running, seemingly on inertia. A hose might spring a leak or a belt might snap, but it kept on running. Steve’s Pontiac had become a fixture—for better or worse, it had been running for decades and it was unbelievable that it would ever stop. Why breakdown now, it could always run one more day.  Read more

There has been a great deal of controversy recently regarding the theory of structuralism, which has been defended by Dr. Michael Denton in his new book, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis and attacked by Professor Larry Moran over at his Sandwalk blog (see here, here, here and here). Evolution News and Views has several articles defending Dr. Denton’s views (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). Let me say at the outset that I have not yet read Dr. Denton’s latest book, which has been reviewed by Barry Arrington here. Rather than reviewing Dr. Denton’s work, my aim in today’s post is to summarize its central thesis, discuss its significance for how scientists should do biology, Read More ›

I finished reading Provine’s last book a few weeks ago, and have meant to post something about it ever since.

In his book, The ‘Random Genetic Drift’ Fallacy, Provine hammers his main thesis over and over: that is, that genetic changes in small populations occur not because of “random genetic drift,” but because of “inbreeding.”

The entire book is meant to show that the entirety of population genetics is based on a basic misunderstanding by Sewell Wright of what was happening in populations, a misunderstanding that allowed R.A. Fisher’s analysis to prevail, a model of alleles mutating around a specific gene location, or locus, which, IIRC, he called F.
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A new study is out here. They were studying epigenetic effects in planaria flatworms. Same planaria, three different “species”-level “heads” were regenerated. Of course, everything must have an “evoltuion-did-it” explanation; so, for the record, here it is: The ease with which a particular shape could be coaxed from a G. dorotocephala worm was proportional to the proximity of the target worm on the evolutionary timeline. The closer the two species were related, the easier it was to effect the change. This observation strengthens the connection to evolutionary history, suggesting that modulation of physiological circuits may be one more tool exploited by evolution to alter animal body plans. However, there is more to mull over: Working with Girardia dorotocephala – free-living 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 UNZ, alternative media: The Jerry Coyne Retirement Jerry Coyne, an eminent evolutionary geneticist and all around public intellectual, is retiring, and has posted a bitter sweet and hopeful farewell letter to his conventional scientific career. For the general public Coyne is probably more famous as a New Atheist, though Coyne is actually a vocal atheist of long standing. His most recent book was on that topic, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible. I’m an atheist, but on the balance I demur form many of his positions in regards to religion and science. More precisely, I am quite willing to defend atheism and dismiss religion, but on philosophical or meta-scientific grounds, not scientific grounds as such. More. Read More ›

Further to Origin of complex cells: Can energy create information? (Lane seems to think that energy can create or substitute for huge amounts of information. This seems wrong but it is apparently acceptable to The Scientist, Rob Sheldon, noting that reader’ thoughts were solicited, writes to say, In thermodynamics, we have the fundamental thermodynamic relation or defining equation dU = dQ + dW = TdS – PdV, where U=internal energy, Q=heat, W=work, T=temperature,S=entropy, P=pressure, V=volume, and “d” means “the change of”. In a closed system that is “reversible” , (no eddies, turbulence etc) and the volume doesn’t change much (incompressible like water), then we can eliminate the work and get the equation dQ = TdS, which is to say, the Read More ›

Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, recently interviewed Eibi Nevo (86), at Huffington Post. She notes that Nevo largely agrees with post-Darwinian James Shapiro, who, in James Barham’s words, stresses the importance of a key concept for understanding how both life and evolution work—“natural genetic engineering.” While the technical details of this phenomenon can be forbidding, the basic idea is simple enough. In a nutshell, the phrase “natural genetic engineering” refers to cells’ ability to “reprogram” their genomes as necessary—that is to say, purposefully—in order to meet changed environmental conditions. Among many other things, Nevo, Eviatar Nevo’s professional publications include 1,200 scientific articles and 24 books. He’s discovered hundreds of animal species, 77 different Dead Sea mushrooms, Read More ›

From Ediacaran period (635 to 542 million years ago) fossils in Newfoundland: Apparently asexual reproduction that the researchers compare to that of plants (though it’s unclear that other branches of life cannot do this). So it appears, here: A significant fossil find on the Newfoundland coastline could shed light on what may be the oldest physical evidence of reproduction in a complex organism. A team led by researchers from England’s University of Cambridge found the fossils in the Trinity Bay North area. The new fossils were estimated to be 565 million years old and belonged to Fractofusus, a type of rangeomorph. Rangemorphs, marine organisms that looked a bit like ferns, were some of the earliest complex organisms on Earth. Earlier life Read More ›

Friends write to say that Darwinian evolutionary biologist (retired) William B. Provine has written a book , The “Random Genetic Drift” Fallacy (2014): Much of my life has been devoted to the history of population genetics. My early book was my Ph.D. thesis still in print: The Origins of Theoretical Populations Genetics (1971, 2nd edition, 1991). I stated in the 2nd edition in the Afterword that “random genetic drift” was giving me pause, as does the evolutionary synthesis. My later book was Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (1986) and is also still in print. Now I am writing this book against “random genetic drift,” invented by R. A. Fisher and followed by Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane. “Random Read More ›

I spend a bit of time teaching and talking to junior-high and high-schoolers, especially homeschool students. One of the things that I try to teach them is how to approach teachers who are Darwinists when they get to college. Anyway, I though some readers might be students and might appreciate the advice. Obviously, this is not gospel-truth, but it might give you a place to start from.
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There are many ID’ers who complain about the AVIDA simulation, and I for the life of me can’t figure out why this is so.
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