Evolutionary biology

Bacteria demonstrate intra-species communication that is species specific using a partner with a communication molecule. Bacteria are also “multilingual” with a generic trade language for interspecies communication. Bacteria control tasks by signal producing and receiving receptors with a signal carrier. The tasks bacteria conduct depend on the concentration they sense of self bacteria versus generic species concentration. e.g. Bacteria control pathogenicity with quorum sensing. The detailed (small) sRNA required for these control mechanisms is now beginning to be desciphered. See below. Question:
Did bacteria “invent” their communication and control methods via evolutionary stochastic processes?
Or do these constitute Complex Specified Information and thus evidence design? Read More ›

In today’s Phys.Org news page, we hear about a three nucleotide change in the organism “Trypanosoma brucei, a parasite that causes sleeping sickness in Africa and Chagas disease in Latin America.” Immediately after “transcription”, via a completely unknown mechanism, a three nucleotide portion of the intron associated with …… is replaced by three different nucleotides. Here’s what they say: “These are changes for which no chemistry is known and has never been described. We don’t know what enzyme is involved and that is the million-dollar question: What mechanism is doing this? We haven’t a clue,” said Juan Alfonzo, professor of microbiology at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study. . . . . Alfonzo sought to identify Read More ›

While having lunch at ICC 2013 with biologist and genetic engineer Robert Carter and the unnamed evolutionary biologist who got laughed off stage (let us call him Erik), I raised a question which the evolutionary biologist and other Darwinists (including Michael Lynch) have not provided satisfactory answers for, namely, “what is the evolutionary simulation that will resolve problems of speed limits of evolution, cost of substitution, rate of substitution, neutral evolution, Haldane’s dilemma, Muller’s ratchet, Haldane’s ratchet, Kondrashov’s question, mutational meltdown, etc?” John Sanford, Walter ReMine, John Baumgardner, Wes Brewer, Paul Gibson, Robert Carter, others created Mendel’s Accountant. Erik kept lambasting the program, “did you model recombination, do you model variable population sizes, do you model linkage, synergistic epistasis, truncation Read More ›

On August 6th, Steven Pinker, the well-known Psychology Professor from Harvard, had an article in New Republic entitled Science is Not Your Enemy, in which he lambasts those who decry scientists for propounding scientism.  You’d expect rebuttals of Pinker to come from the likes of Wesley J. Smith who indeed took Pinker to task in an article in National Review Online, which we discussed here at UD as well.  You wouldn’t expect attack from your own side, however, but that is precisely what P.Z. Myers has done on his popular anti-ID blogsite Pharyngula in a post entitled Repudiating scientism, rather than surrendering to it.  Never one to mince words, PZ launches right in: When I heard that Steven Pinker had Read More ›

Over at his Why Evolution is True website, the infamous Jerry Coyne has given his lame excuses for not wanting to take up a genuine offer from ENV’s David Klinghoffer to debate and discuss Steve Meyer’s latest Book Darwin’s Doubt as well as discussing anything else Darwin related.  In his “I’m too busy and important to do that’ rant he writes: You ID advocates can also make your case, but the website rules are that we can then ask, before you post further, about your evidence for God The Intelligent Designer. This is the last time I’ll be engaging the Discovery Institute directly on these issues. DIers are not scientists but religious zealots concealing clerical collars beneath threadbare lab coats. I Read More ›

In the comments of this UD post from yesterday, (comment #21) I referred to Nick Matzke’s rant over at the Panda’s Thumb yesterday as yet another illustration of the double standard’s Matzke’s has when it comes to his critiques of anyone who dares challenge Darwinian Orthodoxy.  In my comments yesterday, I gave an example of Matzke being guilty of the very same thing he (falsely)accuses Meyer of doing.  Today, I want to call out Matzke on another of his famous ploys: the bluff!  In earlier days, before he gained his current status among the defenders of the Darwinian Faith, Matzke posted and commented on various ID sites under various pseudonyms.  His favorite ploy was to use what we came to Read More ›

The Fox News website recently ran this story on the 7 Weirdest Jobs in Science.  To this list I would add an eighth – Evolutionary Biologist (EB).  To be an EB these days, not only does one have to explain away large bits of contrary data, but also believe that the mass amounts of complex specified information observed throughout biological systems is easily explained by the blind, purposeless forces of matter and energy interacting over eons of time through chance and/or necessity. Given the choice of being an EB or one of the 7 other Science careers mentioned, I’d opt to be a Scatologist.  At least the crap they talk about is real!

A visual artist and a Ph.D. in computational genomics have gotten together to predict what we mere human mortals will look like in, say, 100,000 years. Given the prediction, I for one am glad I won’t be around to see it actually happen. The current design appeals to me much more. But maybe others will feel differently.

Our old friend PZ Myers holds school boards in utter contempt. In a recent blog post at his widely followed Pharyngula blog site, he takes contemptuous pot shots at the Springboro, OH School Board for having the audacity to even consider a “critical thinking” policy in the curriculum. The Springboro Community City School District is considering a so-called “critical thinking” policy that would require teachers to explore “all sides” of controversial issues. The proposed policy change would direct teachers to discuss creation science or intelligent design when teaching about the theory of evolution. <a href=”http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201…..-proposal/ Full story here. PZ can’t restrain his contempt: Please. There is no controversy here. Evolution happened, teach it. The best argument that one student provided Read More ›

This my third installment of a discussion I began here and continued here on the validity of the claim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, or what I call the EC-EE claim. In the first installment we looked at the EC-EE claim itself and asked whether the EC-EE claim is an example of an EC-EE claim that failed to live up to its own standard. In the second installment, we looked at what exactly are the extraordinary claims being made by ID that so require such extraordinary evidence, or is it Darwinian evolution that is really making the extraordinary claim and so far has failed the EC-EE test? In this third post I want to look at the evidentiary side Read More ›

As those who live among them will know, the 17-year insect, the cicada, emerges en masse this year after five larval stages, mates and dies. They are an ongoing puzzle: In 1665, the first volume of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society included a report from New England concerning “swarms of strange insects, and the mischiefs done by them”. Charles Darwin also puzzled over them. Even now, entomologists are trying to understand how the insects’ peculiar life cycles evolved, how they count the years underground and how they synchronize their schedules. “They are one of the big ecological mysteries out there,” says Walt Koenig, a behavioural ecologist at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. Interesting: … Read More ›

The late Carl Sagan is credited with popularizing the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. (hereinafter this will be referred to as the “EC-EE” claim) While the phrase has become the skeptic’s mantra, its original roots probably trace back to the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre –Simon LaPlace (1749-1827) who once wrote: “the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness”. Regardless of its origins, the sentiment expressed in the quote has, over the last few years, become one of the bedrock critiques against ID. The notion seems to be along the lines that ID’s core claim is that only an unembodied supernatural intelligence can account for the specified complexity exhibited in biological systems, and Read More ›

HT: Nullasullus Evolutionary theory itself is already in a state of flux… all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (often also called Neo-Darwinism) have been disproven Denis Noble Physiology is rocking the foundations of evolutionary biology Nice to hear the truth for a change. The paper drew on the work of James Shapiro (who by the way had co-authored a paper with Discovery Institute Fellow, Richard Sternberg here). Jerry Coyne has a dislike of Shapiro’s writings: I hate to give attention to my Chicago colleague James Shapiro’s bizarre ideas about evolution, which he publishes weekly on HuffPo rather than in peer-reviewed journals. His Big Idea is that natural selection has not only been overemphasized in evolution, but appears to Read More ›

Martin Cadra has a wonderful blog focusing on non-Darwinian views on evolution. He recently highlighted some rare publications by field biologists who provide empirical evidence that challenges the idea that Darwinian evolution is the source of butterfly mimicry. Here is an excerpt: Since Darwin’s time mimicry is presented as one of the best example of the efficiency of natural selection. Several species should have been shaped by natural selection to resemble or mimic dangerous or poisonous species. It is supposed that protected by their shape and coloration they deceive their predators. Thus mimicry confers them a survival advantage. In many cases mimicry is believed to be found among butterflies where palatable species mimic unpalatable ones (so called Batesian mimicry). In Read More ›