Category: extinction
Extinction: When evolution is suddenly found to have a purpose
| October 17, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction |
And human beings do too, apparently. From ScienceDaily: The sixth mass extinction is underway, this time caused by humans. A team of researchers have calculated that species are dying out so quickly that nature’s built-in defense mechanism, evolution, cannot keep up. If current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct […]
Researchers: Fossil record “dramatically distorted”
| September 17, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Using the fossil record to accurately estimate the timing and pace of past mass extinctions is no easy task, and a new study highlights how fossil evidence can produce a misleading picture if not interpreted with care. Florida Museum of Natural History researchers used a series of 130-foot cores drilled from the Po […]
Humans lived in Madagascar 6000 years earlier than thought
| September 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, extinction, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
And probably did not kill off all the elephant birds, as often claimed, say researchers: Analysis of bones, from what was once the world’s largest bird, has revealed that humans arrived on the tropical island of Madagascar more than 6,000 years earlier than previously thought—according to a study published today, 12 September 2018, in the journal […]
In the latest version: Cold climate helped to do in the Neanderthals
| September 3, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: A team of researchers from a number of European and American research institutions, including Northumbria University, Newcastle, have produced detailed new natural records from stalagmites that highlight changes in the European climate more than 40,000 years ago. They found several cold periods that coincide with the timings of a near complete absence of […]
Researchers: Homo erectus died out because he was lazy and very conservative
| August 11, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
We don’t hear as much old-fashioned moralizing these days as we used to but this looks like the authentic product from ScienceDaily: Laziness helped lead to extinction of Homo erectus An archaeological excavation of ancient human populations in the Arabian Peninsula during the Early Stone Age, found that Homo erectus used ‘least-effort strategies’ for tool […]
The Atlantic: “Nastiest feud in science” erupts over dinosaur extinction theory
| August 11, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction, Intelligent Design, Peer review |
Paleontologist Gerta Keller attributes the extinction 66 million years ago of three-quarters of Earth’s species, including all dinosaurs, not to an asteroid hit but to a series of volcanic eruptions. A writer goes with her on a field trip: The prestige of science is solidly behind the asteroid: The impact theory provided an elegant solution […]
But why did the Ediacaran life forms just die out?
| August 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Ediacaran, extinction, Intelligent Design |
News from the Ediacaran era (600 – 542 million years ago), when many animals were genuinely hard to distinguish at first from plants, sharpens the question: So-called Ediacaran organisms have puzzled biologists for decades. To the untrained eye they look like fossilized plants, in tube or frond shapes up to 2 meters long. These strange […]
Stripes confuse people but they do not cool zebras
| July 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
From ScienceDaily: Susanne Åkesson, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden, refutes the theory that zebras have striped fur to stay cool in the hot sun. That hypothesis is wrong, she and her colleagues show in a study recently published in Scientific Reports. There has been an ongoing discussion among researchers, dating back to Darwin, […]
Darwinian just-so story: Some migratory birds do better with weak immune systems
| June 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design |
From Asher Elbein at New York Times: Europe’s migratory songbirds can’t fight off diseases as well as African species that stay put. But that may be to the European birds’ advantage. The evolutionary origins of bird migration are a longstanding puzzle for ornithologists, and the role of disease in influencing the behavior has never been entirely […]
Upside of dinosaur extinction: Life came back to the asteroid’s crater very quickly
| May 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, extinction, Intelligent Design |
Okay, it wasn’t good news for the dinosaur. Still, as earth scientist Scott K. Johnson tells it at Ars Technica, reporting on a find from the Chicxulub Crater hit 66 million years ago: Usually, new studies of the dino-killing mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous provide another view into just how bloody awful it […]
Startling Result–90% of Animals Less than 200 kya
| May 28, 2018 | Posted by PaV under Darwinism, Evolutionary biology, extinction, Intelligent Design, Tree of life |
From PhysOrg this morning, in a study using “DNA bar-codes” (mitochondrial DNA, using a specific gene COI) and conducted around the world, here’s the verdict: The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. “This conclusion is very […]
Endangered giant Chinese salamander is at least five different “species”
| May 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design, speciation |
From ScienceDaily: With individuals weighing in at more than 140 pounds, the critically endangered Chinese giant salamander is well known as the world’s largest amphibian. But researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on May 21 now find that those giant salamanders aren’t one species, but five, and possibly as many as eight. The bad […]
Butterfly “extinction” that wasn’t
| May 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, Evolution, extinction |
From ScienceDaily: The evolution of wild species, adapting them to human management practices, can cause localised extinctions when those practices rapidly change. And in a new study published in Nature, Professors Michael C. Singer and Camille Parmesan have used more than 30 years of research to fully document an example of this process. A large, […]
Researchers: Darwinian sexual selection can be selection for extinction
| April 13, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: The lengths that some males go to attract a mate can pay off in the short-term. But according to a new study from scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), extravagant investments in reproduction also have their costs. By analyzing the fossils of thousands of ancient crustaceans, a team of […]
Genetic literacy project: Are humans genetically loaded for extinction?
| March 27, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Andrew Porterfield at the Genetic Literacy Project: idea called “genetic load” was developed in the 1930s by famed biologist J.B.S. Haldane, referring to any genome that had increasing numbers of deleterious mutations. The more mutations in a population, the more likely that members of that population couldn’t survive, ultimately threatening the fitness of that […]
Sixth mass extinction, but no news on defining “species”?
| March 22, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction, speciation |
From Phoebe Weston at the Daily Mail, who offers a convenient bullet point format: Revealed: The worrying state of Earth’s species in numbers as scientists warn the sixth mass extinction is here and wildlife is in a ‘global crisis’ Two species of vertebrate, animals with a backbone, have gone extinct each year Currently more than […]
Once again: The pygmy marmoset is two “species”
| March 1, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction, Intelligent Design, speciation |
But the giraffe turned out to be four species. From ScienceDaily: Evolutionary biologists have now discovered that the Pygmy Marmoset — the world’s smallest monkey — is not one species but two. Weighing in at just 100 grams — roughly the size of a large tomato — the insect-eating primate was first described scientifically in […]
Shaking the horse family tree
| February 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design, speciation |
Ah, start the day with fond memories. Most people who were kids in the mid-twentieth century grew up with the icons of horse evolution, starting with grubby little Eohippus and ending with Black Beauty. Of course, the story didn’t need to be true and as Jonathan Wells pointed out in Icons of Evolution, it wasn’t […]
Upcoming Royal Society meeting: Sexual selection in extinct animals Huh?
| November 23, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design |
Extinct animals? Pos-Darwinista writes to draw our attention to Theo Murphy International scientific meeting organised by Dr Rob Knell, Dr Dave Hone and Professor Doug Emlen [May 9-10 2018] Sexual selection is potentially an important driver of macroevolutionary processes like speciation and extinction, but this has rarely been tested using the fossil record. This meeting will bring […]
