Category: extinction
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 […]
The changing strategies of the dinosaurs’ PR agents
| August 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design |
We’ll probably never know what dinos were really like inthe sense that we can know what horses are like but we learn from Will Tattersdill at H-Sci-Med-Tech about the different ways we have understood them. Reviewing Dinosaurs Ever Evolving: The Changing Face of Prehistoric Animals in Popular Culture by Allen A. Debus, (1926–2009), he writes […]
Study: Two years’ darkness provides clue to total dinosaur extinction
| August 24, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design |
Along with massive but not total extinction of many other life forms. From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: The 2 minutes of darkness caused by the total solar eclipse earlier this week may seem momentous, but it’s nothing compared with the prolonged darkness that followed the dinosaur-killing asteroid that collided with Earth about 65.5 million years […]
Astronomer changes mind after 40 years: They not out there because They have gone extinct
| August 13, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, extinction, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Daniel Whitmire, a retired astrophysicist who teaches mathematics at the University of Arkansas, once thought the cosmic silence indicated we as a species lagged far behind. “I taught astronomy for 37 years,” said Whitmire. “I used to tell my students that by statistics, we have to be the dumbest guys in the galaxy. […]
National Geographic: Water bears could survive most Earth-shattering disasters
| August 5, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, extinction, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
From Casey Smith at National Geographic: In essence, the researchers say, only the death of the sun will ultimately lead to the total extinction of life on Earth, including tardigrade [water bears]. “It seems that life, once it gets going, is hard to wipe out entirely,” Sloan says. “Huge numbers of species, or even entire […]
Why the cloned woolly mammoth is not just around the corner
| July 11, 2017 | Posted by News under extinction, Genetics |
From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: The road to bringing back the mammoth — a giant that went extinct at the end of the last ice age — is filled with barriers.More. Of the eleven hurdles Geggel cites, here’s Even if pieces of preserved ancient DNA are uncovered, they might be contaminated with foreign DNA from […]
Extinction (or maybe not): New Scientist offers five “Lazarus species”
| May 13, 2017 | Posted by News under extinction, Intelligent Design, News |
Animals we thought were extinct sometimes aren’t. From Julia Brown at New Scientist: Will Bill Laurance and his team find Tasmanian tigers lurking in Australia’s remote Cape York peninsula? Numerous animals that were thought to be extinct have recently been rediscovered. Here are our top five species that came back from the dead – and […]
Can sexual selection cause a decline in evolutionary fitness?
| May 9, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
From evolutionary biologist Richard O. Prum at the New York Times: Are These Birds Too Sexy to Survive? Natural selection can’t explain this. Wow. Careers have been wrecked over such departures from dogma. Most biologists believe that these mechanisms always work in concert — that sex appeal is the sign of an objectively better mate, […]
Experts challenge wild bee near-extinction claim
| April 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Culture, extinction, Intelligent Design, News |
From Hank Campbell at Science 2.0: Colony Collapse Disorder, the belief that honeybees, an important pollinator, are being killed off in droves, has been good for environmental fundraising but hasn’t had a scientific foundation. … Nonetheless, it has persisted for 10 years despite data showing that periodic die-offs in bees are as common, and therefore […]
Possible live Tasmanian wolf sightings?
| April 4, 2017 | Posted by News under Convergent evolution, Evolution, extinction |
From Mike Wehner at Yahoo News: Multiple reports of Tasmanian Tiger sightings are starting to flow in from everyday citizens in Australia. Several people have recently claimed they’ve spotted the animal… The marsupial Thylacine, believed extinct, is really much more like a wolf than a tiger, in appearance and ecological role. Australians have occasionally claimed […]
“Extinct” Paleozoic echinoderm turns up in Triassic
| March 22, 2017 | Posted by News under extinction, Intelligent Design, News |
Challenges fundamentals of echinoderm evolution. From ScienceDaily: Echinoderms are among the marine invertebrates that suffered the most severe losses at the end-Permian extinction. At least that was the consensus until a team of European paleontologists — Ben Thuy, Hans Hagdorn, and Andy S. Gale — cast a critical eye on some poorly studied Triassic echinoderm […]
Plants saved Earth from permanent ice age?
| March 16, 2017 | Posted by News under extinction, Intelligent Design, News, Plants |
Nick Stockton asks, at Wired, why didn’t the ice ages that began at 800,000 ago just remain? What reversed the cooling trend? A new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, has a hypothesis what that something was: plants. Or, more specifically, a complicated process in which plants wear down certain kinds of rocks, and how […]
Extinction: Dying woolly mammoths were in genetic meltdown?
| March 9, 2017 | Posted by News under extinction, Genetics, Intelligent Design, News |
From Brian Switek at Nature: A study1 published 2 March in PLOS Genetics gives a rare insight into how genomes change as a species dies out. Towards the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,700 years ago, woolly mammoths ranged through Siberia and into the colder stretches of North America. But by about 4,000 […]
Extinction: Can New Zealand extirpate invasive species?
| February 3, 2017 | Posted by News under Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design, News |
Except where dinosaurs or media-friendly modern species are in play, extinction barely rates a yawn. But here is an interesting item by Veronika Meduna at New Scientist, on a plan to return an ecosystem to a previous time: We are inside the old water reservoir for New Zealand’s capital, Wellington. Over the past two decades, […]
Researchers: The dinosaurs died of darkness and cold
| January 14, 2017 | Posted by News under extinction, Intelligent Design, News |
After the asteroid hit. The extinction of the dinosaurs is, in certain ways, the pop science equivalent of the falls of great houses in ancient literature. It’s fascinating and it accommodates dozens of plausible explanations and hundreds of possible ones. Good for business. From ScienceDaily: “It became cold, I mean, really cold,” says Brugger. Global […]
