Intelligent Design

It’s as if evolutionary biologists are beginning to take some of the problems of Darwinism seriously enough to discuss them openly, as failures in research. In this case, the failure of claims for sexual selection (females drive evolution by choosing the fittest mates) are openly publicized. In the past five years, meta-analyses and reviews have generated more evidence of bias in ecology and evolutionary biology research. For example, biases have been found in the literature on ideas such as feather color affecting mate choice in blue tits and black bib sizes indicating male dominance in house sparrows. As with zebra finch leg bands, such biases don’t necessarily invalidate the hypotheses themselves, but undermine the strength of evidence for them, leaving Read More ›

Including things you didn’t know about Archaea discoverer, Carl Woese. From a review of The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen (Simon & Schuster, 2018): In The Tangled Tree, celebrated science writer David Quammen tells perhaps the grandest tale in biology: how scientists used gene sequencing to elucidate the evolutionary relationships between living beings. Charles Darwin called it the ‘great Tree of Life’. But as Quammen reveals, at the molecular level, life’s history is more accurately depicted as a network, a tangled web through which organisms have been exchanging genes for more than 3 billion years. This perspective is indeed radical, and he presents the science — and the scientists involved — with patience, candour and Read More ›

If they are not Buddhist or Hindu. From Zeeya Merali at Aeon: The discussion has gone on ever since. I partook in 2014, while researching my book, A Big Bang in a Little Room (2017), about experiments on recreating the origins of the Universe in the lab. Not only did I meet with Ashtekar at Penn State but also with his kindred spirit, the cosmologist Andrei Linde, at Stanford University in California. Linde had just returned from giving a series of guest lectures at the University of Hamburg in Germany on the philosophical implications of ‘quantum cosmology’, the discipline that applies the rules governing the micro realm – quantum theory – to the study of how the Universe evolved in Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Research on evolution typically focuses on the importance of social interactions, including parent-offspring bonding, competition for resources, and courtship and mating rituals. But Nathan Bailey at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and his colleague Allen Moore at the University of Georgia realized that isolation must then be an extreme condition worthy of equal attention. “The environment an animal experiences can influence which genes it expresses, when, and how much, so conditions of social isolation might cause expression of different traits,” says Bailey. “This in turn could affect responses to natural selection in terms of survival and reproduction, which has evolutionary consequences. For some species, it might even mean that temporary social isolation is favorable.” The invasive Read More ›

From Susan Milius at ScienceNews: In the final frenzy of reproduction and death, social amoebas secrete proteins that help preserve a starter kit of food for its offspring. Dictyostelium discoideum, a type of slime mold in soil, eats bacteria. Some wild forms of this species essentially farm the microbes, passing them along in spore cases that give the next generation of amoebas the beginnings of a fine local patch of prey. Tests find that the trick to keeping the parental immune system from killing this starter crop of bacteria is a surge of proteins called lectins, researchers say in the July 27 Science.More. Slime molds are known for a sophistication that approaches that of an insect colony: Apparent intelligence can Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A concept known as ‘percolation’ is helping microbiologists explain how communities of bacteria can effectively relay signals across long distances. Once regarded as a simple cluster of microorganisms, communities of bacteria have been found to employ a strategy we use to brew coffee and extract oil from the sea. Percolation helps the microscopic community thrive and survive threats, such as chemical attacks from antibiotics. … Biofilm communities inhabit locations all around us, from soil to drain pipes to the surface of our teeth. Cells at the edge of these communities tend to grow more robustly than their interior counterparts because they have access to more nutrients. To keep this edge growth in check and ensure the entire community Read More ›

Explaining how to overthrow a theory in science via better explanations, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel offers advice at Forbes, including advice re Darwinism: Want to go beyond Darwin’s evolution? You still need to explain the emergence of biological diversity, the response to selection pressures, and how inheritance works, among others. More. First, it is interesting to hear an admission that anyone might want to go beyond Darwin’s theory, touted elsewhere as the single best idea anyone ever had. Yes, well, things do get oversold at times… But if the bar is actually set at a better explanation, in the sense of an explanation that explains more of what we see more cogently and provides better predictions, ID theorists might be able Read More ›

Modified gravity is a hypothesis (1983) that attempts to account for the gravitational pull that is otherwise attributed to dark matter (which has never been identified). From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at : Which one is right? We still don’t know, though astrophysicists have been on the case since decades. Ruling out modified gravity is hard because it was invented to fit observed correlations, and this achievement is difficult to improve on. The idea which Milgrom came up with in 1983 was a simple model called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). It does a good job fitting the rotation curves of hundreds of observed galaxies, and in contrast to particle dark matter this model Read More ›

Here’s an inventive turn of phrase from Nature: “Eye evolution came easy for simple sea creatures Family tree shows that jellies and their relatives evolved eyes independently at least eight times.” Jellyfish and their kin have no brains and make do with rudimentary nervous systems. But an analysis now shows that these simple sea creatures evolved eyes multiple times, transforming basic precursor cells into a wide range of useful visual systems. Curr. Biol. (2018), “Eye evolution came easy for simple sea creatures” at Nature Nothing like a bold approach to the problems of irreducible complexity! Imply, without stressing the point, that if the creatures were “simple,” the process must have been “easy” and therefore wthin the range of random Darwinian Read More ›

From Jillian Mock at Audubon: Hummingbirds come in a jewel-like assortment of colors and are so dexterous, they can hover still for seconds and fly backward. They also have one of the most diverse avian families in the world, boasting about 350 known species across North and South America. Sunbirds, the prime nectar-feeding birds of the Old World, have fewer than 150. But once upon a time, tens of millions of years ago, hummingbirds did zip around the hills and forests of Europe. According to Jim McGuire, it all started about 42 million years ago, when hummingbirds broke away from the swifts, their closest living relatives. McGuire, an integrative biologist at University of California Berkeley, calculated this date by examining Read More ›

At Scientific American, John Horgan reprints his profile of  Bohm (1917-1992) shortly before his death, in which Bohm explains his view: Although he tried to make the world more sensible with his pilot-wave model, he also argued that complete clarity is impossible. He reached this conclusion after seeing an experiment on television, in which a drop of ink was squeezed onto a cylinder of glycerine. When the cylinder was rotated, the ink diffused through the glycerine in an apparently irreversible fashion. Its order seemed to have disintegrated. But when the direction of rotation was reversed, the ink gathered into a drop again. He was consistent: Bohm rejected the claim of physicists such as Hawking and Weinberg that physics can achieve a Read More ›

Much has been written about the so-called “warfare thesis” first popularized in the 1870’s by Andrew Dickson White.  This thesis posits that there is an inherent conflict between Christianity and science.  Never mind that many of the most famous scientists in history, including practically all of the progenitors of the scientific revolution, were Christians (Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, etc.).  The obvious historical weakness and intellectual tendentiousness of the warfare thesis has led to its reevaluation and often its rejection by contemporary researchers.  (See here for example). The idea that there is an inherent conflict between science (in the sense of an investigation of nature) and Christianity is risible.  This is not to say, however, that there is no conflict at all.  Read More ›