Category: Natural selection
Does horizontal gene transfer enable genetic parasites to survive natural selection?
| August 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
Researchers Iranzo and Koonin ask: Typically, natural selection results in deletions of harmful genes, so the main question is, why hasn’t natural selection wiped out genetic parasites? They mean “transposons, plasmids, viruses” etc., that offer no benefit to the hosts. They offer a hypothesis: In a new study published in EPL, researchers Jaime Iranzo and […]
Do socially isolated animals speed evolution?
| August 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
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 […]
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, […]
Nematode study: New find can help explain “how diversity arises, an open question with relevance to evolution and genetic processes”
| June 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
What? We have been told that natural selection acting on random mutations explains diversity! From ScienceDaily: For years, it was assumed other nematodes’ neurons were similar to those of C. elegans, until researchers at the University of Illinois demonstrated the vast diversity in neuronal anatomy present across species. Now Nathan Schroeder, assistant professor in the […]
Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig’s Long-Necked Giraffe book now free online
| May 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
Readers have written to ask why Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig’s book, The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe: (Giraffa camelopardalis L.) What do we really know? Testing the Theories of Gradualism, Macromutation, and Intelligent Design, is no longer available on Amazon: “Darwin (1871) and many African folk legends before him […] proposed a simple but powerful explanation for […]
Is this a serious attempt to evaluate natural selection as something other than an ideology? At PNAS?
| March 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
From W. Ford Doolittle and S. Andrew Inkpen at PNAS: Many practicing biologists accept that nothing in their discipline makes sense except in the light of evolution, and that natural selection is evolution’s principal sense-maker. But what natural selection actually is (a force or a statistical outcome, for example) and the levels of the biological […]
Evolution: Mice change when humans feed them
| March 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
From ScienceDaily: Many tame domesticated animals have a different appearance compared to their relatives in the wild, for example white patches in their fur or shorter snouts. Researchers have now for the first time shown that wild house mice develop the same visible changes — without selection, as a result of exposure to humans alone. […]
Basener stands his ground at Skeptical Zone: Fisher’s Darwinian theorem is clearly false.
| February 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Natural selection |
From William Basenerand John Sanford at The Skeptical Zone: Joe Felsenstein and Michael Lynch (JF and ML) wrote a blog post, “Does Basener and Sanford’s model of mutation vs selection show that deleterious mutations are unstoppable?” Their post is thoughtful and we are glad to continue the dialogue. This is the first part of a […]
Nancy Pearcey: Macroevolution does not happen in nature
| February 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection, Naturalism |
From Nancy Pearcey, author of Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality, at CNS: What Was Darwin’s ‘Original’ Thought? Original thinking? The truth is that there was little about Darwin’s scientific theory that was original—and the part that was original was not scientific. The idea that organisms undergo minor variations was not […]
At Aeon: Damage control attempted re the current evolution upheavals
| January 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
By evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland, who seems to have adopted that role: Evolution unleashed: Is evolutionary science due for a major overhaul – or is talk of ‘revolution’ misguided? If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis […]
(Real non-Darwinian) evolution in action: Bacteria murder rivals and steal their genes
| December 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
From ScienceDaily: Bacteria not only develop resistance to antibiotics, they also can pick it up from their rivals. In a recent publication in Cell Reports, Researchers from the Biozentrum of the University of Basel have demonstrated that some bacteria inject a toxic cocktail into their competitors causing cell lysis and death. Then, by integrating the […]
Design Disquisitions: H. Allen Orr on Darwin’s Failure
| June 28, 2017 | Posted by Joshua G under Biology, Darwinism, Food for thought, Natural selection, speciation |
Did Darwin really explain the origin of species? My quote of the month is now up on my blog. This is an interesting one as it comes from an evolutionary biologist and critic of ID. I also focus on comments of a similar nature that have been made in more recent years. Surprise, […]
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, […]
A Unifying Principle for the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
| April 16, 2017 | Posted by johnnyb under Evolutionary biology, Natural selection |
There has been quite a controversy over the past few years over whether the extended evolutionary synthesis is a replacement of the modern synthesis or a refinement of it.
Twelve hallmarks of good theories in science
| April 12, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Natural selection, News, Philosophy, Science |
From Michael Keas at Synthese: Essay Abstract: There are at least twelve major virtues of good theories: evidential accuracy, causal adequacy, explanatory depth, internal consistency, internal coherence, universal coherence, beauty, simplicity, unification, durability, fruitfulness, and applicability. These virtues are best classified into four classes: evidential, coherential, aesthetic, and diachronic. Each virtue class contains at least […]
Design Disquisitions: Jeffrey Koperski on Two Bad and Two Good Ways to Attack ID (Part 2): Two ‘Good’ Ways
| March 20, 2017 | Posted by Joshua G under Biology, Convergent evolution, Darwinism, ID, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, Natural selection, Naturalism, Peer review, Philosophy, Probability, Science, theistic evolution |
Part two of my series looking at Jeffrey Koperski’s paper ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Good Ones’ is now up on my blog. This one is quite in depth, but a couple of interesting issues come up along the way. I examine the concept of soft and hard anomalies in scientific […]
Design Disquisitions: Critic’s Corner-Kenneth Miller
| February 12, 2017 | Posted by Joshua G under Biology, Cell biology, Darwinism, Evolution, ID, Irreducible Complexity, Natural selection |
This week’s post at Design Disquisitions is the first in a series of articles entitled ‘Critic’s Corner’ where I focus on a critic of ID. The main purpose of these posts is to document their work relevant to ID and also to document the direct responses to the particular critic in question, by those sympathetic to […]
Natural selection hard to measure?
| August 19, 2016 | Posted by News under Natural selection, News |
You mean the same way that ghosts in the barn loft are hard to find? From Evolution News & Views: Charles Darwin’s idea that an unguided natural process led to all the beauty and diversity of the world, including its Undeniable appearance of design, guides scientific thinking to this day. But what if his signature […]
Insects used camouflage 100 million years ago
| June 27, 2016 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Design inference, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection, News |
From Eurekalert: A research team under Dr. Bo Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Paleobiology and Stratigraphy in Nanjing (China) worked together with paleontologists from the University of Bonn and other scientists from China, USA, France, and England to examine a total of 35 insects preserved in amber. With the aid of grains of […]
Natural selection as negative principle only
| March 26, 2016 | Posted by News under Natural selection, News, Philosophy, Science |
A friend writes to note what philosopher of science, John Elof Boodin (1869-1950), had to say about natural selection: The principle of natural selection is indeed an important contribution to biology. But it is a negative, not an architectonic, principle. It does not explain why variations appear, why they cumulate, why they assume an organization […]
