Category: Natural selection
Aging has always been with us, say researchers (to no one’s surprise)
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
This group somehow links it to natural selection: A new USC Dornsife study indicates that aging may have originated at the very beginning of the evolution of life, at the same time as the evolution of the first genes. … This could be a game changer for research on longevity and aging. It may also […]
Silenced! Selectivity too close to truth?
| September 9, 2018 | Posted by DLH under academic freedom, Culture, Education, Free Speech, Human evolution, Mathematics, Natural selection, Peer review, Popular culture, Probability, Science, Mathematics, Philosophy and (Natural) Theology, Society |
Should science pursue truth regardless of consequences? Or must we succumb to political correctness? Must selectivity of females always equal males? Consider: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole – by Theodore P. Hill “In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are […]
Newly discovered tiny tunnels run from skull to brain
| August 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Medicine, Natural selection |
They may be a shortcut for the immune system. From ScienceDaily: “We always thought that immune cells from our arms and legs traveled via blood to damaged brain tissue. These findings suggest that immune cells may instead be taking a shortcut to rapidly arrive at areas of inflammation,” said Francesca Bosetti, Ph.D., program director at the […]
Peter Ward: Epigenetics explains why there are fewer “species” than we think
| August 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Epigenetics, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
Says biologist Peter Ward, because epigenetics changes can account for life forms that have been classified as different species: More and more, biologists are discovering that organisms thought to be different species are, in fact, but one. A recent example is that the formerly accepted two species of giant North American mammoths (the Columbian mammoth […]
Gerald Joyce no longer uses the NASA “must show Darwinian evolution” definition of life
| August 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Natural selection, Origin Of Life |
Though he helped develop it. Recently, a problem has arisen round efforts to create a synthetic cell. Gerald Joyce, now of the Salk Institute, helped NASA come up with a very widely used definition of life, “Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.” But, as medicl historian Rebecca Wilbanks explains at Aeon, In 2009, […]
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.
