Natural selection

In “Genetics Paper Retracted: Due to statistical errors, a Science paper claiming that mutation is responsible for genetic variation is retracted” (The Scientist September 2, 2011), Jessica P. Johnson reports, A May 2010 Science paper showing that the most genetically fit cow-pea weevils have fewer deleterious genetic mutations in their genomes than their less fit counterparts was retracted yesterday (September 1) by the authors because of flaws in their statistical analysis. The results apparently supported the hypothesis that individuals with the fewest bad mutations will produce the most fit offspring. The revised data analysis, which shows little effect on fitness due to mutation, suggests that some other mechanism may instead be responsible for maintaining genetic variation in weevil populations. Wonder Read More ›

At ScienceDaily we learn, “Scientists Uncover an Unhealthy Herds Hypothesis” (June 24, 2011), Biologists worldwide subscribe to the healthy herds hypothesis, the idea that predators can keep packs of prey healthy by removing the weak and the sick. This reduces the chance disease will wipe out the whole herd, but could it be that predators can also make prey populations more susceptible to other predators or even parasites? Biologists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered at least one animal whose defenses against a predator make it a good target for one opportunistic parasite. In principle, that should be no surprise; most defense strategies carry a cost, for water fleas or nations. That’s because while growing larger keeps Daphnia Read More ›

A reason captured in photos: Here, Barry Arrington notes, “Natural Selection Defies the Odds,” As in

Recently the management of a casino hired Professor Hannum to investigate a roulette player whom they suspected might be cheating. The house has a huge mathematical advantage in roulette, which is why the casino suspected something other than random chance was involved when the player parlayed a few thousand dollars into over $1.4 million.

Professor Hannum crunched the numbers, however, and told the casino that while the player’s run was very unlikely (about an 80:1 shot), it was not so unlikely as to suggest cheating. And sure enough, over the next few gaming sessions the player blew his entire $1.4 million stack.

Yes, that’s just the trouble. We are forever being told, as he goes on to note, how the magic of natural selection bests the odds, when in fact no natural force can do so.

A friend writes to tell us a remarkable story from Kenya about a moment when natural selection fails: Three cheetahs spare tiny antelope’s life, … and play with him instead” (Daily Mail, 5th February 2010) Read More ›

No evidence that there is enough time for evolution[*]

Lee M Spetner

Redoxia Israel, Ltd. 27 Hakablan St., Jerusalem, Israel

Abstract: A recent attempt was made to resolve the heretofore unaddressed issue of the estimated time for evolution, concluding that there was plenty of time. This would have been a very significant result had it been correct. It turns out, however, that the assumptions made in formulating the model of evolution were faulty and the conclusion of that attempt is therefore unsubstantiated.

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 00 hours Tuesday May 31. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

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THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this monster priority mail). This is a must-have book if you are interested at all in the ID debate. To get it from Amazon.com, click here. Below is the table of contents and some introductory matter.

(Other news coverage continues below)

———————————————

Seven years in the making, at 500,000 words, with three Nobel laureate contributors, this is the most thorough examination of naturalism to date.

<<<<<>>>>>

The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science

Edited by Bruce L. Gordon

and William A. Dembski

ISI Books

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Wilmington, DE 19807

Back Cover:

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PaV’s recent post Darwinn Step Aside – Survival of the ‘Quickest’ got me thinking again about natural selection and the role it supposedly played in evolution. The conventional wisdom among Darwinists, including Darwin himself, is that NS is a mechanism. The very title of Darwin’s famous tome suggests as much – On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection . The clear implication is that NS is some sort of mechanism. A mechanism by definition is something that does something. Consider the simple dictionary definition of the term “mechanism”

1
a : a piece of machinery b : a process, technique, or system for achieving a result
2
: mechanical operation or action : working 2
3
: a doctrine that holds natural processes (as of life) to be mechanically determined and capable of complete explanation by the laws of physics and chemistry
4
: the fundamental processes involved in or responsible for an action, reaction, or other natural phenomenon

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Lenski’s the guy who studied all those generations of E. Coli bacteria, and discovered that over many thousands of generations, there were very few beneficial mutations. (Darwinism depends, not on mutations as such but on mutations that benefit the organism.) Recently, his work was the subject of an item, “Evolvability, observed” by Jef Akst (The Scientist, 17th March 2011 ), where we learn

Natural selection picks the most well adapted organisms to survive and reproduce. But what if the most beneficial mutations in the short term meant less room for adaptation in the future?[ … ]

Researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Houston in Texas took advantage of a long-term evolution experiment on Escherichia coli that’s been running for more than 50,000 generations. Characterizing archived strains from 500, 1000, and 1500 generations, the team identified two beneficial mutations that arose in some strains prior to 500 generations and eventually spread through the entire population. The researchers dubbed the strains that carried these mutations at 500 generations the eventual winners (EWs) and those lacking the mutations the eventual losers (ELs).

Andrew J. Fabich at Tennessee Temple University, who knows somewhat of bacteria, writes to say that none of the stuff about them is any big surprise, Read More ›

From Tina Hesman Saey, “Helpful Mutations Didn’t Sweep Through Early Humans”, Wired Science (February 18, 2011) we learn Humans probably didn’t get swept up in evolution.Scientists have favored a model of evolution in which beneficial gene mutations quickly and dramatically sweep through a population due to the evolutionary advantages they confer. Such mutations would become nearly universal in a population. But this selective sweep model may not be accurate for humans, a new study indicates. Human evolution likely followed a more subtle and complicated path, say population geneticists Molly Przeworski of the University of Chicago and Guy Sella of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and colleagues. [ … ] Good evidence does exist for some mutations that did undergo selective sweeps Read More ›

I’m writing to tell people about a paper of mine that was published in Synthese last month, titled:  “Self-organisation in dynamical systems: a limiting result”.  While the paper doesn’t address intelligent design as such, it indirectly establishes strict limits to what such evolutionary mechanisms as natural selection can accomplish.  In particular, it shows that physical laws, operating on an initially random arrangement of matter, cannot produce complex objects with any reasonable chance in any reasonable time.

The published version may be downloaded (payment or subscription needed) from Springer at:

         http://www.springerlink.com/content/74316rt8373k560x/

Alternatively, a pre-published version is freely available at:

         http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/rjohns/spontaneous_4.pdf

The argument is based on a number of original mathematical theorems that are proved in the paper.  A less technical presentation of the argument is however given below.

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How well neoDarwinian evolution is established and the universal “consensus” over it is demonstrated by:
Bird-from-Dinosaur Theory of Evolution Challenged: Was It the Other Way Around?

ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2010) — A new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides yet more evidence that birds did not descend from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs, experts say, and continues to challenge decades of accepted theories about the evolution of flight. Read More ›

The late Stephen J. Gould once wrote “Replay the tape [of evolution] a million times from a Burgess [the Burgess Shale fossils]beginning, and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.” (Gould, Stephen J. [Professor of Zoology and Geology, Harvard University], “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History,” [1989], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.289. Well, maybe we wont’ have to replay the tape, because the tape of evolutionary history is getting replayed all the time, in the sense that lately it seems that every new discovery forces a complete re-write (re-wind?) of evolutionary history. Now we have a recent fossil discovery about to be reported in Nature shows that tetrapods may have crawled out of the seas way earlier than previously thought.

According to the article Read More ›

Playing off the title of Dr. Dembski’s new book, I’m going to cite three articles that are summarized at PhysOrg.com just this past week. I don’t have access to any of them, but let’s just take a look at what these summaries report. I think it’s quite interesting.

First, there is this article, DNA study sheds new light on horse evolution, that informs us that ancient species of zebras and horses are actually much more related to the modern day versions than previously thought. Here’s what they say:

The study used bones from caves to identify new horse species in Eurasia and South America, and reveal that the Cape zebra, an extinct giant species from South Africa, were simply large variants of the modern Plains zebra. The Cape zebra weighed up to 400 kilograms and stood up to 150 centimetres at the shoulder blades.

“The Plains zebra group once included the famous extinct quagga, so our results confirm that this group was highly variable in both coat colour and size.”

while concluding that:

“Overall, the new genetic results suggest that we have under-estimated how much a single species can vary over time and space, and mistakenly assumed more diversity among extinct species of megafauna,” Professor Cooper says.

This now means that the already tiny portion of “intermediate forms” that RM + NS produces in reduced in size. And perhaps greatly. This weakens what Darwin would call the “principle of divergence” and weakens the notion of gradualism that is implicit in his theory.

Next, there is this article: Introns: A mystery renewed.

Here we read:

“Remarkably, we have found many cases of parallel intron gains at essentially the same sites in independent genotypes,” Lynch said. “This strongly argues against the common assumption that when two species share introns at the same site, it is always due to inheritance from a common ancestor.”

which now calls into question prior notions of “proof” of common descent, and, I would think, requires a new look at how transposons operate.

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British physicist David Tyler comments: