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We are told that the mistletoe species lacks genes found in all other complex organisms. From ScienceDaily: A discovery made during an analysis of a species of mistletoe whose apparent ability to survive without key genes involved in energy production could make it one of the most unusual plants on Earth. … “This loss of genes very likely corresponds to the loss of an entire respiratory complex,” said Jeff Palmer, IU Distinguished Professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Biology, who led the study. “This is something that hasn’t been reported before for any multicellular organism.” The genes that have been lost from V. scurruloideum typically reside in the mitochondrial genomes of plants and animals. Read More ›

Darwin’s finches, we are told, have reached their limits on the Galapagos Islands From ScienceDaily: The evolution of birds on the Galapagos Islands, the cradle of Darwin’s theory of evolution, is a two-speed process. Most bird species are still diversifying, while the famous Darwin’s finches have already reached an equilibrium, in which new species can only appear when an existing one becomes extinct. This finding expands the classical theory on island evolution put forward in the 1960s. What? We haven’t even established how many “species” there are anyway, due to hybridization. Nonetheless, ‘The analysis shows that for the finches, diversity does indeed have a negative effect. There is no more room for new species, unless one of the existing species Read More ›

Pos-Darwinista writes to say, We have established the Intelligent Design Brazilian Society – TDI Brasil, and our president, Marcos Nogueira Eberlin, a biochemistry professor at Unicamp, Campinas, Sao Paulo, where he heads the ThoMSon Mass Spectometry Laboratory, is a member of the Academia Brasileira de Ciências (Brazilian Academy of Sciences) But is he Darwin’s followers’ next job loss target? Destroying critics’ careers is pretty much the only thing Darwin’s current followers can account for successfully in the history of life. Brazilians may learn the hard way: When you aim at Darwin, you must not miss. That said: In September 2015 we will have two more ID conferences in Brazil like the first one we had in Campinas, Sao Paulo, that Read More ›

From Kirk Durston, Mounting evidence that the digital information that encodes all of life is steadily degrading, falsifies a key prediction of the theory of neo-Darwinian macroevolution and verifies a prediction of intelligent design science. Longer: I was struck, but not surprised, by a statement made a few days ago by Neil Turok, Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics here in Waterloo, Ontario. Speaking of the apparent collapse of evidence for a critical component of the Big Bang theory, he responded, ‘even though hundreds or thousands of people are working on an idea, it may still be wrong.’ His statement is a harbinger of a much greater collapse looming on the scientific horizon, also involving thousands of scientists. Read More ›

Jaws were also more complex than expected. From ScienceDaily: A tiny tooth plate of the 410 million year old fossil fish Romundina stellina indicates that teeth evolved earlier in the tree of life than recently thought. That is a while back. The tooth plate of just some millimeters in size had been in a box for more than 40 years, without being recognized after the discovery and preparation of the fish it belonged to. Because no one expected to find anything like that. And few had any special desire to Everyone knows evolution is a long, slow process of natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinian evolution). Every third rate biology teacher teaches that, and so do first raters, because Read More ›

From New Scientist: The biome of the ocean resembles that of the human gut We’re a step closer to understanding the microbial community that inhabits the ocean – and it has some striking similarities to the community that lives inside our guts. The microbiome of the world’s biggest ecosystem and one of the smallest appear to function in surprisingly similar ways. … For example, we already knew of about 4350 species of microalgae, 1350 species of protists and 5500 species of tiny animals, based on direct studies of their appearance. But the new genetic evidence suggests that there are probably three to eight times as many distinct species in each group as currently recognised. Shades of issues around claims about Read More ›

  Further to: Is a sixth great extinction in progress? (It would help if a key exponent was anyone but Paul “Population Bomb” Ehrlich, a contender for the heavyweight champ of wrong-headed predictions) and Rob Sheldon on the sixth great extinction, Liberty U geologist Marcus Ross writes to say, For an abbreviated and pictorial list of species driven extinct in the past 400 years, see National Geographic You can mouse over each dot to learn about the species in question. Extinction rates in the fossil record are almost all determined at the family and genus level. In my own work on mosasaur richness during the Cretaceous (mosasaurs are large, mercifully extinct marine lizards), I focused on specimens identified to the Read More ›

Further to: Biochemist: Is RNA world wrong after all? (As noted before, if we really wanted researchers not to find out how life originated, we would urge that they continue with full-bore Darwinism), from BioMed Central, we learn from biochemist Harold S. Bernhardt: The RNA world hypothesis: the worst theory of the early evolution of life (except for all the others) Abstract:The problems associated with the RNA world hypothesis are well known. In the following I discuss some of these difficulties, some of the alternative hypotheses that have been proposed, and some of the problems with these alternative models. From a biosynthetic – as well as, arguably, evolutionary – perspective, DNA is a modified RNA, and so the chicken-and-egg dilemma of “which Read More ›

Remember when RNA world just had to be true, in that multiverse/global warming/Darwinism way? Where the observer soon realizes that evidence is superfluous—is even a threat? According to many origin of life researchers, RNA world (RNA preceded DNA and once did its job) has had that status for some time now among science writers. Well… From New Scientist: Why ‘RNA world’ theory on origin of life may be wrong after all Note: We are told, “Registration is required to view the article.” Not only that, but one can’t now even preview the first two graffs from the article before signing up for something. That said, a friend who did sign up offers the salient point: At some point, the idea Read More ›

Geek Anders Exoself (yes, we think it is a pseud too) dismisses the hope of finding a huge Earth naturally (“We can do better if we abandon the last pretence of the world being able to form naturally (natural metal microlattices, seriously?)”) and considers the issues around just building a giant habitable planet from scratch: Why aim for a large world in the first place? There are three apparent reasons. The first is simply survival, or perhaps Lebensraum: large worlds have more space for more beings, and this may be a good thing in itself. The second is to have more space for stuff of value, whether that is toys, gardens or wilderness. The third is to desire for diversity: Read More ›

and others of note Further to: Is there a sixth great extinction in progress? (It would help if a key exponent was anyone but Paul “Population Bomb” Ehrlich, a contender for the heavyweight champ of wrong-headed predictions), at Evolution News & Views, Rob Sheldon offers While the criteria may sound quantitative, and the increase in extinction rate qualitatively higher, there is a missing factor in this calculation. First, the extinction rate in the past is determined from fossils. Since almost by definition, fossil animals are nearly all extinct today, the extinction rate is close to 100 percent. But the key thing is that not all species are represented in the fossil record. Second, the present extinction rate is determined from Read More ›

This should be a Fri Nite Frite, but only if you live on an island, so… From Duke U ScienceDaily: Island rodents take on nightmarish proportions Rodents of unusual size are 17 times more likely on islands than elsewhere Whoever wrote that release has a future in frites. Researchers have analyzed size data for rodents worldwide to distinguish the truly massive mice and giant gerbils from the regular-sized rodents. They found that the furry animals with chisel-like teeth are 17 times more likely to evolve to nightmarish proportions on islands than elsewhere. The results are in keeping with an idea called the ‘island rule,’ which previous studies claimed didn’t apply to rodents. … More than half of the rodent populations Read More ›

Further to The multiverse: Hi, Nonsense, meet Budget (This Perimeter Institute conference could be a party’s over signal; time to sweep up the streamers and bust balloons, and get back to evidence-based science): Columbia mathematician Peter Woit is following the proceedings and notes, You can follow a lot of what is going on at this conference on Twitter, here. For example, I was glad to hear about this comment from Dimopoulos There is no difference that we know right now … between the story of divine intervention and the multiverse. It’s great to see a conference on fundamental physics where the multiverse is coming in for some appropriate skepticism. Nonsense, meet Prayer Beads. He has a wonderful plan for your Read More ›

Oh and, Budget, meet Rationalization. But you two can talk later. The meeting is starting… From physicsworld.com, we hear that the Perimeter Institute at MIT North (University of Waterloo, Canada) is starting to ask some questions about crackpot cosmology. As Louise Mayor tells us, on site: Right now, top physicists from around the world are arriving in Waterloo, Canada, to attend a unique conference. Christened Convergence, the meeting is the brainchild of Neil Turok, director of thePerimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, where the event will be based. I spoke to Turok to find out what motivated him to set up this conference, what makes it so special, and what he hopes it will achieve. Turok was fairly Read More ›

Further to PBS’s “shocking” revelation about long-ago humans (“we met and mated with other types of human” and “40 kya human bones contain Neanderthal and current genes,” one couldn’t help wondering about last year’s apparent attempt to revive Darwinian racism, in the form of science writer Nicholas Wade’s Troublesome Inheritance. In the increasingly Soviet system that governs the evolution elite today, science writer Ash Jogalekar was supposed to know that he should privately agree with the premise of the “Dark Enlightenment” in which non-racists are “creationists” but—publicly—mildly disparage the book. He made the mistake of actually saying he liked it: That mainly shows us the power that Darwin’s name exercises over a large swatch of the U grad public. Just Read More ›