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The story is packaged as evidence for natural selection, but wait till you hear the details. Michael Denton is right. From ScienceDaily: Jumping genes, more formally known as transposable elements (TEs), are mobile segments of DNA that can change their position within a genome and alter the expression of other genes. Using fine-scale linkage and association mapping combined with next-generation DNA sequencing, the team established that a large transposable element, inserted within the moth’s cortex gene, was responsible for the colour change. Dr Ilik Saccheri, from the University’s Institute of Integrative Biology, who led the research, said: “This discovery fills a fundamental gap in the peppered moth story. The fact that this famous mutant is caused by a transposable element Read More ›

From The Scientist: A former scientist at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago made up more than 70 experiments on heart cells, according to the Office of Research Integrity. According to his LinkedIn profile, Malhotra worked at an Ann Arbor, Michigan–based microscopy company called PicoCal and is now serving as cardiovascular and metabolic consultant in the greater Boston area. He told the ORI that he does not plan to apply for any US Public Health Service funding. If he should do so in the next five years, his work will be supervised and he will be required to provide biannual reports to verify the legitimacy of his research, according to the ORI summary. More. Yawn. Either abolish Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Deep inside Bruniquel Cave, in the Tarn et Garonne region of southwestern France, a set of human-made structures 336 meters from the entrance was recently dated as being approximately 176,500 years old. This discovery indicates that humans began occupying caves much earlier than previously thought: until now the oldest formally proven cave use dated back only 38,000 years (Chauvet). It also ranks the Bruniquel structures among the very first in human history. In addition, traces of fire show that the early Neanderthals, well before Homo sapiens, knew how to use fire to circulate in enclosed spaces far from daylight. … But most importantly, the cave contains original structures made up of about 400 stalagmites or sections of stalagmites, Read More ›

There’s a certain haplessness to ScienceDaily. For example: Human intelligence might have evolved in response to the demands of caring for infants, new research suggests. Experts in in brain and cognitive sciences have developed a novel evolutionary model in which the development of high levels of intelligence may be driven by the demands of raising offspring. … Piantadosi and Kidd tested a novel prediction of the model that the immaturity of newborns should be strongly related to general intelligence. “What we found is that weaning time–which acts as a measure of the prematurity of the infants–was a much better predictor of primate’s intelligence than any of other measures we looked at, including brain size, which is commonly correlated with intelligence,” Read More ›

From Mark Pagel at New Scientist: If H. sapiens has always had language, could other extinct human species have had it too? Some believe that Neanderthals did – which would imply we both inherited it from our common ancestor some 500,000 or more years ago. This theory is consistent with the discovery that FOXP2, a gene that is essential to speech, is identical at two key positions in humans and Neanderthals but different in chimpanzees. But a single gene is not enough to explain language. And recent genetic evidence shows that the Neanderthal brain regulated its version of FOXP2 differently.What’s more, language is inherently symbolic – sounds stand for words that stand for real objects and actions. But there is Read More ›

Not an improvement, apparently, on read-only memory. From Bio-Complexity’s editor-in-chief Robert Marks II, some more thoughts on peer review: Authors are often asked to write short autobiographies in the third person at the end of their papers. In these biographies we often read self-congratulatory phrases like “Dr. Pythagoras is the author of over 500 journal and conference papers.” This is like saying “Dr. Pythagoras pounded 500 nails into various types of lumber.” The pounding of the nails is unimportant. It’s what you’ve built that counts. I once found myself in a discussion about publication count with a newly minted acquaintance at a neural network conference in Japan. He asked me how many publications I had. I told him. He looked Read More ›

As at Biologos. He writes: Venema’s argument is that harmful mutations shared amongst different species, such as the human and chimpanzee, are powerful and compelling evidence for evolution. These harmful mutations disable a useful gene and, importantly, the mutations are identical. Are not such harmful, shared, mutations analogous to identical typos in the term papers handed in by different students, or in historical manuscripts? Such typos are tell-tale indicators of a common source, for it is unlikely that the same typo would have occurred independently, by chance, in the same place, in different documents. Instead, the documents share a common source. Now imagine not one, but several such typos, all identical, in the two manuscripts. Surely the evidence is now Read More ›

From Jessica Riskin at ABC: Since Weismann’s [a 19th century German biologist] refutation of Lamarckism was obviously false, you might think it couldn’t have had much influence. On the contrary. Weismann actually had a huge influence on Darwinism that has lasted until the present day. Today’s neo-Darwinists—people such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—are really Weismannians (in fact, Dawkins has called himself an ‘extreme Weismannian’). Even outside of evolutionary biology, some of the most influential thinkers and writers in biology and cognitive science today have adopted the Weismannian view that living organisms are essentially passive, made of dumb and inert mechanical parts. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker is an example: he has written that the human mind can be reduced to Read More ›

Michael Denton does not quarrel with common descent in principle but finds that there is no good evidence for the continuous series of small changes over time that Darwin’s theory of evolution requires. Rather, after summarizing the evidence in Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016), he writes, There is a tree of life. There is no doubt that all extant life forms are related and descended from a primeval ancestral form at the base of the tree. But there is no evidence to support the Darwinian claim that the tree is a functional continuum where it is possible to move from the base of te trunk to all the most peripheral branches in tiny incremental adaptive steps. On the Read More ›

Tom Woodward, author of Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design (2003) and its sequel (2006), Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, is coauthor with Dr. James Gills of The Mysterious Epigenome: What Lies Beyond DNA (2012), writes to tell us, Just a quick report from the front lines of the ID/Darwin debate here in Copenhagen, Denmark, as I near the end of a 15-day speaking tour of those two countries. First, for another few hours, you can see a surprise major article in the largest daily newspaper of Denmark, The Jutland Post (Jyllens-Posten), where here you can scroll down to see the headline at least, and a pic of me holding up one of our Read More ›

From Nicholas Kristof at New York Times, who has just discovered  that most “liberals” don’t agree that close-mindedness is a bad thing (he wrote about it recently, and now follows up): Third, when scholars cluster on the left end of the spectrum, they marginalize themselves. We desperately need academics like sociologists and anthropologists influencing American public policy on issues like poverty, yet when they are in an outer-left orbit, their wisdom often goes untapped. In contrast, economists remain influential. I wonder if that isn’t partly because there is a critical mass of Republican economists who battle the Democratic economists and thus tether the discipline to the American mainstream. I’ve had scores of earnest conversations with scholars on these issues. Many Read More ›

Priceless: Perhaps no topic appears as potentially threatening to evangelicals as evolution. The very idea seems to exclude God from the creation the book of Genesis celebrates. Yet many evangelicals have come to accept the conclusions of science while still holding to a vigorous belief in God and the Bible. How did they make this journey? How did they come to embrace both evolution and faith? Here are stories from a community of people who love Jesus and honor the authority of the Bible, but who also agree with what science says about the cosmos, our planet and the life that so abundantly fills it. Among the contributors are Scientists such as … More. Just think. The rest of the Read More ›

Response to Dennis Venema, Part II. From Cornelius Hunter: The Naked Ape: BioLogos on Human Chromosome Two There is one piece of contradictory evidence I did not discuss in my previous article. I omitted it because Venema gives it special emphasis and so it merits its own article. This evidence is that while we humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 46, the chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla each have 24 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 48. In my previous article I pointed out several differences in the primate genomes that contradict evolutionary theory. This difference in chromosome count is yet another fundamental problem for evolution. According to evolution, humans have 23 rather than 24 pairs Read More ›

From New Horizons:

From H. Allen Orr in “DNA: ‘The Power of the Beautiful Experiment,’” in a review of Matthew Cobb’s Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code (Basic Books)New York Review of Books: The “information” that is “encoded” in DNA gets “read” by cells. You likely didn’t notice because this is now a nearly reflexive way of talking about DNA, even in popular culture. It’s just obvious to us that DNA stores information—for curly hair or blue eyes—and it’s natural to think of it as an information storage device much like the hard disk of a computer. Yet one of Cobb’s main points is that this is a remarkably recent way of thinking about biology. True Then it gets Read More ›