The recent find of a probable new kingdom of life in a routine dirt sample in Nova Scotia (an east coast province of Canada) raises an obvious question: How much more is there out there that is underfoot, so to speak, that does not fit our tidy categories? Just yesterday, we were looking at the […]
Tree of life
Podcast: Winston Ewert on the Dependency Graph vs. Darwin’s Tree of Life, Part 1
Here: On this episode of ID the Future, guest host Robert J. Marks talks with Dr. Winston Ewert about Ewert’s groundbreaking new hypothesis challenging Darwin’s common descent tree of life. The new model is based on the well-established technique of repurposing software code in different software projects. Ewert, a senior researcher at Biologic and the […]
Acknowledged: Claims of well-established patterns in evolution may be “remarkable bias”
From ScienceDaily: How do the large-scale patterns we observe in evolution arise? A new paper in the journal Evolution by researchers at Uppsala University and University of Leeds argues that many of them are a type of statistical artefact caused by our unavoidably recent viewpoint looking back into the past. As a result, it might […]
Winston Ewert on his dependency graph model of the relationship of life forms
Programmer Winston Ewert has developed a dependency graph, as an alternative to the Darwinian “tree of life,” to understand relationships among life forms. Here he discusses it with Jonathan McLatchie: Dr. Winston Ewert … proposes an alternative model to common descent to explain the hierarchical classification of life. Based on his paper published in Bio-Complexity, […]
New “fixed” bacterial Tree of Life looks like a cityscape
Seen from below: Professor Hugenholtz said the scientific community generally agrees that evolutionary relationships are the most natural way to classify organisms, but bacterial taxonomy is riddled with errors, due to historical difficulties. “This is mainly because microbial species have very few distinctive physical features, meaning that there are thousands of historically misclassified species,” he […]
Find deepens mystery of turtle’s origins
From ScienceDaily: There are a couple of key features that make a turtle a turtle: its shell, for one, but also its toothless beak. A newly-discovered fossil turtle that lived 228 million years ago is shedding light on how modern turtles developed these traits. It had a beak, but while its body was Frisbee-shaped, its […]
At New York Times: Darwin skeptic Carl Woese “effectively founded a new branch of science”
David Quammen, author of The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life, a biography of Darwin skeptic Carl Woese, who discovered the Archaea, offers a long reflection at the New York Times on how biology is moving away from Darwinism: Woese was a rebel researcher, obscure but ingenious, crotchety, driven. He had his Warholian 15 […]
Life should be classified not as a tree but as a dependency graph, says researcher
Winston Ewert, one of the authors of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics has a new paper at BIO-Complexity: Abstract: The hierarchical classification of life has been claimed as compelling evidence for universal common ancestry. However, research has uncovered much data which is not congruent with the hierarchical pattern. Nevertheless, biological data resembles a nested hierarchy sufficiently […]
Molecular biologist: Speculation re the last universal common ancestor is not helping science
From molecular biologist Mike Klymkowsky at The Scientist There is a pernicious temptation in science to speak authoritatively about topics that are beyond scientific exploration and certainty. This has led some theoretical physicists to advocate for a “post-empirical” form of science. That is the idea that theories need not be judged on their ability to […]
Startling Result–90% of Animals Less than 200 kya
From PhysOrg this morning, in a study using “DNA bar-codes” (mitochondrial DNA, using a specific gene COI) and conducted around the world, here’s the verdict: The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. “This conclusion is very […]
Phylogenetics of plants is a mess
From Douglas E. Soltis, Michael J. Moore, Emily B. Sessa, Stephen A. Smith, and Pamela S. Soltis, Using and navigating the plant tree of life, at Amerian Journal of Botany 7 April 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajb2.1071 (open access) : The “tree of life” has become a metaphor for the interconnectivity and breadth of all life on Earth. […]
Giant virus shares genes (core histones) with complex life forms. But what exactly does that imply?
From ScienceDaily: “It’s exciting and significant to find a living family of giant viruses with eukaryote-specific genes in a form that predates the latest common ancestor of all eukaryotes,” says Albert Erives, associate professor in the Department of Biology. “These viruses are like time machines that tell us more about how life on our planet […]
Grand evolution theory for complex animals in ruins; fossil is, in fact, a jellyfish
From ScienceDaily: Pseudooides fossils have a segmented middle like the embryos of segmented animals, such as insects, inspiring grand theories on how complex segmented animals may have evolved. A team of paleontologists from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences and Peking University have now peered inside the Pseudooides embryos using X-rays and found […]
Another axe lying at the root of the Tree of Life
A brand new early eukaryote (“its own eukaryotic lineage”) From Katarina Zimmer at The Scientist: From an aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, scientists have identified a unicellular species that could shed light on how eukaryotes evolved, they report in Current Biology this week (November 22). The tiny organism—named Ancoracysta […]
Dinosaurs are tearing paleontology apart?
Should we call on 9-11, the Humane Society, or the vegans… or on soft dino tissue, to restore order? From Matthew Reynolds at Wired: The [March 2017] paper overturned one of the most fundamental things that we thought we knew about dinosaurs – that they split neatly into two groups. This is dinosaur 101. The […]