A friend writes to say that he has a “very anti-Christian friend” who seems to have gotten herself high on “evolution” (= a fool for Dawkins). She wanted to know if any of my books would help. I recommended this one and this one, but ended by saying Re evolution: Do reassure your friend that it is okay to be an atheist and doubt current accounts of evolution. Many now do. Reviewing current accounts of evolution is like watching sausages get made, and hearing the details spelled out. It could throw you off meat altogether or else cause you to be much more selective in what you consume.

From New Scientist, we learn “Meteorite cargo could solve origin-of-life riddle” (01 March 2011) Andy Coghlan because A chemical vital for life on Earth may have arrived ready-made from space. Unexpectedly, a chondritic meteorite has been found to contain large amounts of ammonia, a nitrogen-rich chemical needed to form the basic building blocks of life, including proteins, DNA and RNA. Just how early Earth acquired sufficient ammonia for life processes has been a puzzle because the gas is destroyed by sunlight, and the assumed early environment didn’t favour ammonia production. However, some enterprising researchers exposed chondritic meteorite dust to water at 300 ̊C, and then compressed it beneath 100 megapascals of pressure, to mimic early Earth conditions. The ammonia, they Read More ›

In a recent article, I criticised Daniel Fairbanks for his selective disclosure of relevant evidence with regards to the chromosomal fusion evidence for human/chimp shared ancestry. In this article, I want to consider Fairbanks’ central argument in chapter 2 of his book (Relics of Eden — The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA), in which he covers jumping genes (transposable elements). In regard to this topic, as we shall learn in due course, Fairbanks not only applies his reasoning inconsistently, but conveniently omits to inform his readers of those papers which (a) serve to substantially undermine his core thesis, and (b) provide extremely potent counter-examples to much of the evidence which he marshalls in defense of it.

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Theist:  You say there is no God.  Evolutionary Materialist [EM]:  Yes. Theist:  Yet belief in God among many (if not most) humans persists. EM:  I cannot deny that. Theist:  How do you explain that? EM:  Religious belief is an evolutionary adaption.  Theist:  But you say religious belief is false. EM:  That’s correct.  Theist:  Let me get this straight.  According to you, religious belief has at least two characterizes:  (1) it is false; and (2) evolution selected for it.  EM [looking a little pale now, because he’s just figured out where this is going]:  Correct.   Theist:  You believe the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis [NDS] is true. EM:  Of course.  Theist:  How do you know your belief in NDS is not another false belief Read More ›

Yes, apparently, the cricket has carved out new territory in sheer conservatism:

A fossil found in northeastern Brazil confirmed that the splay-footed cricket of today has at least a 100-million-year-old pedigree.Researchers have discovered the 100 million-year-old ancestor of a group of large, carnivorous, cricket-like insects that still live today in southern Asia, northern Indochina and Africa. The new find, in a limestone fossil bed in northeastern Brazil, corrects the mistaken classification of another fossil of this type and reveals that the genus has undergone very little evolutionary change since the Early Cretaceous Period, a time of dinosaurs just before the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana.

[ … ]

Although the fossil is distinct from today’s splay-footed crickets, its general features differ very little, Heads said, revealing that the genus has been in a period of “evolutionary stasis” for at least the last 100 million years.

– (ScienceDaily, Feb. 4, 2011)

The paper is free online at open access journal ZooKeys. While we don’t know for sure, the explanation seems to be that the cricket could always find a habitat that let it just go on being what it is. If I were a teacher, I’d love a recent find like this, to demonstrate that evolution doesn’t necessarily just happen; something pushes it.

But apparently, findings like this are not to be taught to students in Texas. According to the local Darwin lobby, Read More ›

We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how evolution can act…on evolution, yielding mechanisms that allow both adaptation and heritability within the course of a lifetime. And such paradigm shifts almost always have societal consequences. Manel Esteller shows that epigenetics also impacts the “dark genome” in a way that may improve cancer diagnostics. So says Andrew D. Ellington in “Epigenetics and Society: Did Erasmus Darwin foreshadow the tweaking of his grandson’s paradigm?”(The Scientist, Volume 25 | Issue 3 | Page 14). He means, roughly, a revival of Lamarckism, the idea that life forms can acquire genetic information from their environment as well as through Darwin’s natural selection acting on random mutation. Why that was Read More ›

We learned recently that “Clay-Armored Bubbles May Have Formed First Protocells: Minerals Could Have Played a Key Role in the Origins of Life” (ScienceDaily, Feb. 7, 2011): A team of applied physicists at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Princeton, and Brandeis have demonstrated the formation of semipermeable vesicles from inorganic clay.The research, published online in the journal Soft Matter, shows that clay vesicles provide an ideal container for the compartmentalization of complex organic molecules. The authors say the discovery opens the possibility that primitive cells might have formed inside inorganic clay microcompartments. They expand, “The conclusion here is that small fatty acid molecules go in and self-assemble into larger structures, and then they can’t come out,” says Read More ›

Raymond Tallis, nearly thirty years in clinical neuroscience, diagnoses the problem here (“A mind of one’s own”, 24 February 2011): The republic of letters is in thrall to an unprecedented scientism. The word is out that human consciousness – from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self – is identical with neural activity in the human brain and that this extraordinary metaphysical discovery is underpinned by the latest findings in neuroscience. Given that the brain is an evolved organ, and, as the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, the neural explanation of human consciousness demands a Darwinian interpretation of our behaviour. The differences between Read More ›

Ardi is a 4.4-million-year-old fossil female, considered a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, was bipedal but reported to have lived in woodlands. That threw into doubt the great savannah myth of human origins. Not long after, came the “backlash”, as writer Jill Neimark puts it, when other authorities contended that she did live on the savannah, but in the meantime, Terry Harrison, a paleoanthropologist at New York University, questioned in Nature whether Ardi was even a member of the human lineage or just an ape “among the tangled branches” of a much larger bush. And University of Toronto paleoanthropologist David Begun also had doubts. “Ardi may be an early side branch of hominids that is not directly related to humans,” Read More ›

Scientists Steer Car With the Power of Thought ScienceDaily (Feb. 21, 2011) — You need to keep your thoughts from wandering, if you drive using the new technology from the AutoNOMOS innovation labs of Freie Universität Berlin. The computer scientists have developed a system making it possible to steer a car with your thoughts. Using new commercially available sensors to measure brain waves — sensors for recording electroencephalograms (EEG) — the scientists were able to distinguish the bioelectrical wave patterns for control commands such as “left,” “right,” “accelerate” or “brake” in a test subject. More here. Here’s the vid. We are, no kidding, advised not to try it at home. A friend comments, “Additional support for field theories of consciousness: Read More ›

Here’s the abstract of a just-published paper: Nature 470, 438 (24 February 2011) doi:10.1038/470438b NASA’s Kepler mission to find habitable planets orbiting Sun-like stars has turned up its first rocky planet. The project uses the Kepler space telescope to identify extrasolar planets by watching for dips in the intensity of light from up to 170,000 target stars. Natalie Batalha of San Jose State University in California and her group spotted Kepler 10b, which is about 4.56 times the mass of Earth. Although similar in size to Earth, its orbit lasts just 0.84 days, making it likely that the planet is a scorched, waterless world with a sea of lava on its starlit side. Despite the pop science media’s tendency to Read More ›

Put intuition aside for a moment and imagine a scenario where E.coli knockout strains that have been deleted for conditionally essential genes are rescued by proteins taken from a protein library composed of >10⁶ de novo designed sequences.  The prevailing assumption- that functional proteins are constrained to a very small subset of possible sequences- would lead us to infer that finding them by a random search through sequence space would be tantamount to impossible.  But a PLOS One paper published in early 2011 appears on the surface to have given us much room for thought.  Scientists from Princeton’s Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology used a combinatorial library of 102-residue long proteins to rescue non-viable E.coli knockouts.   The functional losses in the knockout strains affected serine, glutamate and isoleucine biosynthesis and disabled the cells’ natural capacity for iron acquisition in iron-limited environments. Read More ›

As Globe & Mail medical reporter Carolyn Abraham tells it (February 25, 2011):

Since James Van Gundia Neel proposed it almost 50 years ago, the thrifty-gene hypothesis has reigned as the dominant explanation for soaring rates of obesity and diabetes among many aboriginal groups. Native communities where diabetes didn’t exist in the first half of the 20th century had, by the end of it, the world’s highest prevalence, with Arizona’s Pima Indians in first place, followed by the Nauru islanders of Micronesia and the Oji-Cree at Sandy Lake.Dr. Neel, an influential geneticist at the University of Michigan, felt that genes were partly to blame. He speculated that genetic traits among the world’s prehistoric hunter-gatherers enabled them to store calories during times of feast in order to survive in times of famine.

But with “the blessings of civilization,” he wrote, these thrifty genes had become hazardous baggage in a sedentary world of all feast and no famine, predisposing carriers to obesity and the diseases it brings.

His idea spread like an epidemic, embraced by everyone from public-health officials and policy-makers to the media and many aboriginal people themselves. Although never billed as more than a hypothesis, it came to be seen as fact – “a scientific axiom,” Dr. Hegele says, “dogma almost.”

But now, with obesity and diabetes shaping up to be a global pandemic, the theory appears to be dying – raising the prospect that prejudice more than proof gave it such a long life.

Why you should always be suspicious when you hear … what? Here’s what: When you hear any medical thesis whatever that is based on what “prehistoric hunter-gatherers” supposedly did.

You need to monitor three simple devices to track the growth of diabetes: Read More ›

I was just reading Warwick University sociologist Steve Fuller’s comment* on the evolutionary psychologist’s insistence on deriving all human characteristics from kinship with apes:

Corresponding to this removal of metaphysical privilege is a tendency for Darwinists to treat the [128] most distinctive features of the human condition as by-products or pathologies, in either case implying that we hare lucky to have them in the first place, but they may prove to be our undoing in the end.

when, smack, into my mailbox arrives news that Darwin defender Christian de Duve believes that our evolved human traits will be our undoing in the end: Read More ›

Contrary to the spirit of this catalogue of bitches against critical thinking in the school system, I offered to answer a schoolkid’s questions. I do write children’s science sometimes, but am sure glad I don’t teach for a living. Doubtless there’s some state somewhere in the US where I’d get fired for saying this, below, contrary to state regulations: Read More ›