Evolution News

Walter Bradley and Casey Luskin write: Major scientific magazines and journals often feature articles on the “Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Science”1 — and the origin of life is almost always on that list, sometimes as the number one mystery.2 In this and coming posts we will explore key challenges to a natural, chemical origin of life. We’ll examine the formation of the essential functional polymers of life — proteins, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), and RNA (ribonucleic acid). How might these extraordinarily complex molecules have formed in oceans, lakes, or ponds from simple, naturally occurring molecular building blocks like sugars and amino acids? What is life? How does it operate? Could life originate by strictly natural means? Three Scientific Discoveries Darwin’s theory of evolution Read More ›

Physicist Rob Sheldon writes: A correspondent asked me recently how we know the age of the universe. The answer is calculated from the inverse of the Hubble constant. That is, if the galaxies are moving away from us at 72 km/s /Mpc, that has units of 1/time, the inverse is the age of the universe (more or less) because it locates the time since everything was at a point. For the universe to be younger, the Hubble constant has to be bigger. In fact, when Hubble first proposed his constant, it gave an age of the universe of about 4 billion years, which is the age of the oldest rocks in the Earth. However every decade saw a decrease in the Hubble Read More ›

William Dembski writes: I am responding again to Jason Rosenhouse about his book The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism. See my earlier posts here and here. In Rosenhouse’s book, he claims that “natural selection serves as a conduit for transmitting environmental information into the genomes of organisms.” (p. 215) I addressed this claim briefly in my review, indicating that conservation of information shows it to be incomplete and inadequate, but essentially I referred him to technical work by me and colleagues on the topic. In his reply, he remains, as always, unpersuaded. So let me here give another go at explaining the role of the environment as a source of information for Darwinian evolution. As throughout this response, I’m addressing the unwashed middle. Darwinian evolution depends on Read More ›