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Dumb Ideas

Can a Cell Improve by Lowering Its Standards?
May 26, 2004
The title of a paper in PNAS is intriguing: “Artificially ambiguous genetic code confers growth yield advantage.”  An international team claims to have created a beneficial mutation.  They removed the editing ability of a protein involved in translating the genetic code, and got it to survive in a nutrient-starved environment.  They suggest that the resulting […]
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Bible and Theology

Humans and Chimps Compared
May 25, 2004
In case you had an identity crisis last time at the zoo, Current Biology can provide psychoanalysis.  The May 25 issue posted two articles side by side: one, simply entitled “Humans,”1 and the other, “Chimps.”2  Various comparisons are contrasts are drawn, including a few surprising facts, such as this statement: “Based on relative amounts of […]
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Dumb Ideas

Plant Evolution Modeled in Computer
May 24, 2004
Simulation games are popular on computers.  Darwinian biologists seem to like them, too.  What they cannot go back in time to observe, they sometimes try to recreate in silico, inside the silicon chips of a computer.  Karl J. Niklas (Cornell) tried to simulate plant evolution, and wrote about it in Annual Review of Earth and […]
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Uncategorized

Evolution of Jaws: A Hox on Storytelling
May 19, 2004
Lampreys are jawless fish, unlike Jaws and his kin.  M.J. Cohn found that Hox genes are expressed in a lamprey in the first pharangeal arch.  Noting that fish with jaws do not express Hox genes in the first pharangeal arch [PA1], from which the jaws develop, Cohn hypothesized that jaw evolution proceeded with a retreat […]
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Uncategorized

Giardia Spoils Evolutionists’ Soup
May 19, 2004
In current evolutionary thinking, Giardia (the backpacker’s bane, a water-borne intestinal parasite that causes cramps and diarrhea) is an oldie.  Once long ago, early cells supposedly engulfed bacteria that became specialized into modern mitochondria.  “Until a few months ago, Giardia was thought to represent a throwback to the time before this union,” reports Nature,1 because […]
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Terrestrial Zoology

Fruit Flies Fail to Exhibit Neo-Darwinism
May 18, 2004
The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis is the current reigning paradigm of Darwinian evolution.  It teaches that random genetic mutations provide the raw material of variation, and that natural selection acting on these variations produces all the complexity of life.  A corollary is that mutation is independent of selection; i.e., that mutations do not “conspire” with natural selection […]
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Uncategorized

Can Traits Evolve Before Need?  The Case of California Chaparral Plants
May 18, 2004
A biologist went to California looking for evolution in plants.  He didn’t find it, but believes the plants evolved anyway.     That seems to be the upshot of a study by David D. Ackerly (Stanford U.) published in American Naturalist1 (see summary on EurekAlert).  Ackerly wanted to test whether natural selection produced the small, […]
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Bible and Theology

Does Darwinism Contribute to Sexual Deviancy?
May 17, 2004
Joan Roughgarden (Stanford U.) is a transsexual biologist.  Although a convinced Darwinian, “she” claims to have disproved Darwin’s theory of sexual selection (see 02/26/2003 headline).  Two reviews of her book Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People (University of California Press, 2003) appeared recently, one in Nature1 and another in Science.2  The […]
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Uncategorized

The Red Queen Did Not Invent Sex
May 16, 2004
A Darwinian story just died.  One of the evolutionary stories for the origin of sex is the “Red Queen” hypothesis.  Named after a character in Alice in Wonderland, it is the idea that an organism must continually change just to stay the same, like running and getting nowhere.  Technically, it states that “sexual reproduction is […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Homology for Dummies
May 5, 2004
Current Biology likes to give its readers primers on various concepts. The topic in the May 4 issue is homology.1 Caleb Webber and Chris P. Ponting explain this important evolutionary term for the rest of us. The Q&A format also introduces homology’s siblings: analogy, orthology, paralogy, xenology, and synteny. Some readers may not realize that […]
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Education

Italy Waffles on School Darwinism
April 29, 2004
It’s not just an American thing; the politicians and scientists in Italy, also, are polarizing around Darwin.  The education ministry just dropped a requirement to teach evolution in elementary and middle schools as part of a major overhaul of education guidelines.  A news brief in the April 28 issue of Science1 claims that pressure “may” […]
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Early Man

Another Human Distinctive: Lying
April 26, 2004
Here’s another evolutionary conundrum: animals usually don’t tell lies.  Why is lying such a well-documented human trait, but rare in the animal kingdom?  Animals signal their own and their enemies in many complex ways.  It would seem that lying would have evolved as a useful strategy many times in the animal kingdom, yet apparently it […]
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Politics and Ethics

Eugenics Documentary Opens at Holocaust Museum
April 22, 2004
Michael Ollove at the Baltimore Sun reports on a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum entitled Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race.  The exhibit shows a 1937 Nazi propaganda film that invokes the law of natural selection as support for weeding out the unfit.  Ollove writes, The narrator declares that “we humans have sinned […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Can Evolution Create Homologous Structures by Different Paths?
April 22, 2004
Günter Thebien (Friedrich Schuller U, Jena, Germany) is baffled about how two plants arrived at similar structures by different evolutionary pathways. In the April 22 issue of Nature,1 he asks, Structures that occur in closely related organisms and that look the same are usually considered to be homologous – their similarity is taken to arise […]
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Dumb Ideas

Fish Gene Gives Darwinists Hope
April 15, 2004
It doesn’t take much to excite an evolutionary biologist.  A little bit of microevolution that might be a stepping stone to macroevolution is all it takes.  This story almost reads like a Good News – Bad News joke.  The good news is that one gene that regulates the spines on one kind of fish has […]
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