Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory

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Genes Attack the Trees

November 26, 2005

Evolutionary tree-building (11/14/2005) is a tangled business. Now that scientists can compare genomes of diverse animals, they can compare the resulting molecular evolutionary trees with traditional ones – those produced by inferring relationships based on outward (morphological) characteristics of living or fossil organisms. What happens when the trees don’t match? Two recent studies, […]

Education

Like, Make a Tree

November 14, 2005

Three Darwinist professors lamented recently in Science1 that few scientists are making like a tree: “‘tree thinking’ remains widely practiced only by professional evolutionary biologists,” they said. And just what is “tree thinking”? It is basically thinking like Darwin; i.e., looking at the living world with phylogenetic glasses: The central claim of the theory of […]

Intelligent Design

Darwinists Refute ID Irreducible Complexity Argument

October 31, 2005

“New book explains how evolution really works, rebuts intelligent design.” That’s the triumphant title of a new book announcement from Harvard Medical School, reported on EurekAlert. According to the release, Marc W. Kirschner (Harvard Medical School) and John C. Gerhart (UC Berkeley) have addressed a “key problem in evolutionary theory that has puzzled scientists from […]

Uncategorized

Darwinian Fitness/Selection Studies Lack Real-World Experimental Verification, Produce Contradictory

October 26, 2005

“Evolution: Do Bad Husbands Make Good Fathers?” is the provocative title of an article in Current Biology1 that conceals the real subject. The first paragraph of the article by David J. Hosken and Tom Tregenza explains the title: Males sometimes harm their mates as they seek to maximise the number of offspring they sire. But […]

Marine Biology

Spider Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

October 21, 2005

Sea spiders look so similar to land spiders, everyone would have thought they were related. They differ, however, in several significant ways, said Graham Budd and Maximilian Telford in Nature:1 ’Their bodies are so slender that the digestive systems and gonads are squeezed into their limbs; they possess a forward-pointing proboscis with a terminal mouth; […]

Birds

Have We Been Sold a Bill of Goods About Feathered Dinosaurs and Bird Evolution?

October 10, 2005

Most people remember the poignant moment at the end of Jurassic Park when the professor, on a flight away from his harrowing experiences on the island of dinosaurs run amok, sees a flock of modern birds and ponders their peaceful existence as descendants of the velociraptors and tyrannosaurs that nearly killed him and his friends. […]

Cell Biology

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: Network Evolution Trumps ID

October 5, 2005

This entry will make more sense after reading yesterday’s story on the evolution of modular networks (10/04/2005). A reader sent in a reference to a very similar article from scientists at Johns Hopkins published in PLoS Biology.1 It must be Network Evolution Week. Before awarding the SEQOTW prize, some background is necessary. Like […]

Cell Biology

Can Networks Design Themselves?

October 4, 2005

A molecular biologist and a physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel (see also 09/26/2003) wrote a paper in PNAS1 with an intriguing title: “Spontaneous evolution of modularity and network motifs.” Can a network arise spontaneously? Biologists increasingly speak of the interaction of genes, proteins and metabolic processes in terms of […]

Uncategorized

Darwinian Phylogenetic Tools Are Mathematically Flawed

October 1, 2005

Many evolutionists use software tools to construct evolutionary trees from genetic data. Two mathematicians have just reported in Science1 that several popular “tree-building” algorithms can give misleading results: Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms play a critical role in the Bayesian approach to phylogenetic inference. We present a theoretical analysis of the rate of convergence […]

Education

Rhetoric Heats Up Over Dover IDea

September 26, 2005

Now that the ACLU’s lawsuit in Dover, Pennsylvania has gone to trial, more and more news media are writing about the controversy over intelligent design. Many seem to think that the school board is trying to replace Darwinism in high school science classrooms with I.D.; actually, the Dover case does not mandate the teaching of […]

Mammals

Evolutionists Finally Figure Out the Eye Well, Partly

September 22, 2005

As if tackling Darwin’s worst nightmare with gusto, evolutionary biologists published a paper in Current Biology1 about the evolution of the eye – at least the lens. Though the paper is restricted to a discussion of genes involved in making the crystallin proteins that make up the lens, EurekAlert announced this as “Insight into our […]

Dumb Ideas

Can Chemicals Be Fertile?

September 21, 2005

Simon Conway Morris wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week for the following entry in Current Biology.1 Ostensibly he was trying to be light-hearted and funny about mass extinctions. We’ll see if anyone is laughing about whether massive impacts are a blessing or a curse: Manna from heaven. So yet more violence, with the Earth […]

Terrestrial Zoology

Big Guys Finish First, Except in Drought

September 21, 2005

Nigel Williams tried to explain in Current Biology1 why “size matters” among marine iguanas in the Galapagos Islands: the vectors of natural and sexual selection don’t always line up. Females appear to like the big males when times are good, but when drought comes, the smaller dudes do better. There’s a difficulty with […]

Dumb Ideas

Are Brains Evolving Bigger, or Fatter?

September 9, 2005

Two papers in Science Sept. 9 claimed that human brains may still be evolving. According to the authors, two genes related to brain size appear to be under “positive selection” in certain people groups. One team said their variant occurred the same time as the emergence of art, music, religious practices and sophisticated tool use, […]