Free Republic

New species might arise as a result of single rare events, rather than through the gradual accumulation of many small changes over time, according to a study of thousands of species and their evolutionary family trees. This contradicts a widely accepted theory of how speciation occurs: that species are continually changing to keep pace with their environment, and that new species emerge as these changes accrue. Known as the 'Red Queen' hypothesis, it is named after the character in Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There who tells a surprised Alice: "Here, you see, it takes...

Dec 3, 2009 — In the previous entry, Darwin inspired some geologists, even though he was wrong. Here are some news stories showing nature inspiring engineers with wonders right under their noses...

ScienceDaily: “Slowing Evolution to Stop Drug Resistance” --snip-- For years, evolutionists have pointed to antibiotic resistance as proof of evolution in action. The argument often amounts to this (in simplified form): the fact that certain organisms grow resistant to certain antibiotics is evidence for the evolutionary idea that all animals must have descended from a single ancestor. Collapsing the argument does make it seem a bit silly, but that’s our point. We certainly don’t want to belittle the very real threat of dangerous organisms becoming immune to the best drugs we now have (though the vast majority of microbes are...

Not to mince words - the modern synthesis is gone --snip-- "The discovery of pervasive HGT and the overall dynamics of the genetic universe destroys not only the tree of life as we knew it but also another central tenet of the modern synthesis inherited from Darwin, namely gradualism. In a world dominated by HGT, gene duplication, gene loss and such momentous events as endosymbiosis, the idea of evolution being driven primarily by infinitesimal heritable changes in the Darwinian tradition has become untenable." ...

Darwin’s theory that species originate via the natural selection of natural variation is correct in principle but wrong in numerous aspects of application. Speciation is not the result of an unlimited naturalistic process but of an intelligently designed system of built-in variation that is limited in scope to switching ON and OFF permutations and combinations of the built-in components. Kirschner and Gerhart’s facilitated variation theory provides enormous potential for rearrangement of the built-in regulatory components but it cannot switch ON components that do not exist. When applied to the grass family, facilitated variation theory can account for the diversification of...

Oct 16, 2009 — It’s called “a fresh theoretical framework” but it undermines the popular conception of natural selection.  It’s called a “dense and deep work on the foundations of evolutionary biology” but it criticizes as simplistic and false the ideas of Richard Dawkins, one of the most outspoken proponents of natural selection as “the greatest show on earth.”  It produces a new scheme for how natural selection works, but raises more questions than it answers.  What is it?  It’s a new book by Harvard philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford, 2009), reviewed mostly positively by Jay...

News to Note, May 23, 2009: A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint (READ THE FOLLOWING STORIES AND MUCH MORE BY CLICKING THE EXCERPT LINK AT BOTTOM) 1. ICR: “‘Missing Link’ Ida Is Just Media Hype”The news media has been awash this week in hype over an alleged missing link fossil nicknamed Ida. As it turns out, the fossil wasn’t fraudulent, but the hype definitely was. 2. The Telegraph: “New ‘Super Rats’ Evolve Resistance to Poison”Is this “super rat” an example of evolution in action, or the result of an information-reducing mutation? 3. Gallup: “More Americans ‘Pro-Life’ than...

While driving into work recently, I had a near encounter with a squirrel. I'm sure most of you have had one too. What generally seems to happen is this. The squirrel goes to the edge of the road, and looks around. Then, just when your car gets within range, the squirrel darts in front of you, seemingly trying to see how close it can get to being squished, without actually dying. As an added bonus, sometimes, just as you break, or swerve the other way, it will change course. If you are really lucky, sometimes the critter will zigzag three...

“Charles Darwin and his followers have shown how all life on the planet evolved from a single source. The mechanism they call evolution by natural selection means competition, extinction and the emergence of new life forms without the need for a director or conductor. The Creator shimmers and vanishes like a mirage.” So says political pundit Andrew Marr, one of the BBC’s most senior journalists, in the first of his three BBC2 programmes celebrating evolution and its legacy during the last century and a half. While there was much to agree with in this thought-provoking series, Marr is careful to...

Slouching Toward Columbine: Darwin's Tree of Death April 20, 2009 David Klinghoffer I've long been fascinated by the image of the Tree of Death, parallel to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and cryptically referred to in mystical texts explaining the Hebrew Bible: And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the Tree of Life also in the midst of the garden, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2:9). Come and behold: as soon as night falls, the...

Natural Selection Studies Based on Bad Statistics March 30, 2009 — Hundreds of studies claiming to show natural selection may be wrong, say scientists from Penn State and Japan.  PhysOrg reported today that “several statistical methods commonly used by biologists to detect natural selection at the molecular level tend to produce incorrect results.”  Many studies of human evolution have relied on these flawed methods.  If the methods were wrong, the conclusions are unreliable.  “Of course, we would never say that natural selection is not happening, but we are saying that these statistical methods can lead scientists to make erroneous inferences,”...

Darwin’s arguments against God How Darwin rejected the doctrines of Christianity by Russell Grigg Charles Darwin Charles Darwin grew up embracing the ‘intelligent design’ thinking of his day—William Paley’s renowned argument that the design of a watch implies there must have been an intelligent watchmaker, and so design in the universe implies there must have been an intelligent Creator.1 Concerning this, Darwin wrote, ‘I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s “Natural Theology�.2 I could almost formerly have said it by heart.’3 Nevertheless, Darwin spent most of the rest of his life attempting to...

Attempts to breed a rare species of duck to avoid extinction in the UK have backfired after the only two remaining males fell for each other.Keepers at a bird sanctuary in West Sussex hoped that the last remaining female Blue Duck in the country - called Cherry - might mate with either of the drakes, Ben or Jerry. But neither male duck appeared interested and are now inseparable at the Arundel Wetland Centre, leaving Cherry to her own devices. Related Articles Endangered bittern returns to Somerset Thai zoo hopes cold spell will put pandas in heat Gay penguins steal eggs...

News to Note, February 28, 2008 (go to link below to read stories) 1. CBC News: “Montreal Scientists Unlock Mystery of Early Molecular Mechanism”. Have Canadian scientists uncovered the key that makes an evolutionary origin of life plausible? 2. Forbes: “The Dangers of Overselling Evolution” Philip Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences for more than three decades, cautions against protecting Darwinism through censorship. 3. The Boston Globe: “Cod in the Act of Evolution” Another example of “evolution in action”—-need we even bother examining the reality to confirm this isn’t what Darwin predicted? 4. BBC News: “‘Ghost Peaks’...

...Coyne and Pigliucci tell us (again) that there is such overwhelming evidence for evolution. OK, put up or shut up. They don’t know what a species is, they don’t know what the target of selection is, they don’t know if natural selection is a queen or a jester, they don’t know what adaptive radiation is, they don’t know how speciation operates (the main reason for Darwin’s little storybook), and they can’t connect mutations to any actual benefit to an organism. Other than those little minor matters, evolution is so supported by such mountains of evidence that only a fool with...

Let’s listen in on a hypothetical conversation between a biblical creationist (C) and an evolutionist (E) as they discuss some recent scientific news headlines: E: Have you heard about the research findings regarding mouse evolution? C: Are you referring to the finding of coat color change in beach mice? E: Yes, isn’t it a wonderful example of evolution in action? C: No, I think it’s a good example of natural selection in action, which is merely selecting information that already exists. E: Well, what about antibiotic resistance in bacteria? Don’t you think that’s a good example of evolution occurring right...

Is Natural Selection Losing its Appeal? Jan 28, 2009 — Some recent science reports sound like they are ready to cast Darwin’s key phrase natural selection overboard, or at least demote it from its leading role in evolution. These articles each hint that long-held beliefs are being challenged...

The traditional understanding of DNA has recently been transformed beyond recognition. DNA does not, as we thought, carry a linear, one-dimensional, one-way, sequential code—like the lines of letters and words on this page. And the 97% in humans that does not carry protein-coding genes is not, as many people thought, fossilized ‘junk’ left over from our evolutionary ancestors. DNA information is overlapping-multi-layered and multi-dimensional; it reads both backwards and forwards; and the ‘junk’ is far more functional than the protein code, so there is no fossilized history of evolution. No human engineer has ever even imagined, let alone designed an...

This is the fourth post in a series of articles on the evils and errors of Darwinism. So far, we have postulated that Darwinism, - the tenets of which furnish the philosophical foundation for atheism and materialism (I do know they both preceded Darwin), and for the actions of Stalin and Hitler in exterminating millions, - is correct about some things and wrong about others. That which Darwin got wrong, however, is crucial. We have seen how the DNA code structure argues conclusively for the tenet that we are all related in some way; but that same DNA code also...

Science Intrudes Into Morality Dec 23, 2008 — The Pope recently declared that we need to save humanity from self-destructive behaviors, like homosexuality. Can science intrude on questions of human behavior and morals? New Scientist thought so; a blog entry today says the Pope “misuses science to attack homosexuality.”One would think that moral behavior would lie outside the field for a scientific news source, but online news editor Rowan Hooper went on, mocking the Pope’s claim that the church has a role in saving “human ecology” like scientists have a role in protecting tropical forests. Hooper called this “a bizarre...

Contact: Deborah S. Rogers dsrogers@stanford.edu 650-630-7760 Stanford University Human culture subject to natural selection, Stanford study shows The process of natural selection can act on human culture as well as on genes, a new study finds. Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes. Speeded or slowed rates of evolution typically indicate the action of natural selection in analyses of the human genome. This study of cultural evolution, which compares the rates of change for structural and decorative Polynesian canoe-design traits, is...

above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews — those of northern European heritage — resulted from natural selection in medieval Europe, where they were pressured into jobs as financiers, traders, managers and tax collectors. Those who were smarter succeeded, grew wealthy and had bigger families to pass on their genes, they suggested. That evolution also is linked to genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher in Jews. The new study was funded by the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Aging, the Unz Foundation, the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin.

In January 1955, Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College, published a paper called “Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life” in American Scientist, the journal of Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society. In it, Dr. Jacobson speculated on the chemical qualities of earth in Hadean time, billions of years ago when the planet was beginning to cool down to the point where, as Dr. Jacobson put it, “one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive.”... Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y....

Science Daily — In a molecular tour de force, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have provided an exquisitely detailed picture of natural selection as it occurs at the genetic level. Writing Oct. 11, 2007 in the journal Nature, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Sean B. Carroll and former UW-Madison graduate student Chris Todd Hittinger document how, over many generations, a single yeast gene divides in two and parses its responsibilities to be a more efficient denizen of its environment. The work illustrates, at the most basic level, the driving force of evolution."This is how new capabilities arise and new...

Atheist Scientists in Uproar over Movie Showing Intolerance of Evidence for Intelligent Design EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed Coming to Theatres in February 2008 LOS ANGELES, October 5, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) -  Atheist scientists who have become famous for attacking those who disagree with them are now loudly complaining about supposedly being mistreated in a film they haven't seen. Oxford zoologist, Richard Dawkins, has made a lot of money and fame calling people who believe in God "delusional." Yet he is now grumbling that the producers of EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed "tricked" him into doing an interview. EXPELLED exposes the intimidation, persecution...

A population of butterflies has evolved in a flash on a South Pacific island to fend off a deadly parasite. The proportion of male Blue Moon butterflies dropped to a precarious 1 percent as the parasite targeted males. Then, within the span of a mere 10 generations, the males evolved an immunity that allowed their population share to soar to nearly 40 percent—all in less than a year. “We usually think of natural selection as acting slowly, over hundreds or thousands of years," said study team member Gregory Hurst, an evolutionary geneticist at the University College London. "But the example...

24 Observations on the Intelligent Design versus Macro Evolution debate I kicked off quite a firestorm with my recent post on Marketing Darwin. The blogger Orac picked it up, shredded it to pieces, which led to dozens of comments at my blog and his. Smelling fresh blood, Professor PZ Meyers takes me to task, and more comments ensue. Basically, I get trashed really badly. Thank goodness I am secure in my old age! :) I find it all interesting. Many of the commenters raise some really good points, and I agree with some of them. Many though seem to deliberately...

RIO VISTA – Two whales lost in the Sacramento River have made progress toward their ocean home, but rescuers were concerned Monday about encounters they might have with large ships as they near San Francisco Bay. The mother humpback whale and her calf were spotted Monday morning near the Benicia-Martinez Bridge, about 45 miles from the Pacific, said Carol Singleton of the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. The pair had traveled about 24 miles in 24 hours, but their pace had slowed. They were first spotted May 13 and got as far as 90 miles inland to the Port of...

Cannes - A semi-documentary about a group of US men who had sex with horses has taken the title as the most shocking movie at the Cannes film festival. But while Zoo has drawn big, curious crowds at its screenings, the real unsettling quality about the movie is its approach: it depicts the men in a sympathetic light, one that tries to push the viewers to understanding their sexual perversion. The documentary - in which actors recreate non-explicit scenes under audio interviews with some of the men involved - centres on a true-life incident. In July 2005, a 45-year-old man...

ST. LOUIS - Evolution happens. But it can also stop and turn on a dime. A new study of lizards in the Bahamas shows that the natural selection pressures that drive evolution can flip-flop faster than previously thought - even in months. "Darwin was right about so many things," said Jonathan Losos, a former Washington University biologist who led the study. "In this case he was wrong. He thought that evolution must occur slowly and gradually." The lizards and their changing leg lengths are yet another case of evolution occurring in real time. From finches that evolve longer beaks in...

The dynamics of evolution are fully in play within the environment of a tumor, just as they are in forests and meadows, oceans and streams. This is the view of researchers in an emerging cross-disciplinary field that brings the thinking of ecologists and evolutionary biologists to bear on cancer biology. Insights from their work may have profound implications for understanding why current cancer therapies often fail and how radically new therapies might be devised. A review by researchers at The Wistar Institute of current research in this new field, published online November 16, will appear in the December issue of...

(AP) SALINAS, Calif. The FBI searched two spinach packaging companies Wednesday for evidence in the nationwide E. coli outbreak that sickened 192 people. Agents from the FBI and the Food and Drug Administration used warrants to search the San Juan Bautista plant of Natural Selection Foods LLC and a Growers Express plant in Salinas to determine whether they followed food safety procedures. Federal health officials said early in their investigation that deliberate contamination was not suspected. "We are investigating allegations that certain spinach growers and distributors may not have taken all necessary or appropriate steps to ensure that their spinach...

Mastodons Driven to Extinction by Tuberculosis, Fossils Suggest Kimberly Johnson for National Geographic News October 3, 2006 Tuberculosis was rampant in North American mastodons during the late Ice Age and may have led to their extinction, researchers say. Mastodons lived in North America starting about 2 million years ago and thrived until 11,000 years ago—around the time humans arrived on the continent—when the last of the 7-ton (6.35-metric-ton) elephantlike creatures died off. Scientists Bruce Rothschild and Richard Laub pieced together clues to the animals' widespread die-off by studying unearthed mastodon foot bones. Rothschild first noticed a telltale tuberculosis lesion on...

Conservatives are outbirthing libs by a wide margin. How soon can you get knocked up? Let this be your rallying cry. Let it be your new hot-button topic, a raw naked condomless blog-ready wildfire underground grassroots crusade, your juiciest of incentive programs, your inspired call to hot naked impregnable sperm-a-riffic action. Because the statistics are ugly, getting uglier: Despite all divine hope and prayer to the contrary, it looks like baby-happy conservatives are outbreeding liberals by a margin of some 20 to 40 percent. It's a fact. It's a trend. It's an onslaught. It's a dreadful soul-curdling predicament and the...

Natural Selection Foods has offered to pay the out-of-pocket medical expenses of people who have been sickened in the nationwide E. coli outbreak, traced to spinach the company processed at a plant in San Juan Bautista. "We know it's the right thing to do," Chief Operating Officer Charles Sweat said at a news conference held next to Mission San Juan Bautista Thursday afternoon. At least 189 people, mostly outside California, have been sickened since August, said the Food and Drug Administration. One person has died. State and federal health officials had found E. coli in nine bags of Dole baby...

<p>He was killed in a freak accident in Cairns, police sources said. It is understood he was killed by a sting-ray barb that went through his chest.</p> <p>He was swimming off the Low Isles at Port Douglas filming an underwater documentary and that's when it occured.</p>

COLLEGE STATION — A Texas A&M University student was killed while trying to jump aboard a moving train, police said. Robert Walker Best, 23, was killed early Saturday when he slipped under the train on a rail line located a few blocks from the university campus. He was pronounced dead at the scene, officials said. Best, of San Antonio, would have been a fifth-year senior biology major when classes resumed Monday. Police said Best was with two male friends when the accident occurred — one a student at Blinn College and the other a University of Texas student. College Station...

EuroStemCell scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have demonstrated one of the body's most sophisticated ways of regulating the genetic material of stem cells. Their findings, published in Nature Cell Biology, show for the first time the mechanism that adult muscle stem cells use to protect their DNA from mutations. Understanding this has important implications for cancer research, the study of gene regulation, and ultimately growing stem cells of therapeutic potential in the laboratory. When a cell divides, its DNA is duplicated and each resulting daughter cell inherits one copy of the DNA. Over time, errors arising during the...

"Birth Control Is Selfish" ... The Message Society Doesn't Want To Hear This past weekend graduates of Saint Thomas University were treated to a surprising speech by 21-year-old graduating student Ben Kessler. Some graduates walked out, many jeered, and others spewed profanities in response to his speech. Just what did he speak of which caused such an outcry? The War in Iraq? Border control? NSA spying? None of the above. So, what exactly did Mr. Kessler do wrong? He touched society's third rail: contraception. Mr. Kessler had the audacity to call the use of birth control "an act of selfishness."...

Seat belt use is reaching record levels, so just who are the holdouts who fail to buckle up? Often they are young men who live in rural areas and drive pickups, the government says. About 48 million people do not regularly put on seat belts when they are on the road, a figure the government's highway safety agency hopes to lower with an annual public education campaign ahead of the summer driving season. The "Click It or Ticket" campaign involves checkpoints, patrols and advertisements to help enforce seat belt laws. It runs from May 22 through June 4. The latest...

Sometimes you have to wonder about the New York Times. It printed a long, breathtakingly written, scientific-sounding piece that just had one problem: It wasn’t news. Now, why would it do that? The article, titled “Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story,” was run prominently on the front page of the New York Times last week. The reporter excitedly announced that scientists had found “the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving.” That’s big news. What was the evidence? “Researchers have detected,” the story says, “some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped...

The breakup of giant icebergs may have forced minor evolutionary changes in penguins over the past 6,000 years, a new study suggests. The Antarctic iceberg chunks, which break off the continent now and then, are thought to have blocked the swim paths of Adelie penguins returning home to their colonies. Some of the penguins were forced to become immigrants in other colonies, where they established new homes and interbred with the locals. As a result, genetic changes that might otherwise have remained isolated became widespread among the different colonies. The result is what scientist call microevolution. Other examples Microevolution involves...

Picky female frogs in a tiny rainforest outpost of Australia have driven the evolution of a new species in 8,000 years or less, according to scientists from the University of Queensland, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service. "That's lightning-fast," said co-author Craig Moritz, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley and director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. "To find a recently evolved species like this is exceptional, at least in my experience." The yet-to-be-named species arose after two isolated populations of the green-eyed tree frog reestablished contact less than 8,000 years ago and...

Ernst Mayr, a biologist who expanded upon Darwin's theory of evolution, died on February 3 at the age of 100. While he also earned acclaim as an ornithologist, naturalist, and historian of biology during his eight-decade career, Mayr will be best remembered as a champion of evolutionary theory.Mayr's major contribution came in 1942, when his book Systematics and the Origin of Species was published. Here, Mayr laid one of the cornerstones of the then new synthetic theory of evolution, which unified Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel's theory of heredity. One of the shortcomings of...

Boise -- A Boy Scout who was using a cable to glide between two trees at a summer camp died after losing his grip and plunging 15 feet, authorities said.

Autocatakinetics, Evolution, and the Law of Maximum Entropy Production By Rod Swenson An Excerpt: Ecological science addresses the relations of living things to their environments, and the study of human ecology the particular case of humans. There is an opposing tradition built into the foundations of modern science of separating living things, and, in particular, humans from their environments. Beginning with Descartes’ dualistic world view, this tradition found its way into biology by way of Kant, and evolutionary theory through Darwin, and manifests itself in two main postulates of incommensurability, the incommensurability between psychology and physics (the “first postulate of...

The family of Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist killed by an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer in Rafah two years ago, sued the State of Israel and the IDF for damages in the Haifa District Court on Tuesday. The 24-year-old Corrie was killed on March 16, 2003 when she tried to block an IDF bulldozer from destroying a Palestinian house near the Philadelphi Route, the strip of land in the Gaza Strip bordering Egypt. An IDF investigation ruled the incident was an accident and that the driver did not see Corrie, and the military prosecutor's office decided not to press charges...

What happened to the rare tribes? SANJAY DUTTA & CHANDRIKA MAGO TUESDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2004 11:19:06 PM NEW DELHI: An enormous anthropological disaster is in the making. The killer tsunami is feared to have wiped out entire tribes — already threatened by their precariously small numbers — perhaps rendering them extinct and snapping the slender tie with a lost generation. Officials involved in rescue operations are pessimistic, but still keeping their fingers crossed for the Sentinelese and Nicobarese, the two tribes seen as bearing the brunt of the killer wave. The bigger fear is for the Sentinelese, anthropologically the most...

Humans march to a faster genetic 'drummer' than primates, UC Riverside research says *Research runs counter to Darwin's theory of natural selection* A team of biochemists from UC Riverside published a paper in the June 11 issue of the Journal of Molecular Biology that gives one explanation for why humans and primates are so closely related genetically, but so clearly different biologically and intellectually. It is an established fact that 98 percent of the DNA, or the code of life, is exactly the same between humans and chimpanzees. So the key to what it means to be human resides in...

Every species seems to come and go. Some last longer than others, but nothing lasts forever. Humans are a relatively recent phenomenon, jumping out of trees and striding across the land around 200 000 years ago. Will we persist for many millions of years to come, or are we headed for an evolutionary makeover, or even extinction? According to Reinhard Stindl, of the Institute of Medical Biology in Vienna, the answer to this question could lie at the tips of our chromosomes. In a controversial new theory he suggests that all eukaryotic species (everything except bacteria and algae) have an...