2010

Links to our 9-Part Series Responding to Nature‘s Evolution Evangelism Packet: • Part 1: Evaluating Nature’s 2009 “15 Evolutionary Gems” Darwin-Evangelism Kit• Part 2: Microevolutionary Gems: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams • Part 3: Microevolutionary Gems: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 4: Microevolutionary Gems: Flea and Guppy-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 5 (This Article): Microevolution Meets Microevolution• Part 6: Evolutionary “Gems” or “Narrative Gloss”?• Part 7: Muscling Past Homology Problems in Nature’s Vertebrate Skeleton “Evolutionary Gem”• Part 8: Of Whale and Feather Evolution: Two Macroevolutionary Lumps of Coal• Part 9: Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik Download Our Full Response to the Packet as a PDF. In Nature‘s evolution-evangelism packet, one of the “evolutionary gems” Read More ›

Bruce Chapman has a piece published at American Spectator today about recent rumblings amongst school board’s over the Louisiana Science Education Act. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed into law last year an act that sets parameters for teachers who introduce scientific supplements on Darwinian evolution, global warming, human cloning and other controversial subjects. The state’s Science Education Act encourages “open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied.” It specifically prohibits religious instruction or interpretations (or irreligious interpretations, for that matter). The law is simple, reasonable and avoids constitutional and scientific mistakes that afflicted earlier laws in Louisiana and elsewhere. But in Livingston Parish, east of Baton Rouge, some enthusiasts for a literal Biblical account of creation decided that the Read More ›

While we often are correcting mistakes and misinformation in news reports about intelligent design and evolution, it’s encouraging to know that solid, thoughtful pieces are still being produced. This story from The New York Times is making the rounds, causing Denyse O’Leary to wonder, “Have the Times people actually started connecting with the public again?”
The surprising article by Virginia Heffernan examines the strange microcosm that is Science Blogs, where, as Bruce Chapman put it, she finds “not science, but self-referencial sophomoric pranks, vitriol and cavil.” Her acute analysis:

Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not what’s bothersome about them. What’s bothersome is that the site is misleading. It’s not science by scientists, not even remotely; it’s science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science” and from occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and thats.

Links to our 9-Part Series Responding to Nature‘s Evolution Evangelism Packet: • Part 1: Evaluating Nature’s 2009 “15 Evolutionary Gems” Darwin-Evangelism Kit• Part 2: Microevolutionary Gems: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams • Part 3: Microevolutionary Gems: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 4 (This Article): Microevolutionary Gems: Flea and Guppy-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 5: Microevolution Meets Microevolution• Part 6: Evolutionary “Gems” or “Narrative Gloss”?• Part 7: Muscling Past Homology Problems in Nature’s Vertebrate Skeleton “Evolutionary Gem”• Part 8: Of Whale and Feather Evolution: Two Macroevolutionary Lumps of Coal• Part 9: Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik Download Our Full Response to the Packet as a PDF. While some of the papers cited in Nature‘s evolution-evangelism Read More ›

An article appeared in The New York Times last week written by the popular geneticist, Sean B. Carroll, who is probably best known for his professional and popular work on the emerging science of evo devo. Carroll’s article attempts to refute the challenges posed by the Cambrian fossil record to evolutionary thought. Carroll writes,

The difficulty posed by the Cambrian Explosion was that in Darwin’s day (and for many years after), no fossils were known in the enormous, older rock formations below those of the Cambrian. This was an extremely unsettling fact for his theory of evolution because complex animals should have been preceded in the fossil record by simpler forms.
In “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin posited that “during these vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures.” But he admitted candidly, “To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer.”

Links to our 9-Part Series Responding to Nature‘s Evolution Evangelism Packet: • Part 1: Evaluating Nature’s 2009 “15 Evolutionary Gems” Darwin-Evangelism Kit• Part 2: Microevolutionary Gems: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams • Part 3 (This Article): Microevolutionary Gems: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 4: Microevolutionary Gems: Flea and Guppy-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 5: Microevolution Meets Microevolution• Part 6: Evolutionary “Gems” or “Narrative Gloss”?• Part 7: Muscling Past Homology Problems in Nature’s Vertebrate Skeleton “Evolutionary Gem”• Part 8: Of Whale and Feather Evolution: Two Macroevolutionary Lumps of Coal• Part 9: Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik Download Our Full Response to the Packet as a PDF. In Nature‘s evolution-evangelism packet, two of Nature‘s “evolutionary gems” Read More ›

Links to our 9-Part Series Responding to Nature‘s Evolution Evangelism Packet: • Part 1 (This Article): Evaluating Nature’s 2009 “15 Evolutionary Gems” Darwin-Evangelism Kit• Part 2: Microevolutionary Gems: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams • Part 3: Microevolutionary Gems: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 4: Microevolutionary Gems: Flea and Guppy-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 5: Microevolution Meets Microevolution• Part 6: Evolutionary “Gems” or “Narrative Gloss”?• Part 7: Muscling Past Homology Problems in Nature’s Vertebrate Skeleton “Evolutionary Gem”• Part 8: Of Whale and Feather Evolution: Two Macroevolutionary Lumps of Coal• Part 9: Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik Download Our Full Response to the Packet as a PDF. Last year, during the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin’s birth, Read More ›

Advocates of intelligent design have long been skeptical of the claim that the majority of our genome is nonfunctional gibberish, a mere relic of our evolutionary past. Many of the key arguments for common ancestry are based around the supposition that certain loci of our genome are functionless. But the gaps in our knowledge of the genome (in which such supposition resides) are continually shrinking.

A recent paper published in Science by Kondo et al. reported on the discovery that some of the supposed “non-coding” regions of the RNA transcript actually actively encode for short peptides that regulate genes involved in Drosophila development.

According to the Abstract,

A substantial proportion of eukaryotic transcripts are considered to be noncoding RNAs because they contain only short open reading frames (sORFs). Recent findings suggest, however, that some sORFs encode small bioactive peptides. Here, we show that peptides of 11 to 32 amino acids encoded by the polished rice (pri) sORF gene control epidermal differentiation in Drosophila by modifying the transcription factor Shavenbaby (Svb). Pri peptides trigger the amino-terminal truncation of the Svb protein, which converts Svb from a repressor to an activator. Our results demonstrate that during Drosophila embryogenesis, Pri sORF peptides provide a strict temporal control to the transcriptional program of epidermal morphogenesis.

Another school year is set to begin at high schools and colleges where the next round of biology students will be filled with evolutionary misinformation. At the center of this propaganda campaign are the many biology textbooks used to indoctrinate young minds with old dogma. These textbooks contain the latest evolutionary newspeak, but the underlying lies are no different.

In their text The Living World (Fifth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008) evolutionary apologists George Johnson and Jonathan Lobos rehearse the usual lies. Students are told that “Microevolution Leads to Macroevolution” with the giraffe’s neck serving as the example of how small change is supposed to accumulate to the large-scale change evolution needs.

Of course this is a long-standing, well-known problem for evolution. Mechanisms for large-scale change are speculative for it does not appear merely to be the result of repeated rounds of microevolution. Johnson and Lobos, of course, inform the student of none of this.