Evolution

As I’ve noted before, it is often only after Darwinists report a new fossil discovery that they retroactively admit how little they previously knew about a given evolutionary transition. This happened again recently as a team of paleoanthropologists reported finding 6-7 million year-old fossil gorilla teeth that Nature News claimed “helps to fill in a huge gap in the fossil record.” Accompanying this find, however, was a striking admission of ignorance regarding the evolution of humans: “The human fossil record goes back 6 to 7 million years, but we know nothing about how the human line actually emerged from apes,” the researchers said in a statement on Wednesday that accompanied publication of their study in the journal Nature. “Chororapithecus gives Read More ›

Michael Egnor recently wrote about the great difficulties faced by origin of life researchers and the great speculation they are willing to undertake to retain natural chemical explanations for origin of life. This reminds of events in the early 1900’s, when some leading scientists had philosophical objections to new ideas in cosmology. In 1931, leading cosmologist Sir Arthur Eddington wrote in response to Big Bang cosmology, “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant . . . I should like to find a genuine loophole.” Even Einstein was troubled by the fact that his own theories showed “the necessity for a beginning.” In fact, he added a “cosmological constant” to his equations to avoid Read More ›

An Associated Press article titled “African fossils paint messy picture of human evolution” explains that common popular conceptions of human evolution are incorrect: “Surprising fossils dug up in Africa are creating messy kinks in the iconic straight line of human evolution with its knuckle-dragging ape and briefcase-carrying man.” Indeed, the inappropriateness of such “straight line” depictions of human evolution was one of Jonathan Wells’ main points in chapter 11 in Icons of Evolution, “From Ape to Human: The Ultimate Icon.” A Harvard biological anthropologist stated the newly reported fossils reveal, “how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.” The Associated Press article goes on to explain why Homo habilis can no longer Read More ›

Pandas Thumb guest contributor Abbie Smith has posted an alleged refutation of Michael Behe. Behe stated in The Edge of Evolution that “in just the past few decades HIV has actually undergone more of certain kinds of mutations than all cells have endured since the beginning of the world.” However, Behe then observed that “those mutations, while medically important, have changed the functioning virus very little. It still has the same number of genes that work in the same way. There is no new molecular machinery.” Smith claims that Behe’s statement is refuted, but her evidence is nothing more than the fact that Human HIV-1 has a gene called Vpu which was present in HIV when it first infected humans, Read More ›

Mathematician and intelligent design supporter Granville Sewell has posted an article, entitled “How Evolution Will Be Taught Someday,” where he makes some interesting predictions about the future state of teaching science. He asks whether intelligent design will be taught and says, “probably not in my lifetime.” In Sewell’s view, “in the not-too-distant future, biology texts will refer to evolution as an amazing, mysterious ‘natural’ process, which scientists do not now understand, but hope to understand some day.” Sewell continues to explain that this result would not be opposed by the Discovery Institute, which is not trying to push ID into schools: But for most ID proponents, this will be a quite satisfactory outcome, certainly a huge improvement over the current Read More ›

Question: What do you do when a theory logically predicts both (a) and not (a)? Answer: Apparently you heavily promote it. MSNBC recently published two articles promoting Darwinian just-so stories to the public. The first article about the evolution of Waterfowl genitalia contends, “Scientists had speculated that male waterfowl evolved longer phalluses to give them a competitive edge over those not as well-endowed when it came to successfully fertilizing females.” That makes sense, I suppose. But the article makes one admission that strikingly contradicts that little just-so hypothesis: “Most birds lack phalluses, organs like human penises. Waterfowl are among the just 3 percent of all living bird species that retain the grooved phallus…” If long phalluses are so advantageous for Read More ›

The best way to rewrite history is to delete the views of those who remember it personally. The Scientist‘s editor Richard Gallgaher’s recent article on “junk”-DNA mentions that Dr. Andras J. Pellionisz suggested that The Scientist publish an “obituary” for “junk”-DNA. Gallagher wrote: Andras J. Pellionisz, to whom I am grateful for bringing this notable 35th anniversary to my attention, suggested that The Scientist publish an obituary to “formally abandon this misnomer.” Pellionisz’s objection is that scientific progress is being inhibited, and declaring junk DNA dead would align us with his own organization, the International PostGenetics Society (postgenetics.org), which disavowed the term on the 12th of October last year. Pellionisz is not alone. (Richard Gallagher, “Junk Worth Keeping,” The Scientist, Read More ›

I recently predicted recently that Darwinists would try to erase the historical fact that Darwinism led to the long-standing presumption that non-coding DNA was largely genetic junk. In the latest issue of The Scientist, editor Richard Gallagher does no less, citing sources that wrongly imply that Neo-Darwinism did not hinder research into function for junk-DNA, and even stating that “[t]he latest iniquity to befall junk DNA is the attempted hijack by proponents of Intelligent Design.” Gallagher’s usage of a terrorism metaphor fits well with Gallagher’s own admission that his article’s purpose is more rhetorical than factual: While I did start this editorial off with a working title of “The Life and Death of Junk DNA,” a few hours of browsing Read More ›

It’s beyond dispute that the false “junk”-DNA mindset was born, bred, and sustained long beyond its reasonable lifetime by the neo-Darwinian paradigm. As one example in Scientific American explained back in 2003, “the introns within genes and the long stretches of intergenic DNA between genes … ‘were immediately assumed to be evolutionary junk.’” But once it was discovered that introns play vital cellular roles regulating gene production within the cell, John S. Mattick, director of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, was quoted saying the failure to recognize function for introns might have been “one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” Now it’s turning out that this “mistake” of Read More ›

Science writer Denyse O’Leary is the latest to weigh in on The Edge of Evolution over at her popular blog, Post-Darwinist. She actually has three insightful posts related to Behe, and of course Behe’s constributions to the overall debate over Darwinism.

She sums up The Edge of Evolution this way:

Behe calculates that, based on the available evidence of observed Darwinian mutations, events less likely than ten to the twentieth power are generally beyond the edge of (Darwinian) evolution (145).

There is the main argument in a nutshell, minus the supporting material. Many people, of course, will feel the need to argue for or against the thesis of The Edge of Evolution without bothering to read it. Despite the fact that it is very clearly written – a masterpiece of simple explanation, accessible to anyone who can read National Geographic or Scientific American.