Evolution

A British family with a bizarre speech deficit has led linguists to FOXP2: a gene that begins to explain how our ancestors acquired language.

2011-12-12T09:15:00.000-08:00

It is a shame that grammar leaves no fossils behind. Few things have been more important to our evolutionary history than language. Because our ancestors could talk to each other, they became a powerfully cooperative species. In modern society we are so submerged in words—spoken, written, signed, and texted—that they seem inseparable from human identity. And yet we cannot excavate some fossil from an Ethiopian hillside, point to a bone, and declare, “This is where language began.”

Lacking hard evidence, scholars of the past speculated broadly about the origin of language. Some claimed that it started out as cries of pain, which gradually crystallized into distinct words. Others traced it back to music, to the imitation of animal grunts, or to birdsong. In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris got so exasperated by these unmoored musings that it banned all communication on the origin of language. Its English counterpart felt the same way. In 1873 the president of the Philological Society of London declared that linguists “shall do more by tracing the historical growth of one single work-a-day tongue, than by filling wastepaper baskets with reams of paper covered with speculations on the origin of all tongues.”

A century passed before linguists had a serious change of heart. The change came as they began to look at the deep structure of language itself. MIT linguist Noam Chomsky asserted that the way children acquire language is so effortless that it must have a biological foundation. Building on this idea, some of his colleagues argued that language is an adaptation shaped by natural selection, just like eyes and wings. If so, it should be possible to find clues about how human language evolved from grunts or gestures by observing the communication of our close primate relatives.

This line of thinking raised an exciting possibility: Perhaps language left a fossil record after all—not in buried bones, but in our DNA. Yet for years biologists could not find a single gene involved in language.

Ten years ago, that finally changed. In 2001 a team of British scientists announced the discovery of a gene, called FOXP2, that seems to be essential for language. FOXP2 came to light through the study of a family that had unusual difficulties with words. The KE family—so called in scientific papers for privacy reasons—lived in West London and included nine siblings, some of whom attended the same special speech and language school. Psychologists at the school discovered that four of the children struggled with language in a similar way. The meaning of sentences sometimes confused them: They might misinterpret “The girl is chased by the horse” to mean “The girl is chasing the horse.” They also had trouble speaking—dropping some sounds off the beginning of words, for example, so that they would say “able” when they meant “table.”

In 1987 the school headmistress referred the case to the Institute of Child Health at University College London. There, neurologists found that some of the children’s cousins had the same language troubles, as did some of the parents. Geneticists traced the condition to a grandmother and deduced that she probably carried a rare mutation that she had passed along. The mutation did not alter intelligence or psychological well-being; the KE family was normal in those regards. Its effects were limited to language—but within that narrow sphere, its effects were profound.

The family then came to the attention of geneticists at Oxford, who began a dogged search for the gene that caused these problems. They compared the DNA of family members, looking for distinctive markers shared only among the ones who had trouble with language. Among those with the language deficit, they found shared markers in a single region of chromosome 7. Years later, the scientists received a vital new clue when the same kind of language disorder was identified in an unrelated 5-year-old boy. He had experienced a particularly dramatic mutation, in which a piece of chromosome 5 had been swapped with a piece of chromosome 7. One end of the boy’s swapped DNA lodged itself in the same region that the Oxford team had identified in the West London family, right in the middle of the FOXP2 gene.

The Oxford researchers turned back from the boy to the KE family and, using the additional information, discovered that those members with language troubles shared a mutation in FOXP2 as well. Their mutation was far more subtle, however. Their trouble with language had been caused by the change of a single nucleotide of DNA—just one letter in the genetic sequence.

All land vertebrates carry a version of the FOXP2 gene, so some of the Oxford researchers then teamed up with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany to analyze what is unique about the variant in humans and to track how the gene had evolved in our ancestors. They determined that after the gene arose, more than 300 million years ago, it barely changed in most branches of vertebrate evolution to the present day. In the human branch, however, two amino acids in the protein produced by the FOXP2 gene changed notably over the course of just a few million years. The scientists concluded that FOXP2 experienced a fast pulse of natural selection in our lineage, a development possibly related to the emergence of language.

Several groups are now hard at work gleaning more details about the relationship between FOXP2 and language. Cognitive neuroscientist Frederique Liegeois of University College London is using fMRI scans to compare the brain activity of members of the KE family who have a mutated copy of FOXP2 with those who have a normal version. The most striking difference, Liegeois recently reported, arises when family members are asked to repeat a set of nonsense words, something most adults can do without trouble. Those with the mutation do badly at the task. They also have low levels of activity in several regions of the brain, especially the basal ganglia, a key hub for learning muscle movements. That makes sense, since one of the hardest aspects of speech is learning how to make the necessary rapid movements of the lips, tongue, and vocal cords.

Other scientists are probing the FOXP2 gene further by studying the protein it produces, known as FOXP2. The protein seems to be especially active while human embryos are developing. Simon Fisher—one of the original Oxford geneticists, now at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands—has found that the gene switches on in neurons within certain regions of the brain, including the basal ganglia. The FOXP2 protein then latches onto other genes in developing neurons and switches them on or off as well. By orchestrating dozens of genes, FOXP2 appears to oversee the growth of new branches on the neurons, bringing about a level of complexity likely to facilitate language.

Humans are not the only species to benefit from FOXP2. Researchers have shown that the gene is associated with vocal learning in young songbirds, which produce higher levels of FOXP2 protein when they need to learn new songs. If their version of FOXP2 is impaired, they make singing mistakes. Other vocal-learning species, such as whales, bats, elephants, and seals, may also rely on the gene. To probe this connection, geneticist Wolfgang Enard of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology engineered mice by replacing their FOXP2 gene with the human one. The mice did not start reciting poetry, but they did display some subtle changes. Instead of producing a high squeak, for example, the engineered mice produced lower sounds. Bigger changes took place within the animals’ brains. Enard found that in the basal ganglia and connected regions involved in learning, the human version of FOXP2 caused some neurons to develop longer branches than those found in normal mice. Around the same time, Fisher and his team engineered mice so that one copy of their FOXP2 gene carried the same mutation as that found in the KE family. In subsequent tests, the mice with the mutation did a worse job than normal mice at learning new motor skills.

These findings hint at what happened to FOXP2 in our ancestors. It may have started out hundreds of millions of years ago as a gene that helped regulate the learning of body movements, such as those involved in running, calling, and biting. Later mutations in the gene spurred more neural growth in certain areas of the brain, including the basal ganglia, creating the connections essential for learning and mastering complicated sounds and, eventually, full-blown language.

FOXP2 didn’t give us language all on its own. In our brains, it acts more like a foreman, handing out instructions to at least 84 target genes in the developing basal ganglia. Even this full crew of genes explains language only in part, because the ability to form words is just the beginning. Then comes the higher level of complexity: combining words according to rules of grammar to give them meaning.

Language is nearly endless in its forms. So the search for its behavioral fossils—genes associated with grammar and syntax—should keep scientists busy for decades to come.

http://discovermagazine.com/2011/oct/08-the-brain-language-fossils-buried-in-your-cells/

Humans are just modified fish

2011-10-20T14:19:00.001-07:00

Lungfish provides insight to life on land: 'Humans are just modified fish'
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111004180106.htm

A study into the muscle development of several different fish has given insights into the genetic leap that set the scene for the evolution of hind legs in terrestrial animals. This innovation gave rise to the tetrapods -- four-legged creatures, and our distant ancestors -- that made the first small steps on land some 400 million years ago.

A team of Australian scientists led by Professor Peter Currie, of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, and Dr Nicolas Cole, of the University of Sydney, report their results October 4 in online, open access journal PLoS Biology.

Scientists have long known that ancient lungfish species are the ancestors of the tetrapods. These fish could survive on land, breathing air and using their pelvic fins to propel themselves. Australia is home to three species of the few remaining lungfish -- two marine species and one inhabiting Queensland's Mary River basin.

There are big gaps in our knowledge, however. Most conclusions have previously been drawn from fossil skeletons, but the muscles critical to locomotion cannot be preserved in the fossil record. The team used fish living today to trace the evolution of pelvic fin muscles to find out how the load-bearing hind limbs of the tetrapods evolved. They compared embryos of the descendants of species representing key turning points in vertebrate evolution to see if there were differences in pelvic fin muscle formation. They studied "primitive" cartilaginous fish -- Australia's bamboo shark and its cousin, the elephant shark -- as well as three bony fishes -- the Australian lungfish, the zebrafish and the American paddlefish. The bony fish and in particular the lungfish are the closest living relative of the tetrapods' most recent common ancestor with fish.

"We examined the way the different fish species generated the muscles of their pelvic fins, which are the evolutionary forerunners of the hind limbs," said Professor Currie, a developmental biologist. Currie and his team genetically engineered the fish to trace the migration of precursor muscle cells in early developmental stages as the animal's body took shape. These cells in the engineered fish were made to emit a red or green light, allowing the team to track the development of specific muscle groups. They found that the bony fish had a different mechanism of pelvic fin muscle formation from that of the cartilaginous fish, a mechanism that was a stepping stone to the evolution of tetrapod physiology.

"Humans are just modified fish," said Professor Currie. "The genome of fish is not vastly different from our own. We have shown that the mechanism of pelvic muscle formation in bony fish is transitional between that in sharks and in our tetrapod ancestors."

Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty

2011-10-20T14:17:00.000-07:00

Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PktUzdnBqWI

'Nature' Paper Refigures the Evolution of Altruism

2010-02-27T02:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.physorg.com/news186416144.html

To this day, biologists debate about how altruistic behaviors evolve and persist. Sterile ants faithfully tend their queen with no chance of reproducing themselves. Vervet monkeys scream to other monkeys about approaching predators, drawing attention to themselves and risking their own safety. Bees lay down their lives to defend the hive.

"Why do they do that?" asks University of Vermont biologist Charles Goodnight. "Doesn't natural selection drive animals to behaviors that increase their own chances of survival, not those of others?"

This question underlies the decades-long debate -- sometimes rancorous -- between two camps of scientists. On one side, are those who argue in favor of "kin selection," in which individuals are altruistic to those who share their genes. In defending the hive, a self-sacrificing bee increases the chances that the genes she shares with her sisters will get passed down.

On the other side, are those who argue in favor of "group selection," (or, in its modern form, "multilevel selection") in which altruism arises from being part of a group. The self-sacrificing behavior of the bee persists and spreads across generations because the whole hive, a group, competes more successfully, leaving more offspring than others.

In the February 18 edition of the journal Nature a team of 18 scientists, including UVM's Goodnight, show that the two traditional approaches are actually mathematically equivalent.

One in the same
How can this be? In order for kin selection to be important, the related kin have to be in groups that preferentially confer altruistic behaviors on each other. In order for group selection to operate, the members of a group have to be closer kin than they are to other groups. The two ideas are close enough that they can actually be converted to each other mathematically. This understanding has been stated in technical research articles for more than 30 years, but the broader scientific community has not often recognized it.
"What we did in this paper was take the equations of a group that was very strongly kin selectionist and we worked through them and translated them back into classic equations," says Goodnight. "and they're the same."

"It is remarkable that kin selection has been widely accepted and group selection widely disparaged," says Michael Wade, a biologist at Indiana University, and the lead author on the paper, "when they are actually equivalent mathematically."

Life-like evolution in a test tube

2010-02-22T00:25:00.000-08:00

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3325/life-evolution-a-test-tube?page=0%2C0

SAN DIEGO: Can life arise from nothing but a chaotic assortment of basic molecules? The answer is a lot closer following a series of ingenious experiments that have shown evolution at work in non-living molecules.

For the first time, scientists have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes - that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components.

What’s more, these simple nucleic acids can act as catalysts and continue the process indefinitely.

'Immortal' molecules

“There’s nothing in biology in this system: no proteins, no cells, no biological matter. We just provide them with the building blocks,” said molecular biologist Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.

“They’re just molecules, so they do what they do until they run out of substrate. And this will go for ever – it’s an immortal molecule, if you like,” he told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

Since he and colleague Tracey Lincoln first succeeded in creating this artificial genetic system that can undergo self-sustained replication and evolution last year, the molecules have changed dramatically as they evolve better and better solutions.

Survival of the fittest

The researchers began with ribozymes known to occur naturally, and put these in a growth medium, heated them and allowed the ribozymes to replicate until they had exhausted their fuel – usually within an hour.

The team then extracted a random subset, and put them in a new medium: ribozymes then competed with each other to consume as much of the medium as possible.

Eventually more successful ribozymes came to dominate the culture, and as the process continued, the ribozymes – undergoing evolution - grew in complexity, blindly finding solutions that made them more successful.

“The key thing is it replicates itself, and passes information from parent to progeny down the line,” Joyce told Cosmos Online.

“There’s roughly 30 bits of information passed. Some functions are more fit than others, and those that are more fit ‘breed’ more, and are perpetuated more efficiently, and so it goes Darwinian.”

The ultimate goal is to create genetic systems that behave like life, and are for all intents ‘life’ as we know it, but arose without using biological systems.

“The aim is to create systems that have inventive capabilities, that can develop novel solutions to challenges posed by the environment. But that we don’t have yet,” he said.

“What we do have is a self-sustained chemical system that undergoes Darwinian evolution.

Synthetic genetic systems

“They are synthetic genetic systems, and they are evolving. But they’re not living because they don’t yet show the capacity to invent a whole cloth of functions.

“The idea is to given them enough information wherewithal [genetic building blocks] so they can start inventing their own solutions rather than just optimising existing solutions,” he added.

Joyce said it was not practical to synthesize the more complex DNA-based life we know from scratch; it’s too complex and probably beyond today’s science. But it is conceivable to start with a much more basic form of life-like molecules based on RNA, and use evolution to build on them.

RNA world hypothesis

Many scientists believe that early life was based on RNA and predated the arrival of life based on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and proteins. RNA, which can both store information like DNA as well as act as an enzyme like proteins, and may have supported pre-cellular life.

A lading proponent of the so-called ‘RNA world’ hypothesis, Joyce believes that RNA-based catalysis and information storage may have been the first step in the evolution of cellular life.

BBC News - 'Lifeless' prion proteins are 'capable of evolution' BBC News - 'Lifeless' prion proteins are 'capable of evolution'

2010-01-01T23:25:00.000-08:00

Scientists have shown for the first time that "lifeless" prion proteins, devoid of all genetic material, can evolve just like higher forms of life.

The Scripps Research Institute in the US says the prions can change to suit their environment and go on to develop drug resistance.

[..]

"This means that this pattern of Darwinian evolution appears to be universally active.

"In viruses, mutation is linked to changes in nucleic acid sequence that leads to resistance.

"Now, this adaptability has moved one level down- to prions and protein folding - and it's clear that you do not need nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) for the process of evolution."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8435320.stm

Oldest living plant

2009-12-28T01:04:00.000-08:00

King's Lomatia is unusual because all of the remaining plants are genetically identical. Because it has three sets of chromosomes (a triploid) and is therefore sterile, reproduction occurs only vegetatively: when a branch falls, that branch grows new roots, establishing a new plant that is genetically identical to its parent.

Although all the plants are technically separate in that each has its own root system, they are collectively considered to be one of the oldest living plant clones. Each plant's life span is approximately 300 years, but the plant has been cloning itself for at least 43,600 years (possibly up to 135,000 years). This estimate is based on the radiocarbon dating of fossilised leaf fragments that were found 8.5 km away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomatia_tasmanica

A phylogeny-driven genomic encyclopaedia of Bacteria and Archaea

2009-12-24T09:41:00.000-08:00

Source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7276/fig_tab/nature08656_F1.html

Bacteria

2009-08-02T05:25:00.000-07:00

Sauce: Bill Bryson - A Short History Of Nearly Everything

IT’S PROBABLY NOT a good idea to take too personal an interest in your microbes. Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with them that he took to peering critically at every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass, a habit that presumably did not win him many repeat invitations to dinner.

In fact, there is no point in trying to hide from your bacteria, for they are on and around you always, in numbers you can’t conceive. If you are in good health and averagely diligent about hygiene, you will have a herd of about one trillion bacteria grazing on your fleshy plains—about a hundred thousand of them on every square centimeter of skin. They are there to dine off the ten billion or so flakes of skin you shed every day, plus all the tasty oils and fortifying minerals that seep out from every pore and fissure. You are for them the ultimate food court, with the convenience of warmth and constant mobility thrown in. By way of thanks, they give you B.O.

And those are just the bacteria that inhabit your skin. There are trillions more tucked away in your gut and nasal passages, clinging to your hair and eyelashes, swimming over the surface of your eyes, drilling through the enamel of your teeth. Your digestive system alone is host to more than a hundred trillion microbes, of at least four hundred types. Some deal with sugars, some with starches, some attack other bacteria. A surprising number, like the ubiquitous intestinal spirochetes, have no detectable function at all. They just seem to like to be with you. Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria’s point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them.

Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.

Bacteria, never forget, got along for billions of years without us. We couldn’t survive a day without them. They process our wastes and make them usable again; without their diligent munching nothing would rot. They purify our water and keep our soils productive. Bacteria synthesize vitamins in our gut, convert the things we eat into useful sugars and polysaccharides, and go to war on alien microbes that slip down our gullet.

We depend totally on bacteria to pluck nitrogen from the air and convert it into useful nucleotides and amino acids for us. It is a prodigious and gratifying feat. As Margulis and Sagan note, to do the same thing industrially (as when making fertilizers) manufacturers must heat the source materials to 500 degrees centigrade and squeeze them to three hundred times normal pressures. Bacteria do it all the time without fuss, and thank goodness, for no larger organism could survive without the nitrogen they pass on. Above all, microbes continue to provide us with the air we breathe and to keep the atmosphere stable. Microbes, including the modern versions of cyanobacteria, supply the greater part of the planet’s breathable oxygen. Algae and other tiny organisms bubbling away in the sea blow out about 150 billion kilos of the stuff every year.

And they are amazingly prolific. The more frantic among them can yield a new generation in less than ten minutes; Clostridium perfringens, the disagreeable little organism that causes gangrene, can reproduce in nine minutes. At such a rate, a single bacterium could theoretically produce more offspring in two days than there are protons in the universe. “Given an adequate supply of nutrients, a single bacterial cell can generate 280,000 billion individuals in a single day,” according to the Belgian biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve. In the same period, a human cell can just about manage a single division.

About once every million divisions, they produce a mutant. Usually this is bad luck for the mutant—change is always risky for an organism—but just occasionally the new bacterium is endowed with some accidental advantage, such as the ability to elude or shrug off an attack of antibiotics. With this ability to evolve rapidly goes another, even scarier advantage. Bacteria share information. Any bacterium can take pieces of genetic coding from any other. Essentially, as Margulis and Sagan put it, all bacteria swim in a single gene pool. Any adaptive change that occurs in one area of the bacterial universe can spread to any other. It’s rather as if a human could go to an insect to get the necessary genetic coding to sprout wings or walk on ceilings. It means that from a genetic point of view bacteria have become a single superorganism—tiny, dispersed, but invincible.

They will live and thrive on almost anything you spill, dribble, or shake loose. Just give them a little moisture—as when you run a damp cloth over a counter—and they will bloom as if created from nothing. They will eat wood, the glue in wallpaper, the metals in hardened paint. Scientists in Australia found microbes known as Thiobacillus concretivorans that lived in—indeed, could not live without—concentrations of sulfuric acid strong enough to dissolve metal. A species called Micrococcus radiophilus was found living happily in the waste tanks of nuclear reactors, gorging itself on plutonium and whatever else was there. Some bacteria break down chemical materials from which, as far as we can tell, they gain no benefit at all.

They have been found living in boiling mud pots and lakes of caustic soda, deep inside rocks, at the bottom of the sea, in hidden pools of icy water in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, and seven miles down in the Pacific Ocean where pressures are more than a thousand times greater than at the surface, or equivalent to being squashed beneath fifty jumbo jets. Some of them seem to be practically indestructible. Deinococcus radiodurans is, according to theEconomist , “almost immune to radioactivity.” Blast its DNA with radiation, and the pieces immediately reform “like the scuttling limbs of an undead creature from a horror movie.”

Perhaps the most extraordinary survival yet found was that of a Streptococcus bacterium that was recovered from the sealed lens of a camera that had stood on the Moon for two years. In short, there are few environments in which bacteria aren’t prepared to live. “They are finding now that when they push probes into ocean vents so hot that the probes actually start to melt, there are bacteria even there,” Victoria Bennett told me.

We now know that there are a lot of microbes living deep within the Earth, many of which have nothing at all to do with the organic world. They eat rocks or, rather, the stuff that’s in rocks—iron, sulfur, manganese, and so on. And they breathe odd things too—iron, chromium, cobalt, even uranium. Such processes may be instrumental in concentrating gold, copper, and other precious metals, and possibly deposits of oil and natural gas. It has even been suggested that their tireless nibblings created the Earth’s crust.

Some scientists now think that there could be as much as 100 trillion tons of bacteria living beneath our feet in what are known as subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems—SLiME for short. Thomas Gold of Cornell has estimated that if you took all the bacteria out of the Earth’s interior and dumped it on the surface, it would cover the planet to a depth of five feet. If the estimates are correct, there could be more life under the Earth than on top of it.

At depth microbes shrink in size and become extremely sluggish. The liveliest of them may divide no more than once a century, some no more than perhaps once in five hundred years. As the Economist has put it: “The key to long life, it seems, is not to do too much.” When things are really tough, bacteria are prepared to shut down all systems and wait for better times. In 1997 scientists successfully activated some anthrax spores that had lain dormant for eighty years in a museum display in Trondheim, Norway. Other microorganisms have leapt back to life after being released from a 118-year-old can of meat and a 166-year-old bottle of beer. In 1996, scientists at the Russian Academy of Science claimed to have revived bacteria frozen in Siberian permafrost for three million years. But the record claim for durability so far is one made by Russell Vreeland and colleagues at West Chester University in Pennsylvania in 2000, when they announced that they had resuscitated 250-million-year-old bacteria called Bacillus permians that had been trapped in salt deposits two thousand feet underground in Carlsbad, New Mexico. If so, this microbe is older than the continents.

It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance toward largeness and complexity—in a word, toward us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes—an interesting side branch. Of the twenty-three main divisions of life, only three—plants, animals, and fungi—are large enough to be seen by the human eye, and even they contain species that are microscopic. Indeed, according to Woese, if you totaled up all the biomass of the planet—every living thing, plants included—microbes would account for at least 80 percent of all there is, perhaps more. The world belongs to the very small—and it has for a very long time.

Study catches 2 bird populations as they split into separate species

2009-07-17T02:48:00.000-07:00

A new study finds that a change in a single gene has sent two closely related bird populations on their way to becoming two distinct species. The study, published in the August issue of the American Naturalist, is one of only a few to investigate the specific genetic changes that drive two populations toward speciation.

Speciation, the process by which different populations of the same species split into separate species, is central to evolution. But it's notoriously hard to observe in action. This study, led by biologist J. Albert Uy of Syracuse University, captures two populations of monarch flycatcher birds just as they arrive at that evolutionary crossroads.

Monarch flycatchers are small, insect-eating birds common in the Solomon Islands, east of Papua New Guinea. Uy and his team looked at two flycatcher populations: one found mostly on the large island of Makira, the other on smaller surrounding islands. Besides where they live, the only discernable difference between the two populations is the color of their feathers. The birds on Makira have all black feathers. Birds on the smaller islands have the same black feathers, but with a chestnut-colored belly.

The question of whether these two populations are on the road to speciation comes down to sex. When two populations stop exchanging genes-that is, stop mating with each other-then they can be considered distinct species. Uy and his team wanted to see if these flycatchers were heading in that direction.

It would be all but impossible to try to catalog every occasion on which an all-black flycatcher mated with a chestnut-bellied. So Uy and his team used another test.

Flycatcher males defend their mating territories. If a potential rival male enters another's territory, fights often ensue. If all-black males react less violently to chestnut-bellied males and vice versa, that's an indication that the two don't recognize each other as reproductive rivals. If they don't see each other as rivals, then one can assume that mating between members of the two populations is rare.

So Uy and his team made all-black and chestnut-bellied taxidermy models. They used the models to invade mating territories in each population. As expected, when all-black birds were presented with all-black models, they attacked. But when all-black birds encountered chestnut-bellied models, they were much less likely to go on the offensive. The same scenario held for the chestnut-bellied birds.

That males from the two populations no longer view the other as a reproductive threat is a good indication that not much mating is taking place between the two groups. Their evolutionary paths are diverging, Uy and his team found-all because of a change in plumage.

The researchers then went a step further. They looked into the birds' genomes to see what genes may have played a role in the different plumage pattern. They found only one: the melanocortin-1 receptor gene (MC1R). The MC1R gene regulates the production of melanin, which gives skin and feathers their color. The all-black and chestnut-bellied birds had different versions of the MC1R gene, which gave rise to the plumage change.

That change appears to have been enough to create a reproductive barrier for flycatchers. Not every species is so picky, so a color change doesn't always drive speciation. Nonetheless, these results suggest that it can take as little as one gene, in the right spot in the genome, to cause a fork in the evolutionary road.
Reference:

J. Albert C. Uy, Robert G. Moyle, Christopher E. Filardi, Zachary A. Cheviron, "Difference in Plumage Color Used in Species Recognition between Incipient Species Is Linked to a Single Amino Acid Substitution in the Melanocortin-1 Receptor." The American Naturalist August 2009.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the University of Chicago Press Journals

http://www.geneticarchaeology.com/research/Study_catches_2_bird_populations_as_they_split_into_separate_species.asp

DNA-like Molecule Replicates Without Help

2009-06-13T03:04:00.001-07:00

DNA-like Molecule Replicates Without Help

By Robert F. Service
ScienceNOW Daily News
11 June 2009
Researchers pondering the origin of life have long struggled to crack the ultimate chicken-and-egg paradox. How did nucleic acids like DNA and RNA--which encode proteins--first form, when proteins are needed for their synthesis? Now, scientists report that they've cooked up molecular hybrids of proteins and nucleic acids that skirt the dreaded paradox. Although it's unknown whether such molecules existed prior to the emergence of life, they offer insight into a chemical pathway that might have helped life arise.

DNA and RNA sport a backbone of sugar and phosphate groups linked to the nucleotide bases that spell out the genetic code. Certain proteins help copy nucleic acids by fashioning complementary strands that carry matching nucleotides. But how could nucleic acids originate without proteins, and vice versa? Proponents of the "RNA World" hypothesis argue that RNA itself was the key because of its dual abilities: It not only carries genetic information but also can catalyze chemical reactions. That view received a big boost earlier this year, when researchers at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, showed that small RNA fragments can catalyze their own reproduction. "The question remains, how those first RNA molecules appeared," says Luke Leman, a chemist at Scripps who was not part of the study. Other researchers have synthesized DNA and RNA analogs with simpler sugar backbones that may have done the job. Yet those are still complex, lessening the chance that they were the primordial replicating molecules, Leman says.

In hopes of finding something simpler, Leman and colleagues did away with the sugar-phosphate backbones altogether. Instead, they turned to amino acids, protein building blocks that have been shown to assemble under prebiotic conditions. The researchers report online today in Science Express that when they combined just two amino acids, a backbone readily assembled without the need for additional enzymes. They then found that DNA bases could bind to a sulfur group in one of the amino acids, cysteine, creating a protein-DNA hybrid strand. But because the nucleic acid bases attach weakly to the cysteines--think Velcro instead of glue--the bases can jump on and off in solution. As a result, when the researchers placed their hybrids in solution with single strands of DNA and RNA, the hybrids were able to rearrange their nucleic acid makeup to form complementary strands that would bind to the DNAs and RNAs. The researchers discovered that the hybrids could also form strands that would bind to other complementary hybrids, which shows that such molecules have the potential to copy themselves.

"This is very interesting and creative," says Eric Kool, a chemist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who studies nucleic acid analogs. These particular hybrids change so rapidly in solution, it's unclear if they would remain stable long enough to propagate genetic information over several generations. However, Kool says, "It's an idea worth considering."

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/611/1

Wired Science News for Your Neurons Life’s First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory

2009-05-15T01:37:00.000-07:00

A fundamental but elusive step in the early evolution of life on Earth has been replicated in a laboratory.

Researchers synthesized the basic ingredients of RNA, a molecule from which the simplest self-replicating structures are made. Until now, they couldn’t explain how these ingredients might have formed.

“It’s like molecular choreography, where the molecules choreograph their own behavior,” said organic chemist John Sutherland of the University of Manchester, co-author of a study in Nature Wednesday.

RNA is now found in living cells, where it carries information between genes and protein-manufacturing cellular components. Scientists think RNA existed early in Earth’s history, providing a necessary intermediate platform between pre-biotic chemicals and DNA, its double-stranded, more-stable descendant.

However, though researchers have been able to show how RNA’s component molecules, called ribonucleotides, could assemble into RNA, their many attempts to synthesize these ribonucleotides have failed. No matter how they combined the ingredients — a sugar, a phosphate, and one of four different nitrogenous molecules, or nucleobases — ribonucleotides just wouldn’t form.

Sutherland’s team took a different approach in what Harvard molecular biologist Jack Szostak called a “synthetic tour de force” in an accompanying commentary in Nature.

“By changing the way we mix the ingredients together, we managed to make ribonucleotides,” said Sutherland. “The chemistry works very effectively from simple precursors, and the conditions required are not distinct from what one might imagine took place on the early Earth.”

Like other would-be nucleotide synthesizers, Sutherland’s team included phosphate in their mix, but rather than adding it to sugars and nucleobases, they started with an array of even simpler molecules that were probably also in Earth’s primordial ooze.

They mixed the molecules in water, heated the solution, then allowed it to evaporate, leaving behind a residue of hybrid, half-sugar, half-nucleobase molecules. To this residue they again added water, heated it, allowed it evaporate, and then irradiated it.

At each stage of the cycle, the resulting molecules were more complex. At the final stage, Sutherland’s team added phosphate. “Remarkably, it transformed into the ribonucleotide!” said Sutherland.

According to Sutherland, these laboratory conditions resembled those of the life-originating “warm little pond” hypothesized by Charles Darwin if the pond “evaporated, got heated, and then it rained and the sun shone.”

Such conditions are plausible, and Szostak imagined the ongoing cycle of evaporation, heating and condensation providing “a kind of organic snow which could accumulate as a reservoir of material ready for the next step in RNA synthesis.”

Intriguingly, the precursor molecules used by Sutherland’s team have been identified in interstellar dust clouds and on meteorites.

“Ribonucleotides are simply an expression of the fundamental principles of organic chemistry,” said Sutherland. “They’re doing it unwittingly. The instructions for them to do it are inherent in the structure of the precursor materials. And if they can self-assemble so easily, perhaps they shouldn’t be viewed as complicated.”

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ribonucleotides/

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227084.200-molecule-of-life-emerges-from-laboratory-slime.html

12 Elegant Examples of Evolution

2009-01-01T02:34:00.000-08:00

In preparation for Charles Darwin's upcoming 200th birthday, the editors of Nature compiled a selection of especially elegant and enlightening examples of evolution.

They describe it as a resource "for those wishing to spread awareness of evidence for evolution by natural selection." Given the continuing battles over evolution in America's public schools — and, for that matter, the Islamic world — such a resource is most welcome.

However, I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the findings below, which range from the moray eel's remarkable second jaw to the unexpected plumage of dinosaurs. They are, quite simply, wondrous — glimpses through an evolutionary frame of life's incredible narrative, expanding to fill every possible nook and cranny of Earth's biosphere.

After all, it's hard to stir passion about the scientific validity of evolution without first captivating minds and imaginations. And this is a fine place to start.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/evolutionexampl.html

A simple fusion to jump-start evolution

2008-12-20T04:17:00.000-08:00

With the aid of a straightforward experiment, researchers have provided some clues to one of biology's most complex questions: how ancient organic molecules came together to form the basis of life.

Specifically, this study, appearing online this week in JBC, demonstrated how ancient RNA joined together to reach a biologically relevant length.

RNA, the single-stranded precursor to DNA, normally expands one nucleic base at a time, growing sequentially like a linked chain. The problem is that in the primordial world RNA molecules didn't have enzymes to catalyze this reaction, and while RNA growth can proceed naturally, the rate would be so slow the RNA could never get more than a few pieces long (for as nucleic bases attach to one end, they can also drop off the other).

Ernesto Di Mauro and colleagues examined if there was some mechanism to overcome this thermodynamic barrier, by incubating short RNA fragments in water of different temperatures and pH.

They found that under favorable conditions (acidic environment and temperature lower than 70 C), pieces ranging from 10-24 in length could naturally fuse into larger fragments, generally within 14 hours.

The RNA fragments came together as double-stranded structures then joined at the ends. The fragments did not have to be the same size, but the efficiency of the reactions was dependent on fragment size (larger is better, though efficiency drops again after reaching around 100) and the similarity of the fragment sequences.

The researchers note that this spontaneous fusing, or ligation, would a simple way for RNA to overcome initial barriers to growth and reach a biologically important size; at around 100 bases long, RNA molecules can begin to fold into functional, 3D shapes.

http://www.geneticarchaeology.com/Research/A_simple_fusion_to_jump-start_evolution.asp

What I hear when creationists speak

2008-09-10T06:34:00.000-07:00

The theory of childhood, also known as child origin, is a damnable, loathsome and indefensible lie. How can any thinking person suppose all humans used to be babies once? There is no development path from babies to adults, no transitional forms between these two species. Show me even one baby with the head of a grown man on his body. Can you? No? Not even a bearded toddler? No adults with unfused skullbones, outside unfortunate disorders? Not even a tiny little newborn girl suddenly sprouting a respectable bosom? You can't find them, because they don't exist. There isn't a single transitional form between children and adults, and you will never find one because the theory simply is an unscientific lie.

The development of children has been well-researched in our six-month study following a sample of one thousand children and adults of various ages. We have conclusively proven that while there are minor changes in features like height and body fat, and replacement of deciduous teeth with permanent teeth, incontravertibly still every creature in the study that started out as a child had only slightly more adult features at the end of the observation period than at its beginning. Children and adults are separate kinds and there will never be sufficient changes to change one into the other. We reject any evidence from longer-term studies as we believe the laws of physics have changed within the last year.

To claim people come from children is demeaning and morally degrading. We have observed how children behave. If we acted like small children we'd all be demanding and impatient, and we'd be cheating, lying, and stealing from each other all the time. If the theory of childhood were true there would be no morality, and with no morality to build one on, no society. Childhood is a wicked lie used by charlatans to justify evils such as public schools.

There is no consensus on the theory of childhood in the scientific community. We should teach the controversy. Our children will be served well to learn that the prospect of them becoming adults is merely a theoretical idea. Many children come from families that do not subscribe to the theory of childhood, and they could be disturbed if the theory were taught as fact.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/386761136/what_i_hear_when_creationists.php

Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

2008-09-10T05:19:00.000-07:00

A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.

It's not as Frankensteinian as it sounds. Instead, a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.

Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/biologists-on-t.html

Molecular evolution is echoed in bat ears

2008-09-07T01:22:00.000-07:00

Echolocation may have evolved more than once in bats, according to new research from the University of Bristol published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

http://www.geneticarchaeology.com/Research/Molecular_evolution_is_echoed_in_bat_ears.asp

Retrovirus archive

2008-09-02T08:22:00.000-07:00

It turns out that about 8 percent of the human genome is made up of viruses that once attacked our ancestors. The viruses lost. What remains are the molecular equivalents of mounted trophies

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/31/AR2008083101759.html

Researchers Discover Remnant of an Ancient 'RNA World'

2008-07-18T10:00:00.001-07:00

(PhysOrg.com) -- Some bacterial cells can swim, morph into new forms and even become dangerously virulent - all without initial involvement of DNA. Yale University researchers describe Friday in the journal Science how bacteria accomplish this amazing feat - and in doing so provide a glimpse of what the earliest forms of life on Earth may have looked like.

To initiate many important functions, bacteria sometimes depend entirely upon ancient forms of RNA, once viewed simply as the chemical intermediary between DNA's instruction manual and the creation of proteins, said Ronald Breaker, the Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale and senior author of the study.

http://www.physorg.com/news135522723.html

Ventastega

2008-06-27T23:12:00.000-07:00

The paleontologists are going too far. This is getting ridiculous. They keep digging up these collections of bones that illuminate tetrapod origins, and they keep making finer and finer distinctions. On one earlier side we have a bunch of tetrapod-like fish — Tiktaalik and Panderichthys, for instance — and on the later side we have fish-like tetrapods, such as Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. Now they're talking about shades of fishiness or tetrapodiness within those groups! You'd almost think they were documenting a pattern of gradual evolutionary change.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/06/ventastega.php

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab

2008-06-11T03:16:00.001-07:00

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html?feedId=online-news_rss20

DNA and Information

2008-06-03T11:02:00.001-07:00

It is worthwhile to note exactly WHY English is such a poor analogue of DNA.

- DNA is redundant. Triplet codons often have a redundancy at the third position. The analogue here is the removal of vowels from the sentence. "Th nmy s nw ttckng" is hard to read but can be deciphered. Similarly ATT GTT GGT codes for Isoleucine, Valine, Glycine just the same as ATC GTC GGC does.

- DNA is context independent. "The bull is now motivating" doesn't make sense, it doesn't even convey a portion of the message (even though it contains a noun & a verb in the correct positions) above whereas ATT GTT GAA would still make relative sense because it codes for Isoleucine, Valine & Glutamic acid where Glu is an acceptable substitute for Gly because they are both acidic residues.

- The order of English is relatively unimportant. We have all listened to non-native speakers (like Yoda) who come out with sentences such as "Attacking is the enemy now" which is completely jumbled but able to be parsed. By contrast, GGT ATT GTT would code for Glycine, Isoleucine, Valine which might destroy the active site of a protein.

So what does all this mean?

The redundancy of DNA means that random mutation can add information, the context independence means that mutations might only have a small, local effect and the importance of order gives a strong intrinsic error checking algorithm. DNA is nearly the perfect information transmittal system for harnessing 'noise' into useful channels.

http://richarddawkins.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=36826&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=25#p696650

Information Theory

2008-06-03T10:41:00.000-07:00

There are actually two very distinct concepts of information. The first (and perhaps the most famous) comes from the paper written by Claude E Shannon entitled A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Some key points from this paper are detailed in point form below:

1. Information content of a message is independent of the meaning of that message
2. Information entropy can be represented as a decrease in the uncertainty of the observer
3. A repetitive message thus contains less information than a purely random one
4. The point of communication is to transmit a message
5. While under some circumstances noise can be an information source, it can only ever decrease the information content of a message

The Shannon theory is often referred to as Classical Information Theory.

Let's leave that for a second and look at another information theory. Algorithmic Information Theory is based off the work of Kalmogorov and a brief description is provided.

The link wrote:
Kolmogorov defined the complexity of a string x as the length of its shortest description p on a universal Turing machine U (K(x)=min{l(p):U(p)=x}). A string is simple if it can be described by a short program, like "the string of one million ones", and is complex if there is no such short description, like for a random string whose shortest description is specifying it bit-by-bit. Kolmogorov complexity is a key concept in (algorithmic) information theory. An important property of K is that it is nearly independent of the choice of U. Furthermore it leads to shorter codes than any other effective code. K shares many properties with Shannon's entropy (information measure) S, but K is superior to S in many respects. To be brief, K is an excellent universal complexity measure, suitable e.g. for quantifying Occam's razor. The major drawback of K as complexity measure is its incomputability. So in practical applications it has always to be approximated, e.g. by MML/MDL or Lempel-Ziv compression or others.

Now, it took me a few goes to understand the distinction between the two so I'll do my best to explain it here in case anyone else is feeling as thick as I was when I read this stuff

Kalmogorov's definition maximises the information content of a message when the randomness is greatest ie. if a message is sufficiently random that every single bit of it must be specified individually and it cannot be simplified, then it contains the highest amount of Kalmogorov information. Thus, making a message more random always increases information under that definition.

By contrast, Shannon (in point 5 above) explicitly specifies that noise (ie. randomness) can only ever decrease the information content of the message.

Now, the two seem irreconcilable until you understand the distinction. Shannon information theory starts with a message and considers the effects of noise on that message. In a Shannon system, the information content can never increase beyond the initial state. By contrast, in a Kalmogorov system, the randomness IS the information and thus there is no upper bound on the amount of information in the system.

The bait and switch of the creationist comes from using the Shannon "mutations always decrease information" truism and applying it to a Kalmogorov system like DNA. More formally, for the creationists to use the Shannon definition in their arguments, they must demonstrate that the information content of DNA was maximal and time directed ie. That the original DNA molecule had all the information it was ever possible to have.

Now, they claim this to be true because of the Fall but there are A) no rigorous proofs of such and B) substantial evidence against the concept. The evidence comes from the presence of endogenous retroviral insertions into the genome of various species that are conserved across those species. eg. This article demonstrates that retroviral elements have been inserted into all primates and that some of them are conserved across species. This means that information has been added to the original message because the length of the original message has been increased in a non-repetitive manner (point 1 and 3 above).

This demonstrable addition of information utterly eviscerates the creationist misuse of information theory as it refutes their Shannon definition by showing that information can actually increase because Shannon clearly states that INFORMATION IS INDEPENDENT OF MEANING.

http://richarddawkins.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=46&p=801662&sid=6d69dad7cf77c5ab3b3359ba786c7423

Materpiscis attenboroughi

2008-05-31T00:56:00.001-07:00

It's not often that something as delicate as details of the reproductive tract get preserved, but here's a phenomenal fossil of a Devonian placoderm containing the fragile bones of an embryo inside, along with the tracery of an umbilical cord and yolk sac.

This is cool: it says that true viviparity, something more than just retention of an egg internally, but also the formation of specialized maternal/embryonic structures, is at least 380 million years old. Hooray for motherhood!

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/materpiscis_attenboroughi.php

Gerobatrachus hottoni

2008-05-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

It's another transitional form, this time an amphibian from the Permian that shares characteristics of both frogs and salamanders — in life, it would have looked like a short-tailed, wide-headed salamander with frog-like ears, which is why it's being called a "frogamander".

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/gerobatrachus_hottoni.php

Researchers document rapid, dramatic 'reverse evolution' in the threespine stickleback fish

2008-05-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

Evolution is supposed to inch forward over eons, but sometimes, at least in the case of a little fish called the threespine stickleback, the process can go in relative warp-speed reverse, according to a study led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and published online ahead of print in the May 20 issue of Current Biology (Cell Press).

http://www.geneticarchaeology.com/Research/Researchers_document_rapid_dramatic_reverse_evolution_in_the_threespine_stickleback_fish.asp

Is DNA Repair A Substitute For Sex?

2008-05-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

The answer is clearly "no" – unless you're a bdelloid rotifer.

What's interesting, of course, about these minute but multi-cellular animals is that they are completely asexual, and apparently have been for millions of years. There are no males, and females reproduce entirely by parthenogenesis. Although that might seem to imply a rather joyless existence, it hasn't stopped the bdelloids from persisting, and even diversifying into more than 370 species.

http://scienceandreason.blogspot.com/2008/05/is-dna-repair-substitute-for-sex.html

Trouble ahead for science

2008-05-10T00:55:00.000-07:00

AMERICAN science is in trouble, and if you wonder why, just go to the movies. Popular culture is gradually turning against science, and Ben Stein's new movie, "Expelled," is helping to push it along.

"Intelligent Design," the relabeled, repackaged form of American creationism, has always had a problem. It just can't seem to produce any evidence. To scientists, the reasons for this are obvious. To conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, Intelligent Design is nothing more than a "phony theory." No data, no science, no experiments, just an attempt to sneak a narrow set of religious views into US classrooms.

Advocates of Intelligent Design needed a story to explain why the idea has been a nonstarter within the scientific community, and Ben Stein has given it to them. The story line is that Intelligent Design advocates are persecuted and suppressed. "Expelled" tells of this terrible campaign against free expression, and mocks the pretensions of the closed-minded scientific elite supposedly behind it.

There are many things wrong with this movie. One example: Viewers are told that Dr. Richard Sternberg lost his job at the Smithsonian Institution because he edited a paper favorable to Intelligent Design. Wrong.

Sternberg wasn't even employed by the Smithsonian (he had no job to lose), and had resigned as journal editor six months before the paper was published. In fact, the irony is that neither Steinberg nor any of the other people featured as martyrs in "Expelled" lost jobs as a result of their advocacy of Intelligent Design, while many others who supported evolution have. In 2007, Chris Comer, the director of science education for Texas schools, was fired for having done nothing more than forwarding an e-mail announcing a pro-evolution seminar.

The movie also uses interviews with avowed atheists like Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion," to argue that scientific establishment is vehemently anti-God. Never mind that 40 percent of the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science profess belief in a personal God. Stein, avoiding these 50,000 people, tells viewers that "Darwinists" don't allow scientists to even think of God.

Puzzled, the editors of Scientific American asked Mark Mathis, the film's co-producer, why he and Stein didn't interview such people, like Francis Collins (head of the Human Genome Project), Francisco Ayala, or myself. Mathis cited me by name, saying "Ken Miller would have confused the film unnecessarily." In other words, showing a scientist who accepts both God and evolution would have confused their story line.

Despite these falsehoods, by far the film's most outlandish misrepresentation is its linkage of Darwin with the Holocaust. A concentration camp tour guide tells Stein that the Nazis were practicing "Darwinism," and that's that. Never mind those belt buckles proclaiming Gott mit uns (God is with us), the toxic anti-Semitism of Martin Luther, the ghettoes and murderous pogroms in Christian Europe centuries before Darwin's birth. No matter. It's all the fault of evolution.

Why is all this nonsense a threat to science? The reason is Stein's libelous conclusion that science is simply evil. In an April 21 interview on the Trinity Broadcast Network, Stein called the Nazi murder of children "horrifying beyond words." Indeed. But what led to such horrors? Stein explained: "that's where science in my opinion, this is just an opinion, that's where science leads you. Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place. Science leads you to killing people."

According to Stein, science leads you to "killing people." Not to cures and vaccines, not to a deeper understanding of nature, not to wonders like computers and cellphones, and certainly not to a better life. Nope. Science is murder.

"Expelled" is a shoddy piece of propaganda that props up the failures of Intelligent Design by playing the victim card. It deceives its audiences, slanders the scientific community, and contributes mightily to a climate of hostility to science itself. Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science. If we actually come to believe that science leads to murder, then we deserve to lose world leadership in science. In that sense, the word "expelled" may have a different and more tragic connotation for our country than Stein intended.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/05/08/trouble_ahead_for_science/

Tiktaalik

2008-05-05T13:38:00.000-07:00

http://cectic.com/144.html

Regulating Evolution: How Gene Switches Make Life

2008-05-05T13:37:00.000-07:00

Switches within DNA that govern when and where genes are turned on enable genomes to generate the great diversity of animal forms from very similar sets of genes.

Mutations in DNA “switches” that control body-shaping genes, rather than in the genes themselves, have been a significant source of evolving differences among animals.
If humans want to understand what distinguishes animals, including ourselves, from one another, we have to look beyond genes.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=regulating-evolution&sc=rss

A question for Ben Stein: Why are you singling out Darwin and ignoring the true inspirations for the Holocaust, Pasteur and Koch?

2008-05-05T13:35:00.000-07:00

Why pick on Charles Darwin as the inspiration for the Holocaust?

Consider this quote by Hitler:

For us, this is not a problem you can turn a blind eye to-one to be solved by small concessions. For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can ever really be eradicated. Don't be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus. Don't think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst. Speech delivered by Hitler in Salzburg, 7 or 8 August 1920. (NSDAP meeting)

Hmmm. Here Hitler is likening the Jew to a disease, to a "racial tuberculosis" even. Who originated the germ theory of disease? Louis Pasteur! So why doesn't Stein blame the Holocaust on Louis Pasteur instead of Darwin?

In fact, it has been seriously argued that the Holocaust was based on not evolution, but concepts of immunology

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/03/a_question_for_ben_stein_why_are_you_sin.php

Other Natural Mechanisms For Evolution

2008-04-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

Sexual selection - Peacocks would escape predation, survive and reproduce much better without their ridiculous tails but for the fact that peahen go bonkers over them. So popularity with the ladies makes a peacock gain more in 'Darwinian fitness' (reproductive success) than he loses by being caught and eaten, which after all most peacocks escape, until they have reproduced, at least. There is also increasing speculation that man's inordinate talking, dancing, music-making and painting evolved because woman liked it ...

Genetic drift is a statistical phenomenon in very small populations, and is essentially sampling error. Pure chance can make one lineage die out and another completely take over the population, even though none is markedly more or less viable than the other. This sort of thing does happen, and it can probably influence speciation which after all is thought to happen in small isolated populations, but it can probably not lead to speciation all by itself. It may very well have influenced the speciation event that made us.

source

Mass extinction events, like the end-of-Permian or the Cretaceous-Tertiary one that killed the dinosaurs, hit species with forces and conditions they never had adapted to in advance, and had no time to adapt to when they happened. So perfectly viable and flourishing species were wiped out by sheer bad luck, leaving room for other, often new species to evolve. It is doubtful that we would have been here if the dinosaurs had survived.

Extermination by the hands of us people, finally, is indubitably influencing evolution. What we have done to date is actually comparable to a medium mass extinction event, even though the special effects are less awesome than the last visitation 65 million years ago. But a big nuclear war can still change that.

Scientists Automate Molecular Evolution

2008-04-28T03:57:00.001-07:00

Under the control of a computer at The Scripps Research Institute, a population of billions of genes morphed through 500 cycles of forced adaptation to emerge as molecules that could grow faster and faster on a continually dwindling source of chemical fuel-a feat that researchers describe as an example of "Darwinian evolution on a chip."

The super molecules that resulted, a species of RNA enzyme, were produced in about 70 hours using an automated tool that is about the size of a compact disc, according to the study published in the April issue of PLoS Biology. The Scripps Research investigators who designed the device note that the findings provide an example of the Darwinian principle of selective pressure at work, seen in real time.

"This is evolution at the level of molecules as a fact, not a theory," says the study's senior investigator, Gerald Joyce, Scripps Research professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular Biology. "This is what it looks like when a computer controls conditions that push molecules to adapt in order to thrive--survival of the fittest on the smallest scale possible."

The evolved enzymes that resulted exhibited a new set of 11 mutations that improved their ability to survive under substrate-starvation conditions by 90-fold, compared to the starting molecules.

http://www.geneticstimes.com/Research/Scientists_Automate_Molecular_Evolution.asp

Refining the date of dinosaur extinction

2008-04-27T15:13:00.000-07:00

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley Geochronology Center have pinpointed the date of the dinosaurs' extinction more precisely than ever thanks to refinements to a common technique for dating rocks and fossils.

The argon-argon dating method has been widely used to determine the age of rocks, whether they're thousands or billions of years old. Nevertheless, the technique had systematic errors that produced dates with uncertainties of about 2.5 percent, according to Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and an adjunct professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley.

Renne and his colleagues in Berkeley and in the Netherlands now have lowered this uncertainty to 0.25 percent and brought it into agreement with other isotopic methods of dating rocks, such as uranium/lead dating. As a result, argon-argon dating today can provide more precise absolute dates for many geologic events, ranging from volcanic eruptions and earthquakes to the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other creatures at the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Tertiary period. That boundary had previously been dated at 65.5 million years ago, give or take 300,000 years.

http://www.geologytimes.com/research/Refining_the_date_of_dinosaur_extinction.asp

Lizards Undergo Rapid Evolution After Introduction To A New Home

2008-04-21T06:19:00.000-07:00

In 1971, biologists moved five adult pairs of Italian wall lizards from their home island of Pod Kopiste, in the South Adriatic Sea, to the neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru. Now, an international team of researchers has shown that introducing these small, green-backed lizards, Podarcis sicula, to a new environment caused them to undergo rapid and large-scale evolutionary changes.

"Striking differences in head size and shape, increased bite strength and the development of new structures in the lizard's digestive tracts were noted after only 36 years, which is an extremely short time scale," says Duncan Irschick, a professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "These physical changes have occurred side-by-side with dramatic changes in population density and social structure."

Researchers returned to the islands twice a year for three years, in the spring and summer of 2004, 2005 and 2006. Captured lizards were transported to a field laboratory and measured for snout-vent length, head dimensions and body mass. Tail clips taken for DNA analysis confirmed that the Pod Mrcaru lizards were genetically identical to the source population on Pod Kopiste.

Observed changes in head morphology were caused by adaptation to a different food source. According to Irschick, lizards on the barren island of Pod Kopiste were well-suited to catching mobile prey, feasting mainly on insects. Life on Pod Mrcaru, where they had never lived before, offered them an abundant supply of plant foods, including the leaves and stems from native shrubs. Analysis of the stomach contents of lizards on Pod Mrcaru showed that their diet included up to two-thirds plants, depending on the season, a large increase over the population of Pod Kopiste.

http://www.wildbiology.com/research/Lizards_Undergo_Rapid_Evolution_After_Introduction_To_A_New_Home.asp

Expelled Exposed!

2008-04-15T04:45:00.001-07:00

Expelled

Study Questions 'Cost of Complexity' in Evolution

2008-04-13T02:01:00.000-07:00

Higher organisms do not have a "cost of complexity" - or slowdown in the evolution of complex traits - according to a report by researchers at Yale and Washington University in Nature.

Biologists have long puzzled over the relationship between evolution of complex traits and the randomness of mutations in genes. Some have proposed that a "cost of complexity" makes it more difficult to evolve a complicated trait by random mutations, because effects of beneficial mutations are diluted.

"While a mutation in a single gene can have effects on multiple traits, even as diverse as the structures of brain, kneecap and genitalia, we wondered how often random mutation would affect many traits" said lead author Gunter Wagner, professor and chair of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale. The phenomenon wherein mutation in a single gene can have effects on multiple traits is known as pleiotropy.

This study showed that most mutations only do affect few traits. Further, the effect of an individual mutation is not dampened because of its effects on other traits.

http://www.geneticarchaeology.com/Research/Study_Questions_Cost_of_Complexity_in_Evolution.asp

Evolution on the table top

2008-04-09T01:18:00.001-07:00

Evolution has taken another step away from being dismissed as “a theory” in the classroom, thanks to a new paper published this week in the online open-access journal PLoS Biology. The research article, by Brian Paegel and Gerald Joyce of The Scripps Research Institute, California, documents the automation of evolution: they have produced a computer-controlled system that can drive the evolution of improved RNA enzymes—biological catalysts—without human input. In the future, this “evolution-machine” could feature in the classroom as well as the lab, allowing students to watch evolution happen in their biology lessons.

The evolution of molecules via scientific experiment is not new. The first RNA enzymes to be “evolved” in the lab were generated in the 1990s. But what is exciting about this work is that the process has been made automatic. Thus evolution is directed by a machine without requiring human intervention-other then providing the initial ingredients and switching the machine on.

http://www.thinkgene.com/evolution-on-the-table-top/

Necrophilia among ducks ruffles research feathers

2008-03-27T01:43:00.000-07:00

"I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head.

"Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his 'mate': when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of two-note 'raeb-raeb' calls (the 'conversation-call' of Lorentz 1953). I secured the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present at the site, calling 'raeb-raeb' and apparently looking for his victim (who, by then, was in the freezer)."

[..]

Mr Moeliker was informed of an American case involving a squirrel and a dead partner, although in this case it is not known whether the necrophilia observed was homosexual or not as the victim had been run over by a truck shortly before the incident.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1432991,00.html

Remains of Human Ancestors Found

2008-03-27T01:37:00.000-07:00

Excavations in a cave in the mountains of northern Spain have uncovered the oldest known remains of human ancestors in Western Europe, scientists reported Wednesday.

The fossils of a lower jaw and teeth, more than 1.1 million years old, were found in sediments along with stone tools and animal bones that appeared to have been butchered. The remains have been attributed to the previously known species Homo antecessor, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/science/26cnd-fossil.html?_r=1&ex=1364270400&en=36e16ced945bdfe0&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

Reproductive history writ in the genome

2008-03-20T02:34:00.000-07:00

We don't have any fossilized placentas, but we know that there was an important transition in the mammalian lineage: we had to have shifted from producing eggs in which yolk was the primary source of embryonic nutrition to a state where the embryo acquired its nutrition from a direct interface with maternal circulation, the placenta. We modern mammals don't need yolk at all … but could there be vestiges of yolk proteins still left buried in our genome? The answer, which you already know since I'm writing this, is yes.

First, a little background. It's not that surprising to find traces of yolk proteins in our genomes, because we also have the evidence of embryology that shows that our embryos still make a yolk sac! Below is a series of diagrams of the human embryo over the last several weeks of the first month of pregnancy, and you can see the large sac hanging from the embryo; it's a useless fluid filled space that contains no yolk at all, but is homologous to similar structures that form in birds and reptiles.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/reproductive_history_writ_in_t.php

Plants Rapidly Evolve New Reproductive Systems in Cities

2008-03-04T03:56:00.001-08:00

A common French weed known as Crepis sancta underwent a form of superaccelerated evolution to cope with the difficulties of spreading their seeds in cities. Scientists studying C. sancta discovered that over a period of just twelve years, the plants went from mostly producing "dispersing" seeds that spread on the wind, to producing "nondispersing" seeds that fall to the ground nearby.

http://io9.com/363347/plants-rapidly-evolve-new-reproductive-systems-in-cities

The Theory of Evolution Made Simple

2008-01-03T07:42:00.000-08:00

The Theory of Evolution Made Simple

Evolution Math

2007-12-13T02:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gavrila/583/583.html

Keeping an eye on evolution

2007-12-07T05:05:00.000-08:00

University of Queensland research has found the “missing link” in the evolution of the eye.
Professor Shaun Collin, from UQ's School of Biomedical Sciences, together with colleagues from the Australian National University and the University of Pennsylvania, have identified animals that have eyes that bridge the evolutionary link between those designed to simply differentiate light from dark to those that possess a camera-like eye.

Professor Collin said his research gathered evidence from multiple branches of biology, in support of a gradual evolution of the eye, and it proposes an explicit scenario to explain how it was that our eye emerged.

http://www.physorg.com/news115919015.html

Tropical fish can live for months out of water

2007-11-17T01:33:00.001-08:00

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - A tropical fish that lives in mangrove swamps across the Americas can survive out of water for months at a time, similar to how animals adapted to land millions of years ago, a new study shows.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,1880,n,n

How Evolution REALLY Works!

2007-10-21T23:51:00.000-07:00

The sheer numeric certainty of evolution

2007-08-24T00:42:00.000-07:00

There's powerful mathematics to evolution, powerful effects going on that you don't hear about in the common explanations of evolution. The common idea of evolution is as a sequence of individual beneficial mutations, like climbing a ladder. If that's how evolution actually worked then critics would be right, it would have been mathematically impossible for evolution to produce the incredible complexity we see today.

To show the true mathematical power of evolution I will first abandon that "ladder climbing" of beneficial mutaions. In fact lets assume that every single mutation that occurs is either neutral or harmful. I'll demonstrate that we still get the real and powerful mechanism of evolution, the math of evolution.

A good place to start is with the common complaint of creationists that mutation and evolution "cannot create information". Well in the initial mutation phase they are right. When a mutation occurs it introduces noise, it tends to degrade information. But look what happens the moment that mutation gets passed on to an offspring. That mutation is now no longer random noise, it now carries a small bit on information. It carries a little tag saying "this is a nonfatal mutation". The presence of this mutation in the offspring is new and created information, the discovery and living record of a new nonfatal mutation. Over time the population builds up a LIBRARY of nonfatal mutations. This library is a vast accumulation of new information.

That information actually undergoes even more processing and synthesis. Over generations beneficial mutations would obviously multiply, but we're assuming there are none of those here. However entirely neutral mutations will also tend to accumulate and multiply. Nearly harmless mutations would also accumulate and multiply to a lesser extent. Somewhat harmful mutations will even accumulate, and extremely harmful-but-nonfatal mutations will pop up and disappear at the rarest frequencies. So not only do we build up a library of nonfatal mutations, the mutations get tagged with a tagged with a frequency, the percentage of the population carrying that mutation. Each mutation is tagged with a measurement. Every mutation now carries a cost/benefit information tag at the population level. The best ones have a high percentage representation and the most harmful ones have a near zero representation percentage. Our library now contains far more valuable and sophisticated newly created information.

The individuals in the population are on average going to carry a roughly stable load of harmful mutations, a roughly constant "cost" in harmful mutations. Individuals loaded with more than the average cost are generally going to die and remove a more-than-average load of harm out of the population pushing the average up, and individuals with a less than average load will multiply and pull the population average upwards. The cleansing effect of selection removing "damage" from the gene pool will automatically scale to offset the exact rate that mutation is causing "damage". Harm/cost/damage will be weeded out by selection at the same rate it is added by mutation. Neutral mutations will steadily accumulate in the library, and negative mutations will remain at a roughly fixed level constantly measured and scaled by the cost of each. Some mutations will dissappear while new ones appear.

The real power in evolution is the recombination. Every offspring contains a random mixture of mutations from that library. every offspring is a test case searching for a jackpot beneficial combination of mutations. Lets assume an individual has a million random mutations across its entire code. There are 500,000,000,000 mutation-pairs being simultaneously tested within that individual in parallel. Perhaps one is a mutation creating a toxin and another mutation for mutant skin pores. Either mutation alone may be harmful, but the pairing could be breakthrough protecting against predators.

There are 160,000,000,000,000,000 mutation-triples. Each individual is also testing all of these triples in parallel. One mutation might be for a toxin, a second might might crank up production of that toxin to fatal levels (which would ordinarily a fatal evolutionary dead end), and the third might be a costly and ordinarily useless anti-toxin. The triplet is now a breakthrough, either a powerful defense against predators or a weapon for a predator to use, or even both at once.

Each individual is also testing 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 mutation quadruples in parallel for free. Maybe those four mutations individually yeild useless proteins and enzymes, but the chain of four together may yeild a new breakthrough digestive pathway.

Each individual also tests a near infinite number of mutation pentuplets and mutation sextuplets and more. Each individual actually acts as a test of a near infinity number of possibilities and it does this testing in parallel and it does so for free. This is called implicit parallelism. It astronomically multiplies the power of evolution to search for jackpot breakthroughs.

Another point that I raised and haven't actually applied yet is the fact that each mutation is present with a frequency percentage in the population. The measurement of the cost/benefit of that mutation. When you want the most efficient search pattern you want to minimize wasted effort and minimize your costs and maximize your return-on-investment for your available resources. Well each offspring is an investment of resources, a test effort. When you are investing your effort looking for a payoff you want to expend most of your effort on the mutations that have paid off the best in the past and the least effort on the almost-fatal mutations. You mostly want to test combinations of good stuff with good stuff, and you almost never want to bother testing two nearly fatal mutations that will most likely combine to cause a dead offspring and a wasted investment. However you do still want to make a very rare test of two nearly fatal mutations because it might just be a jackpot payoff. In mathematics this exact investment-of-effort and search pattern had already been studied and a mathematical optimization pattern found. And guess what? By an almost staggering coincidence the evolutionary population frequency on each mutation in the population and in the offspring exactly matches and produces the mathematically optimal and most efficient search pattern for the next generation of offspring. You invest lots of effort and lots of offspring on testing the best mutations and groups of the best mutations and you invest exactly the right level of very rare testing of really bad combinations that will probably be fatal but which might just find a jackpot payoff. Mutations at all levels are tested proportionally to the measured cost it impose on the host.

So evolution has a nearly infinite multiplier on its search power and it just happens to invest its search effort in the mathematically optimal most efficient search allocation. Two fairly deep and powerful mathematical results that are hardly apparent in the usual way evolution is explained.

A further point is that once some beneficial mutation or combination of mutations is found, evolution then searches that vast library of stored nonfatal mutations. Most new breakthroughs will be extremely crude at whatever it is they do, and they will probably come with harmful side effects. A set of limbs might be mutated into some useful form for getting some new food source, yet be horribly mutated and otherwise dysfunctional. Evolution then searches the library for mutations that combine to further improve that new breakthrough, and it also searches the library for mutations that will repair or offset any harmful side effects of the breakthrough. A search for ways to further improve the mutated limbs for the new purpose, and a search for modifications to repair problems caused by these malformed limbs.

Evolution is very rarely a simple ladder-climb series of beneficial mutations. Evolution is an information processing system building vast database of information and synthesizing complex measurements of that information and doing an incredibly powerful search and mining of that information database to discover and refine improvements.

And this fits in perfectly with punctuated equilibrium. During the quiet phase the library is accumulating new mutation contributions and measuring those mutations into a percentage of the population, and then when there is a breakthrough discovered or there is an environment shift then evolution goes into overdrive. It mines the database for contributions to the new development or to adapt to the new environment. The frequencies of all of the mutations also get re-measured to re-weigh their cost/benefit ratio in light of the new development or in the new environment. Not only can this radically shift the frequency of vast portion of the genes and mutations in the population, it can quite easily trigger the discovery of other independent breakthroughs. If the population underwent heavy selection pressure, if most of the population was exterminated or displaced by this change, then the gene pool gets decimated. Much of that accumulated library gets wiped out along with the losing majority of the population. With a depleted library in the new population you are naturally going to see little change and progress. You see a stable population, equilibrium, until that library can be very slowly rebuilt through accumulation of new mutations.

Genetic evidence for Evolution

2007-08-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

Retroviruses:

Chromosomes:

Tiny Eagle Evolved into Huge Beast that Barely Flew

2007-08-13T04:13:00.000-07:00

In a blink of geologic time an eagle the weight of a squirrel evolved into a giant predator that fed on animals twice as big as humans. It grew so large it approached the physical limits of flight, a new study suggests.

Before man arrived in New Zealand 700 years ago the land was dominated by birds. With no land mammals, the more than 250 avian species created an isolated and unique ecology.

Amidst this remote laboratory the Haast's eagle was 40 percent larger than today's record holder, the Harpy eagle, and topped the local food chain. The eagle fed largely on the moa, an extinct flightless bird somewhat like an ostrich. Bones from moa as large as 440 pounds (200 kilograms) bear the marks of the Haast's talons.

The eagle held its victim by its pelvis and killed it with a strike to the throat or head, researchers say.

http://www.livescience.com/animals/050104_giant_eagle.html

Rare Example of Darwinism Seen in Action

2007-08-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

A research team, including UC Riverside biologists, has found experimental evidence that supports a controversial theory of genetic conflict in the reproduction of those animals that support their developing offspring through a placenta.

The conflict has been likened to a "battle of the sexes" or an "arms race" at the molecular level between mothers and fathers. At stake: the fetus's growth rate and how much that costs the nutrient-supplying mother.

The new research supports the idea of a genetic "arms race" going on between a live-bearing mother and her offspring, assisted by the growth-promoting genes of the father.

http://www.geneticarchaeology.com/research/Rare_Example_of_Darwinism_Seen_in_Action.asp

Butterfly shows evolution at work

2007-07-12T23:23:00.001-07:00

Scientists say they have seen one of the fastest evolutionary changes ever observed in a species of butterfly.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6896753.stm

New Discoveries From Ethiopia Fill Major Gap In Fossil Record (7/12/2007)

2007-07-12T08:08:00.000-07:00

Scientists working in the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar Region, Ethiopia, have recovered fossils that may prove to be a bridge to establishing a relationship between the earlier Australopithecus anamensis (4.2 - 3.9 million years) and the later Australopithecus afarensis (3 - 3.6 million years) early human species.

http://www.geneticarchaeology.com/Research/New_Discoveries_From_Ethiopia_Fill_Major_Gap_In_Fossil_Record.asp

Critical Analysis of the Molecular Collapse of Evolution

2007-06-22T08:41:00.000-07:00

Evolution:Transition to land

2007-05-11T16:49:00.001-07:00

The "Threat" of Creationism

2007-04-27T14:09:00.000-07:00

The following essay was published in Science and Creationism (1984).

by Isaac Asimov

cientists thought it was settled. The universe, they had decided, is about 20 billion years old, and Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old. Simple forms of life came into being more than three billion years ago, having formed spontaneously from nonliving matter. They grew more complex through slow evolutionary processes and the first hominid ancestors of humanity appeared more than four million years ago. Homo sapians itself—the present human species, people like you and me—has walked the earth for at least 50,000 years.

But apparently it isn't settled. There are Americans who believe that the earth is only about 6,000 years old; that human beings and all other species were brought into existence by a divine Creator as eternally separate variations of beings; and that there has been no evolutionary process.

They are creationists—they call themselves "scientific" creationists—and they are a growing power in the land, demanding that schools be forced to teach their views. State legislatures, mindful of the votes, are beginning to succumb to the pressure. In perhaps 15 states, bills have been introduced, putting forth the creationist point of view, and in others, strong movements are gaining momentum. In Arkansas, a law requiring that the teaching of creationism receive equal time was passed this spring and is scheduled to go into effect in September 1982, though the American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit on behalf of a group of clergymen, teachers, and parents to overturn it. And a California father named Kelly Segraves, the director of the Creation-Science Research Center, sued to have public-school science classes taught that there are other theories of creation besides evolution, and that one of them was the Biblical version. The suit came to trial in March, and the judge ruled that educators must distribute a policy statement to schools and textbook publishers explaining that the theory of evolution should not be seen as "the ultimate cause of origins." Even in New York, the Board of Education has delayed since January in making a final decision, expected this month [June 1981], on whether schools will be required to include the teaching of creationism in their curriculums.

The Rev. Jerry Fallwell, the head of the Moral Majority, who supports the creationist view from his television pulpit, claims that he has 17 million to 25 million viewers (though Arbitron places the figure at a much more modest 1.6 million). But there are 66 electronic ministries which have a total audience of about 20 million. And in parts of the country where the Fundamentalists predominate—the so called Bible Belt— creationists are in the majority.

They make up a fervid and dedicated group, convinced beyond argument of both their rightness and their righteousness. Faced with an apathetic and falsely secure majority, smaller groups have used intense pressure and forceful campaigning—as the creationists do—and have succeeded in disrupting and taking over whole societies.

Yet, though creationists seem to accept the literal truth of the Biblical story of creation, this does not mean that all religious people are creationists. There are millions of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews who think of the Bible as a source of spiritual truth and accept much of it as symbolically rather than literally true. They do not consider the Bible to be a textbook of science, even in intent, and have no problem teaching evolution in their secular institutions.

To those who are trained in science, creationism seems like a bad dream, a sudden reveling of a nightmare, a renewed march of an army of the night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.

The scientific evidence for the age of the earth and for the evolutionary development of life seems overwhelming to scientists. How can anyone question it? What are the arguments the creationists use? What is the "science" that makes their views "scientific"? Here are some of them:

• The argument from analogy.

A watch implies a watchmaker, say the creationists. If you were to find a beautifully intricate watch in the desert, far from habitation, you would be sure that it had been fashioned by human hands and somehow left it there. It would pass the bounds of credibility that it had simply formed, spontaneously, from the sands of the desert.

By analogy, then, if you consider humanity, life, Earth, and the universe, all infinitely more intricate than a watch, you can believe far less easily that it "just happened." It, too, like the watch, must have been fashioned, but by more-than-human hands—in short by a divine Creator.

This argument seems unanswerable, and it has been used (even though not often explicitly expressed) ever since the dawn of consciousness. To have explained to prescientific human beings that the wind and the rain and the sun follow the laws of nature and do so blindly and without a guiding would have been utterly unconvincing to them. In fact, it might have well gotten you stoned to death as a blasphemer.

There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

In short, the complexity of the universe—and one's inability to explain it in full—is not in itself an argument for a Creator.

• The argument from general consent.

Some creationists point at that belief in a Creator is general among all peoples and all cultures. Surly this unanimous craving hints at a greater truth. There would be no unanimous belief in a lie.

General belief, however, is not really surprising. Nearly every people on earth that considers the existence of the world assumes it to have been created by a god or gods. And each group invents full details for the story. No two creation tales are alike. The Greeks, the Norsemen, the Japanese, the Hindus, the American Indians, and so on and so on all have their own creation myths, and all of these are recognized by Americans of Judeo-Christian heritage as "just myths."

The ancient Hebrews also had a creation tale—two of them, in fact. There is a primitive Adam-and-Eve-in-Paradise story, with man created first, then animals, then women. There is also a poetic tale of God fashioning the universe in six days, with animals preceding man, and man and woman created together.

These Hebrew myths are not inherently more credible than any of the others, but they are our myths. General consent, of course, proves nothing: There can be a unanimous belief in something that isn't so. The universal opinion over thousands of years that the earth was flat never flattened its spherical shape by one inch.

• The argument of belittlement.

Creationists frequently stress the fact that evolution is "only a theory," giving the impression that a theory is an idle guess. A scientist, one gathers, arising one morning with nothing particular to do, decided that perhaps the moon is made of Roquefort cheese and instantly advances the Roquefort-cheese theory.

A theory (as the word is used by scientists) is a detailed description of some facet of the universe's workings that is based on long observation and, where possible, experiment. It is the result of careful reasoning from these observations and experiments that has survived the critical study of scientists generally.

For example, we have the description of the cellular nature of living organisms (the "cell theory"); of objects attracting each other according to fixed rule (the "theory of gravitation"); of energy behaving in discrete bits (the "quantum theory"); of light traveling through a vacuum at a fixed measurable velocity (the "theory of relativity"), and so on.

All are theories; all are firmly founded; all are accepted as valid descriptions of this or that aspect of the universe. They are neither guesses nor speculations. And no theory is better founded, more closely examined, more critically argued and more thoroughly accepted, than the theory of evolution. If it is "only" a theory, that is all it has to be.

Creationism, on the other hand, is not a theory. There is no evidence, in the scientific sense, that supports it. Creationism, or at least the particular variety accepted by many Americans, is an expression of early Middle Eastern legend. It is fairly described as "only a myth."

• The argument of imperfection.

Creationists, in recent years, have stressed the "scientific" background of their beliefs. They point out that there are scientists who base their creationists beliefs on a careful study of geology, paleontology, and biology and produce "textbooks" that embody those beliefs.

Virtually the whole scientific corpus of creationism, however, consists of the pointing out of imperfections in the evolutionary view. The creationists insists, for example, that evolutionists cannot true transition states between species in the fossil evidence; that age determinations through radioactive breakdown are uncertain; that alternative interpretations of this or that piece of evidence are possible and so on.

Because the evolutionary view is not perfect and is not agreed upon by all scientists, creationists argue that evolution is false and that scientists, in supporting evolution, are basing their views on blind faith and dogmatism.

To an extent, the creationists are right here: The details of evolution are not perfectly known. Scientists have been adjusting and modifying Charles Darwin's suggestions since he advanced his theory of the origin of species through natural selection back in 1859. After all, much has been learned about the fossil record and physiology, microbiology, biochemistry, ethology, and various other branches of life science in the last 125 years, and it was to be expected that we can improve on Darwin. In fact, we have improved on him. Nor is the process finished. it can never be, as long as human beings continue to question and to strive for better answers.

The details of evolutionary theory are in dispute precisely because scientists are not devotees of blind faith and dogmatism. They do not accept even as great thinker as Darwin without question, nor do they accept any idea, new or old, without thorough argument. Even after accepting an idea, they stand ready to overrule it, if appropriate new evidence arrives. If, however, we grant that a theory is imperfect and details remain in dispute, does that disprove the theory as a whole?

Consider. I drive a car, and you drive a car. I do not know exactly how an engine works. Perhaps you do not either. And it may be that our hazy and approximate ideas of the workings of an automobile are in conflict. Must we then conclude from this disagreement that an automobile does not run, or that it does not exist? Or, if our senses force us to conclude that an automobile does exist and run, does that mean it is pulled by an invisible horses, since our engine theory is imperfect?

However much scientists argue their differing beliefs in details of evolutionary theory, or in the interpretation of the necessarily imperfect fossil record, they firmly accept the evolutionary process itself.

• The argument from distorted science.

Creationists have learned enough scientific terminology to use it in their attempts to disprove evolution. They do this in numerous ways, but the most common example, at least in the mail I receive is the repeated assertion that the second law of thermodynamics demonstrates the evolutionary process to be impossible.

In kindergarten terms, the second law of thermodynamics says that all spontaneous change is in the direction of increasing disorder—that is, in a "downhill" direction. There can be no spontaneous buildup of the complex from the simple, therefore, because that would be moving "uphill." According to the creationists argument, since, by the evolutionary process, complex forms of life evolve from simple forms, that process defies the second law, so creationism must be true.

Such an argument implies that this clearly visible fallacy is somehow invisible to scientists, who must therefore be flying in the face of the second law through sheer perversity. Scientists, however, do know about the second law and they are not blind. It's just that an argument based on kindergarten terms is suitable only for kindergartens.

To lift the argument a notch above the kindergarten level, the second law of thermodynamics applies to a "closed system"—that is, to a system that does not gain energy from without, or lose energy to the outside. The only truly closed system we know of is the universe as a whole.

Within a closed system, there are subsystems that can gain complexity spontaneously, provided there is a greater loss of complexity in another interlocking subsystem. The overall change then is a complexity loss in a line with the dictates of the second law.

Evolution can proceed and build up the complex from the simple, thus moving uphill, without violating the second law, as long as another interlocking part of the system — the sun, which delivers energy to the earth continually — moves downhill (as it does) at a much faster rate than evolution moves uphill. If the sun were to cease shining, evolution would stop and so, eventually, would life.

Unfortunately, the second law is a subtle concept which most people are not accustomed to dealing with, and it is not easy to see the fallacy in the creationists distortion.

There are many other "scientific" arguments used by creationists, some taking quite cleaver advantage of present areas of dispute in evolutionary theory, but every one of then is as disingenuous as the second-law argument.

The "scientific" arguments are organized into special creationist textbooks, which have all the surface appearance of the real thing, and which school systems are being heavily pressured to accept. They are written by people who have not made any mark as scientists, and, while they discuss geology, paleontology and biology with correct scientific terminology, they are devoted almost entirely to raising doubts over the legitimacy of the evidence and reasoning underlying evolutionary thinking on the assumption that this leaves creationism as the only possible alternative.

Evidence actually in favor of creationism is not presented, of course, because none exist other than the word of the Bible, which it is current creationist strategy not to use.

• The argument from irrelevance.

Some creationists putt all matters of scientific evidence to one side and consider all such things irrelevant. The Creator, they say, brought life and the earth and the entire universe into being 6,000 years ago or so, complete with all the evidence for eons-long evolutionary development. The fossil record, the decaying radio activity, the receding galaxies were all created as they are, and the evidence they present is an illusion.

Of course, this argument is itself irrelevant, for it can be neither proved nor disproved. it is not an argument, actually, but a statement. I can say that the entire universe was created two minutes age, complete with all its history books describing a nonexistent past in detail, and with every living person equipped with a full memory; you, for instance, in the process of reading this article in midstream with a memory of what you had read in the beginning—which you had not really read.

What kind of Creator would produce a universe containing so intricate an illusion? It would mean that the Creator formed a universe that contained human beings whom He had endowed with the faculty of curiosity and the ability to reason. He supplied those human beings with an enormous amount of subtle and cleverly consistent evidence designed to mislead them and cause them to be convinced that the universe was created 20 billion years ago and developed by evolutionary processes that include the creation and the development of life on Earth. Why?

Does the Creator take pleasure in fooling us? Does it amuse Him to watch us go wrong? Is it part of a test to see if human beings will deny their senses and their reason in order to cling to myth? Can it be that the Creator is a cruel and malicious prankster, with a vicious and adolescent sense of humor?

• The argument from authority.

The Bible says that God created the world in six days, and the Bible is the inspired word of God. To the average creationist this is all that counts. All other arguments are merely a tedious way of countering the propaganda of all those wicked humanists, agnostics, an atheists who are not satisfied with the clear word of the Lord.

The creationist leaders do not actually use that argument because that would make their argument a religious one, and they would not be able to use it in fighting a secular school system. They have to borrow the clothing of science, no matter how badly it fits, and call themselves "scientific" creationists. They also speak only of the "Creator," and never mentioned that this Creator is the God of the Bible.

We cannot, however, take this sheep's clothing seriously. However much the creationist leaders might hammer away at in their "scientific" and "philosophical" points, they would be helpless and a laughing-stock if that were all they had.

It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for or even against evolution, march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.

Even if I am right and the evolutionists' case is very strong, have not creationists, whatever the emptiness of their case, a right to be heard? if their case is empty, isn't it perfectly safe to discuss it since the emptiness would then be apparent? Why, then are evolutionists so reluctant to have creationism taught in the public schools on an equal basis with evolutionary theory? can it be that the evolutionists are not as confident of their case as they pretend. Are they afraid to allow youngsters a clear choice?

First, the creationists are somewhat less than honest in their demand for equal time. It is not their views that are repressed: schools are by no means the only place in which the dispute between creationism and evolutionary theory is played out. There are churches, for instance, which are a much more serious influence on most Americans than the schools are. To be sure, many churches are quite liberal, have made their peace with science and find it easy to live with scientific advance — even with evolution. But many of the less modish and citified churches are bastions of creationism.

The influence of the church is naturally felt in the home, in the newspapers, and in all of surrounding society. It makes itself felt in the nation as a whole, even in religiously liberal areas, in thousands of subtle ways: in the nature of holiday observance, in expressions of patriotic fervor, even in total irrelevancies. In 1968, for example, a team of astronomers circling the moon were instructed to read the first few verses of Genesis as though NASA felt it had to placate the public lest they rage against the violation of the firmament. At the present time, even the current President of the United States has expressed his creationist sympathies.

It is only in school that American youngsters in general are ever likely to hear any reasoned exposition of the evolutionary viewpiont. They might find such a viewpoint in books, magazines, newspapers, or even, on occasion, on television. But church and family can easily censor printed matter or television. Only the school is beyond their control.

But only just barely beyond. Even though schools are now allowed to teach evolution, teachers are beginning to be apologetic about it, knowing full well their jobs are at the mercy of school boards upon which creationists are a stronger and stronger influence.

Then, too, in schools, students are not required to believe what they learn about evolution—merely to parrot it back on test. If they fail to do so, their punishment is nothing more than the loss of a few points on a test or two.

In the creationist churches, however, the congregation is required to believe. Impressionable youngsters, taught that they will go to hell if they listen to the evolutionary doctrine, are not likely to listen in comfort or to believe if they do. Therefore, creationists, who control the church and the society they live in and to face the public-school as the only place where evolution is even briefly mentioned in a possible favorable way, find they cannot stand even so minuscule a competition and demand "equal time."

Do you suppose their devotion to "fairness" is such that they will give equal time to evolution in their churches?

Second, the real danger is the manner in which creationists want threir "equal time." In the scientific world, there is free and open competition of ideas, and even a scientist whose suggestions are not accepted is nevertheless free to continue to argue his case. In this free and open competition of ideas, creationism has clearly lost. It has been losing, in fact, since the time of Copernicus four and a half centuries ago. But creationism, placing myth above reason, refused to accept the decision and are now calling on the government to force their views on the schools in lieu of the free expression of ideas. Teachers must be forced to present creationism as though it had equal intellectual respectability with evolutionary doctrine.

What a precedent this sets.

If the government can mobilize its policemen and its prisons to make certain that teachers give creationism equal time, they can next use force to make sure that teachers declare creationism the victor so that evolution will be evicted from the classroom altogether. We will have established ground work, in other words, for legally enforced ignorance and for totalitarian thought control. And what if the creationists win? They might, you know, for there are millions who, faced with a choice between science and their interpretation of the Bible, will choose the Bible and reject science, regardless of the evidence.

This is not entirely because of the traditional and unthinking reverence for the literal words of the Bible; there is also a pervasive uneasiness—even an actual fear—of science that will drive even those who care little for fundamentalism into the arms of the creationists. For one thing, science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel among themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.

Second, science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary—an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal and immediate care; a world in which you are his particular concern and where He will not consign you to hell if you are careful to follow every word of the Bible as interpreted for you by your television preacher.

Third, science is dangerous. There is no question but that poison gas, genetic engineering, and nuclear weapons and power stations are terrifying. It may be that civilization is falling apart and the world we know is coming to an end. In that case, why not turn to religion and look forward to the Day of Judgment, in which you and your fellow believers will be lifted into eternal bliss and have the added joy of watching the scoffers and disbelievers writhe forever in torment.

So why might they not win?

There are numerous cases of societies in which the armies of the night have ridden triumphantly over minorities in order to establish a powerful orthodoxy which dictates official thought. Invariably, the triumphant ride is toward long-range disaster. Spain dominated Europe and the world in the 16th century, but in Spain orthodoxy came first, and all divergence of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed. The result was that Spain settled back into blankness and did not share in the scientific, technological and commercial ferment that bubbled up in other nations of Western Europe. Spain remained an intellectual backwater for centuries. In the late 17th century, France in the name of orthodoxy revoked the Edict of Nantes and drove out many thousands of Huguenots, who added their intellectual vigor to lands of refuge such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Prussia, while France was permanently weakened.

In more recent times, Germany hounded out the Jewish scientists of Europe. They arrived in the United States and contributed immeasurably to scientific advancement here, while Germany lost so heavily that there is no telling how long it will take it to regain its former scientific eminence. The Soviet Union, in its fascination with Lysenko, destroyed its geneticists, and set back its biological sciences for decades. China, during the Cultural Revolution, turned against Western science and is still laboring to overcome the devastation that resulted.

As we now, with all these examples before us, to ride backward into the past under the same tattered banner of orthodoxy? With creationism in the saddle, American science will wither. We will raise a generation of ignoramuses ill-equipped to run the industry of tomorrow, much less to generate the new advances of the days after tomorrow.

We will inevitably recede into the backwater of civilization, and those nations that retain opened scientific thought will take over the leadership of the world and the cutting edge of human advancement. I don't suppose that the creationists really plan the decline of the United States, but their loudly expressed patriotism is as simpleminded as their "science." If they succeed, they will, in their folly, achieve the opposite of what they say they wish.

( Isaac Asimov, "The 'Threat' of Creationism," New York Times Magazine, June 14, 1981; from Science and Creationism, Ashley Montagu, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 182-193. )

John Maynard Smith on Information Theory

2007-04-26T16:49:00.001-07:00

Richard Dawkins : On Evolution

2007-04-26T14:51:00.001-07:00

Richard Dawkins interviews the Bishop of Oxford

2007-04-20T02:13:00.001-07:00

Evolution vs Creationism

2007-04-20T01:51:00.001-07:00

Watch the videos:

http://www.evolutionvscreationism.info/Evolution%20vs.%20Creationism/Select%20Videos.html

Common Creationist Arguments

2007-03-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

Here's the list: http://www.icr.org/article/1842/

And here is the reply:

1. Galaxies wind themselves up too fast.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE380.html

2. Too few supernova remnants.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE401.html

3. Comets disintegrate too quickly.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE261.html

4. Not enough mud on the sea floor

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD220.html

5. Not enough sodium in the sea.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD221.html

6. The earth's magnetic field is decaying too fast.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD701.html

7. Many strata are too tightly bent

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD510.html

8. Biological material decays too fast.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC371.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB621_1.html

9. Fossil radioactivity shortens geologic "ages" to a few years

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CF/CF201.html

10. Too much helium in minerals.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD015.html

11. Too much carbon 14 in deep geologic strata

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD011_6.html

12. Not enough Stone Age skeletons

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC381.html

Also, this claim contradicts #8 above.

13. Agriculture is too recent.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CG/CG041.html

14. History is too short.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth/specific_arguments/history.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CG/CG040.html

Yanoconodon, a transitional fossil

2007-03-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

clipped from scienceblogs.com

The latest Nature reveals a new primitive mammal fossil collected in the Mesozoic strata of the Yan mountains of China. It's small and unprepossessing, but it has at least two noteworthy novelties, and first among them is that it represents another step in the transition from the reptilian to the mammalian jaw and ear.

Here's the beautiful little beast; as you can see, it's very small, and we need to look very closely at some details of its morphology to see what's special about it.

Bombardier Beetle & Evolution.

2007-03-05T08:26:00.000-08:00

Richard Dawkins- proves the existence of God

Evolution of the Bombardier Beetle

Dinosaur blood & Evolution

2007-03-05T08:21:00.000-08:00

No, dinosaur cells do NOT disprove evolution, in spite what certain "creation scientists" would like you to believe:

http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2006/may/dinosaur.php

Schweitzer’s research has been hijacked by “young earth” creationists, who insist that dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years. They claim her discoveries support their belief, based on their interpretation of Genesis, that the earth is only a few thousand years old.
[..]
This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.” For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science.

Lewis Black-Old Testament(stand up comedy)

2007-03-05T07:49:00.001-08:00

Ken Miller talks about the bacterial flagellum

2007-03-05T07:48:00.003-08:00

Ken Miller on Apes and Humans

2007-03-05T07:48:00.001-08:00

Ken Miller on Intelligent Design

2007-03-05T07:47:00.000-08:00

Carl Sagan - Origins

2007-03-05T07:46:00.005-08:00

Carl Sagan - Evolution (Part 2 Of 2 Parts)

2007-03-05T07:46:00.003-08:00

Carl Sagan - Evolution (Part 1 Of 2 Parts)

2007-03-05T07:46:00.001-08:00

BBC_-_Horizon_-_The_Blind_Watchmaker_(1987)_(Richard_Dawkins)

2007-03-05T07:45:00.001-08:00

Richard Dawkins - The Big Question: Why are we here?

2007-03-05T07:44:00.001-08:00

BBC Horizon: Richard Dawkins - Nice guys finish first

2007-03-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

Evolution vs. Creationism:Scientists Responsibility to Speak

2007-03-05T07:40:00.000-08:00

Creation vs Evolution

2007-03-05T07:39:00.004-08:00

Why Intelligent Design is WRONG

2007-03-05T07:39:00.003-08:00

Why Intelligent Design is WRONG Part II

2007-03-05T07:39:00.001-08:00

Top 10 List Why Anti-Evolutionists are WRONG

2007-03-05T07:38:00.004-08:00

The Evolution of the Flagellum

2007-03-05T07:38:00.003-08:00

Proof that Intelligent Design is Creationism

2007-03-05T07:38:00.001-08:00

Evidence for Evolution, Part II

2007-03-05T07:37:00.005-08:00

Evidence for Evolution

2007-03-05T07:37:00.003-08:00

Why Young Earth Creationists are WRONG, Part II

2007-03-05T07:37:00.001-08:00

Why Young Earth Creationists are WRONG

2007-03-05T07:36:00.005-08:00

How wrong are Young Earth Creationists?

2007-03-05T07:36:00.003-08:00

Why Creationists are WRONG about MacroEvolution

2007-03-05T07:36:00.001-08:00

Evolution of the Bombardier Beetle

2007-03-05T07:35:00.001-08:00

How Evolution Causes an Increase in Information Part II

2007-03-05T07:34:00.000-08:00

How Evolution Causes an Increase in Information

2007-03-05T07:33:00.000-08:00

thetruth.uv.ro

2007-03-05T06:03:00.000-08:00

Te rugam sa citesti cu atentie si cu mintea deschisa urmatoarele randuri; ar putea fi primul pas spre restructurarea completa a viziunii tale asupra lumii.

Motto: "Exista o controversa intre creationism si teoria evolutiei in aceeasi masura in care exista o controversa intre teoria berzei si biologia reproductiva"

Q: Ce este http://thetruth.uv.ro/ ?
A: O pagina a unor amatori, continand material furat de pe site-ul creationist american Answers in Genesis.

Q: Cui se adreseaza acele pagini?
A: Persoanelor nefamiliarizate cu metoda stiintifica si cu erorile de argumentare.

Q: Care este scopul thetruth /AiG?
A: Sa raspandeasca ignoranta in randurile enoriasilor crestini, sa-i impiedice sa isi puna intrebari despre lumea in care traiesc, pentru a-i controla mai usor.

Q: Care sunt cateva dintre dogmele promovate de acele pagini?
A: Pamantul a fost creat in 6 zile in urma cu 6000 de ani de catre Yehova, iar oamenii si dinozaurii au fost contemporani.

Q: Care sunt principalele argumente prezentate?
A: Pledoaria lor mizeaza pe o pregatire stiintifica inadecvata a cititorilor si pe incapacitatea acestora de a gandi critic, de a recunoaste o greseala de argumentare si de a distinge stiinta de pseudostiinta.
Filmuletele postate pe acest site dovedesc exhaustiv falsitatea afirmatiilor de acolo.

Q: Ce neaga acele pagini?
A: Continutul contrazice practic toate stiintele cunoscute si acceptate (fizica, chimia, cosmologia, astronomia, biologia, geologia), fara ca autorii sa aiba calificarea necesara pentru a aduce obiectii pertinente la adresa domeniilor respective si fara a oferi un temei solid pentru afirmatiile lor.

Q: Dar daca intr-adevar ar fi lucruri pe care stiinta nu le poate explica, atunci nu inseamna ca Biblia inspirata de Dumnezeu ar avea raspunsurile?
A: Nu, religia nu are nici o autoritate in acest sens atata timp cat nu are dovezi. Desigur, stiinta nu are raspunsuri la toate intrebarile, dar asta nu inseamna nicidecum ca alte discipline le-ar avea, in ciuda parerii reprezentantilor lor. De asemenea, aceasta nu inseamna nici ca intrebarile respective pot fi puse cu sens.
- De ce Biblia? Fiecare cultura din antichitate avea propriul mit al genezei. Iata o lista cu 10.
- De ce Dumnezeul biblic? Au existat ~3000 de zei in istoria omenirii, cu noi zeitati aparand in fiecare zi (vezi si: Flying Spaghetti Monster).

Q: Unde pot afla mai multe despre evolutie?
A: Pe urmatoarele linkuri, precum si in filmuletele postate aici pe pagina.
http://www.evolutionism.ro/ - pagina romaneasca despre Evolutie, in curs de dezvoltare
http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Main_Page - EvoWiki
http://www.talkorigins.org/ - TalkOrigins Archive

Evolution

A British family with a bizarre speech deficit has led linguists to FOXP2: a gene that begins to explain how our ancestors acquired language.

Humans are just modified fish

Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty

'Nature' Paper Refigures the Evolution of Altruism

Life-like evolution in a test tube

BBC News - 'Lifeless' prion proteins are 'capable of evolution' BBC News - 'Lifeless' prion proteins are 'capable of evolution'

Oldest living plant

A phylogeny-driven genomic encyclopaedia of Bacteria and Archaea

Bacteria

Study catches 2 bird populations as they split into separate species

DNA-like Molecule Replicates Without Help

Wired Science News for Your Neurons Life’s First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory

12 Elegant Examples of Evolution

A simple fusion to jump-start evolution

What I hear when creationists speak

Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

Molecular evolution is echoed in bat ears

Retrovirus archive

Researchers Discover Remnant of an Ancient 'RNA World'

Ventastega

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab

DNA and Information

Information Theory

Materpiscis attenboroughi

Gerobatrachus hottoni

Researchers document rapid, dramatic 'reverse evolution' in the threespine stickleback fish

Is DNA Repair A Substitute For Sex?

Trouble ahead for science

Tiktaalik

Regulating Evolution: How Gene Switches Make Life

A question for Ben Stein: Why are you singling out Darwin and ignoring the true inspirations for the Holocaust, Pasteur and Koch?

Other Natural Mechanisms For Evolution

Scientists Automate Molecular Evolution

Refining the date of dinosaur extinction

Lizards Undergo Rapid Evolution After Introduction To A New Home

Expelled Exposed!

Study Questions 'Cost of Complexity' in Evolution

Evolution on the table top

Necrophilia among ducks ruffles research feathers

Remains of Human Ancestors Found

Reproductive history writ in the genome

Plants Rapidly Evolve New Reproductive Systems in Cities

The Theory of Evolution Made Simple

Evolution Math

Keeping an eye on evolution

Tropical fish can live for months out of water

How Evolution REALLY Works!

The sheer numeric certainty of evolution

Genetic evidence for Evolution

Tiny Eagle Evolved into Huge Beast that Barely Flew

Rare Example of Darwinism Seen in Action

Butterfly shows evolution at work

New Discoveries From Ethiopia Fill Major Gap In Fossil Record (7/12/2007)

Critical Analysis of the Molecular Collapse of Evolution

Evolution:Transition to land

The "Threat" of Creationism

by Isaac Asimov

John Maynard Smith on Information Theory

Richard Dawkins : On Evolution

Richard Dawkins interviews the Bishop of Oxford

Evolution vs Creationism

Common Creationist Arguments

Yanoconodon, a transitional fossil

Bombardier Beetle & Evolution.

Dinosaur blood & Evolution

Lewis Black-Old Testament(stand up comedy)

Ken Miller talks about the bacterial flagellum

Ken Miller on Apes and Humans

Ken Miller on Intelligent Design

Carl Sagan - Origins

Carl Sagan - Evolution (Part 2 Of 2 Parts)

Carl Sagan - Evolution (Part 1 Of 2 Parts)

BBC_-_Horizon_-_The_Blind_Watchmaker​_(1987)_(Richard_Dawkins)

Richard Dawkins - The Big Question: Why are we here?

BBC Horizon: Richard Dawkins - Nice guys finish first

Evolution vs. Creationism:Scientists Responsibility to Speak

Creation vs Evolution

Why Intelligent Design is WRONG

Why Intelligent Design is WRONG Part II

BBC_-_Horizon_-_The_Blind_Watchmaker_(1987)_(Richard_Dawkins)