History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Science center settles lawsuit over ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’
‘This is the 1st free-speech victory for the Intelligent Design movement’
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Read more: Science center settles lawsuit over ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’ http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=339237#ixzz1Wd3uryjd
Neanderthal survival story revealed in Jersey caves
New investigations at an iconic cave site on the Channel Island of Jersey have led archaeologists to believe the Neanderthals have been widely under-estimated.
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http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/08/someone_has_taken_the_coulter.php?utm_source=mostactive&utm_medium=link
It is disastrous for naive Darwinists (and liberals) to hand Coulter an easy debate over Darwinian evolution. And it is equally disastrous to suggest that Darwinism is a liberal idea, when in fact it is a conservative social darwinist mess, one that conservative ID-ists are thrilled to land on the heads of confused liberals.
Someone has taken the Coulter Challenge!
Category: Creationism • Evolution
Posted on: August 29, 2011 12:21 PM, by PZ MyersIt only took five years. Remember, my Coulter Challenge was for someone to take any of Coulter’s paragraphs about evolution from her book Godless, and cogently defend its accuracy. It’s been surprising how few takers there have been: lots of wingnuts have praised the book and said it is wonderful, but no one has been willing to get specific and actually support any of its direct claims. Until now.
It takes that special combination of arrogance and ignorance to think anything Coulter said is defensible, so I suppose it’s not a huge surprise that our brave foolhardy contestant is Michael Egnor.
After professing his deep and entirely uncritical love of Ann Coulter and everything she has ever said, Egnor chooses the very first paragraph of the first chapter on evolution. He might as well, he thinks she’s “right about everything”.
Liberals’ creation myth is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It’s a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist’s laboratory or the fossil record–and that’s after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn’t still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God.
David Sloan Wilson has to deserve the booby prize award for naivete about Darwinism. The attempt to use ‘evolution’ as an idea will not work if you make Darwinian assumptions.
I wish Huffpost would give equal time to some decent critics of Darwinism.
Talk of formulating public policy from an evolutionary perspective raises the specter of “Social Darwinism”, a term associated with past efforts to justify social inequality in terms of the “survival of the fittest”. Social Darwinism has been used to justify some very nasty actions — not just in Nazi Germany, but in England and the United States. Before we rush to blame evolution, however, consider that these same nasty actions have been justified in other ways throughout history, such as nationalism and the religious principle of divine right. Consider also that the term “social engineering” has acquired a creepy reputation in all its forms, including the kind of brainwashing inspired by the “blank slate” tradition of behaviorism.
California Science Center Pays $110,000 to Settle Intelligent Design Discrimination Lawsuit
New Monkey and American Bird Species Found
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/642830-new-monkey-and-american-bird-species-found
By JENNIFER VIEGAS – DISCOVERY NEWS
Added: Saturday, 27 August 2011 at 11:35 PM
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/08/24/republicans-perry-creationism/
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-neanderthal-immune-genes-20110826,0,377237.story:
Humans got immunity boost from Neanderthals, study finds
Neanderthals, as well as hominids known as Denisovans, contributed key types of immune genes still found in human populations, scientists say.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/08/surprisingly_soon_archaean_mic049921.html
Discovery of a 160-Million-Year-Old Fossil Represents a New Milestone in Early Mammal Evolution
ScienceDaily (Aug. 24, 2011) — A remarkably well-preserved fossil discovered in northeast China provides new information about the earliest ancestors of most of today’s mammal species — the placental mammals. According to a paper published August 25 in the journal Nature, this fossil represents a new milestone in mammal evolution that was reached 35 million years earlier than previously thought, filling an important gap in the fossil record and helping to calibrate modern, DNA-based methods of dating the evolution.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/science-is-not-democratic/2011/08/24/gIQAdEgxaJ_blog.html: Science is not democratic
The comic irony here is that if science, in this case, was more democratic, we might have the play of opinions and viewpoints that would drive scientists to upgrade from Darwinian ideology to real science.
This pitiful article in fact shows us why the scientific process, distorted, can be dangerous. People think Darwinism is science, and that they therefore can’t question it!! ?
Intelligent design has no place in Texas classrooms
ID may have no place, but Darwinism has no place either.
Rick Perry’s true ID: creationism in the classroom
Republican candidate Rick Perry believes creationism should be taught in schools. That breaches both science and constitution
Evolution And Probabilities: A Response to Jason Rosenhouse
One of the mysteries of the Darwin paradigm is the way competent (?) mathematicians suddenly talk rot on the subject of probability.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/08/irremediable_complexity049851.html
“Irremediable Complexity”
Michael Behe August 22, 2011 5:00 AM | Permalink
An intriguing “hypothesis” paper entitled “How a neutral evolutionary ratchet can build cellular complexity”1, where the authors speculate about a possible solution to a possible problem, recently appeared in the journal IUBMB Life. It is an expanded version of a short essay called “Irremediable Complexity?”2 published last year in Science. The authors of the manuscripts include the prominent evolutionary biologist W. Ford Doolittle.
The gist of the paper is this. The authors think that over evolutionary time, neutral processes would tend to “complexify” the cell. They call that theoretical process “constructive neutral evolution” (CNE). In an amusing analogy they liken cells in this respect to human institutions:
Organisms, like human institutions, will become ever more ”bureaucratic,” in the sense of needlessly onerous and complex, if we see complexity as related to the number of necessarily interacting parts required to perform a function, as did Darwin. Once established, such complexity can be maintained by negative selection: the point of CNE is that complexity was not created by positive selection.2
An Evolution Formalism And The Eonic Model
Darwinism isn’t actually able to manage a theory of evolution, which is always something with a ‘process’ to do that evolution, and a set of sub-processes that mediate that. That seems obscure, but the basics of the ‘evolutionary formalism’ are implicit in Lamarck, in ‘punctuated equilibrium’ jargon, and in any process that shows development. Darwinism makes no sense, and it is not surprising it can’t fit into the basic ‘evolution framework’.
The previous post cited Coyne’s blog, which gives this link: The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey – review
A book that would have had Darwin swooning
Time was when scientific revolutions – the discoveries of Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Einstein, Watson and Crick – reverberated around the globe. But although we are living through the greatest discoveries about the processes of life generally, and human beings in particular, the new findings hardly rate a blip on the collective consciousness. In March 2010 Oliver Burkeman wrote for this paper on the subject of epigenetics. The article was provocatively titled: “Why everything you’ve been told about evolution is wrong.” It isn’t, but I confidently predicted to anyone within earshot that this would finally set tongues wagging.
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Three Waves of Evolutionary Innovation Shaped Diversity of Vertebrates, Genome Analysis Reveals
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110818142738.htm
ScienceDaily (Aug. 18, 2011) — Over the past 530 million years, the vertebrate lineage branched out from a primitive jawless fish wriggling through Cambrian seas to encompass all the diverse forms of fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals. Now researchers combing through the DNA sequences of vertebrate genomes have identified three distinct periods of evolutionary innovation that accompanied this remarkable diversification.
http://behe.uncommondescent.com/2011/08/irremediable-complexity/
To me, evolution as fact is soundly established, whatever the theory to explain it (natural selection fails on many fronts). That said, and keeping one’s distance from design arguments, it remains true that evolution has not been fully observed/demonstrated as fact in the emergence of complex human characters, such as language, complex consciousness, and the ‘will’ factor so elusively associated with ethical action. To say that these ‘evolved’ is an assumption about ultra complex entities, one not fully confirmed by any observations. We don’t even know how these functions work in man. To say that they evolved is conjectural (the term ‘evolution’ is vague), and we are stuck with the fact that something like capacity for speech, and/or the ability of consciousness to jump to higher octaves (like the enlightenment ‘state’) don’t make any sense even as evolutionary outcomes. The only safe assumption is, indeed, evolution, but the term, we can see, is breaking down, and we end suspicious these complexities demand a new category of thought.
In fact, the question of ‘soul’, and any serious discussion of man must consider this factor, which came into being with the emergence of homo sapiens compounds the complications we have already pointed to.
Here scientists are adamant in their rejection of ‘soul’. They hardly have a choice: if soul is real then a component of man is beyond space and time, and science is out the window. But the suspicion is great that this is just what the situation is.
Then the idea of ‘evolution’ becomes very stressed: an entity, to evolve, must be in space and time (as far as we know), so once again the question of human evolution pushes the idea to its limits, where it breaks down, perhaps.
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2011/08/evolution-is-fact-and-theory.html
The confusion is still present, it seems, in this article attempting clarification. But it is roughly right as long as we don’t let Darwinists confused natural selection theory with ‘evolution’.
The issue is: evolution is clear as a set of facts about deep time. But the theory of natural selection is dubious addition to that affirmation of evolution.
We can also complicate the discussion by considering ‘theories of the evidence’, prior to forming theories to explain that evidence. Thus, the evidence as a set of facts about evolution may show punctuated equilibrium, say, which might lead to a theory about evolutionary facts, far short of a theory.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/are-humans-still-evolving-a-radio-4-show/
Discussions of this question are almost universally incoherent, especially if they assume the truth of prior darwinian evolution.
Since man did not evolve by Darwinian natural selection, the question of whether he is still evolving makes no sense. Makes no sense, but emboldens social darwinists with their eugenic obsessions.
However, if we examine the eonic effect we see that if we take a broader view of evolution, then we can see unity between human emergence, and the emergence of civilization, in the sense of ‘evolution’: check out http://history-and-evoluton.com. In that context, the question of future ‘evolution’ can be answered: man, as he becomes aware of his past evolution moves to transcend it and at the same time to realize its implications, completing its potential. And that requires truly advanced behavioral effort, something that makes the social darwinist survival of the fittest syndrome look grotesque.
Rapid Evolution Within Single Crop-Growing Season Increases Insect Pest NumbersScienceDaily (Aug. 15, 2011) — New research by scientists at the University of California, Riverside shows that evolution — genetic changes in populations over time — can occur so rapidly in organisms that its impact on population numbers and other aspects of biology can be seen within just a few generations.
How Butterflies Copy Their Neighbors to Fool BirdsScienceDaily (Aug. 15, 2011) — The mystery of how a butterfly has changed its wing patterns to mimic neighbouring species and avoid being eaten by birds has been solved by a team of European scientists. The study is published August 14, 2011 in the journal Nature.
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2011/08/bill-2-endless.html
The other Sean Carroll: I have criticized this book for grafing a developmental logic onto natural selection. Evo-devo shows the way out of Darwinian logic, but the Darwinists can’t take the suggestion.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/08/butterfly_color_convergence_or049191.html: Butterfly Patterns: Convergent Evolution or Design?
What Shapes a Bone? Diet and Genetics Dictate Adult Jaw Shape
ScienceDaily (Aug. 5, 2011) — Researchers at Johns Hopkins found that use over time and not just genetics informs the structure of jaw bones in human populations. The researchers say these findings may be used to predict the diet of an ancient population, even if little evidence exists in the fossil record. It can also make it easier for scientists to pinpoint the genetic relationship between fossils.
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