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Michael Behe’s Challenge: A Conversation with Biologist Ann Gauger
At Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne pictures a newly rediscovered and rather unhandsome fly native to a particular rock in Kenya (and nowhere else) where it sports about in the bat guano deposited in a cleft in the rock. The fly has only vestigial wings — “evidence for evolution, of course,” notes Dr. Coyne. Isn’t it interesting how “evidence for evolution” tends to be, as in this example, evidence not for the building up of new functionality but for its loss, where the loss has some adaptive advantage? Losing information is one thing — like accidentally erasing a computer file (say, an embarrassing diplomatic cable) where, it turns out in retrospect, you’re better off now that’s it not there Read More ›
Icons of Evolution 10th Anniversary: The Miller-Urey Experiment
Michael Behe’s “First Rule of Adaptive Evolution” Could Undermine the Evolution of Functional Coding Elements
After reviewing the effects of mutations upon Functional Coding ElemenTs (FCTs), Michael Behe’s recent review article in Quarterly Review of Biology, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” offers some conclusions. In particular, as the title suggests, Behe introduces a rule of thumb he calls the “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: “Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain.” In essence, what Behe means is that mutations that cause loss-of-FCT are going to be far more likely and thus far more common than those which gain a functional coding element. In fact, he writes: “the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that would arise from the diminishment Read More ›
NCSE’s Program Director Josh Rosenau: Human Dependency Obviates the Right to Life
National Center for Selling Evolution Science Education’ s Program and Policy Director Josh Rosenau has made disturbing arguments in favor of abortion. On his personal blog Thoughts from Kansas, Rosenau, who has been a doctoral candidate in evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, asserted that children in the womb were nearly indistinguishable from… cancer.Later in his post, Rosenau defends abortion by asserting: Is an embryo a discrete human being? I think not. An embryo is dependent on its living host… An old-fashioned term for the “living host” of an embryo is… mother. Rosneau frames the mother-child relationship charmingly: he compares the relationship between a mother and her unborn child to the relationship between a host and a parasite. Rosneau: Read More ›
Science and Worldviews: Slate Sees the Light
Slate — yes, stet that, Slate — carries an excellent essay opening up the interesting question of whether political and philosophical presuppositions distort what we think of as mainstream science (“Lab Politics: Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That’s a problem“). Author Daniel Sarewitz notes that among scientists, self-identified Republicans make up a dismal 6 percent, while Democrats are 55 percent (the rest are independents and I-don’t-knows). Though Sarewitz doesn’t mention evolution, he ought to have done so. But never mind. While folks on the political right have been strangely slow to pick up on the political resonances of Darwinism, his illustration from the climate debate makes the same point: Could it be that disagreements over climate change are Read More ›