Faith, Beer, and Other Things That Interest Geoff

Marx is Dead, Freud is Dead, and Darwin is Felling Really, Really Sick

Every once in a while there is a flurry of news which shows how badly Darwinism, as a theory, is doing.

All of these articles are from the excellent blog Uncommon Descent.

1) A scientist doubts his own experiment. It shows that highly conserved regions of DNA, which according to Darwinism would come under natural selection pressures, can be knocked out with no affect to the organism. This would be a major problem for Darwinism.

2)The cell employs counter-circuits.

3) Turbulent times in the world of phylogeny:

IF YOU want to know how all living things are related, don’t bother looking in any textbook that’s more than a few years old. Chances are that the tree of life you find there will be wrong. Since they began delving into DNA, biologists have been finding that organisms with features that look alike are often not as closely related as they had thought. These are turbulent times in the world of phylogeny, yet there has been one rule that evolutionary biologists felt they could cling to: the amount of complexity in the living world has always been on the increase. Now even that is in doubt.

While nobody disagrees that there has been a general trend towards complexity - humans are indisputably more complicated than amoebas - recent findings suggest that some of our very early ancestors were far more sophisticated than we have given them credit for. If so, then much of that precocious complexity has been lost by subsequent generations as they evolved into new species. “The whole concept of a gradualist tree, with one thing branching off after another and the last to branch off, the vertebrates, being the most complex, is wrong,” says Detlev Arendt, an evolutionary and developmental biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany.

The idea of loss in evolution is not new. We know that snakes lost their legs, as did whales, and that our own ancestors lost body hair. However, the latest evidence suggests that the extent of loss might have been seriously underestimated. Some evolutionary biologists now suggest that loss - at every level, from genes and types of cells to whole anatomical features and life stages - is the key to understanding evolution and the relatedness of living things. Proponents of this idea argue that classical phylogeny has been built on rotten foundations, and tinkering with it will not put it right. Instead, they say, we need to rethink the process of evolution itself.

Update: More articles!

4) Forgot this important piece of news: Death of the Junk DNA Idea, which was an Intelligent Design prediction.

5) Dual-Coding Genes.

A recent article in Public Library of Science discussed how dual-coding genes – genes which overlap and code for multiple proteins when read through different reading frames – are "hallmarks of fascinating biology" and "nearly impossible by chance" to the extent that evolutionary biologists have held "skepticism surrounding" their very existence. Now it seems they do exist, and they don't quite match Ayala's vision of biology, where "[c]hance is an integral part" of the "design of organisms is "dysfunctional" and "not intelligent."

Labels: evolution, ID