21Oct 2020 by Post

Scientific Paper Reaffirms New Genes Required for Cambrian Explosion

arthropods, bilateral symmetry, bilaterians, body plans, Cambrian animals, Cambrian Explosion, Cambrian News, Darwin's Doubt, ecological factors, eLife, Evolution, Evolution News, evolutionary biology, fossil record, genes, genetic information, Günter Bechly, Intelligent Design, Nature Communications, orthology, oxygenation, paleontology, Precambrian, Stephen Meyer
The notion that many genes would be required for the Cambrian explosion may seem unsurprising — what is surprising is that anyone would challenge the idea. Source
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23Jul 2020 by Post

In Carbon Isotope Excursions, Darwinists Lose Another Excuse for the Cambrian Explosion

animals, arthropods, biology, bioRxiv, body plans, Cambrian Explosion, Cambrian fossils, Cambrian News, Cambrian phyla, Canada, carbon, carbon isotope excursions, Darwin's Doubt, Darwinian tree, Ediacaran explosion, Ediacaran fossils, Evolution, fossil record, Gaskiers deglaciation, geochemistry, Newfoundland, Oman, oxygen, PNAS, Proterozoic Eon, Stephen Meyer, Uncategorized
The claim that a spike in carbon isotope concentrations led to the explosion of biological diversity in the Cambrian doesn’t hold up, as if it would have helped, anyway. Source
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26Mar 2020 by Post

Ancestor of All Animals in 555-Million-Year-Old Ediacaran Sediments?

annelids, arthropods, bilaterian animals, Buddenbrockia plumatellae, burrowing, Cambrian Explosion, Cambrian News, China, cnidarians, Deuterostomia, Ediacaran animals, Evolution, Germany, habitus, Helminthoidichnites, Ikaria wariootia, incertae sedis, microbial mats, mortichnia, Nephrozoa, PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Protostomia, Scyphozoa, South Australia, UC Riverside, University of California, Xenacoelomorpha, Yilingia spiciformis
For my series of articles about alleged Ediacaran animals predating the Cambrian explosion there is a new candidate that deserves a closer view: New research on Ediacaran fossils was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team of scientists from UC Riverside (Evans et al. 2020), and it has already made global news headlines including, “Ancestor of all animals identified in Australian fossils” (University of California 2020) and the even more sensational, “Fossil hunters find evidence of 555m-year-old human relative” (Davis 2020). What did those scientists discover and are their far-reaching conclusions really justified?  Grains of Rice The authors of this study looked at fossil layers from the National Heritage Nilpena site in the Flinders Range of South Australia, which are slightly older than…
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21Feb 2020 by Post

I Disagree with David Klinghoffer, But It’s My Fault for the Confusion

Against Method, arthropods, Brian Charlesworth, Cambrian Explosion, Charles Darwin, chordate, David Klinghoffer, Deborah Charlesworth, Douglas Futuyma, Evolution, Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, Galápagos Islands, history, Intelligent Design, Jerry Coyne, Macroevolution, molluscan, natural selection, neo-Darwinian synthesis, Nicholas Barton, organisms, origin of life, Paul Feyerabend, William Paley
In a post yesterday, David Klinghoffer cited my comments in a recent podcast and described his own view that intelligent design could be considered as a theory of evolution, making the point that intelligent design tries to explain the innovations that happened in the history of life (e.g., the origin of life itself, the burst of complexity during the Cambrian explosion, etc.). I’d describe the situation a little differently. Evolution is an implication — that is, an empirical consequence — of design. Design is the more general (i.e., comprehensive) idea, and the well-understood phenomena usually designated as “evolution” are in fact consequences of designed systems undergoing or responding to perturbation. If anything, then, it would be more accurate to say that “evolution is a sub-theory of design,” no matter how…
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