Dawkins and Picard Win This Year’s Trotter Prize

affective computing, American Humanist Association, C.S. Lewis, Charlie Townes, clash, Culture & Ethics, Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, debates, Denis Noble, Denyse O'Leary, Faith & Science, Francis Collins, Francis Crick, Ide P. Trotter Sr., Intelligent Design, James Shapiro, Mendelian genetics, Micah Green, Michael Egnor, Miracles (book), MIT, Old Testament, qualia, Richard Dawkins, Roger Penrose, Rosalind Picard, Rudder Theatre, Santa Fe, Simon Conway Morris, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Steven Weinberg, Stuart Kauffman, Texas A&M University, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Blind Watchmaker, The End of Christianity, The Third Way of Evolution, Trotter Prize, Tufts University, violence, Zeitgeist
A reflection on the 2025 Trotter Prize Lecture delivered by Oxford's Richard Dawkins and MIT's Rosalind Picard. Source
Read More

Fossil Friday: Saber-Toothed Tigers Originated Multiple Times

carnivores, cats, clades, convergence, Evolution, Fossil Friday, Intelligent Design, jaws, La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles, paleontologists, paleontology, Pleistocene, predators, saber teeth, saber-toothed tiger, Simon Conway Morris, skulls, Smilodon populator, teleology, University of Liege
No explanations offered, but no intelligence allowed either. Maybe scientists should stop shutting their eyes and ears to what nature wants to tell them. Source
Read More

Why Evolutionary Biologists Are “Fatigued” by Darwin

Bill Nye, Cambrian animals, college, Darwin fatigue, Darwin's Doubt, earth, Evolution, evolutionary biology, high school, Intelligent Design, Kindle, libraries, life, mathematics, neo-Darwinian mechanism, paleontology, peer-reviewed literature, probabilistic resources, retailers, Simon Conway Morris, Stephen Meyer, textbooks
Says Stephen Meyer, “The neo-Darwinian math is itself showing that the neo-Darwinian mechanism cannot build complex adaptations." Source
Read More

Fossil Friday: A Fossil Butterfly Lookalike

apomorphies, beetles, Brazil, butterflies, butterflies of the Jurassic, convergence, Crato Formation, Darwinism, design pattern, Fossil Friday, fossil record, genetic predispositions, insects, Intelligent Design, Kalligrammatidae, lacewing, Lower Cretaceous, Lower Jurassic, Makarkina adamsi, Makarkina kerneri, mouthparts, natural selection, neuropterans, paleontology, science, Simon Conway Morris, Stephen Jay Gould, tape of life, University of Tübingen, wing span
An intelligent design paradigm can easily accommodate convergences as a natural consequence of a designer reusing the same ideas in different constructions. Source
Read More

Lukas Ruegger on the “Ediacaran Explosion”— No Solution to the Cambrian Puzzle

Basics of Intelligent Design Biology, biology, Cambrian Explosion, Cambrian fauna, Cambrian News, Complexity, Darwinian gradualism, Ediacaran fauna, Ediacaran Period, Evolution, fossil record, Intelligent Design, Lukas Ruegger, missing ancestors, multicellular life, Simon Conway Morris, single-celled organisms
Ruegger is the personable new intelligent design “explainer” whose videos take an approach similar to Khan Academy’s, but better. Source
Read More

Was Spriggina an Evolutionary Ancestor of Arthropods?

Allison C. Daley, arthropods, bilateral symmetry, Cambrian Explosion, Cambrian News, Darwin's Doubt, Ediacaran Period, Evolution, fossil record, genetic evidence, Greg Edgecombe, Günter Bechly, Intelligent Design, Mark McMenamin, Marten Scheffer, neo-Darwinian mechanisms, paleontology, Precambrian fossil, Princeton University Press, Science Uprising, Simon Conway Morris, Spriggina, Stephen Meyer, Sven Jorgen Birket-Smith
For those wedded to an evolutionary interpretation of life’s history, the fossil and genetic evidence leave the origin of arthropods a major mystery.  Source
Read More

Repentant Biology Journal Offers a Weak Rebuttal to Its Own Pro-ID Fine-Tuning Paper

biological networks, biology, Carl Sagan, Darwin's Doubt, Design Inference, DNA, George Tech, Intelligent Design, Intelligent Faith, Irreducible Complexity, irreducibly complex systems, Journal of Theoretical Biology, logical fallacies, molecular motors, natural selection, Neo-Darwinism, Ola Hössjer, protein complexes, rarity, Simon Conway Morris, specification, Steinar Thorvaldsen, Stephen Meyer, Stuart Kauffman
The authors close by quoting Carl Sagan’s famous adage that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Do they offer that kind of evidence? Source
Read More

Ignoring the Obvious: Convergent Evolution in Strickberger’s Evolution

adaptive challenges, Benedikt Hallgrimsson, biology, Brian K. Hall, convergence, convergent evolution, Darwinism, engineer, Ernst Mayr, Evolution, flowering plants, Francois Jacob, George Ledyard Stebbins, natural selection, neo-Darwinian theory, parallelism, plant evolution, Simon Conway Morris, St. George Jackson Mivart, Strickberger’s Evolution, textbooks, The Origin of Species, tinkerer, What Evolution Is
Remarkably, even Ernst Mayr was forced to tacitly acknowledge the challenge to Darwinism posed by convergence. Source
Read More