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We can also witness DEEVOLUTION by looking at the liberals as they deevolve back into sheep!
Will we be hosting it at Darwin Central? If so, I'd better start on getting the banquet hall prepared.
I wonder how many "subfields" Intellegent Design has? But at least they have 2 countries involved, the Christians from the US and Islamists from Turkey. It's the Turks, who have recently shown how far advanced they are over us by banning evolution from their schools on threats of religious violence.
Funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) made it possible for more than two dozen students attend the conference and present their recent research in a poster session.
Wow. 20+ graduate students presenting real research on evolution. The article doesn't say how many professionals had new research.
Looks like a theory in crisis to me. [/sarcasm]
The promoters and participants in this world summit appear to be in complete agreement with one another concerning one thing in particular: an intelligent agent cannot possibly be causative of anything biological, even though biological entities function with more complexity than many humanly-invented machines. I reckon it is of some comfort to be in the midst of the choir, but it is hardly demonstrative of scientific inquiry to use it for the sake of propping up a philosophy
What is the explanation these folks have for why the theory of evolution has essentially stagnated since Darwin's time with any scientists who dare to question some of the sillier premises like the "tree of life" being marginalized as religious zealots, even if they aren't religious at all? Just wondering.
Huxley said that evolution implies eventual devolution. Can we ever return to that blissful state of nature before there was a State and bickering over the nature of private property? Would anybody want to?
From The Woodstock of Evolution
Natural selection does not shape an adaptation or cause a gene to spread over a population or really do anything at all. It is instead the result of specific causes: hereditary changes, developmental causes, ecological causes, and demography. Natural Selection is the result of these causes, not a cause that is by itself. It is not a mechanism.
Provine’s White Whale is the theory of random genetic drift, and it tasks him. It is not random, he said.
The random assortment of chromosomes at meiosis is deterministic. What is the deterministic random number generator that produces random genetic drift? Random binomial sampling. Substitute inbreeding for random drift and then everything makes sense. Frequency of alleles at an individual locus drift, that is, they change in frequencies randomly. Linkage and recombination are ignored. Random drift is independent at each locus. When population size is small, the random drift is greater. Inbreeding and random drift are measured by the same variable, the inbreeding coefficient, F. Inbreeding increases frequency changes.
After providing numerous examples, Provine then concluded:
Random sampling from the allele pool doesn’t exist. The ‘gene pool’ is a bad term. There is no such thing as a gene pool for a population or species. Sewall Wright’s model requires each chromosome be cleaved at each locus each generation. This is a hopeless requirement. Random drift must be distinguished from inbreeding. Inbreeding effects stem from pairing chromosomes together with themselves, thus rendering them homozygous. Recessive traits are often revealed. Random drift must also be distinguished from founder effects. Founder effects lead to inbreeding effects, but not random drift because the new population is so small.
Since this is all beyond my pay scale, and since no one challenged him or even had a question in the discussion session, I privately canvassed the evolutionary theorists present for their opinion. With the exception of Lynn Margulis — who said she thinks that Provine is basically right even if he doesn’t communicate it clearly — no one else present thought that there was any merit to Provine’s challenges to modern evolutionary theory.
Well, at least 2 out of a sample of 210 evolutionary biologists have a problem.