Adaptation

Several papers on the topic of “evolvability” have been published relatively recently by the laboratory of Richard Lenski. (1, 2) Most readers of this site will quickly recognize Lenski as the Michigan State microbiologist who has been growing cultures of E. coli for over twenty years in order to see how they would evolve, patiently transferring a portion of each culture to new media every day, until the aggregate experiment has now passed 50,000 generations. I’m a huge fan of Lenski et al’s work because, rather than telling Just-So stories, they have been doing the hard laboratory work that shows us what Darwinian evolution can and likely cannot do. The term “evolvability” has been used widely and rather loosely in Read More ›

Dear Readers, An interesting paper appeared several months ago in an issue of the journal Genetics, “Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution” (Durrett, R & Schmidt, D. 2008. Genetics 180: 1501-1509). This is the fifth of five posts that discusses it. Cited references appear in this post. The final conceptual error that Durrett and Schmidt commit is the gratuitous multiplication of probabilistic resources. In their original paper they calculated that the appearance of a particular double mutation in humans would have an expected time of appearance of 216 million years, if one were considering a one kilobase region of the genome. Since the evolution of humans from other primates took much less time Read More ›

Dear Readers,  An interesting paper appeared several months ago in an issue of the journal Genetics, “Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution” (Durrett, R & Schmidt, D. 2008. Genetics 180: 1501-1509). This is the second of five posts that discusses it. Cited references will appear in the last post.  Interesting as it is, there are some pretty serious problems in the way they applied their model to my arguments, some of which they owned up to in their reply, and some of which they didn’t. When the problems are fixed, however, the resulting number is remarkably close to the empirical value of 1 in 10^20. I will go through the difficulties in turn. Read More ›

Dear Readers, The latest issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE) carries a tediously disdainful review (1) of The Edge which revisits the blunders of previous reviews while adding new ones. This is the third of a three part series concerning the review. At the end of his essay our reviewer suddenly reveals his skill at mind reading: “It is clear that Behe is driven not by a truly scientific investigation, but instead metaphysics.” And this: “He is obsessed with ‘randomness,’ which he incorrigibly associates with ‘Darwinism’ and cosmic purposelessness.” Now, wait a darn second. Wasn’t it Darwin himself, we are constantly assured, who based his theory on “random” variation? So it’s “incorrigible” to associate with Darwin’s theory something which Darwin Read More ›

Dear Readers, The latest issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE) carries a tediously disdainful review (1) of The Edge which revisits the blunders of previous reviews while adding new ones. This is the second of a three part series concerning the review. Like other Darwinian reviewers, the one for TREE questions the number I specify of 1 in 1020 for the origin of chloroquine resistance, citing a recent interesting paper on the development of CQR in India, which showed different strains of malaria with various numbers of mutations in their pfcrt genes. (4) Yet such field studies, while very valuable, can be fraught with uncertainty. For example, another recent paper (cited by the first) on CQR in Cambodia (5) reported data showing that the Read More ›

Dear Readers, The latest issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE) carries a tediously disdainful review (1) of The Edge of Evolution which revisits the blunders of previous reviews while adding new ones. This is the first of a three part series concerning the review. (References will be attached to the third part.) Like almost all reviews by Darwinists, this one begins with a genuflection to the Dover trial, where a former-head-of-the-Pennsylvania-Liquor-Control-Boa rd-appointed-judge, showing no evidence he actually understood the academic arguments of either side, copied almost word for word the document handed to him at the end of the trial by the lawyers for the complainant. This was his “decision.” For signing off on a document castigating intelligent design the apparently Read More ›

Dear Readers, Tonight concludes my response to University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, which began earlier this week.  As you know if you’ve been following my blog here, Professor Coyne reviewed my new book Edge of Evolution in The New Republic.  I replied to his response here, and he has responded to my reply at TalkReason.org.  Because it quickly gets awkward to include all of the context here, I’m only quoting the portions of his response that I specifically address here.  Readers who want to see the full back-and-forth should read his posted review and response. Coyne: The reviews by Ken Miller in Nature and Sean Carroll in Science cite several examples of the gradual origin of adaptations via the step-by-step accumulation of point mutations in proteins. Behe: Hardly. Read More ›