Archive for the ‘What Scientists Say’ Category

The leading ScienceDaily Science News posted this week features the new findings from a Peking man canine tooth discovered in China during the 1920’s and laments that the fossilized tooth that had been sent to Carl Wiman in Sweden along with “40 cartons were left unopened and forgotten”—until now.

Early in the twentieth century, Carl Wiman (1867-1944), the first professor of paleontology at Uppsala University, the oldest university in Scandinavia founded in 1477, was a legend in the world of paleontology. Among his achievements, Wiman is recognized for his contributions in the naming of the extinct penguins Archaeospheniscus wimani and Palaeospheniscus wimani, the fossil turtle Dracochelys wimani, the ichthyosaur Wimanius and the sauropod dinosaur Borealosaurus wimani.

At issue, though, is why did Wiman leave the “40 cartons… unopened and forgotten”? Why have the Peking man fossils remained ”unopened and forgotten” at Uppsala University for over 80 years. Continue Reading

“It seemed to me sufficient to indicate, in the first edition of my ‘Origin of Species,’ that by this work “light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history;” and this implies that man must be included with other organic beings in any general conclusion respecting his manner of appearance on this earth.” Charles Darwin, 1872

Darwin envisioned man evolving into existence in the same way as animals. Since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the hunt has been on to find all the missing “slight, successive” transitional links, especially the link from animal to man.

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Gerd B Műller, one of the Altenberg-16 and Professor and Department Head Department of Theoretical Biology, University of Vienna & Konrad Lorenz Institute, in the book entitled Evolution, the Extended Synthesis (2010) published by The MIT Press, explains today’s theoretical evolutionary problem with the evidence from the Cambrian Explosion—extinction, not evolution.

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Charles Darwin never mentions hemoglobin even in the sixth and last edition of The Origin of Species in 1872, even though this oxygen-carrying protein hemoglobin was discovered much earlier by Friedrich Ludwig Hünefeld in 1840. Hünefeld explains: “I have occasionally seen in almost dried blood… rectangular crystalline structures which under the microscope had sharp edges and were bright red.”

In 1851, Otto Funke published a series of articles in which he described growing hemoglobin crystals by successively diluting red blood cells with a solvent such as pure water, alcohol, or ether, followed by slow evaporation of the solvent from the resulting protein solution. Hemoglobin’s reversible oxygenation was described a few years later by Felix Hoppe-Seyler. Continue Reading

Tennessee House of Representatives, ruffling Charles Darwin’s feathers,  sent tremors across the realm of public education on last week on April 7. The Representatives overwhelmingly approved HB 368, sponsored by Bill Dunn (R-District 16), a measure allowing science teachers to encourage students to “develop critical thinking skills” in the science classroom.

The Senate version, SB 893, sponsored by Bo Watson (R-District 11) although discussed, has yet to be voted on, by the Senate Education Committee. Continue Reading

Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778), founded the scheme of naming and classifying plants and animals with a genus and species name. This is known as binomial nomenclature. Linnaeus is known as the father of modern taxonomy. Linnaeus is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology.

Linnaeus ranked as a legend even with his contemporaries. Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau sent him the message: “Tell him I know no greater man on earth.” The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: “With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly.” Swedish author August Strindberg wrote: “Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist”. Continue Reading

Natural selection is Charles Darwin proposed natural mechanism for the origin of new species, as the title implies—On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Natural selection was Darwin’s proposed unifying “natural law of evolution”.

What is the evidence for natural selection? Darwin explains -

In order to make it clear how, as I believe, natural selection acts, I must beg permission to give one or two imaginary illustrations.

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Francis Collins, the past director of the Human Genome Project and current director of the National Institute of Health (NIH), and Charles Darwin have pursued a common cause—a belief in evolution supported by deductive reasoning.

Both Collins and Darwin abandoned the inductive Scientific Method reasoning process to embrace deductive reasoning. Their resulting conclusions on “Junk DNA” and “Natural Selection” are similar.

While the DNA regions not known to code for proteins were thought to be only “Junk DNA” by Collins, Darwin thought that Natural Section was the driving force of evolution. Continue Reading

Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species explains the role of natural selection in evolution: “I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.” The key to evolution is the accumulation of “slight, successive” changes.

In 1995, Edward B. Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, and Eric F. Wieschaus were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on HOX genes. During the 1950’s, geneticist Edward B Lewis discovered the Bithorax complex (BX-C) group of HOX genes in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Continue Reading

Leonid Moroz, professor of neuroscience, chemistry, and biology at the University of Florida College of Medicine, in a recent article published in The Scientist entitled “The Devolution of Evolution,” comments on Theodosius Dobzhansky assertion nearly 40 years ago that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

If Dobzhansky’s assertion is true, “How is it, then”, Moroz asks, “that so few newly minted PhDs in the biological sciences have taken any formal graduate school courses in evolution or biodiversity?” Continue Reading