Posts Tagged ‘evidence’

In the December 26^th CBS 60 Minutes news segment, reporter Leslie Stahl in the story “B-REX” interviewed paleontologists Jack Horner in Montana, Mary Schweitzer in North Carolina, and Sean Carroll in Wisconsin on the B-rex discoveries.

B-rex is actually a Tyrannosaurus rex, otherwise known as T-rex, found in Montana and the fossil was re-named after Bob Harmon, the chief preparator of paleontology Museum of the Rockies in Montana. The primary interest in B-rex centered on the discovery soft-tissue and blood vessels in the estimated 68-million-year-old dinosaur.

Since this medullary tissue in the bone marrow is similar to birds, speculations on the evolution of dinosaur to bird once again emerged in the prime time media. The original report was published in the March 25, 2005, issue of the journal Science was entitled “Gender-Specific Reproductive Tissue in Ratites and Tyrannosaurus rex”.

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In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin envisioned that “natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations; it can produce no great or sudden modifications.”

Since 1859, the search for Darwin’s “slight, successive” accumulated actions of natural selection has become a driving scientific and societal phenomenon. In 1872, the British Parliament commissioned the HMS Challenger for first international exploration to discover the “missing links” resulting from natural selection.

Like the HMS Challenger experience, evidence for “slight, successive” evolutionary changes continues to be an elusive pursuit—in the fossil record and now in molecular biology. Darwin’s dilemma deepens with the latest evidence from the Denisova caves in Russia.

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Of all the alleged facts in The Origin of Species, for Charles Darwin embryology stands out as the most important “fact”. In a letter to Asa Gray in September 1860, Darwin wrote – “embryology is to me by far the strongest single class of facts in favor” of the theory.

Darwin was influenced by German embryologist Ernst Haeckel, who coined the now-famous phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. In other words, in the embryo the ontology (development) of the new offspring retraces (recapitulates) all stages representing its alleged evolutionary ancestors (phylogeny) from the microbe to man. Haeckel called the theory the “biogenetic law”.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin gave credit for this theory to Haeckel. “Professor Haeckel in his “Generelle Morphologie” and in [other] works has recently brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny, or the lines of descent of all organic beings. In drawing up the several series he trusts chiefly to embryological characters [to establish evolutionary sequences].”

According to Haeckel, in the embryo is a silent movie of our alleged ancestral history—evolution in action. Through his polished and widely publicized drawings, Haeckel attempted to show that all embryos are identical in the earliest stages followed by progressive “slight, successive” changes of increasing differential complexity—the alleged retracing of evolution.

Much has happened since 1859, however. This week, ScienceDaily featured an article entitled “Similarities in the Embryonic Development of Various Animal Species Are Also Found at Molecular Level”. The article was referring two research papers published in the journal Nature, December. 9, 2010 by the Max Planck Institute that challenge the basic tenets of Haeckel’s theory of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.

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Charles Darwin in a letter Joseph D. Hooker in February 1871 speculated that life might have originated in “some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes”. The search for the origin of life continues.

Felisa Wolfe-Simon (shown on the left), supported by NASA’s Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology (Exo/Evo) Program and the NASA Astrobiology Institute, is a researcher working with programs to determining the evolution of genes, metabolic pathways, and microbial species on Earth in order to understand the potential for life on other worlds. Continue Reading

Often called the most important scientific book ever, Charles Lyell‘s Principles of Geology published in three volumes from 1830-33, shook prevailing views of how Earth had been formed.

Lyle challenged the premise that the history of the Earth has experienced supernatural and catastrophes events, including Noah’s flood as documented in Genesis. Ironically, Lyell was a graduate of Exeter College, a Catholic institution.

The frontispiece image illustrates the main point of the book: that evidence of the forces of geological change that have been shaping Earth for millennia is observable today—”the present is the key to the past”. The temple columns, with their high-water marks were the evidence Lyell used to propose that the sea levels had changed gradually several times. Continue Reading

Critical of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin in a letter to Hugh Falconer in October 1862, Darwin wrote, “I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand.” 

Darwin’s conceptual framework of “slight, successive” changes over time had remained intact for 150 years, until the evidence from the human genome project delivered the decisive destruction of the original “framework”.   

J. Craig Venter, the microbiologist turned entrepreneur that mapped the human genome and re-produced what he calls “the first synthetic species”, concluded during a 60-Minute CBS interview with Steve Kroft on Sunday, November 21 that the human genome project has been a “bust”. Continue Reading

Charles Darwin, desperate to discover how evolution keeps going, in 1865, sent his good friend, Thomas Huxley, a thirty-page manuscript under the heading “The Hypothesis of Pangenesis.” Huxley’s response must have been discouraging, since Darwin replied, “I do not doubt your judgment is perfectly just and I will persuade myself not to publish. The whole affair is much too speculative.”

Pangenesis extended Aristotle’s concept of “spontaneous generation,” later popularized by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Still anxious, two years late in 1867 Darwin sent a letter to American scientist, Asa Gray at Harvard University -

The chapter on what I call Pangenesis will be called a mad dream, and I shall be pretty well satisfied if you think it a dream worth publishing; but at the bottom of my own mind I think it contains a great truth.

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Contrary to popular opinion, The Origin of Species was not a scientific work, and Charles Darwin makes that point very clear –

I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science.

Rather, Darwin called The Origin of Species “one long argument”—not a scientific showcase. Darwin makes this point because he knew what differentiates science from logic.

More than 200 years before the publication of The Origin of Species, English scientist Francis Bacon formalized what is now known as the Scientific Method – the only proven method of scientific inquiry for discovering natural laws.

As a founding member of the Royal Society, Bacon was quoted by Darwin in the preamble of The Origin of Species. The Scientific Method had earlier been used by Copernicus and Galileo overturning the geocentric worldview, and later by Isaac Newton that lead to the discovery of the natural laws of motion and gravity. Continue Reading

In his autobiography, Charles Darwin notes, “Towards the end of the work I gave my well abused hypothesis of Pangenesis. An unverified hypothesis is of little or no value”—the First-Wave of evolutionary thought. Today, Darwin’s sentiments on pangenesis have re-emerged, however, this time on genetics.

In this week’s edition of the journal Science published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the focus is on epigenetics. An on-line issue even features a video by Science editor Guy Riddihough asking a number of top researchers a simple question: “What’s your definition of epigenetics?” And, “Their answers aren’t quite so simple,” according to Riddihough. Continue Reading

Charles Darwin simply presented an argument in The Origin of Species for evolution. Darwin called it “one long argument”.

Even critical of his own work, in a letter to H. Falconer in October 1862, Darwin wrote, “I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand.”

To demonstrate that Darwin’s framework has stood the test of time, in 2008 the journal Nature, launched the following challenge to evolutionists – “Evolution is a scientific fact, and every organization whose research depends on it should explain why… Between now and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth on 12 February 2009, every science academy and society with a stake in the credibility of evolution should summarize evidence for it on their website and take every opportunity to promote it.”

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