Posts Tagged ‘theory of evolution’

The Joint International Turtle Genomes Consortium from China, Japan and the United States published findings for the first time in the prestigious journal of Nature. The research team described their most recent findings on embryonic gene expression in the paper entitled “The draft genomes of soft-shell turtle and green sea turtle yield insights into the development and evolution of the turtle specific body plan.”

Since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, embryology has played a pivotal role in the history of evolution. Charles Darwin noted that the “leading facts in embryology … [were] second to none in importance” in establishing his theory of evolution. That was then. Continue Reading

In the same way Isaac Newton discovered the laws of motion and gravity, Charles Darwin launched his pursuit to discover the laws of biological evolution. After decades of searching and studying, Darwin eventually proposed his law of evolution – “natural selection.”

Natural selection soon emerged as the cornerstone law of evolution following the publication of the first edition of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in November 1859. Natural selection stands as the fundamental tenet of Darwin’s theory of evolution, popularly known as Darwinism. But, what in natural selection – really?

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The long-awaited genome analysis for one of the most infamous fish in evolution history, the coelacanth, was published last week by lead scientists Chris T. Amemiya of University of Washington, and Jessica Alföldi from MIT and Harvard in the prestigious journal Nature.  

The coelacanth, first described in 1839 by Louis Agassiz at Harvard University, has played a pivotal role in the history of evolution. Based on the early fossil evidence, the coelacanth had long been thought to be an extinct evolutionary link in the transition between the fish and amphibians, also known as tetrapods. The coelacanth was touted as a fin-to-limb transition link.

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Last year was not a good year for advocates of evolution, again. Rather than unity, splits and cracks within the avant-garde of the evolution industry continued to multiply.

In June, long-time straight-laced British Darwinian advocate Richard Dawkins launched an attack on Harvard evolutionary biologist Edward O Wilson. Dawkins and Wilson stand at the pinnacle in the industry. Dawkins claims Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, is “downright perverse.”

Wilson is the senior biologist born in 1929 by more than a decade−Dawkins was born in 1941. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Wilson was awarded the President’s “National Medical of Science” award in 1976 by President Jimmy Carter and the “Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science” in 1994. Wilson has been the avant-garde within the evolution industry. Continue Reading

Darwin’s finches from the Galápagos Islands are nearly synonymous with proof of evolution–at least, among the uneducated story-telling evolution advocates. A “proof” never advanced by Charles Darwin.

In the first edition of The Origin of Species in 1859, while Darwin mentioned the “Galápagos Archipelago” seventeen times, “finches” were only mentioned twice. Darwin never used “Galápagos” and “finches” together in the same sentence−or even in the same paragraph.
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The Origin of Species written by Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century late remains one of the most influential books ever written. Of the original 1,250 first edition copies released on the 24^th of November in 1859, occasionally one becomes available for purchase. Rare book collector Peter Harringtonn is selling a first edition copy for $ 249,556.13 through Abebooks.com.

The eventual buyer of this rare book should know at least 5 things The Origin of Species isn’t.
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At the age of sixteen, Charles Darwin entered Edinburgh University in the autumn of 1825 to study medicine with his brother Erasmus in Scotland. Edinburgh, at the time, was the leading European medical school of the day. Attendance at Edinburgh fulfilled a long Darwin alumni tradition.

During the two years at Edinburgh, however, Darwin was drawn to the study of nature rather than medicine under the guidance of Professor Robert Edmund Grant (1793 – 1874). Grant was a progressive radical, politically and socially.
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Scientists last week have proposed evolutionary relationships among all 9,993 of the world’s known living bird species. In a study published in the prestigious Nature journal, scientists used DNA-sequence data to create a radiating phylogenetic tree — a branching map of proposed evolutionary relationships among species. From the genetic data, rates of global bird speciation across space and time were estimated.

Walter Jetz, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut was the leading author of the study entitled “The global diversity of birds in space and time”.

“This is the first dated tree of life for a class of species this size to be put on a global map,” says Walter Jetz, in an interview with science writer Virginia Gewin of Nature News.

Gewin noted, however, that the “endeavor is also controversial, owing to the large number of species for which no sequence data are available.”

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Since the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859, the origin of feathers has been among the most contentious issues in evolutionary paleobiology.

A new study published in the October 26 edition of Science, led by paleontologists Darla Zelenitsky from the University of Calgary, describe the first the first dinosaur named Ornithomimus found with evidence of feathers preserved in a juvenile and two adult skeletons in North America that had been discovered in 1995, 2008, and 2009. The published study was entitled “Feathered Non-Avian Dinosaurs from North America Provide Insight into Wing Origins”.

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After graduating tenth out of a field of 178 students from Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, Charles Darwin gradually, but surely, began to openly reflect his hostile and aggressive heritage against Christianity stemming from his grandfathers.

In the biography entitled Darwin, the Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, Adrian Desmond and James Moore sets the stage by declaring that “Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus had a lacerating wit and a loathing of meddling gods”. Continue Reading