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Areas of expansion in the human cortex during infancy and childhood, top, closely match areas of change in the human brain when compared to the brains of apes and monkeys. Yellow areas expanded the most, followed by orange, red, blue and light blue areas. (Credit: Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.)
ScienceDaily (July 13, 2010) — A study undertaken to help scientists concerned with abnormal brain development in premature babies has serendipitously revealed evolution’s imprint on the human brain.
Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that the human brain regions that grow the most during infancy and childhood are nearly identical to the brain regions with the most changes when human brains are compared to those of apes and monkeys.
Researchers report the finding in a detailed comparison of the brains of normal-term infants and healthy young adults published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists conducted the study to help assess the long-term effects of premature birth on brain development. These can include increased risks of learning disabilities, attention deficits, behavioral problems and cognitive impairments.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Evolutionary Biology, Recent Posts, Science on July 14, 2010 - ג' אב תש"ע at 12:08 pm
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Published: 07/07/2010, Press and Journal
SCIENTISTS from Aberdeen have uncovered more than 10 new species of deep-sea life on the Atlantic Ocean floor – and may be closer to finding the missing evolutionary link between backboned and invertebrate animals.
They found abundant numbers of species thought to have been rare, and huge differences in habitats just a few miles apart.
Professor Monty Priede, of Aberdeen University’s Ocean-lab, compared some of the habitats he and his team encountered on the six-week trip to “a scene from Alice Through the Looking Glass”.
And he said the discoveries they made along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between Iceland and the Azores had revolutionised scientific thinking about life in the ocean. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Evolutionary Biology, News Articles, Recent Posts, Science and Technology on July 7, 2010 - כ"ה תמוז תש"ע at 6:53 pm
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The findings reject allopatric speciation in a case study from a system thought to exemplify it, and suggest the potential importance of speciation due to differences in ecological conditions (ecological speciation).
ScienceDaily (May 1, 2010) — A genetic study of island lizards shows that even those that have been geographically isolated for many millions of years have not evolved into separate species as predicted by conventional evolutionary theory.
Professor Roger Thorpe and colleagues Yann Surget-Groba and Helena Johansson, at Bangor University, UK, reveal their findings April 29 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.
Since Darwin’s study of the Galapagos Islands, archipelagos have played a central role in understanding how new species evolve from existing ones (speciation). Islands epitomize allopatric speciation, where geographic isolation causes individuals of an original species to accumulate sufficient genetic differences to prevent them breeding with each other when they are reunited.
Current day Martinique in the Lesser Antilles is composed of several ancient islands that have only recently coalesced into a single entity. The phylogeny and geology show that these ancient islands have had their own tree lizard (anole) species for about six to eight million years. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Evolutionary Biology, Recent Posts, Science on May 3, 2010 - י"ט אייר תש"ע at 7:10 am
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by Gert Korthof (updated 23 Apr 2010)
http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/korthof.htm
Extensions & alternative evolutionary theories 
Evo-Devo 
Non-religious Anti-Darwinism + Anti-Evolution Religious criticism: Creationism / Intelligent Design Fine Tuning Theistic Evolution Buddhism & Hinduism Orthodox neo-Darwinism textbooks Evolutionary Biology introductions Anti-Creationism/ID Origin of life & Astrobiology Ecology & Earth System Science History of Darwinism Bibliographies, anthologies, encyclopedias Human evolution (general) Psychology, Behaviour & Brain Sex & evolution Genetics & genomics Medicine & evolution Economics & evolution Politics, ethics & evolution Theoretical & mathematical biology Philosophy & evolution History & evolution Engineering & evolution Evolution & Literature
philosophy of science 
books suggested by readers Scientific controversies Nederlandse literatuur
This page lists the most accessible literature on evolution including the critics of evolution. The emphasis is on recent, affordable books for non-specialists written by specialists. This page shortly characterises noteworthy books and gives links to book reviews in Nature, Science, etc (19). Furthermore, I have written detailed reviews of many books which are on separate pages of the site Was Darwin Wrong? (now called: ‘The Third Evolutionary Synthesis’). Those reviews are listed in a handy table on the index page. I have subdivided the literature in categories and subcategories (see directory structure above). The goal of this site contains also information about myself. If the reader feels I omitted books that belong on this introduction page, please drop me a note. They are included on this page or suggestions by readers.
Extensions, revisions & alternative evolutionary theories
top
This is a category of scientific, non-religious critics of Darwinism. Here we find scientists who do accept evolution (common descent), but aren’t happy with parts of the neo-Darwinist explanation of evolution (mainly the mechanism of evolution: natural selection).
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Evolutionary Biology, Recent Posts, Science on May 1, 2010 - י"ז אייר תש"ע at 6:04 am
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EVOLUTION WATCH
“When it comes to intelligent design, private and government-run agencies are suppressing free speech.”
By Bob Unruh, April 15, 2010
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
A complaint has been filed against NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, which sent Galileo to Jupiter and dispatched a ship named Dawn to orbit asteroids Vesta and Ceres, claiming managers there discriminated against and demoted a key project worker because he shared intelligent design videos with co-workers.
The case has been filed by David Coppedge, an information technology specialist and systems administrator on the lab’s Cassini mission to Saturn, which has been described as the most ambitious interplanetary exploration ever launched.
“For the offense of offering videos to colleagues, Coppedge faced harassment, an investigation cloaked in secrecy, and a virtual gag order on his discussion of intelligent design,” said attorney Casey Luskin of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.
Luskin serves as a consultant to the Coppedge lawsuit, which is being handled by Los Angeles First Amendment attorney William J. Becker, Jr., of The Becker Law Firm, and includes allegations of free speech violations and wrongful demotion.
“Coppedge was punished even though supervisors admitted never receiving a single complaint regarding his conversations about intelligent design prior to their investigation, and even though other employees were allowed to express diverse ideological opinions, including attacking intelligent design,” Luskin said. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Evolutionary Biology, Recent Posts, Science on April 16, 2010 - ב' אייר תש"ע at 3:23 pm
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MIT Press, April 2010
Edited by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller
In the six decades since the publication of Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, spectacular empirical advances in the biological sciences have been accompanied by equally significant developments within the core theoretical framework of the discipline. As a result, evolutionary theory today includes concepts and even entire new fields that were not part of the foundational structure of the Modern Synthesis. In this volume, sixteen leading evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science survey the conceptual changes that have emerged since Huxley’s landmark publication, not only in such traditional domains of evolutionary biology as quantitative genetics and paleontology but also in such new fields of research as genomics and EvoDevo.
Most of the contributors to Evolution—The Extended Synthesis accept many of the tenets of the classical framework but want to relax some of its assumptions and introduce significant conceptual augmentations of the basic Modern Synthesis structure—just as the architects of the Modern Synthesis themselves expanded and modulated previous versions of Darwinism. This continuing revision of a theoretical edifice the foundations of which were laid in the middle of the nineteenth century—the reexamination of old ideas, proposals of new ones, and the synthesis of the most suitable—shows us how science works, and how scientists have painstakingly built a solid set of explanations for what Darwin called the "grandeur" of life.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Evolutionary Biology, Recent Posts, Science on April 5, 2010 - כ"א ניסן תש"ע at 2:53 pm
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What if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is inaccurate? What if the way you live now affects the life expectancy of your descendants? Evolutionary thinking is having a revolution . . .
Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, Friday 19 March 2010
The story, still sometimes repeated in creationist circles, goes like this: it is the 1960s, at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, and a team of astronomers is using cutting-edge computers to recreate the orbits of the planets, thousands of years in the past. Suddenly, an error message flashes up. There’s a problem: way back in history, one whole day appears to be missing.
The scientists are baffled, until a Christian member of the team dimly recalls something and rushes to fetch a Bible. He thumbs through it until he reaches the Book of Joshua, chapter 10, in which Joshua asks God to stop the world for . . . "about a full day!" Uproar in the computer lab. The astronomers have happened upon proof that God controls the universe on a day-to-day basis, that the Bible is literally true, and that by extension the "myth" of creation is, in fact, a reality. Darwin was wrong – according to another creationist rumour, he’d recanted on his deathbed, anyway – and here, at last, is scientific evidence!
Inevitably, those of us who aren’t professional scientists have to take a lot of science on trust. And one of the things that makes it so easy to trust the standard view of evolution, in particular, is amply illustrated by the legend of the Nasa astronomers: the doubters are so deluded or dishonest that one needn’t waste time with them. Unfortunately, that also makes it embarrassingly awkward to ask a question that seems, in the light of recent studies and several popular books, to be growing ever more pertinent. What if Darwin’s theory of evolution – or, at least, Darwin’s theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it – is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?
Such talk, naturally, is liable to drive evolutionary biologists into a rage, or, in the case of Richard Dawkins, into even more of a rage than usual. They have a point: nobody wants to provide ammunition to the proponents of creationism or "intelligent design", and it’s true that few of the studies now coming to public prominence are all that revolutionary to the experts. But in the culture at large, we may be on the brink of a major shift in perspective, with enormous implications for how most of us think about how life came to be the way it is. As the science writer David Shenk puts it in his new book, The Genius in All of Us, "This is big, big stuff – perhaps the most important [discoveries] in the science of heredity since the gene."
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Evolutionary Biology, Science on March 21, 2010 - ו' ניסן תש"ע at 4:01 pm
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The becoming of the universe — because we’re part of it — is only partially describable by natural law. In its place is a huge creativity. I want to say that God is the natural creativity in the universe.
Release Date: 03-17-2010, University of Vermont
Author: Joshua E. Brown1
Email: Joshua.E.Brown@uvm.edu2
Phone: 802/656-3039 Fax: (802) 656-3203
Stuart Kauffman is famous for arguing that biology must look beyond Darwin. From molecules to ecosystems, he sees self-organization as the twin to natural selection in giving order to living systems. He’s joined the UVM faculty to continue making his case — and he’ll be in residence this fall, “eager for conversation across disciplines,” he says. (Photo: Joshua Brown)
In the early 1980′s, Stuart Kauffman was a tenured professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania — but he left his ivied job to go to the deserts of New Mexico. “I was lucky enough to be at the Santa Fe Institute near the beginning and fell in love with complex adaptive systems,” he says, “but nobody knew exactly what that meant!”
A decade there, at the world-leading think-tank for complex systems — including five years as a MacArthur “genius” fellow — brought Kauffman closer to an answer than perhaps any scientist on the planet. “The combination of confusion and passion drove creativity,” he says.
There, and later at the University of Calgary, he published research on a breathtaking range of topics from the origin of life, to gene regulatory networks, to molecular evolution, to so-called fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology. A medical doctor by training, his books span from the technical Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution to his recent exploration of the links between religion and science, Reinventing the Sacred. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education, Evolutionary Biology, Recent Posts, Science on March 17, 2010 - ב' ניסן תש"ע at 8:23 pm
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Fodor, Nagel, and Plantinga don’t need to turn themselves into biochemists, but some awareness of the issues and advances would not be entirely misplaced.
By Michael Ruse, Chronicle Review, March 7, 2010
Last year was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The anniversary was marked by conferences the world over. I will not tell you how many I attended; ecologically sensitive readers of The Chronicle might start whining about carbon footprints and that sort of thing. Let me just say that I found myself going no fewer than three times through the Quad City International Airport, in Moline, Ill. Moline!
I mention this as background to the publication of a new book by Jerry A. Fodor, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona. The title of the book, What Darwin Got Wrong (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), tells you their opinion of the old English naturalist and of his theory of evolution through natural selection. If Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini were an isolated case, one could dismiss their book with a grimace (if you were a biologist), or welcome them with a cheer (if you were a creationist). But in the philosophical community, there is an increasingly vocal cadre of eminent philosophers harboring doubts about Darwin. To understand their critique, we must first put the clock back a year, to the beginning of the celebrations.
The anniversary conferences usually had a smattering of professional Darwin types like me—I am a historian and philosopher of science specializing in evolutionary theory—but the bulk of the presenters and attendees were evolutionary biologists. For two reasons, the atmosphere was universally positive. First, scientists deeply respect Darwin and his achievements. These people are evolutionists—they take the past seriously. Second, there was not a person at these conferences who was not excited about the science today. Evolutionary biology is on a roll, and that was a cause for celebration—and frenetic presentations that jammed in as much new science as possible. Moreover, to a person, the scientists saw that the first point led smoothly into the second. Everyone appreciates the tools of Darwinism, above all the mechanism of natural selection. But great science doesn’t stand still. It picks up and carries ideas and findings way beyond the wildest hopes of its founders. Evolutionary biology today is deeply Darwinian, but it has outpaced the Origin in ways that its author could never have imagined. To use a hackneyed phrase, Darwin gave biology a paradigm, and biologists have been expanding it ever since.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Evolutionary Biology, Opinion, Recent Posts, Science on March 8, 2010 - כ"ב אדר תש"ע at 3:15 pm
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What Darwin Got Wrong
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (cloth)
Ned Block and Philip Kitcher
Boston Review, March/April 2010
In On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, Charles Darwin made two remarkable scientific contributions. First, he presented an overwhelming case for the relatedness of all living things. Biological diversity, he argued, results from a process of “transmutation” of species—via “descent with modification.” Second, he recognized that the basic mechanism of such change is natural selection: a combination of variations in traits and a selective retention of the variations that contribute to reproductive success.
Descent with modification was accepted quickly. As early as 1872, Thomas Henry Huxley described Darwin as having achieved a revolution comparable to that brought about by Newton’s Principia. Natural selection, by contrast, remained controversial until the 1930s, when Darwin’s ideas were integrated with the genetics of Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan, creating the “Modern Synthesis.” More than 70 years later, thanks to a proliferation of evolutionary explanations and significant new theoretical contributions, the fundamentals of evolutionary biology are reasonably well settled.
To be sure, religiously inspired opposition to evolution persists. Although religious opponents seem to have accepted—at least officially—the relatedness of organisms, proponents of “intelligent design” continue to insist that natural selection is unable to explain some prominent instances of evolutionary change. Their skepticism is based on alleged examples of “irreducible complexity”—an intricate interdependence in the features of organisms that supposedly cannot be explained by Darwinian mechanisms of step-by-step improvement.
Other critics—more sophisticated and scientifically informed—wonder whether natural selection explains as much about evolution as biologists commonly assert. They urge, for example, that causes other than natural selection (such as genetic drift) are important in explaining evolution. Or they argue—overemphasizing something all evolutionary biologists agree with—that natural selection operates against a background of constraints, perhaps stemming from features of genomes. Darwin himself was aware of these complexities about the role of natural selection, and throughout the Origin laments his own ignorance about the extent of that role and what alternative causes of evolutionary change there are. His awareness of how much he did not know led him to cautious formulations: for example, he writes, “Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.”
As in other areas of science, then, lively debate continues, and an interest in deeper and more comprehensive understanding moves the field forward. But even as some scientists suggest that natural selection may be limited in ways Darwin could not envisage, they accept his basic insights and work to improve our biological understanding within the framework he set forth.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Evolutionary Biology, Recent Posts, Science on March 3, 2010 - י"ז אדר תש"ע at 8:27 am
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