Category Archives: Science

Back in 2007 (you see I’m late, as ever) Allen MacNeill published a list of 47 sources of variation within living cells. I believe he’s since expanded it to over 50. As you’ll see from the link, his intention was to knock down an ID “straw man” that random point mutation cannot produce nearly enough variation to give natural selection traction. Every evolutionary biologist, he points out, can refute that from the hosts of other mechanisms now known to occur. His critique of ID is a little unfair, I feel, having seen firsthand how often orthodox Neodarwinists knock down ID on the basis that point mutations are more than sufficient, … Continue reading →

Whilst I was re-reading the threads on BioLogos about Signature in the Cell, I chanced upon an exchange between Rich and Dennis Venema (from this time last year) on a thread about whale evolution. Rich had linked to a video by Richard Sternberg . In this he suggested that the large number of big hurdles evolution needed to overcome, in a short time, to cause the change from terrestrial mammal to whale, seemed to be mathematically implausible given known rates of mutation. Rich was bemoaning the fact that, although no detailed genetic transitions had ever been proposed even hypothetically for such an evolutionary process, Neodarwinists are still supremely, or even … Continue reading →

I’ve just come across this overview paper by James Shapiro. If the evidence he gives is as presented, it really does seem to me to present a potentially fruitful 21st century view of evolution. The weak point of Neodarwinism has always been its reliance on random mutation as the ultimate source of variation. Indeed, for many decades after it was first suggested, mutation was downplayed as a better mechanism was sought for – that’s because all the experiments with mutation showed a zero rate of positive return (here is an amusing illustration of those results). Mutation really won the Neodarwinian day, it seems, mainly by default – and maybe by … Continue reading →