The ID Report

by Denyse O"Leary
ARN correspondent

Back in the 1920s when, as the Scopes Trial showed, no Official Smart PersonTM questioned Darwinism, a scientist came across a curious phenomenon: Beetle eggs, stacked Of course he knew what to make of it.

"The discovery of the beetle laying eggs on top of each other is not a novel discovery," said Deas. "But they thought it"s a way to compete: That the beetles are stacking eggs on top of other beetles" eggs to crush them. They didn"t actually do any lab experiments to prove that those eggs are from exactly the same female."

In the 1970s, another researcher did the same thing. Joseph Deas, University of Arizona Entomology, decided to quit telling Darwin legends and find out whether it was true that the eggs on top were laid by a competitor beetle.

They weren"t. All the eggs in a stack were laid by the same beetle. Stacked, the clutch was better protected from a parasitic wasp that kills beetle larvae by laying its own larvae inside them:

Deas measured the parasitism on eggs laid individually versus on bottom eggs in a stack to see whether having one or more eggs on top was sufficient to protect the bottom eggs. And sure enough, Deas found the individual eggs were parasitized much more frequently than those eggs that were shielded at the bottom of a stack

The capper:

As often happens in science, Deas came upon the discovery of M. amicus" strategy through the course of a different investigation.

It doesn"t happen nearly as often as it should.

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Most investigators, faced with either doing science or announcing Darwin"s truths, will settle for announcing Darwin"s truths. It"s easier and safer and, in a journal article, it will look like science to the rest of us.

Denyse O"Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O"Leary
ARN correspondent

And take the space aliens with them?

Denyse O"Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

It's the only solution.

Here.

Zool Syst Evol Res doi: 10.1111/j.1439-0469.2008.00505.x

W. J. Bock

Design – an inappropriate concept in evolutionary theory*

Abstract

The concept of accident in evolution refers to causes which are stochastic with respect to selective demands arising from the external environment and acting on the organism, while the concept of design refers to causes which meet the requirement of these selective demands. The condition _with respect to selective demands_ is generally forgotten so that evolutionary changes are described as being design modifications. Design is an invalid synonym for adaptation. Further it implies a designer and has been used by some authors since before Darwin to argue that design in organisms demonstrates the existence of a designer and hence a plan. Yet if evolution depends on two simultaneously acting causes, one of which is accidental, then the process of evolution and all attributes of organisms are accidental. The concept of design is inappropriate in biology and should be eliminated from all biological explanations.

Get this: "Yet if evolution depends on two simultaneously acting causes, one of which is accidental, then the process of evolution and all attributes of organisms are accidental."

Try to apply that to daily life: You set out to clear snow of the sidewalk, which is not accidental, and you skid and fall, which is. So everything that happened was accidental! Case closed ... or ... Well, now you see why they have to ban the concept

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

And you can download it for free from the Royal Society until September 24, here.

Transitional forms between the three domains of life and evolutionary implications

Emmanuel G. Reynaud1,* and Damien P. Devos2,*

The question as to the origin and relationship between the three domains of life is lodged in a phylogenetic impasse. The dominant paradigm is to see the three domains as separated. However, the recently characterized bacterial species have suggested continuity between the three domains.

Here, we review the evidence in support of this hypothesis and evaluate the implications for and against the models of the origin of the three domains of life. The existence of intermediate steps between the three domains discards the need for fusion to explain eukaryogenesis and suggests that the last universal common ancestor was complex.

We propose a scenario in which the ancestor of the current bacterial Planctomycetes, Verrucomicrobiae and Chlamydiae superphylum was related to the last archaeal and eukaryotic common ancestor, thus providing a way out of the phylogenetic impasse.

If the last universal common ancestor was complex ... and how long ago was that?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!