Origin of Nerves Traced to Sponges contains this predictable, indeed, seemingly obligatory line:

A new study has surprised researchers, however.

Let's get the unsurprising surprised reaction stated at the outset and go for the meat:

"We are pretty confident it was after the sponges split from trunk of the tree of life and sponges went one way and animals developed from the other, that nerves started to form," said Bernie Degnan of the University of Queensland. "What we found in sponges though were the building blocks for nerves, something we never expected to find."

This pattern has become so commonplace one is tempted to ascribe a template formula for research labeled under the front loading tab. Find trunk splits and begin a search for biological building blocks. I know. This is all predicted by mainstream evolution. Except for the surprise part. More:

"But what was really cool," he said, "is we took some of these genes and expressed them in frogs and flies and the sponge gene became functional — the sponge gene directed the formation of nerves in these more complex animals.

This is nerd heaven.

…for the Candidates to answer

Thought Provoker is a little ruffled that there's a non-science specific thread on the front page [Lying to Advance a Cause], so I thought I'd post something genuinely scientifical that some here might be interested in.

This is, right on time following the political minutiae of hammering platform planks into a sturdy stage and getting nomination formalities out of the way, Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama's Answers to the Top 14 Science Questions as winnowed by ScienceDebate2008 and leading science organizations from more than 3400 questions submitted by more than 38,000 scientists, engineers and other concerned Americans.

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Why teaching evolution is dangerous is the title of an unheroic blog entry. From the blog:

Ed Darrell points out the competitive advantage this gives the rest of the world and how local the problem of Creationism is.

I rarely label a statement as a lie even though I might believe it is and rarely use the term liar but will make an exception in this case. Many have peddled the lie linking increasing adherents to Intelligent Design to a loss of competitive advantage for America vis a vis the rest of the world- in the educational, scientific and economic spheres. In the past I've gently corrected these misapprehensions by pointing out some simple facts.

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In his book, The Edge of Evolution; the Search for the Limits of Darwinism, Michael Behe tries to find where exactly the limit to Darwinian evolution is. In a previous thread, Behe's Test, Take 2, it was admitted that if it takes more than two mutations (with the question of whether this includes neutral mutations being brought up by not discussed at length) before a selective advantage is bestowed, then Darwinian evolution probably wouldn't happen. The question is whether or not more than two mutations have ever been needed for evolution to occur. Behe would say, "Yes." And in Chapter 7, "The Two-Binding-Sites Rule," he presents his argument. First there is a long discussion on the nature of "shape space," and then Behe gets to his argument, beginning on page 133: Read the rest of this entry »

Phillip Johnson authored Science Futures, an article that makes some points that resonate with me. From the article:

“Predicting is very difficult, especially when it is about the future.” I probably don’t need to tell readers of Touchstone that this weird sentence, paradoxically both wise and absurd, bears the trademark of New York Yankee sage Yogi Berra, the Buddha of baseball.

I think of the great Yogi’s maxim whenever I hear theistic evolutionists warn intelligent design theorists against committing what they call the “God of the gaps” fallacy. Their point is that it is futile to rely on “gaps” that the theory of evolution has not yet explained as places where divine acts might be necessary, because those gaps will inevitably be filled as science progresses. Eventually, God will be squeezed out of these spaces, with consequent embarrassment to the cause of religion.

To avoid committing this fallacy, they claim, we must concede that evolutionary naturalism in biology has been proved beyond doubt, since whatever proof is missing today will surely be supplied tomorrow. I see the point, but I wonder how these folks can be so sure that the future discoveries will always support naturalism. Don’t they know that predicting is difficult, especially when it is about the future?

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We are continually discovering and classifying planetary systems beyond our own solar system. These efforts can lead to the discovery of exotic formations. Solar systems like ours likely to be rarer than we thought contains this paragraph:

Astronomers, to their obvious delight, have discovered some 250 planetary systems beyond our own, many of them with curious properties. In particular, the discovery of several “hot Jupiters” gas giants that orbit close to their parent stars, challenges our theories of planet formation. The thinking is that gas giants can only form far away from stars because gas and dust simply gets blown away from the inner regions.

Data gathered from the study of other solar systems can influence theories as to how our solar system formed. Another quote:

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Mark Vernon authored Not so highly evolved, an article worth reviewing, both for its analysis of Richard Dawkins and for its commentary about an evolutionary phenomenon known as convergence. The article begins:

The 2009 Darwin celebrations are officially under way, now that we are halfway through Richard Dawkins' flagship TV series, The Genius of Charles Darwin. But I can't help but feel they have not begun well. Dawkins' exploration of the science seems to be driven mostly by his desire to score atheistic points: this is not evolution as survival of the fittest but as zero-sum game.

I have not seen the TV series but based on prior behavior a charge that Dawkins is using science to score atheistic points comes as no surprise. If Dawkins is indeed guilty as charged he needs to be taken to task. The Trojan Horse imagary is apt for all who would use science to introduce a side agenda. Vernon also had this to say:

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Mike Gene has written a piece pertinent to the blog entry Pondering Evolution titled A Hibernation Mechanism? Mike makes these observations:

As I see it, chapter 6 from The Design Matrix once again becomes important if one desires to extrapolate Sherman’s model/predictions to a case for teleological evolution/design. With such an extrapolation, the predictions that Sherman makes are more relevant to the realm of epistemological evidence than ontological evidence. Put simply, these predictions, if verified, would be revolutionary and might indeed convince hardcore skeptics of teleological evolution, but I don’t think that we should expect such things from the hypothesis of design through front-loading itself.

As I just explained, genetic information in lower taxons that would be functionally useless but become useful in higher taxons would amount to a pool of pseudogenes in lower taxons that would quickly be erased by mutations. And since developmental programs amount to genes and their regulatory units, these too would decay if they are not useful.

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CHARLES DARWIN has been hailed as the greatest scientist of the 19th century for his discovery of the secrets of evolution.

Is that true? My favorite is James Clerk Maxwell.

In the early nineteenth century, despite many individual advances in knowledge, there was no inkling of a comprehensive theory of electricity and magnetism. In developing this, Maxwell pointed the way to the existence of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Defining fields as a tension in the medium, he stated his belief in a new concept - that energies resides in fields as well as bodies. This pointed the way to the application of electromagnetic radiation for such present-day uses as radio, television, radar, microwaves and thermal imaging.

Who is your candidate? The scientist must have performed the major body of his work during the 19th century. So, for example, Einstein and others would not be considered even though they were born in the 1800s.

Michael Sherman's Universal Genome in the Origin of Metazoa proposes an experimentally testable hypothesis and a model with two major predictions appearing in the linked abstract:

…first that a significant fraction of genetic information in lower taxons must be functionally useless but becomes useful in higher taxons, and second that one should be able to turn on in lower taxons some of the complex latent developmental programs, e.g., a program of eye development or antibody synthesis in sea urchin. An example of natural turning on of a complex latent program in a lower taxon is discussed.

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