Witness reason based morality in action.

China's "One Child Policy" is a very reasonable solution to overpopulation, which makes it reasonable to value males over females, which makes it reasonable to abort females in pregnancy up to late term, which makes it reasonable for society to care very little for the death of a small Chinese female.

All very reasonable.

HT: voxday

Would you shake hands with a man who could write stuff like that? Would you share a platform with him? I wouldn't, and I won't. Even if I were not engaged to be in London on the day in question, I would be proud to leave that chair in Oxford eloquently empty.

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Jonathan M. at evolution news recently criticized the hypothesis of a monophyletic origin of the eyes.

The common evolutionary rationalization of this phenomenon is to posit that the gene in question had some kind of propensity for promoting the development of the respective structure. But this solution appears dubious, particularly in the case of the even more spectacular example of eye development…

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, but they don't know much about this great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical soup out of which evolution gradually constructed more complex forms. Some scientists still debate whether it was even a cell.

New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism after all, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell, researchers report. Their study appears in the journal Biology Direct.

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The study lends support to a hypothesis that LUCA may have been more complex even than the simplest organisms alive today, said James Whitfield, a professor of entomology at Illinois and a co-author on the study.

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