Guts posted this video before, but I thought I would repost it. I especially enjoyed the comments from Sean Carroll (according to Michael Ruse, "Of all the scientists in the world today, there is no one with whom Charles Darwin would rather spend an evening than Sean Carroll."):

So what this means is in some ways, some sense, evolution is a simpler process than we first thought. When you think about all of the diversity of forms out there, we first believed this would involve all sorts of novel creations, starting from scratch, again and again and again. We now understand that, no, that evolution works with packets of information and uses them in a new and different ways, and new and different combinations, without necessarily having to invent anything fundamentally new, but new combinations.

My, that's a pretty radical change in the way we view evolution. The old way was far more friendly to non-teleology and also failed to prepare scientists for the more accurate understanding of evolution, an understanding that is now much more friendly to teleology.

After reading The Design Matrix, where next do you turn as you await the appearance of volume 2? I've finally finished reading Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart's, The Plausibility of Life and, if the concept of front-loading tantalizes you, I highly recommend it. In fact, I plan to post various excerpts from the book over the summer and put together a book review.

But let me start with three points.

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Earth's first animal was the ocean-drifting comb jelly, not the simple sponge, according to a new find that has shocked scientists who didn't imagine the earliest critter could be so complex.

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"This was a complete shocker," said study team member Casey Dunn of Brown University in Rhode Island. "So shocking that we initially thought something had gone very wrong."

Dunn's team checked and re-checked their results and came up with the same result every time: the comb jelly came first. The results are detailed in the April 10 issue of the journal Nature, a journal that, like most respected journals, requires other scientists review a paper prior to publication.

[...]

The finding was unexpected because evolutionary biologists had thought that less complex animals split off and evolved separately first. Dunn says that two evolutionary scenarios can explain why the comb jellies would actually have been first among animals. The first is that the comb jelly evolved its complexity independent of other animals after branching off to forge its own path.

The second is that the sponge evolved its simpler form from the more complex form. This second possibility underscores the fact that "evolution is not necessarily just a march towards increased complexity," Dunn said.

Read the rest here.

Okay, you defenders of the non-telic dog-eat-dog Malthusian evolutionary world! Here's a great, heart-warming story from the UK's Daily Mail…

Pointer is Baby Kangaroo's Hero

in Torquay, Victoria, Australia a 10 year old German Shorthaired Pointer/Wirehaired Pointer mix, named Rex made quite a discovery while on a walk with his owner Leonie Allan. Early in the morning Rex and Leonie headed out on their usual walk and discovered that a female kangaroo had been struck and killed by a car. Later on in the afternoon Rex returned to the body and gently retrieved what no one knew was there - a 4 month old joey! Rex carried the baby by the neck in such a nurturing way that the little guy was unharmed.

"The joey was snuggling up to him, jumping up to him and Rex was sniffing and licking him - it was quite cute", said Allan.

To appreciate why I am a lonely bunny, let's consider the core assertion of David Zeigler's argument:

In our science, there is no mention of, or mechanism for achieving, any long-term metaphysical or teological goals of form, complexity, or intelligence"”as Gould has argued so eloquently. Most of the other known mechanisms of evolutionary change such as genetic drift, neutral mutation, gene duplications, transposons, horizontal gene transfer by plasmids, and others have no direction or goal at all and are in fact random (which natural selection is not) and therefore could not possibly give a particular direction to evolution.

Okay, this is the mainstream, non-teleological perspective that is so well explained to a new generation of scientists in the writings of Gould and Dawkins. So how have the teleologists responded? Largely by questioning the accuracy of the claim.

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Writing in the journal, Evolution: Education and Outreach, David Zeigler has an article entitled, "The Question of Purpose." Zeigler's argument is twofold: Darwinian science teaches us that there is no purpose or meaning outside of ourselves and teachers can improve evolution education by better stressing the non-teleological nature of evolution and reality. You can read this for yourself here (pdf file). I'm hoping to comment on several aspects, but I thought you'd like to check it out first and have an opportunity to correct me if I have wrongly mischaracterized it.

TT member Nick (not Matzke) outlined his views as a theistic evolutionist. He summarizes as follows:

I'm content with the label "theistic evolutionist," and I believe that:
a) God is the Creator;
b) the history and process by which God created living things is best explained by modern evolutionary biology, rather than "Intelligent Design" in its various incarnations;
c) that process included events that we (correctly) perceive as chance or the results of natural selection, but
d) those events were nevertheless known to God "before" the creation of the Universe, the universe is sustained by God's will, and nothing happens contrary to his will.

I bring this up because this is very close to my own theological views. I would quibble about (b) because I am not convinced modern evolutionary biology and Intelligent Design are mutually exclusive and keep an eye on ID for reasons I have explained before. But perhaps more interesting is point c). From my experience, many theists seem uncomfortable with chance playing a significant role in history. But I think God works through chance. What say you?

Abiogenesis and evolution are different topics. Evolution is supported by a massive amount of evidence and abiogenesis is not. Evolution has many well-established mechanisms while abiogenesis has nothing more than a myriad of speculations supported by slim amounts of circumstantial evidence. Evolution comes with a track record of success; abiogenesis does not. There is a Theory of Evolution; there is no Theory of Abiogenesis. Evolution is a core element of biology; abiogenesis is largely ignored. Since the two are not equally supported or understood, why treat them the same by reacting to a denial of abiogeneis as if it were a denial of evolution?

Here's part of a book review:

And here, I think, the book falls down. An evolutionary/population geneticist picking it up might not only feel overwhelmed by the details"”that cannot be helped, given the nature of the material"”but might well be irritated that his/her concerns and perspectives hardly get acknowledged. Natural selection and mutation only get brief mention in the book, in the final chapter, (and are not listed in the index) while the whole edifice of Neodarwinian thinking is essentially dismissed. The author, in particular, implicitly discards one of the central tenets of evolutionary theory: that macroevolutionary change simply reflects microevolutionary change (speciation) writ large (and longer). In my opinion, that view would have been worth explicit discussion.

Can you guess what book it is (and no, I am not shamelessly plugging)?

Scientists at the University of Washington and other institutions have identified 25 genes regulating lifespan in two organisms separated by about 1.5 billion years in evolutionary change. At least 15 of those genes have very similar versions in humans, suggesting that scientists may be able to target those genes to help slow down the aging process and treat age-related conditions.

["¦]

These findings also give new insight into the genetic basis of aging, the scientists said, and provide some of the first quantitative evidence that genes regulating aging have been conserved during the process of evolution. Earlier evolutionary theories suggested that aging was not genetically controlled, since an organism does not get any advantage in natural selection by having a very long lifespan that goes far past their reproductive age.

HERE