by Richard William Nelson | Aug 15, 2010
The evolution industry is celebrating 100 years of fruit fly genetic research. Charles W. Woodworth, at the University of California, Berkeley, at the turn of the twentieth century, was the first to use the fruit fly as a model in the study of genetics.
During the twentieth century, Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, was one of the most studied organisms in biological research, particularly in genetics.
The fruit fly model seemed to emerge as one of the first laboratory-induced speciation events.
Continue Reading
by Richard William Nelson | Jul 19, 2010
In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wove the eugenic philosophy of Plato into the theory of natural selection. By arguing that “extinction and natural selection go hand in hand,” Darwin legitimized the eugenics movements of the 20th century.
Eugenics originated in ancient cultures. Rome, Athens, and Sparta practiced eugenics to improve the strength and survival of their societies. Encouraged by his brother, Erasmus, Darwin read An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus, an English political economist, in 1838.
Continue Reading
by Richard William Nelson | Jul 11, 2010
Natural selection is a simple scientific theory, according to the American Museum of Natural History, New York. For the museum’s Darwin Exhibit, the museum curator, Niles Eldredge, explains:
“A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin offered the world a single, simple scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth: evolution by natural selection.”
“Natural selection.” Eldredge explains, “is a simple mechanism that causes populations of living things to change over time.”
Continue Reading
by Richard William Nelson | Jun 27, 2010
Faced with the failure of the Stanley-Urey model to explain the origin of life, evolutionary scientists have been exploring the RNA World theory. With only the four nucleic acids required to form RNA (pictured left) rather than the twenty amino acids to form a protein, the chance probability tipped the advantage to the RNA-first theory, but that is not all.
In The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Richard Dawkins explains –
“This is the RNA World. To see how plausible it is, we need to look at why proteins are good at being enzymes but bad at being replicators; at why DNA is good at replicating but bad at being an enzyme; and finally why RNA might just be good enough at both roles to break out of the Catch-22.”
Continue Reading
by Richard William Nelson | Jun 20, 2010
Why Evolution is True, one of the best-selling books in support of evolution written by Jerry Coyne and endorsed by Richard Dawkins, conveniently fails to address one minor evolutionary issue—the origin of life problem. Charles Darwin had been stonewalled by this problem, too, in The Origin of Species.
In the mid twentieth century, using a simple laboratory experiment, Stanley Miller (pictured left) and Harold Urey (pictured right) was the first to demonstrate how life may have started from simple molecules and energy. In the excitement, addressing the scope of the Miller-Urey probability issue was postponed.
Continue Reading
The evolution industry is celebrating 100 years of fruit fly genetic research. Charles W. Woodworth, at the University of California, Berkeley, at the turn of the twentieth century, was the first to use the fruit fly as a model in the study of genetics.
Natural selection
Faced with the failure of the 
