by Richard William Nelson | Jul 9, 2015
The Influenza virus (pictured) species is one of the best-known and studied pathogens in the healthcare industry. Infectious outbreaks of the virus, more commonly known as the flu, are legendary.
The 1918 flu pandemic, nicknamed the Spanish flu, is estimated to have infected 500 million, eventually killing 50 to 100 million. The first influenza vaccine was approved for military use in 1945. Evolutionary scientists, however, continue to be increasingly perplexed by the unpredictable Influenza virus.
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by Richard William Nelson | Jun 11, 2015
De-extinction is thought to have first appeared – as a word – in The Source of Magic (1979) science fiction book by Piers Anthony and caught the attention of Hollywood.
Using ancient cloned dinosaur DNA, popular ER television scriptwriter Michael Crichton then captivated the imagination of American film producer Steven Spielberg with the 1990 Jurassic Park novel igniting the de-extinction craze.
In 2013, de-extinction was announced to be a science, at least according to journalist Ben Macintyre writing in the Times (London, March 8).
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by Richard William Nelson | May 14, 2015
The Evolution 101 Common Ancestor website, produced by the University of California, argues that “the central idea of biological evolution is that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor.”
This idea dates back to Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). He proposed that “all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament,” which is a common ancestor.
In their book Tree Thinking (2013), David Baum of the University of Wisconsin, along with Stacy Smith of the University of Colorado, attempts to build on this Darwinian argument. “This means,” they argue, “that evidence of common ancestry is also evidence for evolution.”
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by Richard William Nelson | Apr 2, 2015
Microbes once thought to be life’s simplest forms, are now known to use complex synchronized genetic processing as a defensive system against foreign invading micro-organisms.
As a previously unknown and unrecognized genetic mechanism, CRISPR challenges the tenets of evolution. This microbe defense process, now known as CRISPR, further undermines natural selection’s fundamental tenet of early life spontaneously emerging from simple processes.
In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin envisioned life starting “from so simple beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” CRISPR presents a new challenge to current theories of evolution, including Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, and the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution.
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by Richard William Nelson | Mar 5, 2015
The finches Charles Darwin encountered on the Galapagos Islands have served as one of the most enduring examples of evolution throughout the twentieth century.
As Darwin explains in The Origin of Species, “one [finch] species had been taken and modified [changed] for different ends” – the essence of natural selection.
However, in the nineteenth century. the technology to scientifically validate these changes in the genetics of Darwin’s finches was inconceivable.
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The Influenza virus (pictured) species is one of the best-known and studied pathogens in the healthcare industry. Infectious outbreaks of the virus, more commonly known as the flu, are legendary.
The