Natural Selection Unfriends Darwin

Liver_Cancer IINatural selection, sometimes known as the opium of evolutionary biologists, has long been envisioned as the driving mechanism of biological evolution. “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” by Charles Darwin was the first publication to popularize natural selection.

In the words of twentieth-century evolutionary biologist Niles Eldredge,

“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.”

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Malarial Evolution Nightmare

Malaria 3 (1)Evolution paradigms increasingly struggle to survive under the weight of new scientific evidence. The malarial evolution nightmare is the latest. “Think of a deck of cards,” said Dan Larremore in an interview with Quanta Magazine science writer Veronique Greenwood.

“Now, take a pair of scissors and chop the 52 cards into chunks. Throw them in the air. Card confetti rains down, so the pieces are nowhere near where they started. Now tape them into 52 new cards, each one a mosaic of the original cards. After 48 hours, repeat.”

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Evolution Bug

ArachnidNothing is simple in biology. Monica Young and Paul Hebert of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, Canada, have found within the amino acid sequences of eight-legged critters, known as arachnids, an evolution bug.

In one of the largest invertebrate amino acid sequences studies to date, Young and Hebert, found highly variable patterns of amino acid sequences in the hemeprotein known as cytochrome C between species. None of Charles Darwin’s continuous “successive, slight” evolutionary changes in more than 4,000 species of arachnids studied were found. The paper, published in the highly respected journal PLoS ONE, August 2015, demonstrates the persistent bug in the theory of natural selection – no common ancestor.

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