Evolution Trifecta

Today’s New York Times’ Science section has three incredible articles dealing with evolution.

This one is about how there may be a paradigm shift occurring over how we should view Darwinian evolution (emphasis mine):

There is certainly no consensus among evolutionary biologists, but development, ecology, genetics and paleontology all provide new perspectives on how evolution operates, and how we should study it. None of these concerns provide a scintilla of hope for creationists, as scientific investigations are already providing new insights into these issues. The foundations for a paradigm shift may be in place, but it may be some time before we see whether a truly novel perspective develops or these tensions are accommodated within an expanded modern synthesis.

This one focuses on how humans are still evolving and the evidence for that:

People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.

And this one discusses the field of Evo-Devo:

Since its humble beginnings as a single cell, life has evolved into a spectacular array of shapes and sizes, from tiny fleas to towering Tyrannosaurus rex, from slow-soaring vultures to fast-swimming swordfish, and from modest ferns to alluring orchids. But just how such diversity of form could arise out of evolution’s mess of random genetic mutations — how a functional wing could sprout where none had grown before, or how flowers could blossom in what had been a flowerless world — has remained one of the most fascinating and intractable questions in evolutionary biology.

Now finally, after more than a century of puzzling, scientists are finding answers coming fast and furious and from a surprising quarter, the field known as evo-devo…

It make take a while to get through them, especially if you’re not well-versed in science, but the articles are excellent and worth the read.

On a side note, it baffles me how Creationists can ignore or dismiss all this information.


[tags]atheist, atheism, New York Times, Science, Charles Darwin, evolution, genetics, Evo-Devo, Creationist[/tags]