Author: Paul Nelson
The Best and Worst Heuristics for Biological Discovery
“We don’t know what this structure does, so it probably does nothing. Remember, evolution produces a lot of non-functional debris.”
Biologists Take a Hatchet to Tree of Life, Biology Keeps Going Anyway
Early in his presentation, McInerney says that he hopes to persuade his audience that this familiar LUCA-based hypothesis “has been falsified.”
Quiz: Is This a Prediction from the Tree of Life?
Conservation of function, but not genes, can be understood with an analogy to natural language. Consider two sentences.
John Horgan on the Madness of “Scientific Omniscience”
“As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd. We still don’t have a clue how life began.”
A Debate on the “Randomness” of Mutation
The historical wellspring of randomness in evolutionary theory is Darwin’s own insistence on “chance” at the causal foundations of life.