EvoBIO

Whales and hippos are closely related! They share a common ancestor that lived about 60 million years ago. Whales and hippos both belong to the order Artiodactyla (even-toed ungulates). Both groups communicate using sounds underwater.

~ Ryan A. Chavez

~ Ryan A. Chavez

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Creationists often fail to grasp the fundamental nature of information, which can arise from intelligent design or natural processes. From the perspective of information theory, biological information is the measurable difference between the maximum and actual entropy of a system, making it highly dependent on context. The introduction of new sequence variations through mutation can either increase or decrease informational content based on statistical methods and population models. A creationist might assert that a chihuahua genome contains less information—using some ill-defined metric for information—since dogs ultimately evolved from ancient grey wolf ancestors, the chihuahua genome can't be found in the grey wolf, so the chihuahua genome contains unique or more “information.” ... Claude Shannon is perhaps rolling in his grave at this point.

(Image credit: biomodal)

~ Ryan A. Chavez

The trichromatic vision of Old World
primates is based on three cone types: long-wavelength (L) medium-wavelength (M), and short-wavelength (S) cones. L cones are most sensitive to longer wavelengths (often associated with red), M cones to medium wavelengths (green), and S cones to shorter wavelengths (blue).

~ Ryan A. Chavez

Even if tomorrow we were to discover that the literal Genesis creation narrative were true, evolutionary biology would still be a field—we'd still have stochastic fluctuations in allelic and genomic frequencies, we'd still have gene flow, we'd still have natural selection, we'd still have genetic drift, and we'd still have mutation. That's all you need for biological evotouching.

~ Ryan A. Chavez

Evolution results in suboptimal designs because natural selection favors what works, not what is optimal.

~ Ryan A. Chavez

Get your Tiktaalik 3D files here: http://bit.ly/43CY3RA

~ Ryan A. Chavez

J.B.S. Haldane was once asked what could disprove biological evolution, to which he famously replied, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.” I remain ambivalent. What do you think?

~ Ryan A. Chavez