Book: Evolution - A theory in crisis

Currently reading this book now, by a molecular biologist Michael Denton. Really interested to know what the fuss is about on the Darwin theory of evolution. It's like this single theory has made and is making so many people atheists more than any other things in life.

I do believe that evolution works to a certain extent to produce genetic variations at small and large scales (this is now done easily on laboratory environments). But I don't think that the Theory of Evolution intrinsically applies that the universe has no Creator. It's just that many people who think so desperately wants to interpret the theory as such, that everything naturally comes about and changes gradually without any need to be created or even controlled.

I'll add more on this later...

Hundreds Of Natural-selection Studies Could Be Wrong

ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2009) — Scientists at Penn State and the National Institute of Genetics in Japan have demonstrated that several statistical methods commonly used by biologists to detect natural selection at the molecular level tend to produce incorrect results.

"Our finding means that hundreds of published studies on natural selection may have drawn incorrect conclusions," said Masatoshi Nei, Penn State Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and the team's leader. The team's results will be published in the Online Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week ending Friday 3 April 2009 and also in the journal's print edition at a later date.

Nei said that many scientists who examine human evolution have used faulty statistical methods in their studies and, as a result, their conclusions could be wrong. For example, in one published study the scientists used a statistical method to demonstrate pervasive natural selection during human evolution. "This group documented adaptive evolution in many genes expressed in the brain, thyroid, and placenta, which are assumed to be important for human evolution," said Masafumi Nozawa, a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State and one of the paper's authors. "But if the statistical method that they used is not reliable, then their results also might not be reliable," added Nei. "Of course, we would never say that natural selection is not happening, but we are saying that these statistical methods can lead scientists to make erroneous inferences," he said.

More on this at ScienceDaily.com.

Natural Selection Not The Only Process That Drives Evolution?

ScienceDaily (Jan. 28, 2009) — Why have some of our genes evolved rapidly? It is widely believed that Darwinian natural selection is responsible, but research led by a group at Uppsala University, suggests that a separate neutral (nonadaptive) process has made a significant contribution to human evolution.

Their results have been published January 27 in the journal PLoS Biology.

The researchers identified fast evolving human genes by comparing our genome with those of other primates. However, surprisingly, the patterns of molecular evolution in many of the genes they found did not contain signals of natural selection. Instead, their evidence suggests that a separate process known as BGC (biased gene conversion) has speeded up the rate of evolution in certain genes. This process increases the rate at which certain mutations spread through a population, regardless of whether they are beneficial or harmful...

More on this article at ScienceDaily.com.