Category Archives: Evolution

Ten years ago, the big question before the 2007 NBA draft was which of two players the Portland Trail Blazers would select with the top overall pick. One option was Greg Oden, the 7-footer out of Ohio State who was a traditional center playing near the basket. The other was Kevin Durant, a spindly, less-classifiable big man out of Texas.

It is easy to knock the Blazers for what happened. They drafted Oden, whom injuries limited to 105 games in the NBA. Meanwhile, Durant, who went No. 2, has become one of the best scorers in basketball history, and last week he was named the most valuable player in the NBA Finals as Golden State defeated Cleveland in five games.

But the most resonant lesson from that draft a decade ago is that were it held today, Portland would not need the benefit of hindsight to know to pick Durant over Oden. In fact, in todays NBA, Oden, who at the time defined his game as big-man hook shot, might not even be one of the top picks at all.

An Oden, people would look at him and want to go big, but hows he going to defend the pick-and-roll? Billy King, formerly the Brooklyn Nets general manager, said in an interview. Those guys arent involved in the game as much.

Understanding the evolution in the style of NBA basketball since the 2007 draft helps explain how Thursdays draft is likely to unfold.

The increased reliance on the 3-point shot; the constant presence of the pick-and-roll, which can be easier defended with nimble big men who can defensively switch onto traditional ball-handlers; the increased use of spacing, which requires big men who can credibly draw their defender away from the basket on offense, all mean that some of the best contemporary big men are mold breakers.

They are players like Giannis Antetokounmpo, the 22-year-old, 6-11 All-Star from Greece who has been versatile enough to play point guard for the Milwaukee Bucks, or gentle giants like the Utah Jazzs Rudy Gobert, a Frenchman who led the NBA in blocks per game while ably switching onto smaller opponents.

Youve had a bunch of very athletic guys coming in from overseas Giannis, Rudy Gobert, said player agent Marc Fleisher, and youre finding American players who are more skilled now, even though theyre big and lanky.

So among likely lottery draft picks, it seems as if for every traditional center who is focused on protecting the rim and scoring down low, there are two Swiss-Army-knife-style big men who are as comfortable shooting 18-foot jumpers as 5-foot bunnies.

So when the draft gets underway Thursday night, expect the top-drafted big man not to be Texas bruising center, Jarrett Allen, but Arizonas 7-foot forward Lauri Markkanen, who made nearly two 3-pointers per game for the Wildcats, or Florida States Jonathan Isaac, a Durant-like athlete.

And describing Edrice Adebayo, whose nickname is Bam, the Kentucky freshman whose draft stock fell because of a subpar season with the Wildcats, ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla, in a conference call, outlined the very model of a modern NBA big man: Youre looking at 6-10, strong, athletic, runs the floor, can guard pick-and-roll, can ball screen and run to the rim and catch lobs, and hes young.

Fraschilla added, Adebayo comes to mind as maybe someone that slipped in the so-called mock drafts that might be a good, really good, value.

Fleisher, copping to personal bias, had another candidate for such a player, and for the same reasons. Not to plug my own guy, he said in an interview, but thats one of the reasons Jonah Bolden is so interesting to teams. Hes 6-10, 7-4 wingspan, and can play small forward, power forward or center.

Thats the prototypical player teams are looking for now, Fleischer added. (Bolden, for those not in the know, is from Australia, played a year at UCLA and then moved to Serbia to play professionally.)

And then there are the elite point guards, with as many as five likely to be selected with the top 10 picks Thursday: Markelle Fultz (Washington), Lonzo Ball (UCLA), DeAaron Fox (Kentucky), Dennis Smith (North Carolina State) and Frank Ntilikina (France). All were just freshmen (or the equivalent, in the case of the 18-year-old Ntilikina). And all can score as well as do the more traditional point-guard work of facilitating the offense.

What this mother lode of ball-handling talent reveals along with a simple abundance of skill that happens to exist in this draft class is the increased premium on that position.

Theres no question having a really good point guard is pivotal in todays game, whereas the center position has probably been a little devalued lately, Fleisher said.

Indeed, the ever-idiosyncratic San Antonio Spurs might be the only team to make this seasons conference semifinals without an in-his-prime point guard, such as the Washington Wizards John Wall or the Boston Celtics Isaiah Thomas.

If you look at the teams winning now, King said, look at the East, with Kyrie Irving and Isaiah Thomas and John Wall. If youre going to have a good team, you have to have a setup point guard or a scoring point guard.

The fact that the Celtics possess a star point guard in Thomas, as well as the No. 1 pick (because of a fateful, four-year-old trade with the Nets) has created its own drama. The consensus best player in the draft is Fultz. So the word, first reported by Yahoos Adrian Wojnarowski, is that the Celtics will avoid that redundancy by trading their pick to the Philadelphia 76ers (who will select Fultz) and with the third overall selection they will receive in return pick one of the two traditional wing players bound to go early in the first round Josh Jackson (Kansas) or Jayson Tatum (Duke), and probably Jackson plug him in immediately and try to get past the Cleveland Cavaliers in next seasons playoffs, which they failed to do this season.

Ball, too, is the subject of much speculation, some of it manufactured by his P.T. Barnum-esque father, LaVar, who has made clear he considers the hometown Los Angeles Lakers, selecting second, to have the only glass slipper that will fit his sons otherwise ZO2-covered foot.

Still, recent chatter has the Lakers perhaps selecting Fox over Ball, and that is assuming Fultz does not drop to them.

Such details sound trivial, but they are not. The precise order of those high draft picks matters a great deal, as does good judgment. Consider what happened in 2009. That draft class was similarly stocked at point guard, with as many as five (depending on how you define them) taken with the first 10 picks that June.

The Minnesota Timberwolves used the fifth and sixth picks to select two point guards Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn. Since that draft, the Timberwolves have never made the playoffs. With the seventh pick, the Warriors selected what ostensibly should have been the fourth-best point guard, Stephen Curry. They have had considerably superior results.

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The evolution of the NBA Draft - MyAJC.com - MyAJC

As bees' social behavior evolved, their complex chemical communication systems evolved in concert, according to a study published June 20 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An international team of researchers, including those from Princeton University, reported that a certain species of bees, called halictid bees, have more sensorial machinery compared with related solitary species. The difference is measured by the density of tiny, hollow sensory hairs called sensilla on their antennae.

Because social living requires the coordination of complex social behaviors, social insects invest more in these sensory systems used to communicate information about resources, mates and sources of danger to their colonies and, therefore, are integral to survival than their solitary counterparts, according to Sarah Kocher, an associate research scholar at theLewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the paper's corresponding author.

Kocher and her colleagues imaged the antennae of adult females from 36 species that Kocher netted in the wild, mostly in France, or secured from specimens from the Museum of Comparative Zoology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Using a scanning electron microscope at Princeton, they obtained information about the antennae's surface topography and composition and observed convergent changes in both sensilla structures and the chemical signals of the groups as sociality was gained and lost.

Sarah Kocher, an associate research scholar at theLewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the paper's corresponding author,and her colleagues imaged the antennae of adult females from 36 species using a scanning electron microscope. They obtained information about the antennae's surface topography and composition and observed convergent changes in both sensilla structures and the chemical signals of the groups as sociality was gained and lost.

Photo courtesy of Bernadette Wittwer, University of Melbourne

Kocher and her colleagues chose to examine halictid bees because they exhibit remarkable diversity in social behavior, from eusocial to solitary. Eusocial refers to an organizational structure in which individual insects in a colony forgo their reproductive capacity and perform a specific task, such as caring for young or gathering food, as seen in many ant, wasp and honeybee species. Also, within this family of insects, social behavior has evolved independently several times, and there are numerous examples of reversion, or a reappearance of an earlier physical characteristic, and replicated losses of sociality. These repeated gains and losses make the species one of the most behaviorally diverse social insects on the planet, and good candidates for studying sociality, according to Kocher. "What we have is a system with tremendous comparative power," she said.

Relatively little is known about the evolutionary transition between solitary and social living, according to Kocher. But in this paper, "[The researchers] provide an elegant solution to this problem," said Tom Wenseleers, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Leuven in Belgium who is familiar with the research but had no role in it. "By studying a group of primitively eusocial insects that evolved sociality more recently and on several occasions reverted back to a solitary lifestyle, [they] succeed in making an accurate comparison of the investment in chemosensory systems made by social and derived, closely related, nonsocial species."

In the paper, the researchers also noted that ancestrally solitary halictid bees those bees that had never evolved social behaviors had sensilla densities similar to eusocial species, while secondarily solitary halictid bees those bees that evolved from social to solitary and back exhibited decreases in sensilla density. Kocher was surprised by these patterns, but concluded that "sensilla density may be an important precursor to the evolution of social behavior."

"This study demonstrates that changes in social structure are reflected in changes to the sensory systems of insects," she said. "[It] not only illustrates the evolutionary shift from reproducing as an individual to having to coordinate reproduction as a group, but also how this behavioral change can create an evolutionary feedback loop in which traits are selected in order to increase sociality in subsequent generations."

Other authors on the paper, "Solitary bees reduce investment in communication compared with their social relatives" published June 20 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were Bernadette Wittwer and Mark Elgar of School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne; Abraham Hefetz and Tovit Simon of the Department of Zoology, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel-Aviv University; and Li Murphy and Naomi Pierce of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

The research was supported in part by the Holsworth Research Wildlife Endowment, the National Science Foundation (IOS-1257543), the Norman and Rose Lederer Chair of Biology at Tel-Aviv-University and Princeton University.

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Bee antennae offer links between the evolution of social behavior and communication - Princeton University

A pair of studies suggests the evolutionary roots of humanlike cooperation can be seen in chimpanzees, albeit in rudimentary forms.

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By Michael PriceJun. 19, 2017 , 3:00 PM

Whether its giving to charity or helping a stranger with directions, we often assist others even when theres no benefit to us or our family members. Signs of such true altruism have been spotted in some animals, but have been difficult to pin down in our closest evolutionary relatives. Now, in a pair of studies, researchers show that chimpanzees will give up a treat in order to help out an unrelated chimp, and that chimps in the wild go out on risky patrols in order to protect even nonkin at home. The work may give clues to how such cooperationthe foundation of human civilizationevolved in humans.

Both studies provide powerful evidence for forms of cooperation in our closest relatives that have been difficult to demonstrate in other animals besides humans, says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved with the research.

In the first study, psychologists Martin Schmelz and Sebastian Grneisen at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, trained six chimps at the Leipzig Zoo to play a sharing game. Each chimp was paired with a partner who was given a choice of four ropes to pull, each with a different outcome: give just herself a banana pellet; give just the subject a pellet; give both of them pellets; or forgo her turn and let her partner make the decision instead.

Unbeknownst to these partner chimpanzees, the chimp that always started the gamea female named Taiwas trained to always choose the last option, giving up her turn. From the partners point of view, this was a risky choice, Grneisen says, as Tai risked losing out entirely on the banana pellets. Over dozens of trials, after Tai gave up her turn, the six partners pulled the rope that rewarded both themselves and Tai with a treat 75% of the time, indicating they valued her risking her own treats to help them.

But the researchers also wanted to see whether the subjects were willing to give up some of their own reward to repay Tai for her perceived kindness. That kind of reciprocity is often claimed to be a landmark of human cooperation, and we wanted to see how far we could push it with the chimps, Grneisen says.

The team repeated the experiment, except this time when Tai passed the turn to the subjects, the subjects had the option of either giving themselves four banana pellets and Tai none, or giving both themselves and Tai only three banana pellets. The subjects chose the sacrifice option 44% of the time, compared with 17% of the time when the experimenters, not Tai, made the initial decision. This suggests that the chimps frequently felt compelled to reward Tai for her perceived unselfishness, even at their own expense, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

We were very surprised to get that finding, Grneisen says. This psychological dimension to chimps decision-making, taking into account how much a partner risked to help them, is novel.

The second study, also published today in PNAS, looked at what motivates male chimps to risk life and limb on patrol missions. Male chimps in the wild often team up and silently stalk the groups boundaries single-file, sniffing for intruders. These can be costly excursions: About a third of the time, they meet chimps from a rival group, and occasionally the encounters turn bloody. So patrolling chimps risk injury or even death.

According to classic behavioral theories, chimps should put themselves in such peril only if they have offspring or close maternal relatives in the group. Yet, after analyzing behavior and relationship data from 3750 male chimps in Ngogo, Uganda, collected over the past 20 years, researchers learned that although that was true for most chimps, more than a quarter of the patrollers had no close relations in the group. Whats more, males who didnt join these all-male patrols didnt appear to face any repercussions, says the studys lead author, anthropologist Kevin Langergraber from Arizona State University in Tempe. So, it was a bit surprising that so many chimps risked it.

He and his colleagues suggest that a theory known as group augmentation best explains these findings. This theory posits that by patrolling to protect the groups food supply and expand its territory, the entire group becomes more attractive to females and improves each individual males chances of reproducing.

Anne Pusey, another evolutionary anthropologist at Duke who is unaffiliated with the studies, agrees its a reasonable hypothesis. Protecting and expanding the groups territory, she says, would secure or increase the space and food supply for resident females, as well as future immigrant females, with whom [the males] will eventually mate and have a chance of siring offspring. More and healthier females means each individual male has a greater chance at producing offspring.

Langergraber adds that such behavior might serve as an evolutionary basis for human cooperation within huge, diverse communities. One of the most unusual things about human cooperation is its large scale, he says. Hundreds or thousands of unrelated individuals can work together to build a canal, or send a human to the moon. Perhaps the mechanisms that allow collective action among chimpanzees served as building blocks for the subsequent evolution of even more sophisticated cooperation later in human evolution.

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True altruism seen in chimpanzees, giving clues to evolution of human cooperation - Science Magazine

Among all mammals studied thus far, the orangutans chromosomes are the most like those of the first placental mammal.

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By Elizabeth PennisiJun. 19, 2017 , 3:00 PM

Humans have 46 chromosomes. Dogs have 78. And a small South American rodent called the red viscacha has a whopping 104. Geneticists have marveled at the chromosomal diversity among mammals for decades, and now, they may know how it happened. A new digital reconstruction of the chromosomes of the ancestor of all placental mammals reveals that these tightly packed structures of DNA and proteins have become scrambled over timea finding that may help pinpoint possible problem sites in our genomes that underlie cancer and other disease.

The work "helps us to understand how chromosomes have changed over time, which chromosome rearrangements may have led to the formation of new species, and what might be driving chromosomal rearrangements," says Janine Deakin, a geneticist at the University of Canberra who was not involved with the work. "This was a very elegant study."

There are three kinds of mammals: egg-laying monotremes such as the platypus, marsupials like kangaroos and opossums, and the majorityplacental, or eutherian, mammalsincluding humans and about 4400 other mammal species. The earliest members of this larger group were mouse-sized, lived in trees, and ate insects about 105 million years ago. To figure out how chromosomes of placental mammals have changed over time, researchers need to know what those early eutherians started with. And that required putting some complicated puzzle pieces back together.

To do that, Harris Lewin, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Davis, and colleagues compared 19 genomes of various mammals at different spots in the eutherian family tree, including several primates. But genomes usually dont reveal how an animals DNA is distributed into chromosomesthey just give you the DNA sequence.

So team member Jaebum Kim, now at Konkuk University in Seoul, and colleagues wrote a sophisticated computer program that was able to reconstruct the original eutherian chromosomes based on what parts of the chromosomes are together today in those 19 species. The researchers came up with 21 pairs of ancestral eutherian chromosomes, they report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A few of those chromosomes have stayed intactwith their genes in the same orderover the past 105 million years, at least in orangutans and humans. "I find the stability of some of the ancestral chromosomes remarkable," Deakin says.

But many have broken apart, swapping places between and within chromosomes, Kim, Lewin, and their colleagues found. These exchanges "are the footprints of changing the order of the packaging of 22,000 vertebrate genes," says Stephen O'Brien, a geneticist at SaintPetersburg State University in Russia who was not involved with the work.

All told, the scientists found 162 break pointsplaces where a chromosome broke open so the DNA between those points could move around. They found that this chromosome scrambling varied over time and from mammal group to mammal group. "The big surprise is how the chromosomes evolved differently in different lineages, Lewin says. "It's one of the most splendid examples of stepwise changes that led to the evolution of new species, he says.

This new study shows that as mammals evolved early on, the rate at which chromosomes broke apart was stable, and relatively low, with eight per 10 million years. But 65 million years ago,the rate jumped, averaging 20 per 10 million years in primates other than the orangutan. So the orangutan chromosome setup looks the most like the ancient ancestor revealed by Kims team, with eight ancient chromosomes intact. Humans have five such chromosomes and mice have just one.

The researchers also showed that ancestral chromosome 20 is completely conserved in primates, but very much changed in goats and cows because of rearrangements within chromosomes. Rat chromosomes, too, are very different than the early eutherians, but for a different reason: Their chromosomes swapped pieces between chromosomes rather than within a given chromosome.

Lewin thinks sections of repetitive basesthe letters that make up DNAtend to make chromosomes susceptible to scrambling. Goats and cows, as well as rodents, had many so-called retrotransposonsrogue invading DNAand many rearrangements, whereas primates have far fewer of both.

In some ways, the implications of the many chromosomal changes suggested by the new analysis is obviousjust look how different an ant-eater is from a whale.But in other ways, researchers have much to learn about exactly how chromosomal changes influence the course of evolution. The changes were clearly advantageous and perpetuated through time in different mammalian groups, Lewin says.

Though O'Brien says he's impressed with this study's detail,he's holding out for more comprehensive comparisons, wherein the genomes of many more than 19 species are matched up. "That is what is really required to get a full history of our chromosomes, he says. Until that scale is achieved, we will still be poking around in the dark matter of evolutionary processes."

That work is coming, says Lewin, as a project at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is sequencing 150 more mammals. And with those genomes, as well as the genomes of marsupials and monotremes, he and his collaborators plan to tackle the ancestral genome of the first mammal next, which lived about 185 million years ago. "I'm looking forward to seeing this analysis expanded to include a detailed look at all mammals, Deakin says.

Meanwhile, these break points may help guide researchers trying to understand disease. "There are a score of medical syndromes involving chromosome rearrangements," says OBrien, and there may be others not yet discovered.

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Digital reconstruction of ancient chromosomes reveals surprises about mammalian evolution - Science Magazine

Pokmon Gos biggest update ever will begin to roll out to players across starting today. Nearly a year after the iOS and Android game launched, Pokmon Gos gyms have been majorly reworked, and a major cooperative multiplayer feature is on the way too.

Polygon got the chance to try Pokmon Gos new gyms during E3 2017, and I came away feeling cautiously optimistic. I wasnt a huge fan of how gyms worked prior to the update; they suffered from top-tier players camping out at them forever and lacked the competitive incentives of the traditional games gyms. These are among the things Pokmon Gos gym update is meant to correct.

Gyms will now have way more to offer players who may not like fighting in them. Every gym is getting a photo disc to spin, just like PokStops, so players can collect items from them. Whats most interesting is a new mechanic that gives pacifist players a reason to visit gyms. Every Pokmon thats housed at a gym now up to six instead of the original three has something called a motivation factor, which is represented by a heart that fills up or depletes over time. To keep a Pokmon at a friendly gym happy and strong, players can feed them berries. Anyone can do this, as long as theyre on the right team so even if you dont like fighting, you still have a reason to visit a gym.

One of the main issues with Pokmon Gos gyms initially was that battles would become increasingly difficult as players climbed the ladder. This became repetitive, as members of Niantic described to us during our demo; it also meant that lower-leveled trainers stood little chance of making it to the top. The revamped gyms have players take on Pokmon based on the order in which they were placed at the gym. The goal there is to make it possible for anyone to finish an entire gym.

Fighting at a gym can still feel like a bland or solitary affair, all these new additions aside. Its still just tapping the screen repeatedly, swiping left and right to dodge attacks, fighting with a mechanic that doesnt work as well as the turn-based battles of traditional Pokmon games. Niantic hasnt really done anything to change up the fiddly nature of fighting in Pokmon Go, but another big content update addresses the asynchronous single-player nature of it.

Dataminers found hints that raids were coming to Pokmon Go earlier this year, and I got to try out how this new mode works in the actual game. Its the first truly cooperative system Pokmon Go has: A countdown timer randomly appears above gyms, and when it goes off, a giant, very strong Pokmon will appear. Approaching it will commence a Raid Battle, which supports more than a dozen players at once, all of whom work together to take that Pokmon down. Everyone is given a ticket to participate in one of these a day, while premium passes let players play more than one Raid daily.

The Raid Battle system even has public and private lobbies, so friends who have happened upon a Raid Battle together can work side-by-side, no random trainers allowed. After defeating the Pokmon still with the usual screen-tapping players have the chance to actually capture it, adding a high-leveled monster to their team. (Theyll also get a bunch of items, including some mysterious new TM items that Niantic declined to tell us anything about.)

Theres no getting around the fact that battles in Pokmon Go just arent as fun as they could be, because of how reductive that core mechanic is. But playing a Raid Battle alongside a few other journalists and my Pokmon Go-obsessed editor-in-chief did feel closer to what I wanted this game to be back when it was in beta. Defeating the same Pokmon at the same time, seeing other team members Pokmon on-screen while doing so, is an exciting bonding experience. Its a group achievement unlike anything else in Pokmon Go.

Every player also gets something to be personally proud of: Winning against a Raid Boss nets you a badge and the chance to catch that Pokmon you just defeated. I managed to capture that super-strong Machamp we took down after the battle ended, while Chris Grant just couldnt get it to stay in the special Premier Ball. (Sorry, bud.)

It will be interesting to see just how much Raids and the wide-ranging gym updates shake up the game. Will it bring more people back into the fold, especially now that the weathers picked up? Pokmon Go isnt hurting for daily users it recently crossed the 750 million mark but for lapsed trainers, the ability to actually play alongside people and approach those intimidating gyms could be a reason to return.

It also helps that Niantic is also working with Ingress players to finally add more portals into that game, which translate as PokStop locations in Pokmon Go. Those in more isolated areas can hope to actually find more places to go and Pokmon to catch in the coming months.

Were eager to see how this latest evolution of Pokmon Go plays out. Keep checking your phone to see if the gym update is live in your area; maybe well see you in a Raid sometime soon.

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Pokmon Go's huge multiplayer update is the game's next evolution - Polygon

We have proven time and again in our Wednesday night apologetics class that the Theory of Evolution is an illogical lie. Yet, the vast majority of the world still believes that every living thing in existence is the result of time and chance. Why would intelligent and logical beings choose to believe something as ridiculous as evolution, over the more logical and factual creationism? There are several reasons this might be the case.

First, for the past 50 years, evolution has been the only thing taught in schools. It is not taught as an unproven theory, but as scientific fact. As a result, many do not question the validity of the Evolutionary Theory and just assume that it is factual.

Second, it has been portrayed in popular culture and the media that the most intelligent people believe in evolution. Those who do not believe in evolution are labeled as stupid or ignorant. Men are prideful. We want people to think we are well educated and smart. So people claim to believe in evolution, not based on facts and evidence, but because it will make them appear to be in the same league as those who are educated and intelligent.

Third, it is claimed that the vast majority of scientists believe in evolution. Popular scientists like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson have broken into the mainstream and spew their evolutionary beliefs, claiming that all true scientists believe in evolution, making it seem that all experts believe in this theory as fact, and those with little to no scientific knowledge follow their words. Just because someone is loudest, doesnt make them right. Even if the majority of scientists believe in the theory of evolution, that doesnt make evolution any less of the lie that it is. You are a free-thinking human being, not a sheep following the masses. As Guy N. Woods correctly stated: It is dangerous to follow the multitude because the majority is almost always on the wrong side in this world.

Fourth, there are many who accept evolution because they have rejected God. They dont want there to be a God, so they accept an illogical theory over the logical and factual truth. No one believes in evolution because of the evidence. Why? Because there is virtually no evidence to back the theory up! Even those who believe in evolution must admit this. For example, Professor D.M.S. Watson, who held the position of the Chair of Evolution at the University of London for more than 20 years, stated that evolution itself is accepted by zoologists, not because it has been observed to occur or can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is incredible. This statement and many like it make it clear that many people believe in evolution simply because they already made up their mind that there isnt a God, no matter what the evidence says.

Consider the evidence. Creationism has evidence while evolution is void of any. Creationism is logical while evolution is improbable. Dont be a sheep. Dont follow the masses as they lead you down the path of destruction. Look at the proof, follow where it leads, and come to your own conclusion. When one does that, the only conclusion that exists is the fact that God is, and He created the heavens and the earth and everything in them.

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Four Reasons Why people believe in Evolution - Pike County News Watchman

American Palaeontologist Stephen Gould.

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In 1972 the eminent palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge proposed an idea about the way evolution worked and, in so doing, sparked a fight of almighty proportions.

New modelling revealed by Michael Landis and Joshua Schraiber of Temple University in Pennsylvania, US, however, adds considerable extra weight to their case.

Gould and Eldredge sought to explain so-called gaps in the palaeontological record missing fossils assumed to represent transitional phases between ancient species and the modern ones into which they evolved by suggesting they were an illusion.

Evolution, they proposed, wasnt a gradual process, marked by the slow accumulation of new characteristics. Rather, they said, the history of evolution is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of homeostatic equilibria, disturbed only rarely by rapid and episodic events of speciation.

Two important principles underpinned their explanation, which they dubbed the theory of punctuated equilibria.

The first was that once a species evolved, it tended to stay pretty much the same from thereon in until extinction ended its run. The second was that when part of a species became isolated from the rest and thus fell under new selection pressure, if it was going to evolve into something new it would do so very quickly (at least, on a geological scale).

If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated local populations, the pair wrote, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is a chimera.

The theory was roundly attacked by some other prominent voices in the field. In his book, The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins said punctuated equilibrium was an idea that "does not deserve a particularly large measure of publicity".

Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his book Darwins Dangerous Idea, also slammed Gould who responded by calling him Dawkins lapdog. Dennett shot back that in doing so Gould was turn[ing] up the volume of his vituperation.

Gould died in 2004, Dennett is now 75, and the debate is still a long way from settled.

However, Landis and Schraiber, publishing on the preprint site bioRxiv, push the argument back in favour of speciation as a comparatively rapid, rather than gradual, process.

The title of their paper serves also as its bold conclusion: Punctuated evolution shaped modern vertebrate diversity.

The pair constructed a mathematical model based on random probability distribution and fed in datasets derived from the morphological characteristics of about 50 clades (genetically-related groups of animals) covering mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and amphibians.

The results fitted best within a framework of punctuated development, with long periods of stasis averaging around 10 million years between jump processes of pulsed evolution lasting as little as 100 generations.

All of the data used concerned modern species. Landis and Schraiber suggest that future work integrating their work with the paleontological evolutionary research kick-started by Gould and Eldredge will throw up more detailed evidence about how rapid spurts of evolution and speciation are related.

The reactions of professors Dawkins and Dennett remain unknown, but might be memorable.

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New model backs controversial idea of how evolution works - Cosmos

Understanding the evolution in the style of N.B.A. basketball since the 2007 draft helps explain how this Thursdays draft is likely to unfold.

The increased reliance on the 3-point shot; the constant presence of the pick-and-roll, which can be more easily defended with nimble big men who can defensively switch onto traditional ballhandlers; the increased use of spacing, which requires big men who can credibly draw their defender away from the basket on offense, all mean that some of the best contemporary big men are mold breakers.

They are players like Giannis Antetokounmpo, the 22-year-old, 6-foot-11 All-Star from Greece who has been versatile enough to play point guard for the Milwaukee Bucks, or gentle giants like the Utah Jazzs Rudy Gobert, a Frenchman who led the N.B.A. in blocks per game while ably switching onto smaller opponents.

Youve had a bunch of very athletic guys coming in from overseas Giannis, Rudy Gobert, said the player agent Marc Fleisher, and youre finding American players who are more skilled now, even though theyre big and lanky.

Among the likely lottery draft picks, it seems as if for every traditional center who is focused on protecting the rim and scoring down low, there are two Swiss-Army-knife-style big men who are as comfortable shooting 18-foot jumpers as five-foot bunnies.

So when the draft gets underway on Thursday night, expect the top-picked big man not to be Texass bruising center, Jarrett Allen, but Arizonas 7-foot forward Lauri Markkanen, who made nearly two 3-pointers per game for the Wildcats, or Florida States Jonathan Isaac, a Durant-like athlete.

And describing Edrice Adebayo, whose nickname is Bam, the Kentucky freshman whose draft stock fell because of a subpar season with the Wildcats, the ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla, in a conference call, outlined the very model of a modern N.B.A. big man: Youre looking at 6-10, strong, athletic, runs the floor, can guard pick-and-roll, can ball-screen and run to the rim and catch lobs, and hes young.

Fraschilla added, Adebayo comes to mind as maybe someone that slipped in the so-called mock drafts that might be a good, really good, value.

Fleisher, copping to personal bias, had another candidate for such a player, and for the same reasons. Not to plug my own guy, he said in an interview, but thats one of the reasons Jonah Bolden is so interesting to teams. Hes 6-10, 7-4 wingspan, and can play small forward, power forward or center.

Thats the prototypical player teams are looking for now, Fleischer added. (Bolden, for those not in the know, is from Australia, played a year at U.C.L.A. and then moved to Serbia to play professionally.)

And then there are the elite point guards, with as many as five likely to be selected with the top 10 picks on Thursday: Markelle Fultz (Washington), Lonzo Ball (U.C.L.A.), DeAaron Fox (Kentucky), Dennis Smith (North Carolina State) and Frank Ntilikina (France). All were just freshmen (or the equivalent, in the case of the 18-year-old Ntilikina). And all can score as well as do the more traditional point-guard work of facilitating the offense.

What this mother lode of ball-handling talent reveals along with a simple abundance of skill that happens to exist in this draft class is the increased premium on that position.

Theres no question having a really good point guard is pivotal in todays game, whereas the center position has probably been a little devalued lately, Fleisher said.

Indeed, the ever-idiosyncratic San Antonio Spurs might be the only team to make this seasons conference semifinals without an in-his-prime point guard, such as the Washington Wizards John Wall or the Boston Celtics Isaiah Thomas.

If you look at the teams winning now, King said, look at the East, with Kyrie Irving and Isaiah Thomas and John Wall. If youre going to have a good team, you have to have a setup point guard or a scoring point guard.

The fact that the Celtics possess a star point guard in Thomas, as well as the No. 1 pick (because of a fateful four-year-old trade with the Nets), has created its own drama. The consensus best player in the draft is Fultz. So the word, first reported by Yahoos Adrian Wojnarowski, is that the Celtics will avoid that redundancy by trading their pick to the Philadelphia 76ers (who will select Fultz). With the third overall selection they would receive in return, they are expected to pick one of the two traditional wing players bound to go early in the first round Josh Jackson (Kansas) or Jayson Tatum (Duke). Boston would plug him in immediately and try to get past the Cleveland Cavaliers in next seasons playoffs, which it failed to do this season.

Ball, too, is the subject of much speculation, some of it manufactured by his P. T. Barnum-esque father, LaVar, who has made clear he considers the hometown Los Angeles Lakers, selecting second, to have the only glass slipper that will fit his sons otherwise ZO2-covered foot.

Still, recent chatter has the Lakers perhaps selecting Fox over Ball, and that is assuming Fultz does not drop to them.

Such details sound trivial, but they are not. The precise order of those high draft picks matters a great deal, as does good judgment. Consider what happened in 2009. That draft class was similarly stocked at point guard, with as many as five (depending on how you define them) taken with the first 10 picks that June.

The Minnesota Timberwolves used the fifth and sixth picks to select two point guards Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn. Since that draft, the Timberwolves have never made the playoffs. With the seventh pick, the Warriors selected what ostensibly should have been the fourth-best point guard, Stephen Curry.

They have had considerably superior results.

A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2017, on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: N.B.A. Teams Covet a New Breed of Big Man.

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Creationist views declining, but many also think God had hand in evolution Wichita Eagle Views about evolution are changing, but a new Gallup poll shows that Americans haven't given up a belief in divine intervention in science. The belief in young-Earth creationism that God created mankind in its present form within the past 10,000 ...

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Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency's Managing Editor Carolyn Petit have been compiling data on the gender of protagonists in video games announced at E3 since 2015, which plenty of people in the industry dubbed the "year of the woman." Sarkeesian and Petit weren't convinced, so they decided to dive into the actual numbers and break down the number of games announced at E3 that actually starred female characters.

"There was this sense in the air of, things are changing and there are more games starring women announced, etcetera, etcetera," Sarkeesian said. "But we were like, OK, but we might be getting ahead of ourselves. So we just started counting. And we came up with numbers and we decided to track them over the years, which would create a really interesting data set moving forward in terms of judging how the industry presents itself and how it's changing over time."

As it turned out, at E3 2015, just 9 percent of new games starred women, while 32 percent had men in the leading role. In 2016, the gap grew -- only 3 percent of newly revealed games featured female protagonists, while 41 percent starred men. This escalation made Sarkeesian and Petit nervous about the figures this year, but things are actually closer to 2015 -- the so-called "year of the woman" -- than 2016.

"The important thing, I think, is that we don't rest on our laurels," Petit said. "We don't say, 'Oh, hey, equality achieved!' or whatever when, actually, the reality is that there's still a lot of work to be done. These trends are encouraging and great, but they're not, hopefully, the end of anything."

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