It made me very happy at the end of Episodes 2 to 5 of the new BBC series ‘Evolution’ when the words “The Evidence” appeared as a title on the screen. As a scientist, this is what I had been waiting for. These sections obviously contain some of the strongest scientific content of the series. They show several scientists, mainly talking about transitional fossils. Despite this, there is still a tendency to assume, rather than defend, evolution. The fossils tend to be presented as filling in details of an evolutionary story that we know must have happened, rather than explicitly as evidence for evolution per se. The emphasis is overwhelmingly on pattern rather than process. It does not seem to have crossed the mind of the BBC team that some viewers might have their doubts about the validity of evolution as a complete explanation for how we got here, and might want evidence for that, rather than evidence for one particular pathway over another.
(more…)Tag: evolution
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Post 4: A critical review of BBC ‘Evolution’ with Chris Packham – LUCA (2)
In my previous post I sought to evaluate the scientific accuracy of the section about LUCA and the origin of life in the first episode of the new BBC series on Evolution. In this post I want to consider the how well the coverage of this topic serves the diverse audience of the BBC. I will argue that Chris Packham does not seem to: (1) engage with arguments that people who disagree with him might make, or (2) consider how different views about God could lead people to draw different conclusions from the evidence he presents.
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Post 3: A critical review of BBC ‘Evolution’ with Chris Packham – LUCA
In my previous blog, I argued that the new BBC Evolution series lets down its audience by presenting a simple dichotomy between God and evolution. The presenter, Chris Packham, makes statements of atheistic presuppositions as if they were the findings of modern science. I argued that the series becomes incoherent as he finds himself ascribing purpose and agency to a process that he also describes as “blind”.
Now I will examine in detail the descriptions and explanations of the origin of life and LUCA (“last universal common ancestor”) in Episode 1 of the series. As introduced in my first post, I will be asking: (1) How scientifically accurate is it? and (2) How well does it fulfil the public service obligations of the BBC? This post will address the first question.
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Post 2: A critical review of BBC ‘Evolution’ with Chris Packham – Atheism
As introduced in my previous post, I am reviewing the new BBC ‘Evolution’ series, focusing mainly on: (1) its scientific accuracy, and (2) how well it fulfils the public service obligations of the BBC.
As I watched the series, I was disappointed that Chris Packham’s opening words make clear that his aim goes far beyond simply conveying the current state of the scientific field of evolutionary biology. He immediately reaches beyond that, into the realm of philosophy and even theology.
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Post 1: A critical review of BBC ‘Evolution’ with Chris Packham – Introduction
‘Evolution’ is a new BBC Television series that is likely to influence the beliefs of millions of people around the world. It is presented by the British wildlife broadcaster and campaigner Chris Packham, filmed in seas, deserts and forests. Production values are high, and include 79 minutes of photoreal CGI, imagining what 20 different extinct creatures looked like. It started to air in Britain last week and will be shown globally; for example in the USA as a NOVA series on PBS.
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Natural selection in the wild
My research group documented an example of natural selection in the wild that was published in Science in June 2025. Here is a short video explaining our findings.
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Natural v. Artificial Selection
Last week I published a short article in Molecular Ecology on evidence for natural selection. It has proven difficult to show natural selection occurring in real time in wild populations. New approaches may help, and these are being pioneered in studies of Soay sheep. While commenting on these new approaches, I make several general points about the evidential case for natural selection.
Perhaps the more broadly interesting of these is a critique of the argument by analogy to natural selection. I suggest that, although widely used, the analogy has severe limitations. You can read this critique from the second to the seventh paragraph of my article, which is available open access here.
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A new talk on Darwin’s abominable mystery
Last evening I spoke for the Reading Geological Society on Darwin’s “abominable mystery”: the origin of flowering plants. My previous talks and publications (here and here) on this topic have focused mainly on the nineteenth century. In this new talk, I outlined twentieth century efforts to solve the mystery, which is something I continue to research.
Here is the talk:
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Adam and Eve: lessons learned
This blog was first posted at Nature Ecology & Evolution Community on 14 April 2018
Preliminary conclusions about the possibility of a short, sharp human bottleneck
A few months ago I asked this community if modern genome science had tested an “Adam and Eve” hypothesis that the human lineage has passed through short, sharp bottleneck of two at some point in its history. While this question may sound bizarre to some, it is one that is often asked by those with a background in Abrahamic faiths. My post has therefore been taken up and discussed extensively on the Skeptical Zone and Biologos Forum over the past few months, as well as by various blogs.
The claim that genomic methods have been used to test and reject an “Adam and Eve” hypothesis was central to the recent book Adam and the Genome. My post, which critiqued the arguments made in that book, has received a broad level of explicit or tacit agreement in subsequent online discussions. More adequate ways of testing the hypothesis have been suggested, and preliminary results have been obtained.
Here I will share some of the lessons I have learned from these discussions and from further reading. These are somewhat tentative, and not all are based on published peer reviewed literature. In a short blog I cannot do not do full justice to all the contributions that have been made by various scientists within the online fora, so as far as possible I will try to provide direct links to the contributions of others.
Here are the lessons I have learned so far:
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“Abundant bioactivity” of random DNA sequences?
This blog was written for the Nature Ecology and Evolution Community where it is posted here.
Probing the claims of a recent study
Readers of this blog will be aware of the recent Nature Ecology and Evolution paper entitled “Random sequences are an abundant source of bioactive RNAs or peptides”. Rafik Neme, the first author, posted an engaging Behind the Paper blog here.
On a quick look, I thought the study might be the beginnings of the solution to the mystery of orphan genes. (I posted about orphan genes here a few months ago.) The paper appears to demonstrate that an unexpectedly high percentage of random 150 base-pair DNA sequences are functional when expressed in E. coli. If true, this would suggest that de novo gene evolution could occur easily from junk DNA. (more…)
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The evolutionary mystery of orphan genes
Every newly sequenced genome contains genes with no traceable evolutionary descent – the ash genome was no exception
This week in Nature I and my co-authors published the ash tree genome. Within it we found 38,852 protein-coding genes. Of these one quarter (9,604) were unique to ash. On the basis of our research so far, I cannot suggest shared evolutionary ancestry for these genes with those in ten other plants we compared ash to: coffee, grape, loblolly pine, monkey flower, poplar, tomato, Amborella, Arabidopsis, barrel medic, and bladderwort. This is despite the fact that monkey flower and bladderwort are in the same taxonomic order (Lamiales) as ash. (more…)
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Phenotypic plasticity drives cichlid radiations?
At the Royal Society last month, I was listening to proponents of the “extended evolutionary synthesis” (EES). Patrick Goymer has blogged this meeting for Nature Ecology & Evolution, and tweets from it can be found on Storify. The debates have rumbled on in the back of my mind since, especially the contention that phenotypic plasticity is too neglected in evolutionary biology. I was therefore fascinated to stumble upon a paper in press at Molecular Ecology which suggests an impressive case of phenotypic plasticity accelerating evolution. Ralf Schneider and Axel Meyer argue that rapid, convergent radiations of cichlid fish in East African Lakes have been greatly facilitated by morphological plasticity, and its fixation as regulatory networks degenerate. “The cichlids of Africa’s lakes impress us mightily with what evolution can do in a short space of time”, wrote Richard Dawkins in The Greatest Show on Earth (Bantam Press, 2009). Will these radiations become textbook examples of the EES in action?
This blog was first posted here at Nature Ecology & Evolution Community on 8 December 2016