Ultimate Questions

“Scientific knowledge is a malleable body of information that changes over time, as new tools are applied and new facts are integrated,” says Bryce Paschal, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at U.Va. “Good science identifies weak links in what is known. Science should acknowledge the shortcomings in evolutionary science, especially as regards what is known about transition species.”

An expert on nuclear transport and cell signaling, Paschal might seem an unlikely candidate to serve as faculty adviser for the IDEA Club….

“Regardless of the number of simple organisms on this earth, and regardless of how many simple molecules are found on other planets, the notion that we evolved by random mutation from a pool of amino acids requires more ‘faith’ than I am capable of mustering,” he says.

Much to the IDEA club’s relief, Bryce Paschal was tenured a few months before becoming the IDEA faculty adviser. I can tell you from first hand knowledge that some individuals who would otherwise be willing to be IDEA advisers declined to do so because of job risk. I’m very grateful for Dr. Paschal’s willingness to be an IDEA adviser.

(thanks to Russ for alerting me to the article)

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In an earlier post (go here), I remarked: Have a listen to the following segment from Dawkins’s documentary against religion (”The Root of All Evil?”): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUy-Uq3WuhA Who is the rapper that did this rendition of the Lord’s Prayer? The first comment on this previous post implicated Al Nezy, “Da PreachaMan,” as the rapper responsible for it. I’ve now been in touch with the producer, and that’s not the case. For Al Nezy’s version of “Our Father,” posted with permission from his producer, go here: https://uncommondescent.com/audios/OurFather.mp3. So the question remains, who did the version of the Lord’s Prayer in Dawkins’s documentary?

Early nonsense: mRNA decay solves a translational problem Nadia Amrani, Matthew S. Sachs and Allan Jacobson http://www.nature.com/nrm/journal/v7/n6/pdf/nrm1942.pdf [Here are some excerpts:] The nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) pathway ensures that incomplete messenger RNAs that harbour premature termination, or nonsense (non Amino acid coding), codons are targeted for rapid degradation. New insights into the process of NMD have provided unexpected glimpses of the complexity of translation termination. Gene expression is highly accurate and rarely generates defective proteins. Several mechanisms ensure this fidelity, including specialized surveillance pathways that rid the cell of mRNAs that are incompletely processed or that lack complete open reading frames. Given the overall congruity of gene expression mechanisms from yeast to humans, and the obvious need for quality control, Read More ›

It seems even the New England Journal of Medicine is unable to honestly charactarize what ID is. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/354/21/2277

Here’s the transcript for the previous posting. It’s comforting to know that popular culture is in such capable hands. A new Zogby international poll shows that 69% of Americans support public school teachers presenting the theory of evolution as well as theories that are in opposition. If only there were any that didn’t have God somewhere in them. The theory of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin in his groundbreaking work “Origin of Species” published in 1859 has been championed by scientists ever since. And like evolution itself, the science of it, the gathering evidence and data is a ceaseless pursuit of scientists all over the world. In the theory of evolution there is no talk of God, and no Bibles Read More ›

Here you can listen to an entertaining anti-ID rant made by Henry Rollins. As you listen to it, remember that Rollins and others like him are only interested in defending the integrity of science. 😆 (HT: Krauze of Telic Thoughts) [Somebody please do a transcript of this and post it here. This is too good not to put into print. –WmAD]

Here is the transcript of the May 11 speech in New York by Patricia Princehouse, as she accepted a Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award from the Playboy Foundation for her efforts to preserve science education in Ohio public schools. Note that Eugenie Scott received this same award in 1999 (go here).

SCIENCE AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT
Patricia J. Princehouse

When I was a grad student, I had romantic notions about how knowledge was gained, how science was done and how democracy worked. Little by little, those notions have changed. Read More ›

Interesting how pro-science has come to mean anti-ID. It reminds me of how pro-choice has come to mean anti-life.

It’s going to become increasingly difficult in coming days for evolutionists to maintain the charade that they are “pro-science” — after all, pro-science means following the evidence wherever it leads.

By the way, I now own the domain names pro-science.com and evidencefreescience.com.

Key Quote: “Many people, including science promoters like Dr. Eugenie Scott, have stated that they have no problem with the Gates Foundation supporting Cascadia, because the money is not going to Intelligent Design research. I, however, disagree. By supporting any aspect of the Discovery Institute, the Gates Foundation is condoning the think tank as a whole.”

Source: http://www.statenews.com/op_article.phtml?pk=36292

Donate responsibly, check pro-science stance first
Megan Mccullen, anthropology student, mccull58@msu.edu

When Microsoft Corp. became a multi-billion dollar enterprise, I used to talk about how much I despised Bill Gates.

The monopolistic control he had on the computer market seemed, to me, to be focused on personal wealth for himself — plus I’m an avid Macintosh fan, so I’m biased.

But as the years went on, I changed my views.

With the formation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill started sharing the wealth. And not only did he share it, he shared lots, and he supported causes I think are really important.

Propelling the future of science, the foundation has supported research and programs to improve global health, increase educational opportunities for inner-city children and improved multiple aspects of life in their own community around Seattle through multiple avenues.

Gates is a supporter of science. Indeed, he might be considered the iconoclastic image of “the geek” — if anyone can see the positive outcomes of scientific research, he can.

That’s why I was so disturbed to find out that he has donated money to the Discovery Institute, the leading organization to support the promotion of Intelligent Design. Read More ›

Yes, it tastes like real science, but it has zero calories and cannot sustain life. [From a colleague:] Why are scientists admitting that current origin of life chemistry is vexing or even dead? Why else does it need “new life breathed into it”? “One of the most vexing questions facing biologists is how life on Earth first emerged. Now, research on a methane-producing microbe has led to a novel theory that could breathe new life into the field and help two opposing theories find common ground.” Quoted here: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/519/2 What are the other vexing questions facing biologists that we are led to believe have already been solved? How about the origin of the information in the first cell? How about Read More ›

Heal Thyself: Systems Biology Model Reveals How Cells Avoid Becoming Cancerous
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060521103656.htm

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego and three other institutions have described for the first time a web of inter-related responses that cells use to avoid becoming diseased or cancerous after being exposed to a powerful chemical mutagen. The group led by UCSD bioengineering professor Trey Ideker describe in the May 19 issue of Science an elaborate system of gene control that was triggered by chemical damage to DNA. The information could be used eventually to develop drugs to boost DNA repair and possibly treat xeroderma pigmentosum, a disease in which the body’s ability to repair DNA damage caused by ultraviolet light is disabled, Werner syndrome, a premature aging disorder, as well as certain immune deficiencies and other degenerative diseases.

“Response to DNA damage is a basic physiological process that is important to coping with environmental toxins and a number of congenital diseases,” said Ideker, the senior author of the paper. “Over the past several decades, scientists have discovered many parts of the DNA-damage-repair machinery, but what has been missing until now is a ‘systems biology’ approach that explains how all the parts function together to enable a cell to repair its DNA while under routine assault.”

UCSD post-doctoral fellow Christopher T. Workman, Ph.D. candidate Craig Mak, and technicians Scott McCuine and Maya Agarwal analyzed the effect of exposure of yeast cells to MMS (methyl-methanesulfonate), a chemical known to cause DNA damage in a manner similar to that of certain mutagens in tobacco smoke. The alkylation injury caused by MMS results in small kinks in the otherwise smoothly curving double helix of DNA. Cells rapidly identify the damage, stop dividing, excise the damaged DNA, and use several alternate methods to substitute a clean copy of genetic material.

“It’s almost as if cells have something akin to a computer program that becomes activated by DNA damage, and that program enables the cells to respond very quickly,” said Mak. “And this program is easily recognizable as operating in everything from yeasts to humans and mice to fruit flies.” Read More ›

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. –Mahatma Gandhi Exam Question: Which stage are we in with the ID debate and what will victory look like? Extra Credit: How long till victory? Justify your answer.

In his 139-page decision, Judge Jones revealed his deficiencies in science. In his commencement address described below, he reveals his deficiencies in history. Note the passage in bold. Who among our nation’s founding fathers believed that the essence of religion is an Enlightenment rationalism that eschews design? None of them. Even Jefferson would be on the ID side in the current debate (inalienable rights conferred on us by a creator is not the language of the French philosophes).

Dover judge addresses graduates
Jones said founders saw religion coming through inquiry.

May 22, 2006 — CARLISLE – A federal judge who outlawed the teaching of “intelligent design” in Dover science classes told graduates at Dickinson College that the nation’s founders saw religion as the result of personal inquiry, not church doctrine.

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones gave the commencement address Sunday to 500 graduates at Dickinson College, his alma mater. Jones received national attention during a 2005 trial on whether intelligent design should be taught to students in Dover Area School District.

“The founders believed that true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained in a Bible, but was to be found through free, rational inquiry,” said Jones, who was thrust into the national spotlight by last year’s court fight over the teaching of evolution in the Dover school district.

The founding fathers – from school namesake John Dickinson to Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson – were products of the Enlightenment, Jones said.

“They possessed a great confidence in an individual’s ability to understand the world and its most fundamental laws through the exercise of his or her reason,” he said.

“This core set of beliefs led the founders, who constantly engaged and questioned things, to secure their idea of religious freedom by barring any alliance between church and state.”

Following a six-week trial in 2005 that explored concepts in biology, theology and paleontology, Jones concluded that the Dover Area School Board had violated the separation between church and state. Read More ›

Have a listen to the following segment from Dawkins’s documentary against religion (“The Root of All Evil?”): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUy-Uq3WuhA Who is the rapper that did this rendition of the Lord’s Prayer? For your further edification, here is another bit of vintage Dawkins from that documentary: The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic cleanser, urging His people on to acts of genocide… Now, of course, the good Christians will be protesting. Everyone knows the Old Testament is deeply unpleasant. Jesus, they claim, undoes the damage, and makes it all right. Yes, there is no doubt that from a moral point Read More ›

Researcher Brings Intelligent Design to Mind
By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

When the leaders of the intelligent-design movement gathered for a secret conference this month in California, most of the talks focused on their standard concerns: biochemistry, evolution, and the origin of the universe. But they also heard from an ally in the neurosciences, who sees his own field as fertile ground for the future of ID.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a research professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, presented a paper titled “Intelligence Is an Irreducible Aspect of Nature” at the conference, held at Biola University, which describes itself as “a global center for Christian thought.” Dr. Schwartz argued that his studies of the mind provide support for the idea that consciousness exists in nature, separate from human brains.

Organizers of the conference, called “Research and Progress on Intelligent Design,” had hoped to keep its existence out of public view. The university held a well-advertised public debate about ID that same week, but Michael N. Keas, a professor of history and the philosophy of science at Biola who coordinated the private meeting, would not confirm that it was happening when contacted by a reporter, nor would he discuss who was attending. “It’s our policy just to keep the names out of the public limelight, since this kind of research tends to draw more attention than many other science topics,” he says.

Intelligent-design proponents believe that an intelligent force rather than natural selection created the diversity of life seen today, a proposition that has sparked conflicts over public-school curricula across the nation. It has also led to debates in higher education. Dr. Schwartz says the other participants at the conference were afraid of losing their jobs if their names were released, but he describes himself as “incendiary,” and discussed his talk in advance with The Chronicle.

Dr. Schwartz treats people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorders by teaching them to focus their attention away from their urges. He says the therapy can actually change people’s patterns of brain activity, an observation that shows that the mind can exert control over the brain, which challenges the material concept of the mind. His theory leads to the conclusion that consciousness exists separate from the human body, he says.

“You can’t get the intelligence out of nature,” says Dr. Schwartz. “Intelligence is an intrinsic part of nature.” Read More ›

How Does The Lowly Bacterium Sense Its Environment? Cornell Researchers Discover Lattice Of Supersensitive Receptors

When humans taste or smell, receptors unique to each nerve cell detect the chemical and send signals to the brain, where many cells process the message to understand what we are smelling or tasting. But a bacterium is just a single cell, and it must use many different receptors to sense and interpret everything around it.

Bacteria can sense in their environments changes in molecular concentrations as small as 0.1 percent, the equivalent of one drop diluted in a pool of a 1,000 drops. How do they do it?

New Cornell research, highlighted on the cover of the May issue of Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, reveals that receptors assemble into a kind of cooperative lattice on a bacterium’s surface to amplify infinitesimal changes in the environment and kick off processes that lead to specific responses within the cell.

“Bacteria sense a lot of different things. But assume it’s a sugar molecule that a bacterium needs as a nutrient — even a 0.1 percent change in concentration can be detected, and this sensitivity is maintained over five orders of magnitude in nutrient concentration,” said Brian Crane, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology and corresponding author of the paper. “Biologically, I know of no other system that is so sensitive over such a large range.” Read More ›