Textbooks often don’t discuss extinction – the death of all members of a species – in any detail. No surprise there, it’s a frustrating and depressing topic. Frustrating because museums would bid billions to bring back a live tyrannosaur. And depressing because good answers are often not available. So discussion can lurch dangerously into the realm of folklore. When that happens, folklore wins hands down over fact. The extinction of the entire superorder of dinosaurs [1] which marked the close of the Cretaceous era – perhaps mainly due to an asteroid hit – has become a pop culture icon that now supports a variety of views and causes. Pop culture need not – and does not – address the real Read More ›

Experimenters have recently found that genes–whereby they mean particular sequences of DNA–can “find” one another without the intervention of proteins or other factors. It appears to be strictly an effect caused by electrical charges along the DNA strand; the longer the ‘gene’ (that is, sequence length), the greater theapparent ease in ‘finding’ one another. The experimenters feel that this finding is a help for figuring out what happens during homologous recombination.

Here’s part of what they say: The researchers observed the behaviour of fluorescently tagged DNA molecules in a pure solution. They found that DNA molecules with identical patterns of chemical bases were approximately twice as likely to gather together than DNA molecules with different sequences.

Professor Alexei Kornyshev from Imperial College London, one of the study’s authors, explains the significance of the team’s results: ‘Seeing these identical DNA molecules seeking each other out in a crowd, without any external help, is very exciting indeed. This could provide a driving force for similar genes to begin the complex process of recombination without the help of proteins or other biological factors. . . .’

The article from ScienceDaily is here.

I have an OOL question: This study strongly suggests that similar DNA sequences have a preferential attraction for one another. And the longer the similar sequence, the greater the attraction. If that is the case, then, if a particular ‘gene’ began to ‘replicate’, wouldn’t the replicated ‘genes’ congeal together?

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Thank you for your support! Dembski’s copyright infringement charges have been dismissed and, after all the shenanigans of you ID crazies, I am back in North Dakota [Details Here].

I now recognize we must all continue to contribute to the evolutionary process. Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to test the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To accomplish this, I subject M&M’s to repeated trials of survival of the fittest. Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, Read More ›

“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD”

Dr. Caroline Crocker Named First Executive Director of the IDEA Center

Dr. Caroline Crocker Named First Executive Director of the IDEA Center – January 15, 2008
Dr. Caroline Crocker, a biologist featured in the upcoming documentary film Expelled, has been hired as the Executive Director of the IDEA Center. A trained biologist who loves working with students, she received her Ph.D. in immunopharmacology from Southampton University, U.K., and an M.Sc. in medical microbiology from Birmingham University, U.K.

Dr. Crocker taught various biology courses for five years at George Mason University (GMU) and Northern Virginia Community College. While at GMU, she won three grants, including one from the Center for Teaching Excellence, and she received commendations for high student ratings and wrote a cell biology workbook. Nonetheless, after she mentioned intelligent design in a class at George Mason in 2004, she was subsequently banned from lecturing. Her story is told as part of the upcoming documentary film about persecuted pro-ID scientists, Expelled, featuring Ben Stein.

“Having personally witnessed the hostility in the academy towards intelligent design, I am excited about helping students in IDEA Clubs to investigate intelligent design in an intellectually honest manner,” said Dr. Crocker.
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“The temperature in Harbin reaches forty below zero, both Fahrenheit and Celsius, and stays below freezing nearly half the year. The city is actually further north than notoriously cold Vladivostok, Russia, just 300 miles away. So what does one do here every winter? Hold an outdoor festival, of course! Rather than suffer the cold, the residents of Harbin celebrate it, with an annual festival of snow and ice sculptures and competitions.” So says a news report. But of course the images below from this so-called Harbin “snow festival” depict merely the detritus of a snow storm. Snow festival indeed! When are people going to get over their teleocentrism and stop trying to see everything as designed?

And don’t use Google, you cheaters! That’s not guessing. Both passages — arguments about possible modes of evolutionary change — were written by the same scientist. He is offering his own view, not expounding that of others. Sample 1: In real life, major evolutionary innovations perhaps had to wait for radical mutational ‘inventions’ that fundamentally altered the basic body plan. Once such a radical change in body plan had arisen, a whole new rush of evolution became possible. An example might be the invention of segmentation early in the ancestral history of annelid worms, arthropods and vertebrates. Sample 2: My suggestion is that Scyllarus may actually present an example in the wild of a homeotic mutation, analogous to antennapedia in Read More ›

Click here to sign yourself up as a volunteer to help promote the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed Not sure? Watch the movie trailer below and then decide if you should help get the message out. P.S. This YouTube trailer is a little dated. The movie is slated for April release in all major movie theaters. You can see a higher resolution version of this trailer and others by clicking here.

DEBATE: Atheism vs. Theism and The Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design Sunday, January 27th at 4pm PST, Stanford University WHAT: Stanford University will play host to a debate entitled Atheism vs. Theism & the Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design. This debate is being organized by student groups at Stanford: IDEA Club at Stanford,The Stanford Review and Vox Clara: A Journal of Christian Thought at Stanford. WHO: Chirstopher Hitchens vs. Jay Richards Christopher Hitchens — Contributing editor to Vanity Fair; visiting professor, New School in New York; author of God is Not Great. VS. Jay W. Richards — Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute; co-author, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place Read More ›

The mind does not exist – or anyway it cannot cause anything to happen, right? Well, it would be very convenient for materialists if that could be shown to be true.

Here, commenter Magnan writes, in response to my recent post on dealing with Darwinist hate,

Such a deep dynamic could explain, for instance, why parapsychology is nearly as implacably opposed today as in the early days of psychical research, 1870-1900 (at least this is my impression).

Well they have certainly tried to implacably oppose it.

But actually, Magnan, things are changing a little bit – though it took way too long, to be sure. Professional unidirectional skeptics are giving up on trying to disprove the idea that there are no paranormal phenomena.

It’s about time. History lesson: Read More ›

Excerpt: When a scrap of evidence supports any one of the competing theories of the origin of life, doubts about that theory itself are often not discussed in the article. That practice distorts the overall picture. To see why, suppose for example that the police are trying to determine which of three suspects stole a car. None of the suspects is considered a truthful witness, so asking for a confession isn’t an option. We hear about – and focus on – information that apparently places one of them at the scene of the crime. However, what if – on the balance of the evidence – the police believe that that particular suspect was out of the country at the time? Read More ›

Remember the dark days of vestigal organs? You know, back when there was a list of 180 vestigal organs? Or remember the days of junk DNA – when repetitive DNA, large regions of non-protein-coding DNA, and all sorts of mobile DNA were assumed to be non-functional simply because the investigators had assumed Darwinism rather than design?

And there’s lots more DNA that doesn’t even deserve the name pseudogene. It, too, is derived by duplication, but not duplication of functional genes. It consists of multiple copies of junk, “tandem repeats”, and other nonsense which may be useful for forensic detectives but which doesn’t seem to be used in the body itself. Once again, creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA. … Can we measure the information capacity of that portion of the genome which is actually used? We can at least estimate it. In the case of the human genome it is about 2% – considerably less than the proportion of my hard disc that I have ever used since I bought it. [Copied from Research Intelligent Design which cites: Richard Dawkins (1998) “The Information Challenge.” the skeptic. 18,4. Autumn 1998.]

Well, it seems that those people who “spent earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA” have been the real winners in the past (and likely upcoming) decade of genome research.

In any case, it seems despite the repeatedly failed efforts to assign vestigality to a range of structures, some people keep pursuing the case.

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I did a local radio show this morning, on which perceptive host Robert White asked me how I cope with hostility in connection with The Spiritual Brain and other books – trolls, votebots, idle anonymous threats, and such.

I think I rather surprised him by pointing out that I didn’t really care much.

Essentially, I can’t do anything about the fact that science, which was supposed to dramatically confirm atheism (remember when?), hasn’t done anything of the kind. Read More ›

Now it’s personal. More.

Because of a prediction, a very strong prediction, I made on another thread, I’ve had reason to look into just what has been happening to Darwin’s finches way off on the Galapagos Islands.

Here is a paper published last year in Science Magazine by the Grants, experts in Darwin’s finches. I looked at their paper, looked at their data, and have come to the conclusion that what I predicted as the ultimate explanation to changed beak sizes is the more reasonable interpretation of the data they present.

But before we even get to the data, here’s a remark from a National Geographic website review of the article that supports my basic position:

“ Researchers from New Jersey’s Princeton University have observed a species of finch in Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands that evolved to have a smaller beak within a mere two decades.
Surprisingly, most of the shift happened within just one generation, the scientists say.”

The shift happened in ONE year? What kind of population genetics are at play here?

Well, to the data:
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