Month: February 2010

The supposed conflict between science and religion is not only bad history, it also goes unsupported by on-going polls of the religious beliefs of scientists. As the story goes, empirical science uncovers inconvenient truths that religious people resist in a losing battle. But if there was a conflict between science and religion, and furthermore if […]

Yours? His? Theirs? Anyone’s? I’ve known Todd since we were graduate students in the 1990s, and have a hardbound copy of his UVA dissertation (Theory and Application of Protein Homology, 1999) sitting on my office shelves. Todd knows more evolutionary biology than many evolutionary biologists. Yet, perversely, or inexplicably, in the eyes of his critics […]

It is well known that Darwin speculated on what might happen in “some warm little pond”. But it was not until 1929 that J.B.S. Haldane developed a testable hypothesis involving a “prebiotic broth, or primordial soup”. He proposed that organic compounds were made when methane, ammonia and water reacted as a result of energy supplied […]

Proteins are the cell’s special machines that perform a variety of tasks. Some of them help to regulate the production levels of other proteins by influencing the transcribing of the DNA genes that code for the proteins. New research is investigating how one such transcription factor, GATA-1, works and, as usual, it isn’t simple.  Read […]

Santa Fe Institute economist Brian Arthur believed that much of what we see in global economic patterns can be explained by a process of ‘locking in’ of historical events (1).  Notably, the success of the QWERTY keyboard or the increased sales of the VHS video system over its arch rival Beta Max did not depend […]

Certain species of garter snake are remarkably immune to tetrodotoxin, a deadly compound that paralyzes and kills. That’s fortunate because the newt, one of the snake’s favorite meals, is loaded with the toxin. The resistance of these lucky snakes is due to tiny adjustments in a protein segment which otherwise is highly conserved across a […]

I’ve been trying to obtain a full transcript of last year’s Vatican conference on evolution, if only to confirm my fears that it had been hijacked by the ‘Darwin was right but that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist’ brigade. So far I have had to make do with a summary of the papers presented […]

The origin of complexity is a key problem in evolutionary theory. How did the blind process construct so many precise and elaborate biological designs? The evolutionary expectation has always been that Darwin’s process of natural selection is the driving force that creates everything from biosonar to the brain. But new research indicates that much of […]