2011
New Research Continues to Point to a Super Progenitor
Everyone knows biology is full of complicated designs, but evolutionists think it arose spontaneously, as a result of the play of natural laws. In other words, it happened to happen. First there was nothing, then there was something, then that something became very complicated. All this just happened to happen. Read more
Messages from the very beginning of the universe about how it began
The Book is not the Ink and Hardware is not the Software
In this post the UD news desk quotes OOL researcher Jack Szostak: “We think that a primitive cell has to have two parts. First, it has to have a cell membrane that can be a boundary between itself and the rest of the earth. And then there has to be some genetic material, which has to perform some function that’s useful for the cell and get replicated to be inherited.” He believes they have the “membrane” part figured out, which leads him to suggest that they are about “halfway” to figuring it all out. Really? Consider a computer in a paper sack. If I figure out how to make a paper sack does that mean I am “halfway” toward Read More ›
Why atheists will doubt Darwin ahead of Biologos and American Scientific Affiliation
After big faster-than-light neutrino meet: “For the moment, there is no explanation that works”
Nobelist Jack Szostak on origin of life research: “We’re halfway there”
Comments on arsenic origin of life: “Anaerobes are much more difficult to grow than people realize”
Human genes use a dual strategy of “prevention and cure” to deal with a type of error
From “Preventing Dangerous Nonsense in Human Gene Expression” (ScienceDaily, Oct. 14, 2011), we learn: Human genes are preferentially encoded by codons that are less likely to be mistranscribed (or “misread”) into a STOP codon. This finding by Brian Cusack and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin and the CNRS in Lyon and Paris is published in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics. In biological systems, mistakes are made because the cellular machinery is complex and error prone. The errors made in copying DNA for transmission to offspring (genetic mutations) have so far been the primary focus of molecular evolution. But errors are much more frequent in the day-to-day task of gene expression, for example in the Read More ›
On the complexity of the cell
Interested in science fiction?: Call for papers at conference where Paul Davies will give plenary
Microbes help panda, descended from carnivores, stay a herbivore?
Origin of life: Ancient mud volcanoes promising early habitat?
Remember NASA’s arsenic origin of life study?
Two-Fold Fragile Codons and Amino Acids
If you read Brian Cusack’s paper (discussed here) you may have wondered why the evolutionists did not distinguish the two-fold fragile codons from the single-fold fragile codons. Perhaps I missed it, but I saw no mention of this distinction. The evolutionists define as “fragile” those codons that can be changed into a STOP codon with a single substitution. They are shaded gray in the table below (from Figure 1 in the paper): Read more