For some months now, I have been having a behind the scenes correspondence with a regular viewer of UD, whom we shall call EP. He works with industrial robots, and has been fascinated by the way the ribosome works as a nano-scale automated machine cell. Accordingly, a process sequence diagram (‘map”) has been developed, based on accessible descriptions of the ribosome in action. The result is a fascinating look at the ribosome as industrial robot work-cell. (The tRNA’s are molecular scale position-arm devices with a universal CCA coupler — yup, the AA bond is universal, it is the loading enzyme that sets up which tRNA gets what AA — to load and click AAs to a protein chain.) So, enough Read More ›

As we saw here, here, here and here Randy Moore and Sehoya Cotner, in their new book Arguing for Evolution: An Encyclopedia for Understanding Science, list altruism as an evidence for evolution, make religious arguments that prove evolution, say that evolution predicts “There will be anatomical similarities among related organisms,” begin the book with a bogus prediction claim, define science as strictly naturalistic and say it would be perverse not to accept the scientific fact of evolution.  Read more

I have just been watching a video compilation by Dr Jonathan T. Pararajasingham, a British neurosurgeon, entitled, 30 Renowned Writers Speaking about God, posted by Professor Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution is True. The video features a pretty impressive array of writers – including Arthur C. Clarke, Nadine Gordimer, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Douglas Adams, Germaine Greer, Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Harold Pinter and (of course) the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens – who are either atheists or agnostics. These are people who craft words for a living and who know how to argue a case, so I was expecting to hear at least one really good argument for atheism. Suffice it to say Read More ›

A few months back, we looked at the story of Wallace’s views here and again here. Now, thanks to an online premiere, here’s the movie (HT: ENV): [youtube hxvAVln6HLI] Relax, enjoy, and discuss. END _____________ F/N: to understand Wallace, have a read of his major book published in 1910 ff, The World of Life (cf. here, here, here and here at Amazon — republished, of course, by Forgotten Books).