I date my break [from communism] from a very casual happening. . . . My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. . . . My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear — those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.’ Witness Whittaker Chambers

The mitochondria inner membrane has an army of protein machines that carry out the mitochondria’s job of constructing ATP molecules—the all-purpose cellular energy source. These proteins are specialized for specific tasks and are precisely arranged in the inner membrane environment. As one writer explained:  Read more

In the News post here we discover: This rule [each side gets its say] presents a challenge when one side of a controversy obviously lacks merit. The notion that chance and physical law can turn dirt into Chopin in 10^17 seconds obviously lacks merit. What about that? …treating climate change naysayers as cranks. But wait a minute. In the 1970s the scientific consensus was that the earth was entering a dangerous cooling period, possibly even a new ice age (caused by human pollution of course, with industrial particulates in the atmosphere reflecting sunlight), and it was even proposed that soot should be strewn on glaciers to help them melt and avoid the impending global-cooling calamity. Oops. Now the planet is Read More ›

Esteemed biologist Massimo Pigliucci offers a goldmine of quotable morsels: I simply don’t buy Dan Dennett’s idea that “Darwinism” (which of course is not a scientific theory, but an ideological-philosophical position) is a “universal acid,” …. Theodozius Dobzhansky, one of the fathers of modern evolutionary theory, who famously said that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution (the phrase is, in fact, approvingly quoted by Pross). Problem is, Dobzhansky was writing for an audience of science high school teachers, and his statement is patently wrong, as an even cursory examination of the history of biology makes clear. For instance, developmental biologists had done a lot of highly fruitful research throughout the 19th and 20th centuries even Read More ›