2012

We are constantly reminded that our intellectual betters overwhelmingly believe the Darwinist party line and undoubtedly that is true.  So what?  It was not that many years ago that all fashionable intellectuals believed another party line, which, in retrospect, only a fool would believe.  I thought about that as I read this (which also might account for the sometimes hysterical tone our opponents take): [The anti-anticommunists at Time magazine] believed a number of things. Foremost among them was the belief that peace could be preserved, World War III could be averted only by conciliating the Soviet Union. For this no price was too high to pay, including the price of willful historical self-delusion. Yet they had just fiercely supported a war [i.e., Read More ›

This is troubling to watch. Maybe it’s because the misrepresentations are in a living color video rather than the usual black-and-white text. Maybe it’s because Schloss is so well-spoken. Maybe it’s because it is a friend doing the misrepresenting. Maybe it is because it was probably something like this that Schloss presented last week in NYC, which Christianity Today referred to as “elegant” and what no doubt so impressed the largely non scientific crowd, save NT Wright hopefully. At the [0.34] mark the Professor and Chair of Biology at Westmont College explains:  Read more

A few days back, Dr Hunter highlighted here and at his own blog, a suggestion in PLoS that CaMKII-MT “bytes” are used in neurons to store six-bit coded information. (BTW, “byte” can be used for short bit arrays, not just eight-bit ones.) Let’s look at an illustration:   Clipping the Author Summary of the PLoS article by Travis J. A. Craddock1*, Jack A. Tuszynski1,2, & Stuart Hameroff: Memory is understood as strengthened synaptic connections among neurons. Paradoxically components of synaptic membranes are relatively short-lived and frequently re-cycled while memories can last a lifetime. This suggests synaptic information is encoded at a deeper, finer-grained scale of molecular information within post-synaptic neurons. Long-term memory requires genetic expression, protein synthesis, and delivery of Read More ›

Today’s evolution sermon comes from Lawrence Krauss, Director of the Origins Project at the tax-payer funded Arizona State University. In his Op-Ed piece which, the LA Times saw fit to print, Krauss begins with the usual anti-realism. Yes the world looks designed, but don’t be fooled:  Read more

That new UCSF paper is yet another example of the intricacies of DNA and gives us a teaching moment on how science can be done in a completely different way. Consider the blood protein hemoglobin found throughout the vertebrate species, illustrated here to show its four protein chains and their many helices. Each of the four chains has about 140 amino acids which are glued together in a long line, and then fold up into a glob. Those 140 amino acids are encoded by the corresponding DNA gene. In the gene, there are three DNA nucleotides for each amino acid. For instance, the figure below shows a short segment of a human and a horse gene, both of which code for a Read More ›