The (remade) video below contains the whole shameful story of the treatment my Applied Mathematics Letters paper has received from AML, Springer and The Mathematical Intelligencer. In this paper, and in my reply to Bob Lloyd’s Mathematical Intelligencer piece, whose primary target was this unpublished AML paper, I did not conclude that the second law […]
Month: March 2013
From SciTechDaily, “Study Describes a Biological Transistor for Computing Within Living Cells”
An interesting article in SciTechDaily reports on a new study describing “a biological transistor that is made from genetic material (DNA and RNA) in place of gears or electrons.” From the article, When Charles Babbage prototyped the first computing machine in the 19th century, he imagined using mechanical gears and latches to control information. ENIAC, the […]
Surprising Similarities between Genetic and Computer Codes
Here’s what we read in this PhysOrg blurb: It may seem logical, but the surprising part of this finding is how universal it is. “It is almost expected that the frequency of usage of any component is correlated with how many other components depend on it,” said Maslov. “But we found that we can determine […]
Optimus, replying to KN on ID as ideology, summarises the case for design in the natural world
The following reply by Optimus to KN in the TSZ thread, is far too good not to headline as an excellent summary of the case for design as a scientifically legitimate view, not mere “Creationism in a cheap tuxedo” ideology motivated and driven by anti-materialism and/or a right-wing, theocratic, culture war mentality commonly ascribed to […]
New PLoS Biology Study On Bacterial Chemoreceptors
An interesting new study has just been published in PLoS Biology on the subject of the remarkable signal transduction circuity responsible for the process of bacterial chemotaxis (a subject that has long fascinated me) and the switching of flagellar rotation direction. The paper is entitled “HAMP Domain Conformers That Propagate Opposite Signals in Bacterial Chemoreceptors,” and the […]
Game-Changing New Book by Stephen Meyer To Be Released in June
Over at Evolution News & Views, Stephen Meyer’s forthcoming game-changing new book on the Cambrian explosion and the origins of evolutionary novelty is announced. From the article, We’ve been keeping something from you, dear readers, but now it can be told. The evolution debate is about to undergo a paradigm shift. Darwin’s Origin of Species launched a revolution […]
Why Up When Down is Just As Good And A Lot Easier?
Phinehas asks Neil Rickert a fascinating question about the supposed direction of evolution. Neil says he will address it in a separate thread, and I started this one for that purpose. The rest of the post is Phenehas’ question to Neil: @Neil I also appreciate the professional tone. I am a skeptic regarding what evolution […]
The “Skeptical” Zone, Where You Can Be Skeptical of Anything (Except Currently Fashionable Intellectual Dogmas)
For those of you who do not know, some months ago Elizabeth Liddle started the website known as The Skeptical Zone (TSZ). The site has a sort of symbiotic relationship with UD, because many, if not most, of the posts there key off our posts here. Not only does TSZ have a name that invokes a skeptical […]
Acorn Worms from the Cambrian Explosion
Soft-bodied worms from the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia, Canada have been known for over 100 years. They are known by the name Spartobranchus tenuis and are considered one of the most abundant species in the Walcott Quarry community. However, only recently has a detailed examination of their characteristics been […]
The equations of evolution
For the Darwinists “evolution” by natural selection is what created all the species. Since they are used to say that evolution is well scientifically established as gravity, and given that Newton’s mechanics and Einstein’s relativity theory, which deal with gravitation, are plenty of mathematical equations whose calculations pretty well match with the data, one could […]
(More) Function, the evolution-free gospel of ENCODE
I need a picture of a small, hot-blooded mammal taunting an irritable dinosaur. An animation would be even better: the dinosaur would have a tic which makes him roar ‘IDiot’ constantly. Maybe make that several small mammals, becoming dozens and then hundreds. Singing something witty to the hamster dance. Or maybe not that last bit. […]
Plant’s Epigenome as Varied as Their Environments
You probably remember that an organism’s DNA is collectively referred to as the genome and that it contains genes that code for proteins. What you may not know is that the genome is tagged here and there with small molecules helping to determine which genes to express. These small molecules are collectively referred to as […]
EA nails it in a response to an insightful remark by KN (and one by Box): “the ability of a medium to store information is inversely proportional to the self-ordering tendency of the medium”
Here at UD, comment exchanges can be very enlightening. In this case, in the recent Quote of the Day thread, two of the best commenters at UD — and yes, I count KN as one of the best, never mind that we often differ — have gone at it (and, Box, your own thoughts — […]