The latest attack in the never ending Texas textbook battle comes from evolutionist James Shapiro, University of Chicago professor, who states that he was falsely misquoted by certain members of the Texas state’s school board textbook review committee. Shapiro explains that he was outraged by a “completely false statement” and that he was “the victim of skillful misquoting for an anti-science purpose.” Indeed, according to Shapiro these opponents of evolution are “trying to confuse and mislead the public,” and are “against freedom of speech in scientific research, honesty in public decision-making, and suitable modern education for the students of Texas.” Shapiro concludes that all of this “sounds counter to the ideals of liberty, democracy and opportunity on which this nation was founded.” Read More ›

The problem of homochirality in biology does not have prominence in ID literature because it is unglamorous and there is hesitation to endorse homochirality as evidence of design because of the fear there will be some future discovery in chemistry that will over turn it. But the sword of uncertainty cuts both ways, and if uncertainty casts doubt on ID, it casts even more doubt on mindless evolutionism. Right now the problem of homochirality is firmly an argument in favor of ID, and future discoveries could favor the ID case even more not less, so let us not be too quick to de-emphasize the homochirality argument. Life is made of chiral molecules. A chiral molecule can be left-handed or right-handed. Read More ›

Earlier this year the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to three scientists for their work on how tiny vesicles shuttle the right chemicals to the right location at the right time within the cell. It is an elaborate traffic control system at the molecular level. Here is how the Associated Press described the work:  Read more

Thomas Huxley would be pleased withnew research out of the University of Florida indicating the slender-snouted crocodile actually comprises two different species. After all, it was that “long succession of different species of crocodiles” which, Darwin’s bulldog argued, would not have been created:  Read more

The reason the 500-fair-coins-heads illustration has been devastating to the materialists is due to a fact that has somewhat escaped everyone until Neil Rickert (perhaps unwittingly) pointed it out: the sides of the coin are distinguishable, but not in a way that biases the probability. This fact guarantees that chance cannot construct recognizable symbolic organization, it can only destroy it. In essence, the world of symbols (heads and tails) has become somewhat decoupled from the world of materials, and the world of specialized information (in the form of recognizable configurations like all-coins-heads) can thus transcend material causes. If the coins were perfectly symmetric and did not have any markings to let you know one side was distinguishable from the other, Read More ›

The philosopher William Lane Craig has written a short piece titled, A Christmas gift for atheists — five reasons why God exists over on the Fox News Website. Evolutionary biologist P.Z. Myers has written a humorous response on his Pharyngula blog, titled, But Mr Craig…! This post is a short counter-response to Professor Myers. As a matter of politeness, I normally use titles when addressing or referring to other people in my posts, but since I see that P.Z. Myers has chosen to address Professor Craig as “Mr Craig,” I have decided to dispense with formalities in my reply. William Lane Craig’s original article contained five very brief arguments for the existence of God, to each of which P.Z. Myers Read More ›

In a comment to a previous post, Jaceli123 writes: Now I have a question for you guys is DNA simply just chemical reactions between DNA and RNA, does it really contain information or is it just the result of a chemical potential? From this video: [link] Curious, I followed the link and found this video that was posted on Youtube by someone who calls himself “bdw5000” on July 24, 2013. Someone put a lot of time and effort into this video and its animations, and it makes some, shall we say, interesting claims. Some excerpts: 0:53 The ancestral molecule to RNA just behaved in a certain way for chemical reasons. 1:09 It is the molecular structure that mattered. Specifically, what Read More ›

Earlier this year in the case of Ass’n for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 133 S. Ct. 2107, 2111 (2013), the court wrote: Genes form the basis for hereditary traits in living organisms. See generally Association for Molecular Pathology v. United States Patent and Trademark Office, 702 F. Supp. 2d 181, 192-211 (SDNY 2010). The human genome consists of approximately 22,000 genes packed into 23 pairs of chromosomes. Each gene is encoded as DNA, which takes the shape of the familiar “double helix” that Doctors James Watson and Francis Crick first described in 1953. Each “cross-bar” in the DNA helix consists of two chemically joined nucleotides. The possible nucleotides are adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G), Read More ›