David Filvaroff was my torts professor. Professor Filvaroff was one of those teachers who drill a mile deep and an inch wide. He really did not care whether his students understood what lawyers call the “black letter” of tort law (e.g., the elements of a negligence cause of action are A, B, C . . . ). I suppose he assumed we would pick up the black letter on our own as the occasion arose. Instead, he wanted us to understand the philosophical underpinnings of tort law, which made his class terrible for bar exam prep (the bar exam emphasizes “black letter” law) but unparalleled for increasing our understanding of the general philosophy of law. Even after all these years Read More ›

Can designs be selectively neutral and even deleterious but still functional? Yes. As Allen Orr said: selection can wreck their exquisite engineering just as surely as it built it. An optic nerve with little or no eye is most assuredly not the sort of design one expects on an engineer’s blueprint, but we find it in Gammarus minus. Whether or not this kind of evolution is common, it betrays the fundamental error in thinking of selection as trading in the currency of Design. Actually, Orr made a mistake, selection can’t build exquisite engineering design, but it can wreck it! In a rare moment of honesty, from the most recent Wiki version of Genetic Redundancy, we read how genes can be Read More ›

α-D-glucopyranosyl-(1→4)-D-glucopyranose α-D-glucopyranosyl-(1→6)-D-glucopyranose This is your chance to talk Off Topic. Keep it civil please.

Here are the numbers for extremely or very confident in the following positions from March 2014 poll by AP GfK Darwinism: 31% non-Darwinism: 42% Earth 4.5 billion: 27% Earth NOT 4.5 billion years old: 36% Anthropogenic global warming: 33% non-Anthropogenic global warming: 37% Big Bang: 21% non-Big Bang: 51% Universe so Complex there must be a creator: 54% Not (Universe so Complex there must be a creator): 25% HT JoeCoder reddit.com/r/creation

What kinds of structural, functional and behavioral complexity can the neutral theory of evolution account for, and what kinds of complexity can’t it account for? According to Professor Larry Moran, to evince confusion on these vital questions is a sure sign of being an “IDiot.” But it is the “neutralists” themselves who are confused on these issues, as I intend to show in today’s post. (I have chosen to use the term “neutralist” to describe someone who adheres to the neutral theory of evolution, as Nature magazine uses that term, although Professor Moran evidently prefers the term “mutationist.”) In a recent post titled, Sal Cordova tries, and fails, to understand evolution by Professor Larry Moran (April 22, 2014), Professor Larry Read More ›

Most molecular evolution is neutral. Done. PZ Myers From wiki: Codon usage bias Codon usage bias refers to differences in the frequency of occurrence of synonymous codons in coding DNA. A codon is a series of three nucleotides (triplets) that encodes a specific amino acid residue in a polypeptide chain or for the termination of translation (stop codons). There are 64 different codons (61 codons encoding for amino acids plus 3 stop codons) but only 20 different translated amino acids. The overabundance in the number of codons allows many amino acids to be encoded by more than one codon. Because of such redundancy it is said that the genetic code is degenerate. Different organisms often show particular preferences for one Read More ›