May 2014

Mathematicians say: Crucially, this type of integration requires loss of information, says Maguire: “You have put in two bits, and you get one out. If the brain integrated information in this fashion, it would have to be continuously haemorrhaging information.” Maguire and his colleagues say the brain is unlikely to do this, because repeated retrieval of memories would eventually destroy them. Instead, they define integration in terms of how difficult information is to edit. More:

There are many “Neutral Theorists” who maintain that there is a lot of “junk-DNA,” among which long, non-coding DNA=lncDNA is some of the “junkiest.” But now consider this from Wikipedia: Nevertheless, despite low conservation of long ncRNAs in general, it should be noted that many long ncRNAs still contain strongly conserved elements. For example, 19% of highly conserved phastCons elements occur in known introns, and another 32% in unannotated regions (Siepel 2005). Furthermore, a representative set of human long ncRNAs exhibit small, yet significant, reductions in substitution and insertion/deletion rates indicative of purifying selection that conserve the integrity of the transcript at the levels of sequence, promoter and splicing (Ponjavic 2007). If lncDNA is ‘junk’, then according to ‘neutral theory’ Read More ›

Assuming we’re dealing with ‘card-carrying’ Christians, let me pose this question to you: As a Christian, you believe in the Virgin Birth: i.e., that the Blessed Mother of Jesus ‘conceived by the Holy Spirit.’ If this is what you believe, then, knowing as we do that Mary, a woman, would have had ordinary ova with only ‘half’ of the normal genetic information, how did the ‘other half’ come about? That is, ‘where,’ and ‘how,’ did this come about? I’ll be interested in your answers.