A new paperwas published last week on a remarkable single-celled organism,Oxytricha trifallax, that has two nucleus’ and 16,000 chromosomes (recall that humans have 46). The organism uses one nucleus to store its active DNA and the other nucleus to store an archive of the genome. Amazingly, Oxytricha trifallax, disassembles the archived copy into a quarter-million pieces and then rapidly reassembles them into a new and improved version. This reassembly occurs at mating time as the organism and its mate exchange about half their genome.  Read more

It is interesting that evolutionists, who believe they came from primitive apes, display a certain primitive thought in their communications. The latest example is an evolutionist who criticized a book skeptical of evolution. The book made the point that fundamentally new genes are unlikely to have evolved by the usual random change and natural selection mechanisms. The book elaborated on this problem at length. But the evolutionist retorted that this was all wrong:  Read more

Evolution is not merely a scientific mistake. It is not a theory gone wrong, started by a guy in 1859. Evolutionary thinking was alive and well when Charles Darwin codified it in the emerging life sciences, for it had been developed and promoted by theologians and philosophers since the seventeenth century. If you understand that history, then today’s world makes much more sense. It is often said that evolution is the most influential scientific theory, but that is because evolution isn’t just a scientific theory, it is a broader world view. So with the dominance of evolution comes a wide array of influences, in government and in society, and across the political spectrum. Another example of this came last week Read More ›

How can a new protein-coding gene emerge from a random stretch of DNA? According to evolutionists this occurs via the usual random mutations and natural selection. In fact, as I explained last time, evolutionists are saying this is “basically a solved problem.” But such de novo gene evolution is not anywhere close to a solution. Even evolutionists, only a few years ago, agreed this was a heroic idea and that such genes could not have evolved, at least in the usual way. In typical fashion they pushed the problem into the recesses of deep time where anything can happen by mysterious mechanisms that no longer are present and so cannot be critiqued. That narrative serviced evolutionary thought for many years until Read More ›

A recent post by Barry Arrington started an interesting and lively discussion about morality, whether it is objective and, if so, how it might be grounded. Barry provided the job description for a clinical ethicist and then asked how a materialist could apply for such a job in good faith, given the inability of the materialist to ground his moral and ethical views in anything more solid, objective and enduring than his own subjective opinions and the opinions of his fellow materialists. In the ensuing discussion, it seemed that many attempts were made to divert attention away from the core issue that materialism can offer no ultimate grounding for objective moral values and duties. Instead, comments were made in which Read More ›