Here is an interview Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig did recently with Marco Respinti of the Centro Italiano Intelligent Design organization (https://www.ciid.science), in English with Italian subtitles. A couple of quotes from the interview: after describing his PhD thesis work in the first 10 minutes he summarizes “The outcome was in full agreement with one of the more important basic predictions of intelligent design theory: mutations usually do not produce any real new information.” Then “So to accept intelligent design and to be critical of evolutionary arguments and put them to the test can be very fruitful for biology and science in general.” Lönnig also discusses the well-funded attempts at, among other places, his own Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, to Read More ›

This is an old paper, but it is surprisingly little-known: Pseudogenes: Are They “Junk” or Functional DNA?. It’s a review paper of pseudogene function. My favorite example in the paper is the antigenic variation. Essentially, the pseudogenes store alternative configurations of parts of genes. The organism can quickly reconfigure itself by swapping various parts in and out of pseudogenes. Many species have been found with this ability. Pseudogenes used to be thought of as the ultimate example of “junk DNA” – something that we *KNOW* that was functionless. But, it turns out, pseudogenes continue to provide more and more evidence of function, much of it being part of directed mutation – something else that the Darwin lobby said couldn’t happen.

Yes, yes, I grant that he was brilliant in his field of expertise, theoretical physics.  But as was recently noted in these pages, when he ventured outside of his bailiwick, he said some really boned-headed things.  Consider just one example from his book The Grand Design:  “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” In one sentence Hawking committed two egregious logical blunders.  First, he committed the error of reification (ascribing concrete properties to abstract concepts).  The law of gravity does not do anything.  Like all laws of science, it is a mathematical model of observed regularities.  Why the regularities scientists observe should be such as they are and how those Read More ›

I found this paper fascinating: “Pseudogene repair driven by selection pressure applied in experimental evolution.” There is also a news article about it which explains what is going on in less technical detail.