The YouTube of the this video was shut down by Unversal and Warner music groups. You can still see it at Liveleak.com. Click here to see it. Make it viral. Link to email to everyone you know, post everywhere you go: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f67_1222761495
Don’t blame ya. It’s easy to forget things that aren’t happening. Not much to report but here goes: Solar Activity Lowest in 100 Years. Sunspots still MIA. NAS reports 50 million year cooling trend.
Many of you are wondering why the UD adminstration decided to take an aggressive stand promoting the McCain/Palin presidential ticket. There are two reasons. The first is that both Senator McCain and Governor Palin are on record supporting “teach the controversy”. Senator Obama is on the record against it. Our goal is not to vanquish the Darwinian narrative by legal chicanery. That’s a tactic our opponents employ. Our goal is to let young people in public schools hear both sides of the argument in a religiously neutral manner and thus stop the early indoctrination into the Darwinian narrative by presenting it in a vacuum devoid of criticism or alternative hypotheses. The second reason is that our opponents in the academic Read More ›
Once one overcomes their prejudice and admits intelligent design as a live option for science to consider then you start to look at “evolution” as an engineering project instead of a big accident. Everything in macroevolution makes sense from this perspective. One of the predictions of front loading is that we may find genomic building blocks for things like complex organs and body plans in organisms lacking those things and whose ancestors never had those things. Those things are there for the future. Chance & necessity can’t build things for future use. Intelligent design is a proactive mechanism which can implement contingency plans for future circumstance. Chance & necessity is a reactive mechanism that cannot plan for the future – it can only react to the present circumstance.
Note that in this case an intelligent designer needn’t be “God”, although it could be. The intelligent designer only requires rather advanced (beyond current human level) expertise in biochemistry and genetic engineering. Intelligent design can be considered without regard or resort to anything from revealed religious scriptures. The meme Intelligent Design is really Scientific or Biblical Creationism is a red herring designed to thwart the introduction of ID into the public school setting through legal chicanery.
Add the following to the growing mountain of scientific evidence pointing to design in the history of life:
Science 22 August 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5892, pp. 1028 – 1029
DOI: 10.1126/science.321.5892.1028b
GENOMICS: ‘Simple’ Animal’s Genome Proves Unexpectedly Complex
Elizabeth Pennisi
Aptly named “sticky hairy plate,” Trichoplax adhaerens barely qualifies as an animal. About 1 millimeter long and covered with cilia, this flat marine organism lacks a stomach, muscles, nerves, and gonads, even a head. It glides along like an amoeba, its lower layer of cells releasing enzymes that digest algae beneath its ever-changing body, and it reproduces by splitting or budding off progeny. Yet this animal’s genome looks surprisingly like ours, says Daniel Rokhsar, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California. Its 98 million DNA base pairs include many of the genes responsible for guiding the development of other animals’ complex shapes and organs, he and his colleagues report in the 21 August issue of Nature.
Democrats in congress are trying to deny any blame in the credit crisis. The fact of the matter is they are wholly culpable and if they hadn’t succeeded in subverting what I’m going to term “lending to the financially fittest” none of this would have happened. Watch the video below the fold which I had published separately but decided fit better melded into this article.
Well, not larger than I thought, but larger than most biologists thought. If biologists were engineers and knew something of designed systems they wouldn’t find their thinking was wrong so often.
And sparc, please make a note, microRNAs don’t just target the 3′ UTR.
RNA Interference Plays Bigger Role Than Previously Thought
ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2008) — In a paper published online in the journal Nature, IBM and the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) reported findings from a joint research study that provides new information on how stem cell differentiation is controlled by microRNAs.
I can’t make stuff like this up. New Scientist reports: Superstitions evolved to help us survive Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense. Typical chance worshipper bore-me-to-tears opening. But this gets really good at the end: However, Wolfgang Forstmeier, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, argues that by linking cause and effect – often falsely – science is a simply dogmatic form of superstition. “You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant,” he says. By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, “quite a Read More ›
I found this paper fascinating and well worth reading. Particularly interesting for me was the idea that phages (viruses that infect bacteria) are like a postal delivery system for biotic information. This is something I’ve proposed before except I’ve also included retroviruses that infect higher orders of life. I proposed it as an answer for ID skeptics asking about what mechanism might an intelligent designer use to direct the course of evolution. The entire paper is available here. One of the authors (Sheldon) is a UD member and if we’re lucky he might be willing answer any questions you might have in the commentary. Cosmological Evolution: Spatial Relativity and the Speed of Life Robert B. Sheldon (a) and Richard B. Read More ›
This isn’t intelligent design, per se, but just something that popped up on the Drudge Report and caught my attention. It’s about a research article that appeared in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry where the researchers conclude that marijuana use causes earlier onset of psychosis.
David Deamer, a distinguished professor of zoology at UCSC, in an interview with Susan Mazur gives us his theory of information as it relates to genetics. Deamer: I think genetic information more or less came out of nowhere by chance assemblages of short polymers. Am I being unfair in interpreting the phrase “more or less came out of nowhere” as “poof”? I report. You decide.
HT to irrepressible UD member/author “Jerry”
Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life
Videos of Kauffman in ALife XI, kind regards AMir Parts 2 and 3
Massimo with an as yet undetermined appendage writes Education is not about having “kids debate both sides,” since most kids would probably conclude that the earth is flat and at the center of the universe (after all, the sensorial evidence is overwhelming in favor of the flat-earth, Ptolemaic system). If Massimo doubts that the science establishment can present the evidence for a round earth, like live satellite images, well enough to let children use critical thinking skills to decide if the scientists have made a compelling case, then quite frankly Pigliucci is a worrisome character whose own critical thinking skills leave a lot to be desired.
Well, either the people behind the trade journal Genome Research are creationists or the term is used by everyone else too. Genomics and Darwinism Genome Research is now accepting submissions for a special issue, entitled Genomics and Darwinism, devoted to comparative and evolutionary genomics, including primary research reporting novel insights in large-scale quantitative and population genetics, genome evolution, and natural and sexual selection. Methinks the Darwinists doth protest too much. 😆