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“People will write to me and say “You’ve changed my life” and that’s a wonderfully warm feeling and it’s really quite common.” This gem comes near the end of this ABC PM extended interview during Richard Dawkins’ latest visit to Australia. Also the following;    “What’s not interesting is the battle between science on the one hand and supernaturalism on the other” “something obviously ridiculous like flat-earthers and slightly less obviously ridiculous like anti-evolutionists. It’s only less slightly obviously ridiculous by the way.”“The sort of powerful illusion of design that all living creatures have but some seem to express more vividly. The almost irresistible urge to think gosh, somebody must have designed that and the beauty of discovering actually no, they Read More ›

“SAN DIEGO: Can life arise from nothing but a chaotic assortment of basic molecules? The answer is a lot closer following a series of ingenious experiments that have shown evolution at work in non-living molecules. For the first time, scientists have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes – that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components. What’s more, these simple nucleic acids can act as catalysts and continue the process indefinitely. “There’s nothing in biology in this system: no proteins, no cells, no biological matter. We just provide them with the building blocks,” said molecular biologist Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.

The researchers began with ribozymes known to occur naturally, and put these in a growth medium, heated them and allowed the ribozymes to replicate.”

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Over on the Biologos Website, Dr. Darrel Falk has posted a response to Dr. Stephen Meyer’s claim in “Signature in the Cell,” that only intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information. Dr. Falk cites a counterexample: “Consider the generation of antibody diversity for example. When a bacterium invades the body, a process results in a whole lot of random rearrangements of DNA sequence, and this eventually produces trillions of highly specific antibodies which specifically recognize and bind to the invading bacterial cells. The antibodies are highly specified. They bind only to that one type of bacteria. We go from a state of lower complexity to higher complexity—higher specified complexity!”   As I understand it, Read More ›

The study of 101 phylogenies reveals a new interpretation of speciation. Nature Vol 463 21 Jan 10 p349 The hypothesis that speciation follows the accumulation of many small events that multiply or simply add together (gradualism as Dawkins promotes) is supported in only 8% and 0% of cases. 78% of phylogenies fit the simple model where new species emerge from single rare stochastic events that produce reproductive isolation sufficient to cause speciation. Species simply wait for the next sufficient cause of speciation to occur. Speciation is freed from the gradual tug of natural selection. There need not be an arms race between species. Gradual genetic and other changes may often be consequent to the event that promotes the reproductive isolation Read More ›

The Royal Society, the foremost British science body is hosting a conference exploring extraterrestrial life. Given that there is zero evidence from any scientific study ever that there is any extra terrestrial life, why is this considered science when even discussing ID would never be sanctioned by the Royal Society? Aliens are likely to look and behave like us Alien life, if it exists at all, is likely to be just like us, a leading scientist has claimed. He also believes aliens would also share our human weaknesses for greed, violence and the exploitation of others. By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent 25 Jan 2010 Professor Simon Conway Morris at Cambridge University will tell a conference on alien life that extraterrestrials will Read More ›

Although Nature titled this piece “Tackling Unintelligent Design” they betray their own bias and fail to appreciate the irony in their claims.

According to R. John Ellis from the University of Warwick “Rubisco, the key enzyme in photosynthesis, is a relic of a bygone age.”

Researchers now plan to genetically manipulate the enzyme to make a designer enzyme fit for the modern world.

Although Rubisco is the most important enyzme on the planet, it is also one of the most inefficient. It evolved when the atmosphere was different and failed to adapt to the modern atmosphere. Attempts to improve the properties of this key enzyme of plants and cyanobacteria have failed because it proved impossible to reconstitute Rubisco in vitro. Liu et al. (Nature 463, 197–202 (2010) Vol 463 14 January 2010 doi:10.1038/nature08651) have overcome this problem with a cyanobacterial Rubisco by using two different chaperone proteins, which guide the folding and assembly of the enzyme. Read More ›

Science 6 November 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5954, pp. 784 – 787 DOI: 10.1126/science.326_784  On the Origin of Religion          Elizabeth Culotta “How and when did religion arise? In the 11th essay in Science’s series in honor of the Year of Darwin, Elizabeth Culotta explores the human propensity to believe in unseen deities. No consensus yet exists among scientists, but potential answers are emerging from both the archaeological record and studies of the mind itself. Some researchers, exploring religion’s effects in society, suggest that it may boost fitness by promoting cooperative behavior. And in the past 15 years, a growing number of researchers have followed Darwin’s lead and explored the hypothesis that religion springs naturally from the normal workings of the Read More ›

This new paper by James Shapiro may be of interest . In it he elaborates on the central dogma of molecular biology. It has become very complex since the old “one gene one protein and all the rest is junk” days. Here is the summary table. Conventional expression of the Central Dogma of Molecule Biology: (DNA ==>2X DNA) ==> RNA ==> Protein ==> Phenotype Contemporary statements of molecular information transfer in cell: 1. DNA + 0 ==> 0 2. DNA + Protein + ncRNA ==> Chromatin 3. Chromatin + Protein + ncRNA ==> DNA replication, chromatin maintenance/reconstitution 4. Protein + RNA + lipids + small molecules ==> Signal transduction 5. Chromatin + Protein + signals ==> RNA (primary transcript) 6. RNA Read More ›

In case we did not know, New Scientist confirms that at the base of the (postulated) tree of life is an extremely complex life form, much like a modern cell. “There is no doubt that the progenitor of all life on Earth, the common ancestor, possessed DNA, RNA and proteins, a universal genetic code, ribosomes (the protein-building factories), ATP and a proton-powered enzyme for making ATP. The detailed mechanisms for reading off DNA and converting genes into proteins were also in place. In short, then, the last common ancestor of all life looks pretty much like a modern cell.” It is easy (or not) to imagine something as simple as that arising by natural processes. here

 Chromosomes have yet another level of complexity and are even better designed than previously thought.   Erez Lieberman-Aiden et al 

By probing the three-dimensional architecture of whole genomes, the authors constructed spatial proximity maps of the human genome that confirm the presence of chromosome territories and the spatial proximity of small, gene-rich chromosomes. They identified an additional level of genome organization that is characterized by the spatial segregation of open and closed chromatin to form two genome-wide compartments. At the megabase scale, the chromatin conformation is consistent with a fractal globule, a knot-free, polymer conformation that enables maximally dense packing while preserving the ability to easily fold and unfold any genomic locus.

Imagine a fine hair 2 meters long. Imagine balling it up in such a way that it can fit on the head of pin — and be unraveled and knot-free, at a moment’s notice. A similar engineering feat is at work inside each cell in our body. The genome is over two meters long and must be carefully packed into the confines of a space (called the “nucleus”) several times narrower than a human hair.

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Is Dawkins pulling the wool over our eyes? Dawkins: “Lenski and a different set of colleagues investigated this phenomenon [bigger cells] by taking two of the [E. coli] tribes, called Ara+1 and Ara-1, which seemed, over 20,000 generations, to have followed the same evolutionary trajectory, and looking at their DNA. The astonishing result they found was that 59 genes had changed their level of expression in both tribes and all 59 had changes in the same direction. Were it not for natural selection, such independent parallelism, in all 59 genes independently, would completely beggar belief. The odds against it happening by chance are stupefyingly large. This is exactly the kind of thing creationists say cannot happen, because they think it Read More ›

Excerpted from The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins 2009

“It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.

Creationists are deeply enamored of the fossil record because they have been taught that it is full of “gaps”. Actually, we are lucky to have any fossils at all. The massive numbers we now do have document evolutionary history. Large numbers by any standards constitute beautiful “intermediates.” The fossil evidence for evolution in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong.

We don’t need fossils. The case for evolution is watertight without them, so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution. There is more than enough evidence for the fact of evolution in the comparative study of modern species and their geographical distribution.

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This week, Simon Conway Morris visited Australia. The following are extracts from a talk he gave in Sydney on Monday 21 Sept. They indicate how he sees ID and Dawkins.

“I suspect, having re-read the Origin from cover to cover, that the Origin is as much to, not only attempt, but in fact to destroy creationism irrevocably. In as much as, as a young man Darwin was hugely influenced by Paley, who we can describe if you like, as the grand daddy of creationists, in as much as he is the person who points to biological structures and organisation and says “look these things are so ludicrously complex, that they must surely represent the hand and authority of a designer.” Paley was of course was referring to the action of God. This is effectively the position which remains to the present day in intelligent design, which I think is non sense.

What I think is interesting is that at each point Darwin simply says “Look nobody is going to accept this as evidence for a creationist argument.” But he does it with enormous subtlety, and he doesn’t have this belligerent sort of “How could you be so stupid as to believe something like that?” But I think it is as clear as I can make out that Darwin really did want to undermine permanently the notion that God was involved, if you like on a day to day action. He had perhaps in the end an almost deistic view of the world which revolved around the primary laws so established that then led to as he said himself “this grandeur of life”.

I think these attitudes, if you like really go very deep and these tensions remain with us today.”

Q. How do you differ from Dawkins?

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The “fact” of Darwinian evolution finally has some support, or so they say at ScienceDaily This is a significant study, but what did they actually find? Darwinian Evolution can break complex productive genetic networks  resulting in “morphological degeneration”. “change recorded in both the fossil record and the genomes of living organisms  … shows  simultaneous molecular decay of the gene that is involved in enamel formation in mammals.” Mammals exist without mineralized teeth (e.g., baleen whales, anteaters, pangolins) and  with teeth that lack enamel (e.g., sloths, aardvarks, and pygmy sperm whales). “Mammals without enamel are descended from ancestral forms that had teeth with enamel,” Mark Springer of UC said. “We predicted that enamel-specific genes such as enamelin would show evidence in Read More ›

Bob Wright is taking hits for bringing the McWhorter Behe bloggingheads diavlog back online. Now Sean Caroll is leaving Bloggingheads. That’s what bullies do when they don’t get their way on the playground. Note that Sean says he didn’t actually listen to the diavlog! “The scientists involved with BH.tv were a little perturbed at the appearance of an ID proponent so quickly after we thought we understood that the previous example [Paul Nelson and Ron Numbers] had been judged a failed experiment. Emails went back and forth, and this morning we had a conference call with Bob Wright, founder of BH.tv. By the time it was over I personally didn’t want to be associated with the site any more.” “If Read More ›