PaV

I’ve been saying the OP’s title for years now. And, every day, I read review articles in the like of Phys.Org (they usually get out the articles first!) and, sure enough, there’s an article undermining Darwinian orthodoxy and the neo-Darwinian mechanisms that underpin it. Here’s today’s latest. It involves the insect genome and proteins once considered indispensible, hence ‘conserved’, throughout all eukaryotic lineages: Cell division, the process that ensures equal transmission of genetic information to daughter cells, has been fundamentally conserved for over a billion years of evolution. Considering its ubiquity and essentiality, it is expected that proteins that carry out cell division would also be highly conserved. Challenging this assumption, scientists from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have found Read More ›

Here’s a link to a Science Daily article on epigenetics. The authors report that the known and studied method of epigenetic marking, methylation of Histone3=H3, is not only passed down from one cell generation to another during development, but that these epigenetic markings are passed on from one generation of organisms to the next. These findings suggest that the neo-Darwinian mechanisms normally invoked in evolutionary discussions may or may not be critical for “adaptation.” If further studies confirms the widespread phenomena of epigentic markings being handed down from generation to generation, then there may not be much force left to the evolutionary tales we’ve been told over the years. What I mean is this. We are told that organisms, in Read More ›

Here’s a news article from Phys.Org on a lamprey study. Actually it’s a study concerning phylogenetics and using gene regulatory mechanisms to figure out the relationships that exist. It turns out that in the lamprey, which is part of the Cambrian explosion, the same kind of hind brain gene regulatory mechanisms are in place as in “jawed” vertebrates, including mammals. From the article: The team at Stowers, collaborating with Marianne Bronner, Ph.D., professor of biology at Caltech, focused on the sea lamprey because the fossil record shows that its ancestors emerged from Cambrian silt approximately 500 million years ago, 100 million years before jawed fish ever swam onto the scene. The question was, could the hindbrain gene regulatory network that Read More ›

A new study is out analyzing electric eel genomes. Guess what? The scientists are “shocked.” The results are “surprising.” If nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of Darwinian evolution, then why are scientists always shaking their heads based on their latest findings in the lab? Here’s some of the background to the study found in an article from Phys.Org: The work establishes the genetic basis for the electric organ, an anatomical feature found only in fish and that evolved independently half a dozen times in environments ranging from the flooded forests of the Amazon to murky marine environments. “These fish have converted a muscle to an electric organ,” explains Sussman, a professor of biochemistry and director of Read More ›

Within the last few days, this story has come out. I’ll provide a link below; but, for the Darwinists (I won’t call them evolutionary biologists. Why? Because Erasmus Darwin was an evolutionary biologist. Lamarck was an evolutionary biologist, etc. No, they’re followers of C. Darwin, and, hence, Darwinists) who want to maintain that Richard Sternberg and others were not shabbily treated, here it is, the same kind of treatment, and, again, at the hands of ‘dispassionate, objective’ scientists. Here’s an excerpt from the article in the Daily Mail: A globally-renowned climate scientist has been forced to step down from a think-tank after he was subjected to ‘Mc-Carthy’-style pressure from scientists around the world. Professor Lennart Bengtsson, 79, a leading academic Read 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.

I recently read about some study whose results conflict with Darwinian evolution. Despite the conflict, the author’s logic basically said that even though Darwinian thinking could not explain what nature contains, the fact that this happened meant that ‘somehow’ evolution had brought about this result, and that more study was needed to find out just how this had happened. It occurred to me—for the first time—that this type of argument is made over and over again by Darwinists (evolutionary biologists, for the easily offended). What do we hear: (1) Even though the ‘odds’ of all the necessary elements and individual components of the ‘original’ cell and its contained DNA (or RNA, if we want to dream) is astronomically high, meaning Read More ›

For a number of years, many of us at UD have made the argument that evolutionary theory, in practice, is of almost no help whatsoever in getting at the secrets of biology. I’ve taken the position personally that it actually hurts, and that it is not a matter of indifference to the study of biology whether evolution is employed or not. ID is the way to go.

In this study reported on at Phys.Org, scientists looked at a particular portion of “non-coding” RNA in the zebra fish and found that it actually does code for a protein (which they call “Toddler”), and which turns out to be almost essential in the proper development of the embryo. Cutting out the sequence for “Toddler” results in improper development of, or the entire loss of, a heart, and subsequent death because the embryo fails to enter the gastrula stage of early embryonic development. Read More ›

Here is a piece over at Phys.Org dealing with “long, intergenic non-coding” RNA. “When we removed the specific lincRNA, we looked at the mouse brain and the progenitors were reduced. As a consequence probably, the population [of neurons] that sits on top of the cerebral cortex are reduced … It’s likely that in the future we’ll see a number of studies showing that other lincRNAs are involved in specific behaviors,” Arlotta said. “The brain likes this junk RNA.” Rinn and his colleagues have generated 18 strains of mutant mice, removing from each a different piece of “junk” genome, or so-called long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs). If the lincRNA truly had been “junk,” nothing should have happened. What the researchers found Read More ›

Today, Phys.Org reports on the following research item concerning bird feather evolution: Research by Cambridge PhD candidate Thanh-Lan Gluckman, published today in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, looks afresh at similarities and differences in plumage in almost 300 members of the Anseriformes and Galiformes orders . . . /blockquote> It seems that the idea that sexual selection determines this kind of plumage dates well before the time of Darwin (Charles, that is, since his grandfather, Erasmus, was very big on evolution, and very big on sexual selection as a conduit of said evolution.) The Phys.Org articles tells us: As early as 1780, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London published a paper by John Hunter proposing Read More ›

An expert in “frog evolution” has demonstrated that frogs in different continents “evolved” the same sorts of characteristics. Now just ask yourself: what are the odds that “evolution,” which works via random processes, would “evolve” the same kinds of characteristics on different continents? Yet, that is what our evolutionary biologist friends would ask us to believe. Do you believe? Do I hear an ‘Amen’? I guess not. Yes, biogeography might explain some of this, but not in the cases our authors looked at. Now, given that DNA is an information resource (prescribed by, and within, the genome), ID would fully expect that the common genome of the frog family would express itself in similar ways–even across continents–given that “new” information Read More ›

In today’s Phys.Org news page, we hear about a three nucleotide change in the organism “Trypanosoma brucei, a parasite that causes sleeping sickness in Africa and Chagas disease in Latin America.” Immediately after “transcription”, via a completely unknown mechanism, a three nucleotide portion of the intron associated with …… is replaced by three different nucleotides. Here’s what they say: “These are changes for which no chemistry is known and has never been described. We don’t know what enzyme is involved and that is the million-dollar question: What mechanism is doing this? We haven’t a clue,” said Juan Alfonzo, professor of microbiology at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study. . . . . Alfonzo sought to identify Read More ›

This just in from Phys.Org.

Pugh added that he and Venters were stunned to find 160,000 of these “initiation machines,” because humans only have about 30,000 genes. “This finding is even more remarkable, given that fewer than 10,000 of these machines actually were found right at the site of genes. Since most genes are turned off in cells, it is understandable why they are typically devoid of the initiation machinery.” . . .

The remaining 150,000 initiation machines—those Pugh and Venters did not find right at genes—remained somewhat mysterious.
These initiation machines that were not associated with genes were clearly active since they were making RNA and aligned with fragments of RNA discovered by other scientists,” Pugh said. “In the early days, these fragments of RNA were generally dismissed as irrelevant since they did not code for proteins.” [Yeah, that’s right—you called it “junk DNA” and said it was proof contradicting design.] . . . . .

Pugh and Venters further validated their surprising findings by determining that these non-coding initiation machines recognized the same DNA sequences as the ones at coding genes, indicating that they have a specific origin and that their production is regulated, just like it is at coding genes. . . . . . .

“These non-coding RNAs have been called the ‘dark matter’ of the genome because, just like the dark matter of the universe, they are massive in terms of coverage—making up over 95 percent of the human genome. However, they are difficult to detect and no one knows exactly what they all are doing or why they are there,” Pugh said. “Now at least we know that they are real, and not just ‘noise’ or ‘junk.’ Of course, the next step is to answer the question, ‘what, in fact, do they do?'”[Really?!! “Dark Matter?” You called it “junk-DNA”; it’s only now, now that you’ve been proven wrong on a grand scale that you’ve decided to call it “dark matter.”][P.S. This is what liberals do: when wrong, change the words; e.g., “global warming” = “climate change”, or, “pro-abortion” = “pro-choice”. You see, it all depends on what the meaning of “is” is.]

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Another day; another bad day for Darwinism. This is so true that I rarely post here anymore. Why bother? Darwinism is beat up everyday by its adherents doing experiments. Here’s another one. The team investigated the validity of Haldane’s predictions for the probability of fixation of a beneficial allele. They used C. elegans because it reproduces asexually, thus ensuring “genetic identity” from one generation to the next. While validating Haldane’s predictions for the initial introduction of both deleterious and beneficial alleles to a population, they found this: If its [i.e., the allele’s] frequency was higher than 5% (when more than five different individuals in a population of 100 individuals), the allele was perceived as deleterious and it started to be Read More ›