Biology

Even if compressed I’ve always thought that the known informational content was not enough data. This makes sense because from an engineering point of view because there doesn’t seem to be enough data storage space in a few billion base pairs of nuclear DNA to specify all the detail in a mammal or similarly complex animal. It’s enough room to store a component library of the nuts and bolts required to build individual cells of different types but not the whole animal.

Obviously no one can argue against the assertion that we do not fully comprehend the biological code. Unlike with computer code we cannot simply determine at a glance which informational content defines what biological function. The title of geneticist Sermonti’s book is “Why a Fly is not a Horse”. In it he writes the only thing we know for certain about why a horse is a horse and not a fly is because its mother was a horse.

Thus, based on our current level of knowledge, any calculations that quantify biological informational content are going to be rough estimates. Personally, when measuring the functional sequence complexity of code encoding proteins I’ve long biased any calculations I do by rounding up to several extra informational bits. And this action seems justified by this recent news: Read More ›

Dr. Guliuzza gives key arguments of detecting design in sexual reproduction, in contrast to evolution and order caused by natural law.
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Creationist speaker makes case for intelligent design Dan Boyer, Michigan Tech Lode 03/25/2009
Dr. Randy Guliuzza

. . .asserted that he was not making an argument about design based on the absence of information but from form and function. “If reproduction isn’t fully functional right from the beginning there are no offspring” and nothing for natural selection to work on, he said. Read More ›

Back in January I posted this comment to ask what is science’s “rightful place.” Now it seems we’re getting a clearer picture of the answer as far as the President is concerned. Fox News is reporting that President Obama to issue an executive order on Monday that would lift the restrictions on embryonic stem cell research put in place under President Bush.

Regardless of one’s opinion or position on this issue, there are a couple points of concern with respect to this story. First is this comment Read More ›

To take the quiz — or to play along — here’s your background information, and no cheating by looking into cell biology textbooks or using Google or PubMed. 1. Topoisomerases are essential enzymes, found in all organisms, which solve topological problems arising from the double-helical structure of DNA. Now, assume: 2. All organisms on Earth share a common ancestor, the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). OK — quiz time. Given (1) and (2), what should we expect to find, with respect to the homology of topoisomerases, when we examine organisms descended from LUCA in different parts of the Tree of Life? Multiple choice: A) Homologous topoisomerases B) Non-homologous topoisomerases C) Can’t say. Make your best guess, and then go here: Read More ›

A recent bill introduced into the Iowa State Legislature has prompted the defenders of Darwinian Dogma to issue the following statement:

STATEMENT BY IOWA FACULTY ON HF 183: THE EVOLUTION ACADEMIC FREEDOM ACT

We, the undersigned members of institutions of higher learning in Iowa, urge our legislators to reject passage of “The Evolution Academic Freedom Act” (HF 183) introduced by Rod Roberts (R-Carroll). The language of this bill comes primarily from the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which has conducted lobbying efforts and political activism against the teaching of evolution since 1994.

Evolution is as established a scientific theory as any other theory in science. It is misleading to claim that there is any controversy or dissent within the vast majority of the scientific community regarding the scientific validity of evolutionary theory. Since there is no real dissent within the scientific community, then “academic freedom” for alternative theories is simply a mechanism to introduce religious or non-scientific doctrines into our science curriculum.

Similar efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution in schools repeatedly have been found to be unconstitutional, something witnessed most recently in Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005) in Pennsylvania.

We, therefore, urge our legislators to recognize HF183 as part of a long history of creationist assaults on science education, and reject passage of this bill.

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Andrew Sibley has drawn attention to the recent Theos survey of the UK public’s beliefs in evolution, creationism and intelligent design. Wearing my sociologist’s hat, one overriding conclusion comes through in this survey: It was very poorly designed. Theos should get its money back from the social researchers they hired. Theos wants to give the impression that the public holds confused views about the various positions relating to the origins of life. In fact, Theos is the one confused. Have a look at how the various positions were described and what people thought of them. I’ve collapsed the statistics because I want to focus on the exact wording: Young Earth Creationism is the idea that God created the world sometime Read More ›

This week marks the publication of the Darwin book that has so far received the most advance publicity in the UK, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Allen Lane). Desmond and Moore, both together and separately, have written some of the best histories of the Victorian life sciences, including a best-selling biography of Darwin. You can get a sense of the book from this excerpt currently featured in Prospect Magazine. 

Desmond and Moore always wade very deep in the archives but also with an eye to what might attract today’s reader about their subject. Not surprisingly, then, this is a book that documents the link between Darwin’s more general doctrine of common descent and his belief that all humans descend from a common ancestor and hence are members of the same species. A lot of stress is placed on Darwin’s revulsion at the brutality of slavery that he saw while voyaging on the Beagle, and the fact that it was common among the natural historians of his day to believe in several species of ‘man’. The reader can easily get the impression that this was some kind of triumph of evidence over prejudice. However, this impression would be very misleading. Read More ›

More details of DNA repair have been revealed.
See: Human DNA repair process recorded in action (Video)

(PhysOrg.com) — A key phase in the repair process of damaged human DNA has been observed and visually recorded by a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis. The recordings provide new information about the role played by a protein known as Rad51, which is linked to breast cancer, in this complex and critical process.
. . . In 2006, the researchers recorded a portion of the bacterial DNA repair process, a system considerably less complex than its human counterpart.. . .

This filament composed of a fluorescently-labeled DNA molecule and the repair protein Rad51 grows progressively brighter and longer as more and more Rad51 molecules assemble onto the DNA.

Human DNA is under constant assault from harmful agents such as ultraviolet sunlight, tobacco smoke and a myriad of chemicals, both natural and man-made. Because damage can lead to cancer, cell death and mutations, an army of proteins and enzymes are mobilized into action whenever it occurs. Read More ›

I have posted on my website an audio recording of the talk I gave this past Tuesday at the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture, kicking off their Darwin Year series. My talk was entitled ‘Darwin’s Original Sin: The Rejection of Theology’s Claims to Knowledge‘. If you scroll down to the bottom of this page you should find it. It’s only about 45 minutes long, and it captures many of the points that I have been raising more discursively since I started blogging here. I should say that the first 4 minutes or so is introductory stuff, including a reference to Obama’s inauguration.

A few relevant facts for those who shoot from the hip, without thinking: 1. Reporters and writers don’t contribute or control article headlines, a privilege their editors reserve to themselves. 2. Nor do reporters and writers have much (or any) say about what goes on the magazine cover. See the editors for that. 3. Graham Lawton was reporting on scientific developments and arguments that have been underway for more than a decade (although accelerating recently). Go here, for instance, for a summary of a recent meeting reviewing those developments. Lawton interviewed some of the participants at this meeting — as a science journalist, not a partisan. The point is, if Lawton didn’t report the story, the story would still be Read More ›

To test the real difference that theodicy makes to ID, Timaeus posed a thought experiment (see post 33) involving a team of scientists of various religious persuasions who conclude that the malarial cell is a designed entity. However, the scientists’ ability to infer why a deity would have created such a malignant cell is impeded by their religious differences, which have no natural resolution. Moreover, Timaeus wonders, even if after much discussion these differences were somehow resolved into a common theodicy, to what extent would that theodicy have been based on their scientific work or, for that matter, the theodicy would be capable of justifying that work. The implied conclusion of this thought experiment is that theodicy is not a necessary feature of ID’s conceptual framework but a controversial add-on.

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Here’s the story from today’s London Telegraph, and here is a related, more in-depth piece on the same question from the latest New Scientist. While Darwin argued for a single Tree — probably the most powerful image he introduced into biological perception — he was always cagey about the structure of its root. Life was “originally breathed [‘by the Creator,’ added in the 2nd edition of the Origin] into a few forms or into one” (1859, 490). There’s a world of (inferential / phylogenetic) difference, however, between divinely created first life and naturally arising first life, when the single most important question in the latter scenario concerns the probability of abiogenesis. “A few forms” that independently evolved (say) ribosomal structure, Read More ›

A recent multidisciplinary study on the two-phase increase in the size of life has concluded that there must exist a “preexisting evolutionary potential” to explain the sudden increase in size and complexity which occurred twice in the history of life, both times following increases in atmospheric oxygen.

From the earliest bacteria to the largest organisms, there has been a 16 orders of magnitude increase in size. Far from the gradual progression over much time which one would expect from a Darwinian explanation, however, this increase was not incremental, but occurred in two very large steps, involving about a million times increase in size over very brief periods of time.

And things didn’t just get bigger, but much more complex as well:

Each size step required a major innovation in organismal complexity—first the eukaryotic cell and later eukaryotic multicellularity.

The investigators conclusion? There must have been a “preexisting evolutionary potential” to account for the rapid changes:
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