Biology

“The energy in the ATP molecule powers all biological processes. Thus, the synthesis of ATP is essential for life.” Sir. John Walker, The ATP Synthase Group, MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit ATP Synthase has been frequently discussed at Uncommon Descent including Intelligent Engineering or Natural Selection 15 July 2006 “Our job is to follow the money, track and document the flow of funds, and thereby help prove the underlying criminal activity.” Eileen Mayer, Chief, Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation Division I propose that one of the most important concepts in Intelligent Design vs evolution is to “follow the energy trail“. This will be especially important in examining the origin of life. Energy processes are central to design of dynamic systems. Read More ›

Greg Bear has been writing hard sci-fi novels in recent years where the plot revolves around recent biotech discoveries. “Darwin’s Radio” received high acclaim even in Nature Magazine for the depth of knowledge of genetics, endogenous retroviruses, and human evolution that Bear displayed in the fictional work. In my opinion “Vitals” is of the same caliber. This biotech thriller revolves around the concept that intelligent bacterial networks have been mankind’s unseen, unknown overlords since time immemorial. In fact I, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, have written on UD about the notion that humanity’s purpose is to discover habitable earth-like planets and design vehicles that can deliver single-celled life to them. In other words we are the means by which bacteria can survive the Read More ›

Similar to the Cambrian explosion of animal life, it appears there was an earlier similar explosion for plants, at least the Ediacaran variety.
In what the ScienceNOW Daily News is calling Another Big Bang for Biology, the oldest assemblage of macroscopic life forms on earth, Ediacaran plants, appeared suddenly and fully diversified.
This plant life “explosion” coincides exactly with a sudden rise in ocean oxygenation.
The study authors, paleontologists from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, call their findings The Avalon Explosion.
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Last week, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence In Biological Systems was in the 17,000-20,000 range at Amazon.com. Since the Darwinist-sponsored negative-review spam campaign (with “reviews” written mostly by people who obviously had not read the book), and as of this writing, the book is sitting at about 3,000, and is: #1 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology #1 in Books > Science > Biological Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology

Yet another ancestor to modern whales is hypothesized. It’s hard to believe people get paid to produce stuff like this. Whales may be related to deer-like beast By SETH BORENSTEIN AP Science Writer Wed Dec 19, 6:55 PM ET WASHINGTON – The gigantic ocean-dwelling whale may have evolved from a land animal the size of a small raccoon, new research suggests. What might be the missing evolutionary link between whales and land animals is an odd animal that looks like a long-tailed deer without antlers or an overgrown long-legged rat, fossils indicate. The creature is called Indohyus, and recently unearthed fossils reveal some crucial evolutionary similarities between it and water-dwelling cetaceans, such as whales, dolphins and porpoises. For years, the Read More ›

In a private listserv the question was recently asked by one of the participants: Just out of curiousity, what would we consider to be the fundamentals of biology? Obviously, you can do biology without trying to shove everything into Darwinian just-so stories. Professor Dembski thought my answer worth repeating on Uncommon Descent so here it is: The salient question is what CAN’T you do in practical biology without resort to mechanistic theories of prehistoric evolution. The answer appears to be there is nothing you can’t do. Modern biology is the study of living tissue not imprints in rocks or theoretical ancient ancestors. Knowledge of The Edge of Evolution is critical in some areas. One needs to know, for instance, the Read More ›

This is a recurring challenge that most recently reared its head in a comment concerning my essay, Why Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, and Engineers Tend to be More Skeptical of Darwinian Claims.

The argument goes like this (as presented by the commenter in the link provided above):

The majority of degreed computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians have completed no college course work in the life sciences. Virtually all have college physics under their belts. Some studied chemistry in college. Relatively few enrolled in college courses in biology.

Among “expert” critics of scholarly fields not their own, at most one in a thousand makes a substantive contribution. If UD should happen to be chock-full of engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians who have all caught life scientists in fundamental error, then it would constitute a singular event in the history of science.

If UD readers promise not to tell anyone, I’ll disclose a secret about my college academic training.

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The road to modularity Günter P. Wagner, Mihaela Pavlicev and James M. Cheverud Nature Reviews Genetics Volume 8 Dec 2007  “From our reading of the literature, origin of modularity research is still mostly based on model analysis rather than data. It is likely that we have not yet fully explored the range of theoretical possibilities to explain modularity, and more theoretical work will still be valuable. The models reviewed here, however, suggest an emerging theme. It seems that the origin of modularity requires both a mutational process that favours the origin of modularity and selection pressures that can take advantage of and reinforce the mutational bias.” Hot off the press and freely available, this EvoDevo paper admits that we need a Read More ›

From Evolution News and Views: More than 50 years ago two playwrights penned a fictionalized account of the 1920s Scopes Trial called “Inherit the Wind” that is now universally regarded by historians as inaccurate propaganda. Last night PBS aired its “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design” documentary, which similarly promotes propaganda about the 2005 Kitzmiller trial and intelligent design (ID). Most of the misinformation in “Judgment Day” was corrected by ID proponents long ago. To help readers sift the fact from the fiction, here are links to articles rebutting some of PBS’s most blatant misrepresentations:

I always find it interesting how Darwinists explain things. Here is a gene that, according to the author, exists in no known species, and simply shows up in this particular fly genome. The way Darwinists want to explain things–knowing that NDE is essentially ‘dead in the water’–is by talking about duplicated genes which are allowed to mutate since their needed function is supplied by the original gene. Well, that can’t be the explanation here since we’re not dealing with a duplicated gene, or a pseudo-gene, or anything like that at all. So, it’s now transposons and viruses inserting this gene into the fly genome. While that’s, hypothetically possible, right now there’s no way of proving that since, per the author, Read More ›

I just wanted to bring this article in Science to the attention of this blog. The results are very intriguing–“these gene “inventions” along the lineage leading to animals were likely already well integrated with preexisting eukaryotic genes in the eumetazoan progenitor.” It seems that the very primitive looking sea anenome is a very sophisticated animal. [As an aside, though Darwinists will be quick to deny this—it’s very easy to deny anything (in fact, I deny that I’m writing this right now!)—this is completely contrary to what Charles Darwin himself expected; viz., that such complex regulatory functions developed in so short a period of time. Since it is soft-bodied, it doesn’t fossilze that well; but there is a well-preserved fossil in Read More ›

We often hear the argument that evidence for common ancestry can also be interpreted as evidence of common design. Some years ago I made the argument that there was no way to discriminate between the two. The argument was countered (successfully IMO) by endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). Read More ›

Researchers have discovered that in certain competitive situations, the “fittest” phenotype is the one that is “rarest” for a given population. In a study of fruit flies, when “rovers” and “sitters” were foraging together, “rovers” did better if they were surrounded by “sitters”, and vice versa. As the author of the study put it: “If you’re a rover surrounded by many sitters, then the sitters are going to use up that patch and you’re going to do better by moving out into a new patch. So you’ll have an advantage because you’re not competing with the sitters who stay close to the initial resource. On the other hand, if you’re a sitter and you’re mostly with rovers, the rovers are Read More ›

I added a category on the sidebar “DCA” so you can find the series of articles I’ve written about this cancer killing drug beginning in late January of this year. It’s been a month since the last update. Read More ›

Newfound Bacteria Fueled by Radiation By David Brown Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 20, 2006; Page A07 They are the microbes from hell, or at least from hell’s Zip code. A team of scientists has found bacteria living nearly two miles below ground, dining on sulfur in a world of steaming water and radioactive rock. A single cell may live a century before it gets up the energy to divide. The organisms have been there for millions of years. They will probably survive as long as the planet does, drawing energy from the stygian world around them. The microbes, found in water spilling out of a fissure in a South African gold mine in 2003, are not entirely new, Read More ›