Cell biology

Evolutionists are going to need a bigger rug as Yale professor Andrew Xiao now has a new pile of stuff he is absurdly trying to ascribe to evolution. Xiao’s team has confirmed that in mammals the fundamental epigenetic signal—the methyl group—is sometimes attached to a second type of DNA base. DNA is made up of four types of bases (cytosine [C], guanine [G], adenine [A] and thymine [T]) and, as in the lower species, methyl groups are sometimes attached to adenine in mammals as well.  Read more

A recent study out of the University of Oregon purports to show the evolutionary pathway of a key protein that helps to control the mitotic spindle, a structure inside the dividing cell that distributes the chromosomes to the daughter cells. In fact the research adds to a growing line of evidence destructive of evolutionary theory. Consider the following findings:  Read more

From ScienceDaily: Their age is estimated to be more than 555 million years old, placing the fossils in the last part of Precambrian times, called the Ediacaran Period. They provide a crucial view of Earth’s earliest evolution of multicellular life, which scientists now think started millions of years earlier than previously thought. … Scientists think that an explosion of animal diversity and complexity began near the start of the Cambrian Period, about 541 million years ago. But Dornbos said this fossil find is the latest example of multicellular life forms appearing in the preceding Ediacaran Period. More. Paper. (public access) As the authors say, this helps us understand more about the history of life. What they don’t say is that Read More ›

Jonathan Wells, author of The Myth of Junk DNA , writes to say, re Mycoplasma mycoides Just Destroyed Evolution Like Venter’s earlier work, this is interesting. But as Hunter has pointed out, the minimal genome still has too much specified complexity to be explained by unguided evolution. Mycoplasma, the organism used by Venter’s lab, is parasitic or saprophytic. That is, it lives off other organisms or off organic waste from other organisms. In other words, it requires other living things for its survival. If anyone wants to infer anything about the origin of life from Venter’s minimal genome, they first have to explain the origin of other, more complex life forms. (Indeed, the stripped-down Mycoplasma made by Venter requires full Read More ›

Call it Mycoplasma mycoides lite—researchers have established what is approximately a minimal organism by removing about have of the genes from theMycoplasma mycoidesgenome. The result is a set of 473 genes which, collectively, appear to be required for any kind of reasonable performance. That is an enormous level of complexity. Furthermore, about one third of that minimal gene set is of unknown function. As J. Craig Venter put it, “We’re showing how complex life is, even in the simplest of organisms. These findings are very humbling.”  Read more

From one Twitter feed, via a tipster: Kinesin (a motor protein) pulling a vesicle along cytoskeletal filament – the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time! The accompanying commentary from people for whom design in nature is a shocking idea is revealing. Once the profanities, incoherence, and irrelevancies are deleted, it is typically along the lines of: “To think that natural selection just somehow does this over billions of years is just so [deleted] neat!” and, of course, “Don’t be deceived by illusions of design. The actual process isn’t that simple… “ Right, kiddos. And so where is my Boltzmann brain then? Follow UD News at Twitter!

I was asked today for a comment about a paper regarding irreducible complexity – Eliminating the Requirement of an Essential Gene Product in an Already Very Small Virus: Scaffolding Protein B-free øX174, B-free by Min Chen, Asako Uchiyama, and Bentley A. Fane, 2007.

I noted that despite this having been written in 2007, no one at all seemed to comment on it one way or the other. So, here is my short commentary on their criticism of Behe’s Irreducible Complexity. It is late, so I didn’t spend a lot of time reading in-depth, so please correct me where I am wrong.
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From Science: Scientists think that mitochondria were once independent single-celled organisms until, more than a billion years ago, they were swallowed by larger cells. Instead of being digested, they settled down and developed a mutually beneficial relationship developed with their hosts that eventually enabled the rise of more complex life, like today’s plants and animals. Most of their DNA is outsourced to the cell’s nucleus, but why not all of it? In humans, all but 37 are outsourced. In a large project involving more than 2000 mitochondrial genomes from a variety of life forms, researchers found All of the mitochondria’s remaining genes help produce energy in some way. But the team found that a gene was more likely to stick Read More ›

From Detecting Design: Now, it is true that mitochondrial organelles are quite unique and very interesting. Unlike any other organelle, except for chloroplasts, mitochondria appear to originate only from other mitochondria. They contain some of their own DNA, which is usually, but not always, circular – like circular bacterial DNA (there are also many organisms that have linear mitochondrial chromosomes with eukaryotic-style telomeres). Mitochondria also have their own transcriptional and translational machinery to decode DNA and messenger RNA and produce proteins. Also, mitochondrial ribosomes and transfer RNA molecules are similar to those found in bacteria, as are some of the components of their membranes. In 1970, these and other similar observations led Dr. Lynn Margulis to propose an extracellular origin Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Up until now, a number of theories have sought to explain how cells came to acquire mitochondria [power plants]. Although there is consensus as to the “how” ?the first mitochondria must have been a bacterium that entered another, and remained there, becoming part of the cell? the “when” has so far been unclear. Some scientists advocated an early incorporation of mitochondria, and considered that step as the first necessary to begin advancing toward eukaryotic cells as they are known today. Other theories proposed a later inclusion of mitochondria, as a more complex host cell could favor the entry of another cell and that cell’s permanence within its interior. Now, predoctoral scientist Alexandros Pitis and ICREA research professor and Read More ›

From Vox: For some reason, the scientists decided the ̊world wasn’t ready for them. So the tardigrades, and the moss they were found in, were wrapped in paper, placed in plastic baggies, and locked away in a -20 degrees Celsius freezer. There they remained — frozen and forgotten — for more than 30 years. This sounds like the start of a horror movie. But be assured: When the tardigrades unfroze in May 2014, they did not seek vengeance upon humanity for their imprisonment. Instead, they moseyed around on a plate of agar gel like nothing had happened. And then they reproduced. More. See also: Water bear’s hybrid genome now disputed Follow UD News at Twitter!

Multi Scale Modeling of Chromatin and Nucleosomes

Swarmbots: Apparently, it takes ingenuity to get a life form to fail, but the trick may come in handy. From Duke University: Duke University bioengineers design cells that die if they leave the confines of their capsule Duke University researchers have engineered microbes that can’t run away from home; those that do will quickly die without protective proteins produced by their peers. Dubbed “swarmbots” for their ability to survive in a crowd, the system could be used as a safeguard to stop genetically modified organisms from escaping into the surrounding environment. The approach could also be used to reliably program colonies of bacteria to respond to changes in their surrounding environment, such as releasing specific molecules on cue. The system Read More ›

“One of the world’s most important biological thinkers.” From Scientific American: Excerpted from A Brief History of Creation by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves III. Copyright © 2016 by Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves III. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. The year is 3,500,000,000 BC. The place is a rocky outcropping that juts out into a shallow, wave-lapped inlet on a landmass that will one day be called Australia. … atmosphere is filled with toxic gases, and almost completely devoid of oxygen. That will come much later, the product of photosynthesis by tiny organisms that will one day churn away in the primitive oceans. But the ancestor of those Read More ›

Machine, argues Josh Bloom at American Council for Science and Health: I recently wrote that viruses do not come even close to meeting the standards that are generally accepted requirements in defining what “alive” means. But they do have a huge impact on living organisms, because they are miracles of evolution — microbes that exist solely to reproduce, and do so with perfect efficiency and no waste. … What this “bag of chemicals,” which is about 100-times smaller than a bacterium, does is nothing short of amazing. It is way “smarter” than the cell that it infects. Using nothing more than a very specifically-shaped protein spike to locate and attach itself to the host cell, its own genetic material, and Read More ›