At ScienceDaily: “Each compartment created by a lamin acts like a kitchen utensil drawer, keeping knives, forks and spoons easy to access, and more rarely used items like serving pieces out of the way until needed,” Reddy says. (And the high information level needed for all that came into existence randomly, of course, just like kitchen drawers and utensils… Which makes sense if you buy the Darwinian approach to consciousness, which treats it as an illusion (whose?) So tidiers and tidying are random too… The people who built up Darwinism decades ago probably didn’t expect to find this stuff. )
Genetics
Five more species of bacteria use alternate genetic codes
At The Scientist: “The genetic code has been set in stone for 3 billion years,” study coauthor Yekaterina Shulgina, a Harvard University graduate student in systems biology, tells The Scientist. “The fact that some organisms have found a way to change it is really fascinating to me. Changing the genetic code requires changing ancient, important molecules like tRNAs that are so fundamental to how biology works.”
Researchers: “The human genome is less ‘normal’ than we thought.”
Stay tuned. Less and less that we hear from genome mapping is making sense in terms of sturdy traditional materialism.
Researchers: Unusual island life forms may have been genetically pre-coded to vary
“Choi et al., publishing in PNAS, have proposed a very un-Darwinian account of how “spectacular adaptive radiations” occur on oceanic islands such as Hawaii. This has been a “paradox of evolutionary biology,” they admit. Maybe the diversity is an outworking of “ancient polymorphisms” of ancestors with a rich gene pool.” As a hypothesis, it has everything going for it but Darwinism.
Flim flam? Flash in the pan? Paleontologists find “possible” dinosaur DNA from 125 million years ago
The Scientist: “But other experts have voiced caution or outright skepticism about the findings… ” The oldest extant DNA is from a 1 million-year-old woolly mammoth.
Some at-your-fingertips stats on human–chimp similarity
Casey Luskin: “many non-coding sequences are highly dissimilar, and there are sequences of the human and chimp genomes that are so different that they can’t be aligned for comparison. For example, there are some parts of our genome, such as the human y chromosome, that are radically different from the chimp genome.”
At Evolution News: Three stunners challenge traditional Darwinism
At ENST: Scientists at Flinders University in Australia found that our DNA spreads up to a meter around us without even touching anything. We’re leaving breadcrumbs of genetic code everywhere we go!
Finding re endangered snakes is the opposite of classic theory (plus some interesting snake evolution news)
A friend who knows the scene writes: First, their findings run counter to classic theory with respect to depression caused by inbreeding. Second, no beneficial mutations are discussed, only benign ones, and then deleterious mutations of varying degrees. Much as in Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves.
A 2010 Oxford U Press book on “unintelligent design” seems so dated now
Now that the very concept of “junk DNA” is being officially retired, this all seems pretty stale. Note: Well yes, there is still Nathan Lents and Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes: Still wrong about sinuses but still writing about them.
On the preprint server: Human micro proteins that sprang from nothing
Researchers: ” Given their short length it is plausible that some of these functional microproteins have recently originated entirely de novo from non-coding sequence. Here we test the possibility that de novo gene birth can produce microproteins that are functional ‘out-of-the-box’. ” So is everybody a creationist now but some people are in denial about it?
What happens when DNA snaps?
At Evolution News: “When both DNA strands break (the “double-stranded break” crisis, or DSB), a cell can die. Molecular machines fly into action as the strands flail about, threatening genomic catastrophe. The repair crew has an additional problem: unlike the bridge cable, the DNA strand is made up of a sequence of code that needs to match what was there before the DSB. In a process called homologous recombination, the machinery searches for a template to rebuild the broken sequence.”
Another Truism Dies
A new paper can be found at Phys.Org undermining the idea that what drives evolution is the “decoupling” of DNA with phylogenic structures. This idea is implicit in the twin ideas of pseudogenes and gene duplication: both allow the DNA to become “uncoupled” from the structures they code for and so RM becomes permissible. Well, Read More…
Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne says they’ll never clone a herd of mammoths
Coyne: What they’d get would be a genetic chimera, an almost entirely Asian elephant but one that is hairier, chunkier, and more tolerant of cold. That is NOT a woolly mammoth, nor would it behave like a woolly mammoth, for they’re not inserting behavior genes.
Genes respond to coded information in signals
The point here is that genes, like fungi, are not intelligent but — like mechanical devices — they can respond to signals. The reason the confusion arises is that establishment science does not want to admit that creative intelligence underlies the universe. Forced into a corner, some will even pretend that mushrooms think and genes have “behavior,” the way a dog would.
Mind Matters News: Our brains break DNA in order to learn more quickly
MIT News: Neurons and other brain cells snap open their DNA in numerous locations — more than previously realized, according to a new study — to provide quick access to genetic instructions for the mechanisms of memory storage. – David Orenstein, “Memory-making Involves Extensive DNA Breaking” at Mit News (July 14, 2021)