Category: Genetics
Devolution: African elephants survive by shedding their tusks
| November 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
A classic in devolution, actually. In Mozambique, it is estimated that 90% of the elephants have been slaughtered for ivory to finance a civil war that ended in 1992. But tuskless elephants seem more likely to survive: Hunting gave elephants that didn’t grow tusks a biological advantage in Gorongosa. Recent figures suggest that about a […]
John Sanford on claims about brand new nylonase genes
| November 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
Recently, we noted that John Sanford was speaking at NIH on human health and mutations. Philip Cunningham writes to mention a 2017 paper by Sanford and S. T. Cordova, Nylonase Genes and Proteins – Distribution, Conservation, and Possible Origins on whether the ba cteria that digest nylon evolved new genes: We began this work hoping […]
John Sanford gives lecture at NIH on mutations and human health
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
Geneticist John Sanford is also the author of Genetic Entropy: and one of the editors of Biological Information: New Perspectives: Proceedings of a Symposium Held May 31 Through June 3, 2011 at Cornell University Note: In a distinctly unsavoury move, devout Darwinians managed to get Biological Information dropped by Springer. It is all the more […]
Do we really live longer because of “longevity genes”? Researchers cast doubt
| November 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
It’s now suggested that people likely to live long tend to find each other (assortative mating). How else to explain this?Researchers found that siblings’ and first cousins’ lifespans were well correlated but also: But spouses’ lifespans were correlated, too. That could be easily explained by spouses sharing the same household and lifestyle: eating the same […]
Berlinski and Denton, agnostics who doubt Darwin, offer their reasoning
| October 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Genetics, Intelligent Design, Mathematics |
David Berlinski and Michael Denton feature in a podcast: For Berlinski, a mathematician and author of The Deniable Darwin, the problem is quantitative and methodological. For Denton, a geneticist and author of the new Discovery Institute Press book Children of Light: The Astonishing Properties of Light that Make Us Possible, the problem is empirical. Don’t miss […]
If thinking so makes a man a woman…
| October 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Genetics, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
… not only is the mind real but it is so real that nature doesn’t even matter. Barry Arrington wrote here recently, Elizabeth Warren says that a DNA report that shows she is between 1/1024th and 1/64th Colombian, Mexican or Peruvian absolutely scientifically proves her claim that she was a Cherokee Indian, so President Trump […]
Elizabeth Warren and the progressive war on science
| October 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Genetics, Intelligent Design, Science |
Here’s a reasonable take on Warren’s DNA results: Using this data, the original analysis, which was prepared by a respected geneticist, determined that five segments of Sen. Warren’s DNA — totaling about 12.3 million bases (“letters”) — are of Native American ancestry. That might sound like a lot, but the human genome contains more than […]
Researchers: The selfish gene does not drive cooperation after all
| October 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Genetics isn’t as important as once thought for the evolution of altruistic social behavior in some organisms, a new insight into a decade-long debate. This is the first empirical evidence that suggests social behavior in eusocial species — organisms that are highly organized, with divisions of infertile workers — is only mildly attributed […]
Researchers claim to have discovered genes re the “meaning of life”
| October 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Genetics, Naturalism |
That guy at Nature who rides “Genetic determinism rides again” was right. Now, from ScienceDaily: For the first time, locations on the human genome have been identified that can explain differences in meaning in life between individuals. This is the result of research conducted in over 220,000 individuals by Professor Meike Bartels and PhD student […]
Why genetic determinism can’t simply be disproven
| October 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
Reviewing behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin’s Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, a history of medicine prof writes, Crude hereditarianism often re-emerges after major advances in biological knowledge: Darwinism begat eugenics; Mendelism begat worse eugenics. The flowering of medical genetics in the 1950s led to the notorious, now-debunked idea that men with an extra […]
It’s likely impossible to find out how many species there are
| October 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, speciation |
But don’t tell Mother Jones’s readers: The Census of Marine Life closing ceremony was meant to celebrate the fact that humans had, for the first time, estimated how many species there were in the sea. The Sloan Foundation, which partially funded the $650 million, 10-year project, organized the event. Scientists had been trying to uncover […]
Did a broken gene improve running and help humans conquer the planet?
| September 20, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Humans apparently have a broken version of CMP-Neu5Ac Hydroxylase (CMAH), which helps build a sugar molecule that impacts running: Despite our couch potato lifestyles, long-distance running is in our genes. A new study in mice pinpoints how a stretch of DNA likely turned our ancestors into marathoners, giving us the endurance to conquer territory, evade […]
Researchers: Genes cannot “be read like tea leaves”
| September 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Medicine |
Which make the effects of mutations harder to predict than hoped. Of course, it’s also a blow for genetic determinism. From ScienceDaily: Ever since the decoding of the human genome in 2003, genetic research has been focused heavily on understanding genes so that they could be read like tea leaves to predict an individual’s future […]
Bee genome changes dramatically through life
| September 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Epigenetics, Genetics |
Remember old-fashioned, unalterable DNA? It was interesting stuff. So now this: “A study of chemical tags on histone proteins hints at how the same genome can yield very different animals:” The bee genome has a superpower. Not only can the exact same DNA sequence yield three types of insect—worker, drone, and queen—that look and behave very […]
New “fixed” bacterial Tree of Life looks like a cityscape
| September 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Genomics, Intelligent Design, Tree of life |
Seen from below: Professor Hugenholtz said the scientific community generally agrees that evolutionary relationships are the most natural way to classify organisms, but bacterial taxonomy is riddled with errors, due to historical difficulties. “This is mainly because microbial species have very few distinctive physical features, meaning that there are thousands of historically misclassified species,” he […]
“Perfect” fossil foal, 30-40 kya, found in Siberian permafrost
| August 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics, Genomics, Intelligent Design |
There were no external injuries. The fossil — discovered in the region of Yakutia — has its skin, hair, hooves and tail preserved. Yakutia is also famous for having found woolly mammoth fossils in the permafrost. Scientists from Russia’s Northeast Federal University, who presented the discovery Thursday, said the foal is estimated to be 30,000 […]
Does DNA testing keep alive ideas that “deserve to die”?
| August 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Genetics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
An anthropologist asks: Now go even further back in time to the 17th or 18th century. The number of folks on average living then who could have contributed to your genetic endowment is so large (more than 1,000), and their possible genetic contribution so small (about 0.098 percent for 10 generations back), it would be smoke […]
Find deepens mystery of turtle’s origins
| August 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design, Tree of life |
From ScienceDaily: There are a couple of key features that make a turtle a turtle: its shell, for one, but also its toothless beak. A newly-discovered fossil turtle that lived 228 million years ago is shedding light on how modern turtles developed these traits. It had a beak, but while its body was Frisbee-shaped, its […]
“Junk DNA” regulates regeneration of tissues and organs
| August 22, 2018 | Posted by News under 'Junk DNA', Darwinism, Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory and the University of Maine have discovered that genetic material in the cell that was previously thought to be “junk” because of its apparent lack of function likely plays a part in regulating genetic circuits responsible for regeneration in highly regenerative animals. … The discovery of these […]
Researchers: Genetic “information” is a key to trees surviving deadly beetle
| August 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics, Information, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: A University of Montana researcher has discovered that mountain pine beetles may avoid certain trees within a population they normally would kill due to genetics in the trees. UM Professor Diana Six made the discovery after studying mature whitebark and lodgepole trees that were the age and size that mountain pine beetle prefer, […]
