Genetics

Joe Felsenstein has been a vigorous advocate of evolutionism. [Oddly, in creationist circles, he is actually revered as are many Darwinists geneticists.] He has defended evolutionism passionately almost all his life. His textbooks are the bread and butter of Nick Matzke and WD400’s understanding of phylogeny, but a new development from fellow scientists at University of Washing could make Joe’s defense of evolutionism much harder. Scientists have discovered a second code hiding within DNA. This second code contains information that changes how scientists read the instructions contained in DNA and interpret mutations to make sense of health and disease. J Stam Genome scientist Dr. John Stamatoyannopolous led a team that discovered a second code hidden in DNA. A research team Read More ›

Wikipedia is known to be Darwin loving, but here is a moment of anti-Darwinian honesty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_redundancy Genetic redundancy is a term typically used to describe situations where a given biochemical function is redundantly encoded by two or more genes. In these cases, mutations (or defects) in one of these genes will have a smaller effect on the fitness of the organism than expected from the genes’ function. Characteristic examples of genetic redundancy include (Enns, Kanaoka et al. 2005) and (Pearce, Senis et al. 2004). Many more examples are thoroughly discussed in (Kafri, Levy & Pilpel. 2006). …. A Darwinian Paradox Genetic redundancy has aroused significant debate in the context of evolutionary biology (Nowak et al., 1997; Kafri, Springer & Pilpel Read More ›

Bacteria demonstrate intra-species communication that is species specific using a partner with a communication molecule. Bacteria are also “multilingual” with a generic trade language for interspecies communication. Bacteria control tasks by signal producing and receiving receptors with a signal carrier. The tasks bacteria conduct depend on the concentration they sense of self bacteria versus generic species concentration. e.g. Bacteria control pathogenicity with quorum sensing. The detailed (small) sRNA required for these control mechanisms is now beginning to be desciphered. See below. Question:
Did bacteria “invent” their communication and control methods via evolutionary stochastic processes?
Or do these constitute Complex Specified Information and thus evidence design? Read More ›

A galaxy is speculated to form in only 700 million years. By way of contrast, in a comparable stretch of time (450 million years) the Living Fossil horse shoe crab has remained unchanged. In fact the Earth supposedly took only 20 million years to form out of a nebula, and that horse shoe crab remained immutable for 450 million years (22 times longer)! In the same time frame that the horseshoe crab remained the same, fish evolve into birds. Isn’t evolution (or lack thereof in the horseshoe crab) amazing? One test I suggest is whenever we have a living fossil plus a supposed real fossil of the same species (like a horseshoe crab), to the extent we can do a Read More ›

In today’s Phys.Org news page, we hear about a three nucleotide change in the organism “Trypanosoma brucei, a parasite that causes sleeping sickness in Africa and Chagas disease in Latin America.” Immediately after “transcription”, via a completely unknown mechanism, a three nucleotide portion of the intron associated with …… is replaced by three different nucleotides. Here’s what they say: “These are changes for which no chemistry is known and has never been described. We don’t know what enzyme is involved and that is the million-dollar question: What mechanism is doing this? We haven’t a clue,” said Juan Alfonzo, professor of microbiology at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study. . . . . Alfonzo sought to identify Read More ›

What would count as evidence against common descent given that organisms share such strong similarities? Darwin for the sake of argument assumed that the Creator (presumably God) created life, but argued the data accorded better with universal common ancestry. Nelson contested that view in his keynote address by arguing that if the principle of continuity is violated, there is no need to assume common ancestry. That even if a pair of organisms are 90% similar, that 10% difference could be sufficient to falsify common ancestry if the gap in differences are sufficiently large to be bridged by mindless processes. IF it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight Read More ›