Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Category

Genomics

Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
May 21, 2022
Categorized
Cell biology, Genomics, Intelligent Design
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Are all those codes used by cells really “codes”?

Denyse O'Leary
May 21, 2022
Cell biology, Genomics, Intelligent Design
One biologist thinks that only DNA is really a code. David Coppedge disagrees. Coppedge: But it seems fair to categorize codes separately if they contain unique information and produce unique results. Even if histones are built from DNA, once they are assembled, they no longer rely on the genetic code. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 12, 2022
Categorized
Genetics, Genomics, Intelligent Design
Tagged
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Changing the genetic code — and still enabling life — would be a challenge

Denyse O'Leary
April 12, 2022
Genetics, Genomics, Intelligent Design
The basic message is that we can’t improve on all the things that just happen to work by accident in exactly the right way. Yet in just about any area of life other than evolution theory we find a completely different picture. Why is Darwinism allowed to be such a big exception to the general rule? Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 1, 2022
Categorized
Darwinism, Genomics, Intelligent Design
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Do genetics and homology really support Darwinism where the fossil record has failed?

Denyse O'Leary
April 1, 2022
Darwinism, Genomics, Intelligent Design
Klinghoffer: Even if universal common ancestry is true, there seemingly is no drawable “true tree.” As Lukas says, “Those who study homology simply assume evolution to be true, but they’ve never actually demonstrated that the ancestral evolutionary relationships between different organisms are real.” Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
March 24, 2022
Categorized
'Junk DNA', Genomics, Intelligent Design, Neuroscience
Tagged
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New use for “junk DNA”: Controlling fear

Denyse O'Leary
March 24, 2022
'Junk DNA', Genomics, Intelligent Design, Neuroscience
Okay, why, until recently, did researchers think that “the majority of our genes were made up of junk DNA, which essentially didn't do anything”? Because that vast sunken library of dead information (sheer randomness and waste) was a slam dunk for Darwinism, as politically powerful theistic evolutionist Francis Collins was quick to point out in The Language of God. (2007). If that’s not true, an argument for Darwinism is disconfirmed. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
March 23, 2022
Categorized
Genomics, Intelligent Design, stasis
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Researchers: Sand dollars and sea biscuits emerged earlier than thought

Denyse O'Leary
March 23, 2022
Genomics, Intelligent Design, stasis
They are using the “molecular clock” technique to determine that. One wonders if that technique is not too risky in the absence of a fossil record. But “earlier than thought” has been a good bet in principle. Not so good for the “long, slow process of evolution” stuff though. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
February 3, 2022
Categorized
Genomics, Intelligent Design
Tagged
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Researchers think they know how chromosomes came to exist

Denyse O'Leary
February 3, 2022
Genomics, Intelligent Design
At Quanta: "Now, in a paper appearing today in Science Advances, an international team of researchers led by Daniel Rokhsar, a professor of biological sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, has tracked changes in chromosomes that occurred as much as 800 million years ago. They identified 29 big blocks of genes that remained recognizable as they passed into three of the earliest subdivisions of multicellular animal life." Okay, but all this information exploding such a long time ago… ? Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
February 2, 2022
Categorized
'Junk DNA', Evolution, Genomics
Tagged
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At Scientific American: Salamander “junk DNA” challenges long-held view of evolution

Denyse O'Leary
February 2, 2022
'Junk DNA', Evolution, Genomics
Douglas Fox at SciAm: The salamanders would be on death’s door if they were human. “Everything about having a large genome is costly,” Wake told me in 2020. Yet salamanders have survived for 200 million years. “So there must be some benefit,” he said. The hunt for those benefits has led to some heretical surprises, potentially turning our understanding of evolution on its head. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 12, 2021
Categorized
Genomics, Intelligent Design
Tagged
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Tim Standish on those five new alternate genetic codes in bacteria: It’s way more complicated than they are making out.

Denyse O'Leary
November 12, 2021
Genomics, Intelligent Design
Standish: Changing codon meaning isn’t merely a tweak. As one of the authors notes, “It’s just mind-boggling that an organism could survive that.” But he is dead wrong when he says, “Stop codon shifts are considerably less ‘dramatic’”. Changing a stop codon seems significantly more challenging than changing any other codon meaning because the mechanism for stop codon recognition is totally different and involves more than RNA-RNA interactions. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
October 22, 2021
Categorized
Genomics
Tagged
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Researchers study why many life forms discard pieces of their DNA as they develop

Denyse O'Leary
October 22, 2021
Genomics
Researchers: "A surprisingly wide array of creatures, all the way up to some vertebrates, dump significant stretches of DNA during early development, so the stretches don’t end up in most of their body cells." [Only in the germ cells they pass on.] Read More ›