SCIENCE: “Now THAT’s a genome. A rare Japanese flower named Paris japonica sports an astonishing 149 billion base pairs, making it 50 times the size of a human genome—and the largest genome ever found. Until now, the biggest genome belonged to the marbled lungfish, whose 130 billion base pairs weighed in at an impressive 132.83 Read More…
Genomics
Sanford’s pro-ID thesis supported by PNAS paper, read it and weep, literally
Cornell Geneticist John Sanford argued that Darwinism is wrong because the rate of genetic deterioration is so high that natural selection could not arrest it. If natural selection cannot arrest genetic deterioration, how then could it be the mechanism for evolutionary improvement? Sanford predicted through his research that human genome is deteriorating. This was a Read More…
A simple statistical test for the alleged “99% genetic identity” between humans and chimps
Typical figures published in the scientific literature for the percentage similarities between the genomes of human beings (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) range from 95% to 99%. However, in press releases intended for popular consumption, evolutionary biologists frequently claim that human and chimpanzee genomes are 99% identical. Skeptics of neo-Darwinian evolution have repeatedly punctured Read More…
The Parameterized Evolution of Dogs
I was digging around for some good examples for a talk I am doing on mutation theory in a few weeks, and came upon this great paper in PNAS – Molecular Origins of Rapid and Continuous Morphological Evolution. Their argument? “tandem repeat expansions and contractions are a major source of phenotypic variation in evolution”. Hmmm…. Read More…
“First cell controlled completely by a synthetic genome”
Big news at Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics: Summary: Link 1 Press Release: Link 2 The rhetoric is interesting. What they’ve done is stuck a synthetic genome inside a nonsynthetic cell. Nonetheless, they’ve slipped into talking of a “synthetic bacterial cell.” Indeed, one headline reads “The First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell.” This is hype. If something Read More…
DNA Preservation discovery wins Nobel prize
Were one to design the encoded DNA “blueprint” of life, would not one incorporate ways to preserve that “blueprint”? The Nobel prize in medicine has just been awarded for discovery of features that look amazingly like design to preserve chromosomes. See: 3 Americans win medicine Nobel for chromosome research Three U.S. researchers were awarded the Read More…
Biosemiotics and Intelligent Design
Semiotix – Stephen Pain The distinction between “theorising” and “belief” is extremely important because our attitude differs towards them. In a theory the reified concept of the sign does not have an ontological status but an epistemological one. While in belief, the concept has often a clear ontological one. Uexküll believed in his concept of Read More…
Metaprogramming and DNA
In informatics metaprogramming is a technique consisting in developing computer programs (sets of instructions) that output other programs. While simple programming means instructions generating data, metaprogramming means instructions generating instructions. In general the prefix “meta” means a thing/cause that stays at a higher semantic/ontological level than another thing/effect (in the case of metaprogramming we have Read More…
The Foresighted Paradigm Shift
I’ve heard geneticists say we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift, and that no one really understands what’s going on. I even read an article the other day showing how at least one creature DELETES portions of its own DNA during certain stages of development. Basically, the long-held ideas from even a couple years Read More…
Uncommon Descent Contest Question 6: Why waste a crisis, especially in genomics?
Okay, so the sixth Contest question, for a free copy of Expelled?, is: What rules of science are relevant for genomics? Are they being followed? Remember, 400 words or less, and I recommend that you read the article first.