Intelligent Design

I recently received a message from someone who had a fascinating video on transcription, which he wanted to share with people he knew. The video, titled “The Central Dogma,” was produced by the RIKEN Omics Science Center for the exhibition titled ‘Beyond DNA’ held at National Science Museum of Japan, and can also be viewed here. Readers are invited to form their own conclusions. Any further comment on my part would be superfluous: the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words was never truer than for the video you are about to watch. Here’s the Youtube video:

Work by a husband-and-wife team of virologists is shedding new light on an old scientific dispute: did viruses emerge before or after the development of cellular life? Until recently, many scientists believed that viruses only appeared after the first cells emerged on the primordial Earth. However, the recent discovery of strange genes in giant viruses is leading some scientists to suggest that the ancestors of viruses evolved before cells. Are they alive or aren’t they? Giant viruses, which were first described in 2003, straddle the gap between viruses and bacteria. Despite the fact that viruses undergo natural selection and reproduce by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly – an ability which University of Cape Town virologist Ed Rybicki considers Read More ›

In Chapter 7 of The Edge of Evolution, Michael Behe explained why protein-protein interactions are a problem for evolution. Here is a summary of the problem. First, protein-protein interactions are important. Proteins often work in teams where half a dozen or more proteins may be interacting with each other to form a molecular machine. Protein-protein interaction is ubiquitous throughout life—so ubiquitous that we now have a name for the collective set of such interactions: theinteractome. You can’t do much without protein-protein interactions. It is not as though protein-protein interactions are a convenient extra that makes cells a bit more efficient or bequeaths a few nice-to-have functions. Protein-protein interactions are fundamental to life, and are fundamental at all levels. Evolution must have Read More ›

Protein-coding genes provide a sequence of nucleotides that is read three nucleotides at a time. Each triplet is translated into a particular type of amino acid. So a sequence of 300 nucleotides codes for 100 amino acids, which are attached to each other to make a protein. But what if you started not with the first nucleotide in the sequence, but with the second one? You would have a different sequence of nucleotide triplets, and so a different sequence of amino acids. This is also true if you started with the third nucleotide. In fact you could switch over to the opposing DNA strand (the other half of the double helix) and again you would have the choice between three Read More ›

The writer, philosopher and home-maker Lydia McGrew makes some very sensible points about Intelligent Design arguments in a recent post on her blog, titled, Special agent intention as an explanation (May 12, 2014), which cogently rebuts the claim (made by some critics) that ID rejects the notion of God as the necessary Cause of created things. She writes: All Christians believe that God made the universe and sustains the universe. All Christians also believe that God sometimes does things that in some sense “go beyond” making and sustaining the universe. We usually call those miracles. Some have argued that, if a particular “going beyond” was “front-loaded” into the initial conditions of the Big Bang, it shouldn’t be considered a miracle. Read More ›