Intelligent Design

That is the question they are asking over at Science Friday. Now, scientists are questioning whether that’s actually true—or if mutation is more likely to occur in some parts of the genome than others. New research published in the journal Nature this week looks at just that question, in a common weed called Arabidopsis thaliana. After following 24 generations of plants for several years and then sequencing the offspring, the team found that some genes are far less likely to mutate than others. And those genes are some of the most essential to the function of DNA itself, where a mutation could be fatal. Conversely, the genes most likely to mutate were those associated with the plant’s ability to respond to its environment—potentially a handy trick Read More ›

WARNING! The video linked here is extremely disturbing. Four days ago Alexis Avila, a woman in New Mexico, had a baby. She put the baby in a garbage bag and threw him in a dumpster. She is being charged with attempted murder. The good news is that a passerby found the baby (umbilical cord still attached) still alive and called 911. The medics were able to save his life. Ms. Avila could have gone to an abortionist a couple of hours earlier and had her baby chopped into pieces in utero. The abortionist could have then removed the pieces, put them in the same garbage bag and thrown it in the same dumpster. In that case, Ms. Avila would have Read More ›

Ethan Siegel offers an opinion at Forbes: No matter how tempting it may be to think that the Universe arose from a singular point of infinite temperature and density, and that all of space and time emerged from that starting point, we cannot responsibly make that extrapolation and still be consistent with the observations that we’ve made. We can only run the clock back a certain, finite amount until the story changes, with today’s observable Universe — and all the matter and energy within it — allowed to be no smaller than the wingspan of a typical human teenager. Any smaller than that, and we’d see fluctuations in the Big Bang’s leftover glow that simply aren’t there. Ethan Siegel, “How Read More ›