You won’t believe this one. According to evolutionists, millions of years ago a retrovirus infected our ancestors’ genome causing disease, but then through the usual random events, which is to say the usual unknown events, it somehow turned hero and now appears to be highly active and playing a crucial role in stem cells. As one evolutionist admits: Read more
Rep. Rush Holt (NJ), with the help of the atheists at the American Humanist Association, wants Congress officially to designate February 12, 2013 as Darwin Day. And you wondered why our government is a disaster. Holt believes that “Without Charles Darwin, our modern understandings of biology, ecology, genetics, and medicine would be utterly impossible.” Read more
In a recent post over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne repeats the tired old canard that science progresses but theology doesn’t: When lecturing on their incompatibility, I always mention that although science has progressed enormously in the past few hundred years, theology has not. That is, we know no more about the nature or existence of God than we did in, say, 800 C.E. Hell, theologians aren’t sure whether there’s one god or many gods (as Hindus believe), or a red-horned devil, not to mention more trivial issues like whether the wine and crackers at communion are wholly Jesus’s blood and body (“transubstantiation”) or only partly Jesus’s blood and body (“consubstantiation”). The only “progress” theology has made Read More ›
DI has just released a video on the ATP Synthase in action (HT: ENV): The blurb at Youtube reads: ATP Synthase is a molecular machine found in all living organisms. It serves as a miniature power-generator, producing an energy-carrying molecule, adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. The ATP synthase machine has many parts we recognize from human-designed technology, including a rotor, a stator, a camshaft or driveshaft, and other basic components of a rotary engine. This machine is just the final step in a long and complex metabolic pathway involving numerous enzymes and other molecules—all so the cell can produce ATP to power biochemical reactions, and provide energy for other molecular machines in the cell. {Added, courtesy commenters below, here is another Read More ›
One of the most common tests evolutionists use, when studying how genes are supposed to have evolved, is to compare the non-synonymous and synonymous genetic differences. That is, if a gene that codes for a particular protein is found in several species, then evolutionists interpret differences in the gene, across those species, as the result of mutations in the evolutionary process. And while most mutations cause a change in the resulting protein amino acid sequence, some mutations do not affect the amino acid that is coded for. These two kinds of mutations are referred to as non-synonymous and synonymous, respectively, and their relative proportions are important to evolutionists. They believe that the while the non-synonymous mutations are important, because they Read More ›
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Your internet line carries multiple signals simultaneously and likewise a gene carries multiple biological signals. A gene does not merely code for a protein. As difficult as it would be to randomly find a protein-coding gene sequence, it would be much more difficult to find a real gene because they carry so many more signals. For instance, the gene’s DNA sequence determines the important stability of the DNA copy—the so-called mRNA strand, and the mRNA interactions with proteins such as editing machinery. Read more
‘Quadruple helix’ DNA seen in human cells Balasubramanian’s group has been pursuing a four-stranded version of the molecule (DNA) that scientists have produced in the test tube now for a number of years. It is called the G-quadruplex. The “G” refers to guanine, one of the four chemical groups, or “bases”, that hold DNA together and which encode our genetic information (the others being adenine, cytosine, and thymine). The G-quadruplex seems to form in DNA where guanine exists in substantial quantities. . . . This revealed the four-stranded DNA arose most frequently during the so-called “s-phase” when a cell copies its DNA just prior to dividing. . . . If the G-quadruplex could be implicated in the development of some Read More ›
When I come across a new idea, I like to see if there are any relatively simple and obvious arguments that can be levied for or against it. When I first came across ID, this is the simple argument I used that validated it – IMO – as a real phenomenon and a valid scientific concept. Simply put, I know intelligent design exists – humans (at least, if not other animals) employ it. I use it directly. I know that intelligent design as humans employ it can (but not always) generate phenomena that are easily discernible as products of intelligent design. Anyone who argues that a battleship’s combination of directed specificity and/or complexity is not discernible from the complexity found in Read More ›
Algae do not merely grow onrocks, they also grow in the cracks and crevices of rocks making the seaweed organisms a difficult meal for consumers such as Cryptochiton stelleri, otherwise known as gumboot chiton, a marine mollusk off the coast of California. This tenacious chiton solves the problem by grinding down rocks with an amazing set of teeth which contain the hardest known biomineral, magnetite. The outer shell of the chiton’s teeth, as professor David Kisailus explains in his latest paper, develop in four distinct stages: Read more
Why is there no debate over evolution? Why does everyone believe in the Epicurean vision that the world arose spontaneously? Just ask David Coppedge, the IT guy at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who dared question evolution. Coppedge was an excellent employee who enjoyed his job, but when he openly questioned … Read more
Recently one of our materialist friends made a comment along the lines of “we’ve known life can come from non-life since the concept of ‘vitalism’ was debunked by the synthesis of urea from inorganic elements.” Our friend is wrong. Let me explain why. It is true that prior to the nineteenth century many chemists believed organic compounds were too complex to be synthesized and organic matter was somehow endowed with a mysterious “vital force.” This is the essence of vitalism. It is also true that vitalism was largely debunked in 1828 when Friedrich Wohler produced urea, an organic constituent of urine, from inorganic ammonium cyanate. Moreover, it is true that since the famous Miller-Urey experiments in the 1950s, scientists have Read More ›
Should Christians reject evolution because it violates the Bible by leaving no room for Adam and Eve and the Fall, or should Christians accept evolution because it is the obvious scientific conclusion? That, according to one history professor, is how the debate will be framed at an upcoming conference. If so, it would be an unfortunate repeat of a centuries old false dichotomy and what would be missing would be any discussion of what evolution really is. Read more
You can find here an utility to calculate the probabilities of random sequences of symbols. It tries to answer questions like this: “a random process generating sequences of length L from an alphabet of S symbols in T trials of t seconds each, involving c chemical reactions, does exceed the resources of the universe (age, max number of chemical reactions, universal probability bound)?”. The user interface is meant to be self-explanatory. The “Demo” button has the function to preset an example of input values. After the “Demo” you can eventually change some or all inputs and click the “Calculate” button to obtain your new output results. Otherwise if you want to start from entirely different inputs you may click the Read More ›