Intelligent Design

You won’t believe what Samie Jaffrey’s group at Cornell is confirming and elucidating about epigenetics, the fantastic adaptation capability cells have to adjust to environmental shifts. Epigenetics is a broad term for a range of adaptation capabilities achieved via the regulation of gene expression. Gene expression can be regulated, for example, by attaching small chemical markers such as methyl groups, like bar codes, to DNA or to the histone proteins about which the DNA is wrapped. Such chemical modifications have been known to be used also on the DNA copy—the messenger RNA—used to synthesize proteins. What Jaffrey’s group has found is that mRNA methylation is ubiquitous. Something like 20% of the transitory mRNA molecules are methylated in human cells. This Read More ›

A new method has been developed for mapping the precise locations at which DNA has been marked with a hydroxyl group. The hydrogen-oxygen molecule, like the methyl group to which it is attached, influences gene expression and so helps organisms adapt. The adaptation of species to environmental pressures would seem like obvious evidence for evolution. But in recent years we have begun to understand the enormous complexity of adaptation. It is not a story of natural selection acting on undirected biological variations (that is, variations that are blind to environmental pressures). This sort of undirected process has been the evolutionary dogma for the past century. In what was known as the Modern Synthesis, biological adaptation was described as resulting from blind variations Read More ›

“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”  George Orwell

David W. Gibson asks some interesting questions in a comment to johnnyb’s last post.  First, he writes concerning Darwinism:  “How could it ever have come to pass that tens of thousands of the most intelligent humans in the world, after decades of detailed study, could STILL fall victim to the ‘transparently ludicrous’?” Let me answer this question by referring to a couple of similar examples from hisotry. In the second century Ptolemy devised his system of cosmology.  In this system each planet moves along a “deferent” and an “epicycle.”  The planet’s movement along these two paths cause it to move closer to and further away from the earth.  For the system to work, the planets sometimes had to slow down, Read More ›

Physicists have come up with the idea that there could be an astronomical number of universes in addition to our own. They call it the multiverse. It can explain very improbable events, such as the origin of life, because no matter how improbable an event, it becomes a virtual certainty when you have so many universes in which it might happen. This idea of separated worlds is now emerging in genetics as well, as some evolutionists are contemplating the idea of different DNA worlds. The evolutionary tree model doesn’t work very well, and so evolutionists are experimenting with other models. One is a network model and using it evolutionists have found that DNA sequences in nature tend to separate into Read More ›