Interesting story at Evolution News & Views about an exchange between Craig Venter (of human genome fame) and Richard Dawkins (of neo-atheist fame). Venter denies common descent, Dawkins can’t believe that he would even question it. For the exchange, which also includes Paul Davies, go here (start at the 9 minute mark). Origin-of-life researchers such as […]
Origin Of Life
Comments from contacts about the possible alien life form discovery
In response to someone who wondered whether American scientists might be letting their imaginations run away with them about this spectacular new alien life find, Rob Sheldon offers “absolutely not”. Au contraire, the French were onto it and NASA dropped the ball. On why that happened, he says, NASA’s attitude is an example of … […]
Breaking, breaking: Possible alien life form discovered
No, not a joke. From “Exclusive: NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite” by Garrett Tenney (March 05, 2011) here: Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. […]
From the Origin of life news desk: Ammonia from meteors kickstarted life
From New Scientist, we learn “Meteorite cargo could solve origin-of-life riddle” (01 March 2011) Andy Coghlan because A chemical vital for life on Earth may have arrived ready-made from space. Unexpectedly, a chondritic meteorite has been found to contain large amounts of ammonia, a nitrogen-rich chemical needed to form the basic building blocks of life, […]
Origin of life theories: Life from vessels of clay?
We learned recently that “Clay-Armored Bubbles May Have Formed First Protocells: Minerals Could Have Played a Key Role in the Origins of Life” (ScienceDaily, Feb. 7, 2011): A team of applied physicists at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Princeton, and Brandeis have demonstrated the formation of semipermeable vesicles from inorganic clay.The research, […]
Origin of life: Is this the kindergarten of science or its dotage?
In “A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life” (February 21, 2011), New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye sounds like a man who knows a comic scene when he sees one: Two dozen chemists, geologists, biologists, planetary scientists and physicists gathered here recently to ponder where and what Eden might have been. Over […]
Promising early life form shown to be minerals, alas
Here, Matt Kaplan explains (Nature News, 20 February 2011), Twenty years ago the palaeontological community gasped as geoscientists revealed evidence for the oldest bacterial fossils on the planet. Now, a report in Nature Geoscience1 shows that the filament structures that were so important in the fossil descriptions are not remnants of ancient life, but instead […]
Is Craig Venter’s Synthetic Cell Really Life?
Bioethicist Gregory Kaebnick, Ph.D., has an interesting take on the recently announced synthetic cell created by a team of researchers led by J. Craig Venter at the J. Craig Venter Instititute (JVCI). In a recent article in The Scientist entitled Is the “Synthetic Cell” about Life?, Kaebnick writes: …the technical accomplishment is not quite what […]
Zettabytes – by Chance or Design?
A new measure of information has been invented – the Zettabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 10^21 bytes. Zettabytes overtake petabytes as largest unit of digital measurement Heidi Blake, 4 May 2010, The Telegraph UK “The size of the “digital universe” will swell so rapidly this year that a new unit – the zettabyte – has […]
Can SETI’s algorithm detect intelligence?
TED granted Jill Tartar her wish to: “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”. TED and Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has set up SETIQuest.org to: . . . make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time. It will also publish […]
How were RNA gene repeats, “essential” to DNA repair, formed?
RNA replications have now been discovered to be “essential” to DNA error correction systems. If they are “essential”, how could they arrive by random mutation and “selection”? On what basis does neoDarwinism predict error correction in the first place? From Intelligent Design, methodology one expects to see evidence of design in complex biochemical systems. From […]
Darwin skeptic Suzan Mazur is one fine journalist
Here is her interview with David H. Koch, a Darwin-thumping multi-millionaire who has done much to front the cult to the public (“Evolution Sea Change?: David H. Koch Weighs In ,” Archaeology Today, February 17, 2009). Mazur made headlines last year when she wrote about the Altenberg 16, scientists who met in Austria to plan […]
Meyer’s SIGNATURE IN THE CELL — one of Thomas Nagel’s top two books of 2009
Steve Meyer’s SIGNATURE IN THE CELL continues to garner the praise it deserves. This from Thomas Nagel in The Times Literary Supplement: Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something […]
The ID argument from thermodynamics
Since in my last post a commenter put on the table thermodynamics to support evolution I decided to offer my personal answer in a specific post, although UD already dealt with this issue. As known, 2nd law of thermodynamics (SLOT, also called “entropy law”) states that in a closed system the overall energy entropy ΔS […]
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 […]