“Avian flight,” a new studyexplains, “is one of the remarkable achievements of vertebrate evolution.” Indeed, there is the “complex biotechnical architecture of avian wings,” the “magic structural wing asymmetries” so important for aeroelastic flight control, and the “extremely precise coordination of the complex wing beat motions, together with a perfect flight guidance and control performance.”  Read more

Proteins consist of a long sequence of amino acids and those amino acids are supplied by the so-called transfer RNA, or tRNA, molecules. The tRNA molecules, in turn, are loaded with the right amino acid by the so-called aminoacyl-transfer RNA synthetases, or aaRS, proteins. There are several different versions of aaRS proteins, which load the different tRNA molecules with the different kinds of amino acids. These aaRS proteins hang around the ribosome where proteins are constructed. But as I discussed in the previous post, the lysine aaRS, also known as LysRS, has an interesting dual role. Normally it hangs around the ribosome where it binds to another LysRS to form what is known as a dimer. In this dimer configuration, there is Read More ›

I’d like to thank skeptical philosopher John Loftus for his prompt reply to my post, Detecting the supernatural: Why science doesn’t presuppose methodological naturalism, after all. In his post, which is titled, Heads I Win Tails You Lose: Another Christian Apologist’s Trick, Loftus zeroes in on what he sees as the fatal weaknesses in my argument. Let’s take a look at them. (The image at the top, by the way, is of a humpback whale breaching, courtesy of Whit Welles and Wikipedia.) When discussing biological Intelligent Design, I calculated that by a very generous estimate, there had been perhaps 10,000,000 “acts of intervention” (to use Loftus’ term), during the 4,000 million year history of life on Earth. I also emphasized Read More ›

You’ve seen those amazing multi-purpose kitchen utensils and jackknifes that perform a dozen tasks, but it is all standard fare in biology. From the DNA molecule which stores all kinds of information (you can see examples here, here, hereand here) including overlapping genes, to molecules that fulfill various roles depending on the cellular context and gene sharing, biology is the model of efficiency. Call it multi-purpose design, component reuse, optimization of information density, or whatever, it is one of biology’s biggest unsung feats and last week yet another example was published.  Read more

In the spirit of Christmas, I thought I would share with you all two intellectual gifts I received from my parents growing up. Read More

Memo to Eugenie Scott and the National Center for Science Education: the claim that scientists must explain the natural world in terms of natural processes alone, eschewing all supernatural explanations, is now being openly denied by three leading scientists who are also outspoken atheists. I’m referring to physicist Sean Carroll, and biologists Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers, who hold that there are circumstances under which scientists can legitimately infer the existence of supernatural causes. That’s a pretty formidable trio. The NCSE is perfectly free to disown these scientists if it wishes, but I think it would be severely undermining its own credibility if it did so. Let me state at the outset that Intelligent Design, while open to the Read More ›

From here: Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are mysterious molecules. They are almost-proteins—transcripts of about 200 or more nucleotides that appear not to encode proteins. Given their noncoding status, it is perhaps surprising that many lncRNAs are expressed in very specific anatomical or developmental patterns, suggesting that their regulation is of biological importance. At the cellular level, most lncRNAs, also called large intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs), are localized to the nucleus. In addition, most lncRNAs either overlap with genes that encode proteins, are transcribed antisense to genes that encode proteins or are expressed as intergenic or intronic regions. But why spend energy tightly regulating the expression and localization of RNA molecules that don’t eventually end up as proteins? And what do Read More ›

Last night, a few of us from Discovery Institute attended the Seattle Analytic Philosophy Club meetup discussion on “Is Intelligent Design Science?” I’ve never met so many thoughtful and open-minded ID critics! One atheist gentleman even said that he would have to abandon one of the arguments he’s been using against ID and research the ID position more thoroughly. He came to realize that, although dismissing ID out of hand as ‘unscientific’ offered an easy way to reject ID without careful consideration and analysis of its claims, the assertion that ID isn’t science is a very difficult position to defend philosophically. When we adequately addressed objections, our detractors would concede the point. Why can’t all ID-critics be like that? Some Read More ›

Lynn Margulis’s son, Dorion Sagan, co-author of Margulis’s well-known book Acquiring Genomes, has written a book dedicated to his mother’s life and work. The book description on Amazon reads, Tireless, controversial, and hugely inspirational to those who knew her or encountered her work, Lynn Margulis was a scientist whose intellectual energy and interests knew no bounds. Best known for her work on the origins of eukaryotic cells, the Gaia hypothesis, and symbiogenesis as a driving force in evolution, her work has forever changed the way we understand life on Earth. When Margulis passed away in 2011, she left behind a groundbreaking scientific legacy that spanned decades. In this collection, Dorion Sagan, Margulis’s son and longtime collaborator, gathers together the voices of Read More ›

Come along this evening (7-9pm) to the Lake Hills Library in Seattle for a discussion hosted by the Seattle Analytic Philosophy Club on “Is Intelligent Design Science?” Casey Luskin, myself (Jonathan M.) and Josh Youngkin from Discovery Institute will be there. Go here for details!

The twentieth century’s eugenics movement was eventually discarded, but eugenics did not go away entirely. Today eugenics continues, but it is a much more diverse and technologically sophisticated. There are the so-called eugenic abortions where the unborn with higher disease risks are “terminated.” And today’s technology allows for specific embryos, and even genes, to be selected. There seems to be, as Nathaniel Comfort observed this month, a eugenic impulse that drives us to seek a better human race. Underlying such health concerns, however, are the usual less benevolent motivations. In addition to the promised health benefits, Comfort explains that eugenics offers an intellectual thrill, and the profits of genetic biomedicine. Such lures are, explains Comfort, “too great for us to do Read More ›

Nature is, as Tennyson lamented, red in tooth and claw, but Darwinism turned death and bloodshed into a virtue. It is evolution’s natural selection that makes way for the more fit by killing off the less fit. Natural selection did not, indeed it cannot, induce better mutations. But when by chance they luckily arise, then they propagate at the cost of the lesser designs. Spencer’s phrase “the survival of the fittest,” which Darwin adopted, is more optimistic sounding but no less telling. With evolution, death is the engine of progress. Or as Matt Ridley explained today, … Read more

A new paper has just been published in the journal Genome Biology by John Rinn and David Kelley, identifying a role for transposable elements in gene regulation in stem cells. Science Daily reports on the paper: Over a decade after sequencing the human genome, it has now become clear that the genome is not mostly ‘junk’ as previously thought. In fact, the ENCODE project consortium of dozens of labs and petabytes of data have determined that these ‘noncoding’ regions house everything from disease trait loci to important regulatory signals, all the way through to new types of RNA-based genes. Yet over 70 years ago, it was first proclaimed that all this junk wasn’t so junky. Barbara McClintock discovered the first utility of all Read More ›

In my previous two posts (see here and here) on feminist atheist Libby Anne’s Love, Joy, Feminism blog, I critiqued her embrace of evolutionary naturalism, and her rejection of the view that the cosmos was designed by an Intelligent Being. I then exposed the deficiencies in her ethical views, which have led her to conclude that human beings do not become persons until the moment of birth, and that abortion should be a woman’s legal right at any time before her baby is born. In my final post, I’m going to address the factual claims that Libby Anne makes in a post that subsequently went viral, entitled, How I lost faith in the pro-life movement. Her opening paragraph immediately grabs Read More ›