A commenter in another thread prompted this. I didn’t approve the comment because it was so impoverished but thought the discussion warranted a thread of its own. The commenter basically said that 30,000 proteins w/regulatory regions is enough – a mere fraction of the DNA in a human egg – implying that plenty of DNA can be functionless junk. While that number of regulated proteins might possibly be enough to define myriad cell types and tissue types there is an awful lot more required. The list of things I can think of (which is likely not complete) includes: 1) cell types 2) tissue types 3) organs 5) body plan 6) autonomic control system 7) instinctive behaviors Since complex system design Read More ›

In “Evolution, Religion and Free Will” (American Scientist, Volume 95, 294ff), Gregory W. Graffin and William B. Provine found that, of 149 eminent evolutionists polled, 78% were pure naturalists (no God) and only two were clearly theists (traditional idea of God). Some were in between these poles. The authors describe most of them as deists (some sort of divinity might have got things rolling but it is not God in any sense that Christians understand).

They note that the evolutionary biologists scored the lowest so far in any such poll. They described the vast majority of their respondents as Read More ›

“To knock out 2 megabases and not have an effect—that’s remarkable,” says Jim Hudson, a geneticist at Open Biosystems in Huntsville, Alabama. “It can’t be true,” says a skeptical Arend Sidow of Stanford University.

Arend Sidow is not a dumb or unqualified guy. He’s the principal researcher at Stanford University’s Sidow Lab. In fact this is his lab’s primary area of investigation: Much of our work rests on a simple, fundamental, principle of evolution: functionally or structurally important sites in the genome are subject to selective constraints;

So why can’t it be true? Because if evolutionary theory (natural selection) is true then it MUST BE TRUE that conserved (constrained) regions of DNA have biological activity. Arend won’t entertain natural selection at the DNA sequence level not being true. The knockout experiment, if there is no mistake, overturns his faith in evolutionary theory. So the experiment must be flawed. “It just can’t be true.” Arend is having a crisis of faith. Isn’t that just precious?

THE BIOLOGY OF GENOMES MEETING: Disposable DNA Puzzles Researchers
Elizabeth Pennisi
11 JUNE 2004 VOL 304 SCIENCE

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Some of the claims by ID proponents have not been adequately explored because of the cost issues involved in doing large-scale whole-genome sequencing of numerous individuals. Not even Warren Buffet has the trillions of dollars needed to accomplish such a massive amount of gene sequencing. At least not today, but maybe in the future!

The human genome project took 3 billion dollars and 13 years to complete. By comparison, Solexa might be able to do a comparable job for a few thousand dollars per person (ideally even less) and in a much shorter time frame. (See the UD sidebar on Solexa Genomics.) Solexa might be viewed as an unwitting research partner of the ID movement.
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Here’s an indicator how the ID debate is shaping up in the UK. Please note the extensive comments at the end of this article at the Guardian website (go here). Intelligent design is a science, not a faith By Richard Buggs Tuesday January 9, 2007 The Guardian . . . If Darwin had known what we now know about molecular biology – gigabytes of coded information in DNA, cells rife with tiny machines, the highly specific structures of certain proteins – would he have found his own theory convincing? Randerson thinks that natural selection works fine to explain the origin of molecular machines. But the fact is that we are still unable even to guess Darwinian pathways for the origin Read More ›

Doubting Rationalist
‘Intelligent Design’ Proponent Phillip Johnson, and How He Came to Be
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051401222_pf.html

By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 15, 2005; D01

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