Fair warning to the regular readership. Typically I like to cover intelligent design and evolution-related issues, but I trust I may be permitted a bit of a detour.  There have been a couple of interesting posts recently by Sal, vjtorley and Barry about issues of a more philosophical bent.  vjtorley’s OP, in particular, quoted parts of an essay from Professor Jerry Coyne.  I would like today to share some thoughts on point. With apologies to those not of the Judeo-Christian tradition, my comments will focus in part on the Bible, given that the Bible and the God of the Bible have been the brunt of many new atheist attacks recently, including Coyne’s.  Similar points, no doubt, could be made with Read More ›

Stretches of DNA that code for proteins are considered non-random, but what about DNA as a whole? DNA Densely Packed without Knots “‘We’ve long known that on a small scale, DNA is a double helix…But if the double helix didn’t fold further, the genome in each cell would be two meters long. Scientists have not really understood how the double helix folds to fit into the nucleus of a human cell, which is only about a hundredth of a millimeter in diameter…’ “The researchers report two striking findings. First, the human genome is organized into two separate compartments, keeping active genes separate and accessible while sequestering unused DNA in a denser storage compartment. Chromosomes snake in and out of the Read More ›

Yesterday, “News” brought readers a fascinating story about a report from Science Daily, titled, Reconstructed ancient ocean reveals secrets about the origin of life (25 April 2014), which was also picked up by Linda Geddes, writing for New Scientist. Reading the Science Daily article, I was struck by the extraordinary naivete of mainstream science reporters covering the origin-of-life issue. Consider the following excerpt, taken from the final two paragraphs: “In the presence of iron and other compounds found in the oceanic sediments, 29 metabolic-like chemical reactions were observed, including those that produce some of the essential chemicals of metabolism, for example precursors of the building blocks of proteins or RNA,” says [Dr. Markus] Ralser, [Group Leader at the Department of Read More ›

Jean Claude Perez is a self-organizational theorist, he is not a creationist. He has also published papers with an occasional visitor to UD, Andras Pellionisz. If the mathematical/musical patterns Perez has found in DNA are improbable relative to laws of physics and chemistry, then he may have found yet another design feature of DNA, and this feature is found by combining coding DNA with non-coding DNA and viewing it holistically. Here is the simplest explanation I found of his work: When cells replicate, they count the total number of letters in the DNA strand of the daughter cell. If the letter counts don’t match certain exact ratios, the cell knows that an error has been made. So it abandons the Read More ›

Quick question: Has anyone else experienced the following: 1. I write a comment and press the “Post Comment” button. 2. I get a complaint that I haven’t properly filled out the Captcha answer. 3. I go back, double check my Captcha answer, and submit again. 4. Again, it refuses. 5. I triple check and submit again.  Same story. 6. I click out of the window, say, by going back to UD Home (hopefully after remembering to copy my comment to the clipboard), find the thread again, paste in my comment, fill out the Captcha, and — ta-da! — it works fine. I haven’t done a scientific survey, but I’m suspicious it happens when I have had a thread open in Read More ›