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David Coppedge

At Evolution News: Secrets that Give Sea Lions and Jellyfish Their Edge as Swimmers

"If the world’s best human designers are attempting to build machines to mimic what these animals “naturally do,” it’s a reasonable inference that sea lions and jellyfish originated from an intelligent cause — one with superior knowledge of propulsion, fluid mechanics, and optimization." Read More ›

At Evolution News: Gene Sharing Is More Widespread than Thought, with Implications for Darwinism

David Coppedge writes: Evidence is growing that organisms share existing genetic information horizontally, not just vertically. This has immense implications for neo-Darwinian theory that are not yet fully recognized. If traits can be shared across species, genera and even phyla, they are not being inherited from common ancestors. The findings might also cast stories about convergence and co-evolution in a completely different light. Let’s look at some of the news on this front. Introgression Last month, Current Biology posted a Primer on Introgression by four authors. Introgression refers to “lasting transfer of DNA from one of the species into the genome of the other” by means of hybridization and backcrossing. Basically, it describes “the incorporation of the DNA from one species into Read More ›

Evolution News reports on The Electric Cell: More Synergy with Physics Found in Cellular Coding

The significant takeaway is that new research is discovering profound layers of complexity in cellular function that confounds the assumption of unguided interatomic forces as responsible for life. Read More ›

At Evolution News: Natural Machinery Operates Without Intervention; But How?

David Coppedge: "The old mechanical philosophy is hopelessly inadequate for these realities. The reason? We know from our experience that unguided natural law does not produce machinery, factories, and quality control. Something else is required: information." He recommended Bill Dembski's book, Being as Communion. Read More ›

Are all those codes used by cells really “codes”?

One biologist thinks that only DNA is really a code. David Coppedge disagrees. Coppedge: But it seems fair to categorize codes separately if they contain unique information and produce unique results. Even if histones are built from DNA, once they are assembled, they no longer rely on the genetic code. Read More ›

David Coppedge on cell division as another “hurdle for evolution”

Coppedge: The two daughter cells face a massive organization problem. Even though they contain the same DNA code, they will take on separate roles in the cell. This means that the accessibility of genes between the two cells must radically differ. Read More ›

Darwinians make their living off claims of bad design – eye division

Coppedge: Baden and Nilsson looked at eyes from an “engineer’s perspective” and shared good reasons for the inverted arrangement. They even spoke of design seven times; “the inverted retinal design is a blessing,” they argued. Read More ›

At Evolution News: Silence around Cambrian Brains

This was bound to come up eventually: First, notice the quote marks around “Cambrian explosion,” a subtle hint that the term is controversial. It’s not. They state clearly that it is “marked by the appearance of most major animal phyla.” Panarthropoda is a taxon that combines arthropods with tardigrades and onycophorans. The sentence means that yes, lots of different arthropods appear throughout the fossil record, revealing “extreme morphological disparities,” i.e. outward differences. Yet these Chinese specimens show that the brains are conservative — not that they vote Republican, but that CNS structures throughout the panarthropod collection are similar, not showing extensive evolution. They’re not just conservative; they are “remarkably conservative.” In terms of general body plan, it’s a picture of Read More ›