30Mar 2024 by Post

“Creation Myths” Misquotes and Misrepresents Junk DNA Video

American Scientist, biochemistry, biologists, biology, Creation Myths, Dan Graur, Dan Stern Cardinale, DNA, ENCODE, Evolution, Ewan Birney, functionality, genetics, genome, human genome, Intelligent Design, John Stamatoyannopoulos, Junk DNA, junk RNA, Laurence Moran, Long Story Short, Nature (journal), repetitive DNA, Richard Dawkins, Rutgers University, species, transcriptional noise, transposable elements, YouTubers
Our video backs up what it says with clear quotes and references. We’ve provided more documentation here. Source
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10Feb 2023 by Post

Fossil Friday: The Abrupt Origins of Lagomorphs and Rodents

beavers, Carl von Linné, China, comparative morphology, Cretaceous, Dan Graur, Darwinism, Early Paleocene, East Asia, Euarchontoglires, Evolution, Fossil Friday, fossil record, Glires, guinea pigs, gundis, hamsters, hares, incongruence, Lagomorpha, Lagomorphs, mammals, mice, molecular clock studies, Mongolia, Nebraska, Oligocene, Palaeolagus haydeni, Paleocene, PaleoDB, paleontology, pikas, placental mammals, porcupines, rabbits, rats, Rodentia, rodents, squirrels, Systema Naturae, Tübingen
Molecular biologist Dan Graur mentioned his weird idea that guinea pigs are not rodents at a lecture at my university in Tübingen when I was still a student. Source
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27Aug 2021 by Post

Why Systems Biologists Now Assume Life Is Optimally Designed

"poor design", bioinformatics, biological structures, biologists, biosphere, Dan Graur, ENCODE, engineers, Eva Balsa-Canto, Evolution, fitness landscape, human body, Human Errors, human genome, Intelligent Design, Julio R. Banga, Junk DNA, knee, Living with Darwin, Nathan Lents, Nikolaos Tsiantis, optimality, pelvis, Philip Kitcher, scientific materialism, teleology, whales, Wikipedia
Purported examples of poor design usually represent opinions resulting from armchair critics’ limited understanding of the technical literature. Source
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01May 2020 by Post

Paper Shows that “Mutational Load” Arguments Don’t Refute ENCODE

Atheism, Dan Graur, deleterious mutations, ENCODE, Evolution News, fitness, functional, genome, Genome Biology and Evolution, Intelligent Design, Junk DNA, molecular evolution, mutations, predictions, Science (journal), University of Houston
When the ENCODE project first proposed, on the basis of direct empirical research, that 80 percent of the genome may be biochemically functional, a huge prediction of intelligent design was fulfilled. Evolutionary biologists saw the writing on the wall and were quick to fight back. Perhaps one of ENCODE’s staunchest critics has been Dan Graur, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Houston. He argued in 2017 in the journal Genome, Biology and Evolution that ENCODE’s empirically based conclusions could not possibly be correct because “Mutational load considerations lead to the conclusion that the functional fraction within the human genome cannot exceed 15%.” What exactly is “mutational load”? Mutational load is based upon the principal that populations of organisms can only tolerate a certain number of deleterious mutations before they reach a critical level…
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