Origin of Life: Saved by Time?

antagonist, biochemistry, Canada, chemical reactants, early Earth, Evolution, First Life from Purely Natural Means? (series), Francis Crick, George Wald, habitability, hero, Intelligent Design, materialists, microfossils, Miracle, Nobel Prize, Nuvvuagittuq belt, origin of life, Quebec, Scientific American
Many materialists believe that the severe unlikelihood of the series of events required for the origin of life is not a serious problem. Source
Read More

How Darwin and Wallace Split over the Human Mind

Alfred Russel Wallace, Animal Liberation, Anthony Flew, Anthony O’Hear, biology, consciousness, cosmogonism, Darwin, David Bentley Hart, David Hume, deism, Donald Hoffman, Erasmus Darwin, Europeans, Evolution, Francis Crick, How Darwin and Wallace Split over the Human Mind, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, Lawrence Krauss, Lucretius, materialism, Michael Ruse, mind, natural selection, natural theology, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, Peter Singer, Racism, rationalism, Richard Dawkins, Richard Rorty, Richard Spilsbury, Stephen Hawking, Ternate letter, The Origin of Species, Thomas Huxley, Tom Wolfe
Marvelously free of racist prejudice, Wallace noted in his fieldwork in far-flung locations that primitive tribes were intellectually the equals of Europeans. Source
Read More

Meyer, Isaac: Is Information in DNA “Abstract”?

abstraction, American Scientific Affiliation, Brian Miller, Christianity, DNA, English, Evolution, Francis Crick, information, Intelligent Design, nucleotide bases, origin of life, Randy Isaac, Stephen Meyer, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Walter Bradley
The American Scientific Affiliation is an association of Christian scientists who are not on the whole supportive of scientific arguments for intelligent design. Source
Read More

Stephen Meyer: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and the God Hypothesis

abiogenesis, alien spacecraft, aliens, Avi Loeb, Big Bang, Carl Sagan, Center for Science & Culture, Faith & Science, fine-tuning, Francis Crick, Harvard University, intelligence, James Watson, mainstream scientists, New York Post, Nobel Prize, origin of life, panspermia, Physics, Earth & Space, Prometheus, Return of the God Hypothesis, Ridley Scott, Stephen Meyer, U.S. Navy, UFOs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
Mainstream scientists have been speculating about other-than-earthly intelligence for decades. Source
Read More

Design Triangulation: My Thanksgiving Gift to All

aliens, Allchemy chemical evolution simulation, Alpha Centauri, black swallowtail, Every Life Is on Fire, Francis Crick, Honda Odyssey, Houdini, Immanuel Kant, Intelligent Design, Jeremy England, Johann Sebastian Bach, Lego blocks, locomotives, mathematics, Naturalistic Parabola, nematodes, Niels Bohr, puzzles, René Descartes, Richard Dawkins, Science (journal), Thanksgiving, The Beatles, William Blake
Hey — wanna see a talk that combines the following. Black swallowtail butterflies, William Harvey, snarky robotic aliens from Alpha Centauri, and more. Source
Read More

The “Why” of the Fly “Y”: Reflections on “Junk” DNA

Alison Nguyen, axioms, Carmen Sapienza, chromosomes, DNA, Doris Bachtrog, Drosophila melanogaster, Emily Brown, euchromatin, Evolution, Francis Crick, fruit fly, genetics, heterochromatic proteins, heterochromatin, Junk DNA, Leslie Orgel, nucleus, organism, phenotype, repetitive sequences, Richard Dawkins, RNA, The Selfish Gene, transposable elements, W. Ford Doolittle, Y chromosome
In April 1980, almost exactly forty years ago, the journal Nature published a pair of highly influential articles on the topic of what has become known as “junk” or “selfish” DNA. Both reflected the key concept of The Selfish Gene, the highly influential 1976 book by Richard Dawkins, namely, that organisms are merely DNA’s way of making more DNA. The first was authored by W. Ford Doolittle and Carmen Sapienza and titled “Selfish genes, the phenotype paradigm and genome evolution.”1 The second was authored by Leslie Orgel and Francis Crick and titled “Selfish DNA: the ultimate parasite.”2 Together they posited an easy-to-grasp way to conceive of “excess” nucleotides along chromosomes — repetitive sequences in general and transposable elements in particular. In short, it was proposed that most such DNA elements…
Read More

Crisis in the Chemistry of Origins

biological information, biological molecules, biology, Charles Thaxton, chemical evolution, chemicals, Discovery Institute Press, DNA, Evolution, Francis Crick, James Watson, neo-Darwinian theory, nucleic acids, origins, prebiotic evolution, proteins, Roger Olsen, Stanley Miller, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Walter Bradley
Editor’s note: As an alternative to what you are getting pretty much everywhere else in the media at the moment, Evolution News is proud to offer inspiration, pointing to purpose and meaning in life. The profoundest mystery and thus the deepest inspiration is life itself. Discovery Institute Press has just published a greatly expanded edition of the 1984 classic of intelligent design science literature, The Mystery of Life’s Origin. Below is an excerpt from the original introduction by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen. Two monumental scientific reports appeared in 1953, both of which have subsequently received wide acceptance in the scientific community. One was the proposal by James Watson and Francis Crick of their double helical model for deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. According to their now-famous model, hereditary…
Read More

BioEssays Editor: “‘Junk’ DNA… Full of Information!” Including Genome-Sized “Genomic Code”

adenine, Advanced Science News, Andrew Moore, BioEssays, Biological Information: New Perspectives, cytosine, DNA, ENCODE, Evolution, Francis Crick, function, genome, genomic code, Giorgio Bernardi, guanine, Intelligent Design, isochores, Junk DNA, Leslie Orgel, narrative gloss, overlapping codes, proteins, selective pressure, thymine, viral genomes
How many times have we heard it claimed that the vast majority of the human genome is “junk” and therefore could not have been designed? Even in the face of overwhelming evidence from the ENCODE project and numerous other studies showing that most of our genome has biochemical function, most evolutionists still maintain that our genomes are largely junk. But a few brave scientists, including some rare evolutionists, have been willing to buck that trend.  In a new article at Advanced Science News — “That ‘Junk’ DNA… Is Full of Information!” — Andrew Moore, the Editor-in-Chief of the respected biology journal BioEssays, comments on a new BioEssays paper. The paper finds that our DNA contains overlapping layered “’dual-function’ pieces of information,” including a “genomic code” that spans virtually the entire…
Read More