08Oct 2021 by Post

Recalling Francis Collins’s The Language of God

Bill Clinton, Center for Science & Culture, China, COVID-19, Darwinian evolution, David French, ENCODE, Evolution, Faith & Science, Francis Collins, John West, Junk DNA, National Institutes of Health, proteins, Religion News Service, The Language of God, The Origin of Species, theology, vaccinations, Wuhan
President Bill Clinton announced, in a speech Collins helped to write, “we are learning the language in which God created life.” 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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18Nov 2019 by Post

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…
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