26Feb 2024 by Post

Specified Complexity Made Simple: The Historical Backdrop

Charles Thaxton, complex specified order, English, Evolution, Francis Crick, information theory, Intelligent Design, Jason Rosenhouse, Leslie Orgel, letters, On Protein Synthesis, Paul Davies, random order, repetitive order, Roger Olsen, specified complexity, Specified Complexity Made Simple (series), The Design Inference, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Walter Bradley, Wikipedia, William Dembski
What happened to change the fortunes of specified complexity in the mainstream scientific community? The intelligent design movement happened. Source
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18Jan 2022 by Post

Eugenie Scott Lecture Resurrects, Spreads Misinformation on Intelligent Design

academic freedom, American Museum of Natural History, baraminology, biology, Cambridge University Press, cats, creationist, Darwin's Black Box, Discovery Institute, Eugenie Scott, Evolution, explanatory filter, free speech, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, Leslie Orgel, Michael Behe, Michael J. Katz, misinformation, persecution, Richard Sternberg, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Smithsonian Institution, specified complexity, Templets and the Explanation of Complex Patterns, The Origins of Life, UC San Diego, William Dembski, Young Earth Creationism
There often seems to be a subtext to her remarks, as if she were telling her audience: “Go forth and persecute.” Source
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03Apr 2020 by Post

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…
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27Jan 2020 by Post

Mystery of Life’s Origin — Intelligent Design’s Original Edition, Greatly Expanded, on Sale Now!

abiogenesis, Alfred Russel Wallace, Allan Bloom, Anaxagoras, Brian Miller, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Charles Thaxton, chemical evolution, Claude Shannon, Dean Kenyon, DNA, Erasmus Darwin, Frankenstein, galvanism, Guillermo Gonzalez, Harvard University, Hubert Yockey, Intelligent Design, James Tour, Jonathan Wells, Joseph Hooker, Leslie Orgel, Lord Byron, Louis Pasteur, Luigi Galvani, Mary Shelley, Michael Polanyi, Miller-Urey experiment, origin of life, Percy Shelley, Plato, Reijer Hooykaas, RNA, Roger L. Olsen, San Francisco State University, Shannon information, Signature in the Cell, Socrates, spaghetti, specified complexity, Stephen Meyer, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, The Return of the God Hypothesis, uniformitarianism, Walter Bradley, William Dembski
Editor’s note: We are delighted today to offer a new book from Discovery Institute Press, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy, a greatly expanded and updated version of the book that, in 1984, launched the intelligent design movement. The following is excerpted from Discovery Institute Senior Fellow David Klinghoffer’s historical introduction to the work. Other brand new chapters on the “continuing controversy” about the origin of life are by chemist James Tour, physicist Brian Miller, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, biologist Jonathan Wells, and philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer. How does life emerge from that which is not alive? This mystery exercises a peculiar fascination, with the power to elicit remarkable feats of imagination. As the novelist Mary Shelley recalled, her invention of the story of Frankenstein traced back…
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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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