17Jun 2020 by Post

Trapped in the Naturalistic Parabola

abiogenesis, American Federation of Teachers, cell phone, Chemistry, Evolution, evolutionists, Faraday cage, federal courts, geometry, hydrolysis, Intelligent Design, Ludwick Fleck, Luke, methodological naturalism, National Academy of Sciences, Naturalistic Parabola, Oparin-Haldane model, origin of life, Origin of Species, parabola, paradigm, Prado Museum, proteins, reducing atmosphere, San Francisco, Sisyphus, smoked herring, strange loop, Thomas Kuhn, Titian
The principles of an alien [thought] collective are, if noticed at all, felt to be arbitrary and their possible legitimacy as begging the question. The alien way of thought seems like mysticism. The questions it rejects will often be regarded as the most important ones, its explanations as proving nothing or as missing the point, its problems as often unimportant or meaningless trivialities.Ludwik Fleck, 1935  When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm’s defense.T.S. Kuhn, 1970 …a wide chasm has been fixed between us, so that those who want to cross from this side to you cannot do so, nor can they cross from your side to us.Luke 16:26 Don’t…
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04Feb 2020 by Post

Important Medical Effects but Modest Mutations

Charles Darwin, CypA, Darwin Devolves, Darwinian processes, Evolution, FCT, function, Functional-Coded-elemenT, HIV, information, isoform, natural selection, New Scientist, Origin of Species, owl monkey, protein, random mutation, retroviruses, rhesus macaque, RNA, The Quarterly Review of Biology, TRIM5
I was asked to address a comment left by a viewer of one of Discovery’s YouTube videos. The comment is:1 Some monkeys have a mutation in a protein called TRIM5 that results in a piece of another, defunct protein being tacked onto TRIM5. The result is a hybrid protein called TRIM5-CypA, which can protect cells from infection with retroviruses such as HIV. Here, a single mutation has resulted in a new protein with a new and potentially vital function. New protein, new function, new information. A bit of Googling shows that the text was taken word-for-word from an old article (2008) on the New Scientist website2 (perhaps by way of intermediate copying). That was during a period when the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species was…
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