28Apr 2020 by Post

Journal Prints “Intelligent Design”! But…

AAA proteins, ATP, ATPases Associated with diverse cellular Activities, blind watchmaker, centrosomes, computers, cytoplasm, Darwin-skeptics, Darwinian evolution, dynein, endoplasmic reticulum, Evolution, Golgi complex, homology, humans, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, J.C. Phillips, kinesin, Maxwell’s demon, Michael Behe, molecular machines, natural selection, proteins, Richard Feynman, Rutgers University, self-organized networks, slime molds, Stephen Jay Gould, worms
You’re not likely to see the phrase “intelligent design” in any typical science journal, except to mock it. A recent example by a doctrinaire evolutionist is, not surprisingly, intended to subvert the design inference for a molecular machine. Did his intention backfire? Read on. J.C. Phillips is a physicist at Rutgers University who has taken an interest in the concept of “self-organized criticality,” something that sounds as credible as “unguided excellence.” Phillips believes that unintelligent Darwinian natural selection moves molecular machines toward optimum performance. It’s kind of like how computers and other technology get more and more sophisticated the longer you leave them left outside to be buffeted by wind, rain, and ice storms. In his recent paper in PNAS, he takes on a marvelous walking machine, dynein, to illustrate…
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27Mar 2020 by Post

More Hints of Order in the Genome

Abo1, Amir Bitran, ATP, biochemistry, Biozentrum, Caulobacter crescentus, central dogma, Chelsea R. Bulock, chromosomes, cohesin, cotranslational folding, Darwinian mechanism, DNA, E. coli, error catastrophe, genome, GGC, GGU, Intelligent Design, Junk DNA, Lego blocks, misfolding, mRNA, Nature Communications, Patricia Clark, PNAS, polymerase, polypeptides, Polδ, proofreader, proteins, RNA, South Korea, strand breaks, UNIST, University of Basel, University of Notre Dame, University of Seville, William Paley
Genomics has come a long way since the central dogma (the notion that DNA is the master controller that calls all the shots) and junk DNA (the expectation that much of the genome is non-functional). If scientists ditch those old dogmas and approach the genome expecting to find reasons for things, they often do. Synonymous Mutations To-may-to or to-mah-to? The British write flavour; the Americans write flavor, but generally each understands the other without too much difficulty. Genomes, too, have alternate ways of spelling things: GGU and GGC in messenger RNA both spell glycine. No big deal, thought geneticists; these “silent” mutations cause no change in the resulting protein. At the University of Notre Dame, however, biochemists are finding that the differences in spelling are not just background noise; they…
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24Mar 2020 by Post

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…
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21Mar 2020 by Post

Listen: Kirk Durston on Fantasy Science and Scientism

Atheism, biophysics, Evidence, experimental science, fantasy science, historical sciences, ID The Future, inferential science, Kirk Durston, materialism, mathematics, multiverse, philosophy, Physics, Earth & Space, Podcast, proteins, testing
On a new episode of ID the Future, Kirk Durston, a biophysicist focused on identifying high-information-density parts of proteins, completes a three-part series on three categories of science: experimental, inferential, and fantasy science. Download the podcast or listen to it here. Fantasy science makes inferential leaps so huge that virtually none of it is testable, either by the standards of experimental science or by those of the historical sciences, which reason to the best explanation by process of elimination. One example of fantasy science, according to Durston, is the multiverse. As he argues, that is an imaginative story largely untethered from evidence and testing, but told using math instead of literary devices. Scientism, “atheism dressed up in a lab coat,” can lead to fantasy science of this kind because it commits…
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23Feb 2020 by Post

Gauger: Is It Easy to Get a New Protein?

Ann Gauger, biological information, Evolution, evolutionary biologists, frameshift mutation, Intelligent Design, language, nylonase, proteins, Sarah Chaffee
On a classic episode of ID the Future, biologist Ann Gauger talks with host Sarah Chaffee about a central argument used by evolutionary biologists, who claim that it’s simple to get new proteins. Listen in to learn more about nylonase, and whether it shows that purely natural processes can produce biological information. Download the podcast or listen to it here. In the conversation, Dr. Gauger discusses a frameshift mutation. Here is an example of what a frameshift mutation would look like in language: The old man T heo ldm an Th eol dma n Photo: Ann Gauger in “The Problem with Theistic Evolution,” via Crossway. The post Gauger: Is It Easy to Get a New Protein? appeared first on Evolution News.
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10Jan 2020 by Post

New Research on Animal Egg Orientation Shows “Unexpected” Diversity

Christian de Duve, eLife, embryo, embryonic development, Evidence, Evolution, evolutionary plasticity, evolutionary theory, evolutionists, genes, nucleic acids, proteins, unexpected, Urs Schmidt-Ott, Vital Dust, Yoseop Yoon, zygote
When the first cell of an animal — the zygote — divides, it usually has a front end, and a back end, and this orientation will influence how the embryo develops. This orientation is inherited from the egg, where certain gene products are deposited, often at the front end of the egg. These so-called anterior determinants signal the basic, front-back, orientation which is fundamental for the later embryonic development. But as is typical in biology, the specific genes involved often are not conserved across different species. As the summary of recent research explains: With very few exceptions, animals have “head” and “tail” ends that develop when they are an embryo. The genes involved in specifying these ends vary between species and even closely-related animals may use different genes for the…
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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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