16Sep 2020 by Post

Design on Time — Paley’s Watch Was Inside Him

biological clock, blood pressure, chronotype variation, circadian clock, clocks, Cyanobacteria, Harvard Medical School, imaging tools, Intelligent Design, Japan, jet lag, KaiC, mammalian locomotor activity, Nagoya University, Nature (journal), Nature Scientific Reports, neurons, PLOS ONE, PNAS, rats, sleep, suprachiasmatic nucleus, Synechococcus elongatus, University of Illinois, University of Rochester, William Paley
Watches are everywhere on the heath. Look up, look down, look inside; biology runs on time. Source
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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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21Feb 2020 by Post

I Disagree with David Klinghoffer, But It’s My Fault for the Confusion

Against Method, arthropods, Brian Charlesworth, Cambrian Explosion, Charles Darwin, chordate, David Klinghoffer, Deborah Charlesworth, Douglas Futuyma, Evolution, Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, Galápagos Islands, history, Intelligent Design, Jerry Coyne, Macroevolution, molluscan, natural selection, neo-Darwinian synthesis, Nicholas Barton, organisms, origin of life, Paul Feyerabend, William Paley
In a post yesterday, David Klinghoffer cited my comments in a recent podcast and described his own view that intelligent design could be considered as a theory of evolution, making the point that intelligent design tries to explain the innovations that happened in the history of life (e.g., the origin of life itself, the burst of complexity during the Cambrian explosion, etc.). I’d describe the situation a little differently. Evolution is an implication — that is, an empirical consequence — of design. Design is the more general (i.e., comprehensive) idea, and the well-understood phenomena usually designated as “evolution” are in fact consequences of designed systems undergoing or responding to perturbation. If anything, then, it would be more accurate to say that “evolution is a sub-theory of design,” no matter how…
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19Feb 2020 by Post

Galápagos Pilgrim: Paul Nelson on Biological Deign and History

Amblyrhynchus cristatus, Andrew McDiarmid, animals, Charles Darwin, cormorant, Discovery Institute, Evolution, flightless cormorant, Galápagos Islands, history, humans, Intelligent Design, marine iguanas, natural theology, philosophy of biology, pilgrimage, Podcast, Santiago Island, tameness, William Paley
Discovery Institute philosopher of biology Paul Nelson got back from his pilgrimage to the Galápagos Islands with some important lessons to share. He spoke with ID the Future host Andrew McDiarmid last week about his experiences. See, “Pilgrimage: On a Visit to Galápagos Islands, Paul Nelson Concedes, ‘Darwin Was Right!’”  Of course he was being “deliberately provocative” there, as he notes in a new podcast with McDiarmid. Download the episode or listen to it here. Andrew and Paul expand on the point that Darwin contributed a deeper understanding of history than design proponent William Paley possessed. In his own version of natural theology, Paley gave little sense that living creatures have histories, or that those histories make much of a difference. This was a shortcoming. But, like Charles Darwin before…
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