Earlier this week, David Klinghoffer posted an article responding to Larry Moran’s claim of contradiction between myself and Jonathan Wells on “junk DNA.” Larry Moran has now posted a follow-up on his blog.
We have recently been discussing a series of critical reviews of Science and Human Origins published by PhD student Paul McBride on his blog Still Monkeys. I am going to respond now to McBride’s review of chapter 4, in which he tackles Casey Luskin’s handling of the subject of “junk DNA.” McBride’s rebuttal to chapter 4 is divided into two sections — part 1 and part 2. First, McBride (before having read the chapter) makes ten predictions about what he will find. He then offers a response to the chapter itself.
A correspondent recently asked me about the evolution of the mammalian middle ear in relation to the fossil record. Based on data gathered from embryology, it is widely thought that the bones of the mammalian middle ear (the region just inside the eardrum) evolved from bones of the reptilian lower jaw joint. Besides the paleontological data, this hypothesis is based on the fact that, in mammals, Meckel’s cartilage plays a role in forming the middle ear bones and mandible before subsequently disappearing. In reptiles, it ossifies to become part of the jaw.
The popular science media are abuzz over the creation by scientists of a synthetic jellyfish, called a medusoid, using silicone and a rat’s heart muscle cells (Nawroth et al., 2012). Explains Nature News, “When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart.”
The authors of the study examined the tissue layout and dynamics of motion of the common moon jelly (Aurelia aurita) and created a jellyfish-like frame using a silicone polymer, on which they grew a layer of rat heart muscle.
ENV editor David Klinghoffer has already drawn our attention to the new book by Ann Gauger, Douglas Axe and Casey Luskin on Science and Human Origins.Although intelligent design is not committed to a particular view on whether our species Homo sapiens share a common ancestor with other primates, the new book, published by Discovery Institute Press and aimed at the popular level, offers a thoughtful and timely evaluation of the scientific evidence bearing on the question of human origins.
I have previously outlined a few of the key mechanisms undergirding flagellar assembly, and the remarkable process of bacterial chemotaxis by which bacteria change direction in response to chemical signals. There are, of course, a number of different variants in those systems. If you thought that these remarkable mechanisms bear a strong resemblance to an intelligently engineered system, you’re going to love the molecular clutch of Bacillus subtilis (illustrated above), reported by Blair et al. (2008).
A correspondent recently referred me to an article in the TalkOrigins Archive responding to the argument that “Complex life forms appear suddenly in the Cambrian explosion, with no ancestral fossils.” TalkOrigins is a popular online resource that collects attempted answers to some often-heard challenges to Darwinian evolutionary theory. The article offers seven responses to the contention that the Cambrian explosion, which occurred some 530 million years ago, represents a significant difficulty for the neo-Darwinian view on how animal body plans evolved.
Since this subject comes up frequently in the evolution debate, as indeed the seeming dilemma posed by the Cambrian event troubled Darwin himself, I here offer a brief reply to TalkOrigins.
On an almost weekly basis, new research floods in documenting previously unidentified functionality of many different classes of non-coding DNA elements. This consistent trend renders untenable the dogmatic claim that our DNA is mostly junk.
A paper was recently published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research that identified a previously unknown function of non-coding (nc)RNA molecules (Isakov et al., 2012). Using a program called RandA (which stands for ncRNA Read-and-Analyze), a tool developed for the purpose of conducting deep-sequencing data analysis including profiling and differential expression analysis, the researchers investigated the expression patterns of the ncRNA transcriptome.
Previously on ENV, I have described several remarkable features — and the finely tuned characteristics — of the genetic code found in nature. A new study, published in the journal Nature and conducted by a research team at the University of California, San Francisco, identifies an additional, hitherto uncovered, layer of information associated with the genetic code.
A post at Uncommon Descent offers an innovative way of illustrating the concept of irreducible complexity — one that is likely to be more resistant to Darwinist misrepresentation than Michael Behe’s well-known mouse trap analogy.
The illustration is intended to address the common misconception that irreducible complexity entails that (a) the individual subcomponents cannot be used to serve other functions; and (b) no simpler system exists that can perform the same or a similar function. This caricature of irreducible complexity is seen, for example, in the writings of John McDonald, Kenneth Miller and Nick Matzke.