Month: March 2009
Nature Paper Shows “Junk-RNA” Going the Same Direction as “Junk-DNA”
When large-scale function was detected for non-coding DNA (once called “junk” DNA) Darwinists, knowing that their viewpoint had long boasted that junk-DNA was evidence for common ancestry and that they were losing that argument, responded in one of two ways: Some sought to rewrite history by claiming that evolutionary biology predicted all along that we’d find function for junk-DNA. Others, however, pushed the “junk” back to RNA. They effectively argued, “Sure, we know that most of the genome is being transcribed into RNA, but that doesn’t mean that the RNAs have function. Much of the transcriptome might in fact be junk.” Evolutionist biochemist Larry Moran, for example, argued that either “[t]he so-called transcripts are just noise from accidental transcription” or Read More ›
ID at the AAAS Annual Meeting, Part 2: David Deamer on the origin of life
This post is the second in a series reviewing the February 15, 2009 session at the AAAS annual meeting, Why Evolution Makes Sense of Biology. The first post is here. David Deamer: Why Evolution Makes Sense of Biochemistry …so-called prebiotic chemistry, which is of course falsely named, because we have no reason to believe that what they’re doing would ever lead to life — I just call it ‘investigator influenced abiotic organic chemistry’… — Robert Shapiro, Chemistry (NYU), at the roundtable “Life, What A Concept!” (p. 92), August 2007 First to the podium following Joshua Rosenau of the NCSE was David Deamer, a biochemist and leading origin of life researcher from UC-Santa Cruz. After outlining the Darwinian historical context — Read More ›
David Medved, RIP
Whether in science, politics, or religion, one of the qualities most lacking in modern culture is breadth of vision.
New Administration Displays Old, Naïve Understanding of Science
In a stunningly biased headline this week, The Washington Post said “Obama Aims to Shield Science from Politics.” Well that is certainly one interpretation of the Administration’s announcement that it will fund new embryo-destructive research! Of course, this is nothing new. It has been an anti-Bush mantra of the hard Left for some years now that there is “A Republican War on Science,” to borrow Chris Mooney’s delightfully fatuous phrase. In the debate over how to teach evolution in public schools, we often hear Darwinists cry, “Science is not democratic.” To which I’ve heard John West sagely reply a thousand times, “But public policy is!” The recent headlines, and the Administration’s own rhetoric, regarding the President’s decision to have taxpayers Read More ›
Richard Dawkins’ Meaningful Meaninglessness
[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org] Alas, poor Richard. Ever since being thrashed by Ben Stein in Expelled he’s just gotten more and more nonsensical. Then, it was that there is no intelligent design of life, except of course maybe alien-directed intelligent design. Now, it seems he has decided to follow some recent sage advice and avoid using the “d” word. And, he’s scrapped his previous idea of using designoid as a replacement. Then Dawkins got to the essential framework of the rest of his talk, making a distinction within purpose between the purpose that comes about as adaptation via natural selection, which he called “archi-purpose”, Read More ›