Month: May 2010
Nature Reports Discovery of “Second Genetic Code” But Misses Intelligent Design Implications
Last month Rob Crowther wrote about a news article in Nature that opposed junk-DNA thinking. According to a new Nature News story, “The code within the code: Computational biologists grapple with RNA’s complexity,” scientists are just beginning to understand the complexity of the processes that create proteins in our cells. The article reports that the distinction we normally see in human technology between hardware and software breaks down in biology, where molecules like RNA can both carry messages and help process those messages — a “second genetic code,” or the “splicing code”: One of the most beautiful aspects of the genetic code is its simplicity: three letters of DNA combine in 64 different ways, easily spelled out in a handy Read More ›
Stephen Meyer Presents Signature in the Cell at Free Event in Southern California
Readers in Southern California should take note: Dr. Stephen Meyer is going to present his groundbreaking work, Signature in the Cell, at a free event at Biola University in less than two weeks.This is the same book which garnered accolades (Times Literary Supplement and “Daniel of the Year“) and earned the ire of Meyer’s critics, some of whom will be on a panel responding to him at this event.Dr. Meyer has presented at Heritage Foundation, the Seattle Art Museum, at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and various other spots stateside — but this is his first time presenting SITC in SoCal. The details are below:May 14, 2010 Signature in the Cell Event hosted by Biola UniversityTime: 7 – Read More ›
At BioLogos, a Disregard for the Truth about David Coppedge
The BioLogos Foundation is a group of Christian theistic evolution advocates who published a distorting review of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell by “living legend” Dr. Francisco Ayala. Dr. Ayala patently hadn’t read the book, as president Dr. Darrel Falk was surely aware. Fresh from that unfortunate display, BioLogos now slurs David Coppedge of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory based on an article from a really sterling peer-reviewed journal, the Huffington Post. Whoever wrote the unsigned “news” item for BioLogos cites as his lone source the piece by Steven Newton, of the Darwinist lobby group National Center for Science Education. Newton’s reporting is none too accurate itself, but BioLogos improved on Newton by introducing falsehoods not even found in the Read More ›
Doug Axe on the Case Against the Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds
The first “critical review” article in the new journal BIO-Complexity is provocatively titled “The Case Against the Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds.” It’s written by Doug Axe of Biologic Institute. To the non-specialist, the subject might sound like some narrow but trivial special case where the Darwinian mechanism wouldn’t apply. But the implications of Axe’s argument, and the evidence on which it is based, are much more far-reaching. As he says near the end: “Clearly, if this conclusion is correct it calls for a serious rethink of how we explain protein origins, and that means a rethink of biological origins as a whole.” The article is somewhat technical for those without the relevant background, but I interviewed Axe recently about Read More ›
BIO-Complexity: A New, Peer-Reviewed Science Journal, Open to the ID Debate
A new scientific journal, BIO-Complexity, is set to accelerate the pace and heighten the tone of the debate over intelligent design. The purpose of the journal, according to its self-description, is to combine the rigors and accountability of peer-review, at its best, with an editorial policy open to the debate over intelligent design. It is an open-access journal, which means everyone can download all articles for free.Here’s its stated purpose: BIO-Complexity is a peer-reviewed scientific journal with a unique goal. It aims to be the leading forum for testing the scientific merit of the claim that intelligent design (ID) is a credible explanation for life. Because questions having to do with the role and origin of information in living systems Read More ›