Month: December 2010
Icons of Evolution 10th Anniversary: Paul Nelson
At 4:38 of this interview, Paul Nelson says that the Miller-Urey experiment is incorrectly interpreted by textbooks as having “synthesized life.” What he meant to say was “the building blocks of life.” Dr. Nelson regrets the error.
Craig Venter’s Artificial Life: A Milestone in Overestimation
Living in two minds has gotta be tough. Perhaps that’s why the notable and irascible Craig Venter has made such a career out of bucking the system. “I have almost no visual memory; I think almost entirely in concepts,” says Venter, explaining his mental peculiarities. The pioneering biochemist won national headlines earlier this year by announcing that he and a team of privately-funded fellow researchers had produced “artificial life.” The truth, however, is more modest — what they succeeded in doing was determining the DNA coding sequence of one of the simplest bacteria they could find, minutely altering it, then artificially reconstructing this sequence of DNA from subunits supplied in chemical solution, removing the DNA from a bacterial cell, then Read More ›
Astronomer Denied Job at University of Kentucky Due to Perceived Sympathy for “Creationism”
Martin Gaskell is an astronomer who is originally from the United Kingdom. He came to the U.S. in 1975 and later received his M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He’s not a creationist. As we’ll see below, he’s generally a theistic evolutionist, who has at times expressed minor criticisms of some aspects of evolution (he accepts common ancestry) and an openness to the possibility of intelligent design. In 2007, Gaskell was on the faculty at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he taught in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. At that time, he applied for a job at the University of Kentucky (UK), hoping to serve as the founding director of a newly planned Read More ›
Michael Behe’s New Paper in Quarterly Review of Biology Now Available for Free Download
For those of you wondering if you might be able to get your hands on Michael Behe’s latest paper (which we’ve been covering here at ENV), I have good news. “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution,’” is now available as a free PDF at Behe’s Lehigh University website.
Michael Behe’s Challenge: A Conversation with Biologist Ann Gauger
At Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne pictures a newly rediscovered and rather unhandsome fly native to a particular rock in Kenya (and nowhere else) where it sports about in the bat guano deposited in a cleft in the rock. The fly has only vestigial wings — “evidence for evolution, of course,” notes Dr. Coyne. Isn’t it interesting how “evidence for evolution” tends to be, as in this example, evidence not for the building up of new functionality but for its loss, where the loss has some adaptive advantage? Losing information is one thing — like accidentally erasing a computer file (say, an embarrassing diplomatic cable) where, it turns out in retrospect, you’re better off now that’s it not there Read More ›