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 ›

Evolution, Then and Now

Let’s set the record straight; things have changed a lot since “then.” When Darwin first ventured to propose an explanation for the origin of species, he didn’t really try to address the question of the origin of life. No one, at that point, had any good idea of what even really needed to be explained. When early optical microscopy gave us our first images of cells, what we saw was puzzling, but not particularly awe-inspiring. As microscopy advanced, in conjunction with advances in physics and chemistry, what came clearer into focus was that cellular structure, function and metabolism, and thus biochemistry as a whole, was a universe awaiting new discoveries of its own. Who could have guessed that the micro-world Read More ›

Intelligent Design as State of the Art

[NOTE: Today we welcome a new contributing writer to Evolution News & Views, Guy Coe. Mr. Coe graduated from the University of California at Davis with a B.A. in Rhetoric and a minor in political science. As a lifelong student of argumentation and logical analysis, his career has taken him from Executive Salesman, to News Reporter, to U.S. Senate Communications Aide, to Tour Guide, to Retail Management, to father of a budding teenager, “where all communications logic begins to break down.” With a lifelong interest in the issues of intelligent design and origins theories, his status as “interested layperson” allows him to continue to follow the evidence where it leads, while showing proper respect for the lifelong dedication displayed by Read More ›