Author: Paul Nelson
With One Short Rule, Philip Ball Explains Why “Junk DNA” May Be a Placeholder for Ignorance
Here is Ball’s proposed rule for molecular biologists: “stop assuming,” he writes, “we know which parts of DNA matter and which don’t.”
Is Epicurus Smiling?
Eugene Koonin pointed out that any abiogenesis scenario requires a cosmological background theory against which any local event probabilities must be evaluated.
The Best and Worst Heuristics for Biological Discovery
“We don’t know what this structure does, so it probably does nothing. Remember, evolution produces a lot of non-functional debris.”
Biologists Take a Hatchet to Tree of Life, Biology Keeps Going Anyway
Early in his presentation, McInerney says that he hopes to persuade his audience that this familiar LUCA-based hypothesis “has been falsified.”
Quiz: Is This a Prediction from the Tree of Life?
Conservation of function, but not genes, can be understood with an analogy to natural language. Consider two sentences.