Category: Evolution
Is Panda’s Thumb Suppressing the Truth about Junk DNA?
The best way to rewrite history is to delete the views of those who remember it personally. The Scientist‘s editor Richard Gallgaher’s recent article on “junk”-DNA mentions that Dr. Andras J. Pellionisz suggested that The Scientist publish an “obituary” for “junk”-DNA. Gallagher wrote: Andras J. Pellionisz, to whom I am grateful for bringing this notable 35th anniversary to my attention, suggested that The Scientist publish an obituary to “formally abandon this misnomer.” Pellionisz’s objection is that scientific progress is being inhibited, and declaring junk DNA dead would align us with his own organization, the International PostGenetics Society (postgenetics.org), which disavowed the term on the 12th of October last year. Pellionisz is not alone. (Richard Gallagher, “Junk Worth Keeping,” The Scientist, Read More ›
Richard Gallagher Frames Intelligent Design Proponents While Rewriting the History of Junk-DNA (Part 1)
I recently predicted recently that Darwinists would try to erase the historical fact that Darwinism led to the long-standing presumption that non-coding DNA was largely genetic junk. In the latest issue of The Scientist, editor Richard Gallagher does no less, citing sources that wrongly imply that Neo-Darwinism did not hinder research into function for junk-DNA, and even stating that “[t]he latest iniquity to befall junk DNA is the attempted hijack by proponents of Intelligent Design.” Gallagher’s usage of a terrorism metaphor fits well with Gallagher’s own admission that his article’s purpose is more rhetorical than factual: While I did start this editorial off with a working title of “The Life and Death of Junk DNA,” a few hours of browsing Read More ›
Did Darwinism Hinder Research Into Understanding Cancer and Diabetes ?
It’s beyond dispute that the false “junk”-DNA mindset was born, bred, and sustained long beyond its reasonable lifetime by the neo-Darwinian paradigm. As one example in Scientific American explained back in 2003, “the introns within genes and the long stretches of intergenic DNA between genes … ‘were immediately assumed to be evolutionary junk.’” But once it was discovered that introns play vital cellular roles regulating gene production within the cell, John S. Mattick, director of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, was quoted saying the failure to recognize function for introns might have been “one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” Now it’s turning out that this “mistake” of Read More ›
Behe’s Edge of Evolution Continues to Attract Attention
Science writer Denyse O’Leary is the latest to weigh in on The Edge of Evolution over at her popular blog, Post-Darwinist. She actually has three insightful posts related to Behe, and of course Behe’s constributions to the overall debate over Darwinism. She sums up The Edge of Evolution this way: Behe calculates that, based on the available evidence of observed Darwinian mutations, events less likely than ten to the twentieth power are generally beyond the edge of (Darwinian) evolution (145). There is the main argument in a nutshell, minus the supporting material. Many people, of course, will feel the need to argue for or against the thesis of The Edge of Evolution without bothering to read it. Despite the fact Read More ›
Is There Evidence of Function for Pseudogenes in Mice?
Over the past year or so I’ve corresponded with a pro-Darwin graduate student in biology at a major public research university on the east coast. Unfortunately, I had to end the correspondence because, despite my repeated pleas for civility and personal forgiveness towards him, he simply could not restrain himself from personal attacks against me. Though I ended any personal correspondence with this Darwinist, he recently asked me a question worth answering here on Evolution News & Views. To give some background, his question asks how I calculated that a mouse “pseudogene,” if it were truly a non-functional pseudogene, would tend to be rewritten by neutral mutations in about 125 million years: I had a question about a figure you Read More ›