Category: Evolution
Icons of Evolution 10th Anniversary: John West
Is “Pseudogene” a Misnomer?
The term “pseudogene” may be as inappropriate as the term “junk DNA,” according to the entry on pseudogenes in the 2010 Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, published by prestigious the academic publisher John Wiley & Sons. Written by researchers Ondrej Podlaha and Jianzhi Zhang at UC Davis and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, respectively, the entry includes a subjection titled “Difficulty with the Pseudogene Definition,” and it states that the discovery of multiple functional pseudogenes should negate the standard presumption that pseudogenes are functionless junk DNA: The term ‘pseudogene’ was originally coined to describe a degenerated RNA- or protein-coding sequence that is incapable of being transcribed or translated into functional RNA or protein products. The key in this definition is Read More ›
New Peer-Reviewed Paper Challenges Darwinian Evolution
Over recent months, papers challenging key elements of Darwinian theory — the kind of papers which are supposed not to exist — have increasingly been slipping through the net and finding their way into the peer-reviewed literature. One such paper, “Is gene duplication a viable explanation for the origination of biological information and complexity?,” authored by Joseph Esfandier Hannon Bozorgmeh and published online last week in the journal, Complexity, challenges the standard gene duplication/divergence model regarding the origin of evolutionary novelty. The abstract reports, All life depends on the biological information encoded in DNA with which to synthesize and regulate various peptide sequences required by an organism’s cells. Hence, an evolutionary model accounting for the diversity of life needs to Read More ›
William Dembski and Robert Marks Publish (Another) Peer-Reviewed Scientific Paper Supporting No Free Lunch Theorems
A peer-reviewed scientific paper published in 2010 by William Dembski and Robert Marks of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab supports no free lunch theorems. Published in Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics and titled “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” the paper’s abstract states that unless one has information about a target, search engines often fail: “Needle-in-the-haystack problems look for small targets in large spaces. In such cases, blind search stands no hope of success.” Their principle of Conservation of Information holds that “any search technique will work, on average, as well as blind search.” However, in such a case “[s]uccess requires an assisted search. But whence the assistance required for a Read More ›
More From Jerry Coyne
At his blog University of Chicago professor of evolutionary biology Jerry Coyne has commented on my reply to his analysis of my new review in the Quarterly Review of Biology. This time he has involved two other prominent scientists in the conversation. I’ll discuss the comments of one of them in this post and the other in a second post. The first one is University of Texas professor of molecular biology James J. Bull, who works on the laboratory evolution of bacterial viruses (phages). I reviewed a number of Bull’s fascinating papers in the recent QRB publication. Coyne solicited Prof. Bull’s comments and put them up on his blog. Bull says several nice things about my review, but agrees with Read More ›