The Human Genome Project Ten Years Later

Scientific American recently reported on what has transpired since the completion of the Human Genome Project ten years ago. When the HGP was first announced in 2000, many scientists said that it would be the key to understanding disease and for developing cures. Ten years later, however, this has not been the case. The human genome project has aided in developing better research and technology, particularly in our abilities to sequence genes. It has also shown us that much of what we once considered junk DNA isn’t really junk at all. (See here, here, here, and here for past ENV discussions on junk DNA). However, scientists are coming to a sobering conclusion that perhaps their models and assumptions on the Read More ›

Francis Collins, Evolution and “Darwin of the Gaps”

Francis Collins is one of the world’s most prominent theistic evolutionists, and now a prominent piece of President Obama’s government. In this clip, God and Evolution contributors and other scholars respond to Francis Collins’ defense of theistic evolution in his book The Language of God. In his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006) and other writings and interviews, Collins has described the paths that led him from atheism to religious belief and from an impatience with “messy” biology and a preference for the pristine realms of physics and chemistry to a fascination with DNA, RNA, and “gene-hunting.” Much of Collins’s case for Darwinian evolution is based on so-called “junk DNA.” This is the part Read More ›

Generation of Antibody Diversity is Unlike Darwinian Evolution

[Editor’s Note: This is part two of a response from microbiologist Don Ewert to arguments from BioLogos’s Kathryn Applegate that our immune system shows the creative power Darwinian evolution. Part one can be found here.] The intricate mechanism for generating antibody diversity from very few germline (existing) genes was discovered over thirty years ago. It involves shuffling gene segments and then fusing them to produce new combining sites for the antibody receptor displayed on individual B cells. How much of this process is pre-programmed and how much is random? Is this an example of the use of a “‘blind’ system to sustain and preserve life,” as Kathryn Applegate suggests? The evidence from decades of research reveals a complex network of Read More ›

Adaptive Immunity: Chance or Necessity?

[Editor’s Note: Earlier this year, in a series of posts on the BioLogos website (“Adaptive Immunity: How Randomness Comes to the Rescue” and “Evolution and Immunity: Same Story“), Kathryn Applegate argued that the “random” processes of the vertebrate adaptive immune system serve as an example of how Darwinian mechanisms can generate biological complexity. Today, Discovery Institute presents part one of a response to Dr. Applegate from Donald L. Ewert, a research immunologist/virologist who spent much of his career studying the molecular and cell biology of the immune system, as well as theories about its evolution. Dr. Ewert received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 1976. As a microbiologist, he operated a research laboratory at the Wistar Institute in Read More ›

Meet Pakicetus, the Terrestrial Mammal BioLogos Calls a “Whale”

In a previous post, we noted some fish-related problems with BioLogos’s page discussing the fossil record. But these aren’t the only marine mistakes on the page. BioLogos says regarding the evolution of whales: Recently, a 52-million-year-old whale fossil, Pakicetus, was found in Pakistan. It was clearly a small, wolf-sized whale, but it did not have the characteristic fat-pad, a structure that allows the whale’s jaw vibrations to be used for hearing. Also, its teeth were much like those of the terrestrial animals already thought to be related to whales. Aside from the fact that Pakicetus was discovered in 1983 (not exactly “recently”), there’s quite a bit more that should be said about this fossil. The claim that Pakicetus is a Read More ›