Category: Life Sciences
Spinning Tales About the Bacterial Flagellum
Download the Complete “Truth or Dare” with Dr. Ken Miller Lecture GuidePermission Granted to Copy and Distribute for Educational Use. Links to our 7-Part Series Responding to Ken Miller: • Part 1: Science and Religion: Is Evolution “Random and Undirected”?• Part 2: Misrepresenting the Definition of Intelligent Design• Part 3: Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry With Evidence for Darwinian Evolution• Part 4: The Name-Dropping Approach to Transitional Fossils• Part 5 (This Article): Spinning Tales About the Bacterial Flagellum• Part 6: Misrepresenting Michael Behe’s Arguments for Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade• Part 7: Ken Miller and the Evolution of the Immune System: “Not Good Enough”? Ken Miller has been making the same objections about irreducible complexity and the bacterial Read More ›
Does “Lifeless” Prion Evolution Demonstrate Anything Significant?
I was recently asked by an e-mailer to comment on a new study about evolution of prions based via a process like Darwinian selection. Prions are misfolded proteins (or misfolded protein complexes). They aren’t alive. They can’t replicate on their own. They require their host’s cellular machinery for producing new proteins they can “misfold” in order to propagate. Prions can be dangerous because they propagate themselves by misfolding other properly folded proteins produced in the cell. The misfolded proteins don’t always function property, and this can disrupt activity in the cell. As the BBC article states, “Prions are associated with 20 different brain diseases in humans and animals.” The new research just shows that prions don’t always make perfect copies Read More ›
New Peer-Reviewed Paper Demolishes Fallacious Objection: “Aren’t There Vast Eons of Time for Evolution?”
When debating intelligent design (ID), there are countless times I’ve heard the old objection, “But aren’t there millions of years for Darwinian evolution?” Perhaps there are, but that doesn’t mean the Darwinian mechanism has sufficient opportunities to produce the observed complexity found in life. Darwin put forward a falsifiable theory, stating that his mechanism must work by “numerous successive slight modifications.” Michael Behe took Darwin at his word, and argued in Darwin’s Black Box that irreducible complexity refuted Darwinian evolution because there exist complex structures that cannot be built in such a stepwise manner. Darwin’s latter day defenders responded to Behe by effectively putting Darwinism into an unfalsifiable position: they put forth wildly speculative and unlikely appeals to indirect evolution. Read More ›
The Name-Dropping Approach to Transitional Fossils
Download the Complete “Truth or Dare” with Dr. Ken Miller Lecture Guide Permission Granted to Copy and Distribute for Educational Use. Links to our 7-Part Series Responding to Ken Miller: • Part 1: Science and Religion: Is Evolution “Random and Undirected”? • Part 2: Misrepresenting the Definition of Intelligent Design • Part 3: Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry With Evidence for Darwinian Evolution • Part 4 (This Article): The Name-Dropping Approach to Transitional Fossils • Part 5: Spinning Tales About the Bacterial Flagellum • Part 6: Misrepresenting Michael Behe’s Arguments for Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade • Part 7: Ken Miller and the Evolution of the Immune System: “Not Good Enough”? Dr. Ken Miller not only conflates evidence Read More ›
“Junk” DNA Discovered to Have Both Cellular and Microevolutionary Functions
Evolutionists have long sought mechanisms for the origin of reproductive barriers between populations, mechanisms which are thought to be key to the formation of new species. A recent article in ScienceDaily finds that “Junk DNA” might be the “mechanism that prevents two species from reproducing.” Basically, so-called “junk”-DNA is involved in helping to package chromosomes in the cell. If two species have different “junk” DNA, then this prevents the proteins in the egg from properly packaging the chromosomes donated by the sperm. The organism does not develop properly. As the article, titled “Junk DNA Mechanism That Prevents Two Species From Reproducing Discovered,” explains: during early development, the proteins required for cell division come from the mother. The researchers speculate that Read More ›