Category: Science
Icons of Evolution 10th Anniversary: Paul Nelson
At 4:38 of this interview, Paul Nelson says that the Miller-Urey experiment is incorrectly interpreted by textbooks as having “synthesized life.” What he meant to say was “the building blocks of life.” Dr. Nelson regrets the error.
Craig Venter’s Artificial Life: A Milestone in Overestimation
Living in two minds has gotta be tough. Perhaps that’s why the notable and irascible Craig Venter has made such a career out of bucking the system. “I have almost no visual memory; I think almost entirely in concepts,” says Venter, explaining his mental peculiarities. The pioneering biochemist won national headlines earlier this year by announcing that he and a team of privately-funded fellow researchers had produced “artificial life.” The truth, however, is more modest — what they succeeded in doing was determining the DNA coding sequence of one of the simplest bacteria they could find, minutely altering it, then artificially reconstructing this sequence of DNA from subunits supplied in chemical solution, removing the DNA from a bacterial cell, then Read More ›
Michael Behe’s Challenge: A Conversation with Biologist Ann Gauger
At Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne pictures a newly rediscovered and rather unhandsome fly native to a particular rock in Kenya (and nowhere else) where it sports about in the bat guano deposited in a cleft in the rock. The fly has only vestigial wings — “evidence for evolution, of course,” notes Dr. Coyne. Isn’t it interesting how “evidence for evolution” tends to be, as in this example, evidence not for the building up of new functionality but for its loss, where the loss has some adaptive advantage? Losing information is one thing — like accidentally erasing a computer file (say, an embarrassing diplomatic cable) where, it turns out in retrospect, you’re better off now that’s it not there Read More ›
Icons of Evolution 10th Anniversary: The Miller-Urey Experiment
Michael Behe’s “First Rule of Adaptive Evolution” Could Undermine the Evolution of Functional Coding Elements
After reviewing the effects of mutations upon Functional Coding ElemenTs (FCTs), Michael Behe’s recent review article in Quarterly Review of Biology, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” offers some conclusions. In particular, as the title suggests, Behe introduces a rule of thumb he calls the “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: “Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain.” In essence, what Behe means is that mutations that cause loss-of-FCT are going to be far more likely and thus far more common than those which gain a functional coding element. In fact, he writes: “the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that would arise from the diminishment Read More ›