Tag: pseudogene
Dover Revisited: With Beta-Globin Pseudogene Now Found to Be Functional, an Icon of the “Junk DNA” Argument Bites the Dust
It’s been Exhibit A — literally, offered as evidence in a famous court case — for critics of ID who argue that our genome can’t be a product of design.
The GULO Pseudogene and Its Implications for Common Descent
The GULO pseudogene may or may not turn out to harbor some sort of function.
Revenge of the Peppered Moths?
British biologists dust off a moth-eaten myth: that peppered moths prove Darwinian evolution.
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 ›
Another Intelligent Design Prediction Fulfilled: Function for a Pseudogene
Darwinists have long made an argument from ignorance, where our lack of present knowledge of the function for a given biological structure is taken as evidence that there is no function and the structure is merely a vestige of evolutionary history. Darwinists have commonly made this mistake with many types of “junk” DNA, now known to have function. In contrast, intelligent agents design objects for a purpose, and therefore intelligent design predicts that biological structures will have function. Here’s where it gets interesting: Functionless structures may have been originally designed but were later rendered functionless by natural processes. For example, if you leave a laptop computer on the top of a mountain for 1000 years where it is exposed to Read More ›