Some of the claims by ID proponents have not been adequately explored because of the cost issues involved in doing large-scale whole-genome sequencing of numerous individuals. Not even Warren Buffet has the trillions of dollars needed to accomplish such a massive amount of gene sequencing. At least not today, but maybe in the future!

The human genome project took 3 billion dollars and 13 years to complete. By comparison, Solexa might be able to do a comparable job for a few thousand dollars per person (ideally even less) and in a much shorter time frame. (See the UD sidebar on Solexa Genomics.) Solexa might be viewed as an unwitting research partner of the ID movement.
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Biology’s next revolution
by Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese
Nature 445, 369 (25 January 2007)

For those without access to Nature click here for a copy of the article. This link added on 5/11/2007.

The emerging picture of microbes as gene-swapping collectives demands a revision of such concepts as organism, species and evolution itself.

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This year’s Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum pits Alister McGrath against Daniel Dennett (last year’s pitted me against Michael Ruse): The Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum in Faith and Culture is a pilot program of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. The Forum is designed to provide a venue in which a respected evangelical scholar and a respected non-evangelical scholar dialogue on critical issues in philosophy, science, religion, and/or culture from their differing perspectives. This year’s forum will feature Alister McGrath of Oxford University and Daniel Dennett of Tufts University in dialogue on the future of atheism. SOURCE: www.greer-heard.com

Increasinginly I find that those with doctorates in the natural and engineering sciences are asking, “What can I do to help in the fight against Darwinism?” For some this will involve research bearing directly on Darwinian theory. But there is also another way to help. Many in the media and the public still do not know that there is scientific dissent from Darwinism. They have no idea that MANY scientists are skeptical of neo-Darwinian theory. So one way you can help is to put your head on the chopping block and voice your skepticism of Darwinism (if you do, trust me, Darwin’s dogmatic defenders will try to chop off your head). This is why Discovery Institute created their statement “A Read More ›

On a listserve which shall remain nameless a botanist yesterday was casting about for a good representative of a colonial protozoan. Having read up on the model organism Dictyostelium discoideum (common name “social amoeba”) a couple years ago and blogging on it then I immediately suggested it and described why it is a model for protozoan to metazoan evolution and also described its interesting display of altruism:

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An article in the February 2007 Scientific American titled Molecular Lego talks about bis-amino acids and bis-peptides. These are synthetic amino acids and peptide chains formed from them.
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The 1/29/07 issue of Time Magazine is captioned “Mind & Body Special Issue”, and starts out with a discussion of the brain’s geography, an endeavor well studied and categorized by now, but which is far overshadowed by the mystery of ‘consciousness’, often tagged as the ‘ghost within the neural machine’. Steven Pinker writes the centerpiece article, “The mystery of consciousness”, and indeed, consciousness is the centerpiece of the mystery regarding life itself.

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As I was watching the Democratic response to President Bush’s State Of The Union speech tonight Senator Jim Webb played the United States Marine card three times (for himself, his brother, and his son all Marines). I take it personally when someone does that.

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I was reviewing recently Stuart Kauffman’s critique of the Darwinian selection mechanism and thought I would share the upshot of it here, especially in light of the recent discussion at UD concerning Haldane’s Dilemma: If selection could, in principle, accomplish “anything,” then all the order in organisms might reflect selection alone. But, in fact, there are limits to selection. Such limits begin to demand a shift in our thinking in the biological sciences and beyond. We have already encountered a first powerful limitation on selection. Darwin’s view of the gradual accumulations of useful variations, we saw, required gradualism. Mutations must cause slight alterations in phenotypes, But we have now seen two alternative model “worlds” in which such gradualism fails. The Read More ›

What are the speed limits of naturalistic evolution? We know from experience it takes time to evolve a species. Would naturalistic evolution be fast enough in geological time to turn a cow into a whale, an ape-like creature into a human? What are the speed limits of evolution?
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In the Haldane thread, DaveScot responded to a comment I made with this: On Haldane’s Dilemma, I’ve determined the evolutionist argument goes like this: Orthodox evolution theory is a fact, not a theory. Therefore Haldane’s Dilemma must be wrong. I propose a corollary to DaveScot’s proposition: Orthodox evolution theory is a fact, not a theory. Therefore the fossil record, common sense, and simple statistical reasoning must be wrong. Common sense and a little elementary arithmetic suggest that: 1) given a few million years (the proposed timeframe for the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection to evolve humans from a primitive ape-like ancestor); 2) a generous assumption about generation time (let’s say, 10 years); and 3) a generous assumption about Read More ›

Intelligent design to feature in school RE lessons

Alexandra Smith
Tuesday January 23, 2007
EducationGuardian.co.uk

Teenagers will be asked to debate intelligent design (ID) in their religious education classes and read texts by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins under new government guidelines.

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Wikipedia suppresses Haldane’s Dilemma by Walter J. Remine The key figure — a limit of 1,667 beneficial mutations to explain human evolution — was brushed aside (by falsely blaming it on creationists, instead of acknowledging that it arises solely from evolutionary theory, evolutionary genetics, and J.B.S. Haldane). This key figure was repeatedly expunged from the article, leaving readers with no idea about the severity of Haldane’s Dilemma. Evolutionists suppressed this key figure. They also suppressed their history — the fact that they never revealed any such figure to the general public. Much more at the link. Without looking I bet I can guess the names of the wiki-editor POV warriors who won’t allow balance in the article. See here. Update: Read More ›

My grandfather hunted arrowheads, and he found them, hundreds of them.  I was awed by his collection, and one of my most prized possessions is a frame containing 48 of his best specimens that I inherited from him.  Nearly two decades after his death that frame is still hanging on the wall in the room where I am typing this post. Sometimes when I was a kid I went arrowhead hunting with him, but I was not much good at it.  Many times I brought a promising specimen to papa for inspection, only to have him cast it aside and say, “Just a rock boy; shah, shah, shah.”  To this day I don’t know exactly what “shah” means, but from Read More ›

The theme of silent mutations that are not so silent has been addressed here at UD before (e.g., go here). Here’s a piece that elaborates on the significance of this recent finding:

Silent No Longer: Researchers unearth another stratum of meaning in the genetic code
By Ivan Amato

The more scientists study the genetic code, the more it reads like poetry. In a poem, every word, every line break, even every syllable can carry more than a literal meaning. So too can the molecular letters, syllables, and words of the genetic code carry more biologically relevant meanings than they appear to at first.

Now, a cadre of researchers is discovering intriguing depths of meaning in “synonyms” in the genetic code—very short wordlike sequences, or codons, that translate into exactly the same amino acids during the construction of a protein. Scientists are finding that synonymous codons influence the temporal pattern by which a messenger RNA (mRNA) molecule bearing genetic specifications from a cell’s nucleus is translated by machinelike ribosomes into protein molecules. Read More ›