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Was Darwin wrong? In the November 2004 issue of National Geographic, David Quammen answers this question with a resounding "NO. The evidence for Evolution is overwhelming." In Quammen's view, most people who reject Darwin's theory of evolution do so out of ignorance, so he proceeds to lay out some of the evidence for it. But the evidence he lays out is exaggerated, and the problems with it are ignored. Quammen explains that Darwin's theory has two aspects: the "historical phenomenon" that all species of living things are descended from common ancestors, and "the main mechanism causing that phenomenon," which is...

When the Dover Area School Board voted to require the teaching of intelligent design Monday night, it likely became the first district in the United States to do so.

Scientists studying the deepest picture of the Universe, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, have been left with a big poser: where are all the stars? The Ultra Deep Field is a view of one patch of sky built from 800 exposures. The picture shows faint galaxies whose stars were shining just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "Our results based on the Ultra Deep Field are very intriguing and quite a puzzle," says Dr Andrew Bunker, of Exeter University, UK, who led a team studying the new data." "They're certainly not what I expected, nor what...

A pro-Darwin lobbying group is being accused of trying to censor a published and peer-reviewed scientific article that deals favorably with the theory of intelligent design. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) claims the article by Dr. Stephen Meyer is "substandard science" and should not have been published by the peer-reviewed biology journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. But Dr. John West, associate director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC), says the NCSE has flip-flopped just like a politician. "The refrain of Darwinists up till this point has been intelligent design isn't science...

Four years after publishing a draft of the human genetic sequence, researchers have hit the halfway mark in producing the "gold standard" version. They have just published a detailed run-down of a 12th chromosome - known as chromosome five - which means there are just 12 left to complete. [Snip] It is not just the genes in chromosome five that the scientists are interested in. Volumes of genetic material lie in between the genes, which for a long time were dismissed as "junk" by researchers. But on closer inspection, it seems this judgement was premature. The fact that sequences of...

Humans march to a faster genetic 'drummer' than primates, UC Riverside research says *Research runs counter to Darwin's theory of natural selection* A team of biochemists from UC Riverside published a paper in the June 11 issue of the Journal of Molecular Biology that gives one explanation for why humans and primates are so closely related genetically, but so clearly different biologically and intellectually. It is an established fact that 98 percent of the DNA, or the code of life, is exactly the same between humans and chimpanzees. So the key to what it means to be human resides in...

The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic CategoriesProceedings of the Bioligical Society of Washington August 25, 2004 Link to PDF only. No text.

DNA mutates, and it's a good thing it does. If it didn't, there could only be one kind of life, not the millions there are today, and species could not adapt to new challenges. This is because mutations in genes—the coding portion of DNA—are the raw material for evolution. However, genes make up a surprisingly small fraction of our DNA. If the genome were a cookbook, its 30,000-odd genetic recipes would be scattered among millions of pages of apparently meaningless nonsense. Mutations affect all DNA, not just the genes, and this provides population geneticists with a veritable toolbox of methods...

RNA could form building blocks for nanomachines WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Microscopic scaffolding to house the tiny components of nanotech devices could be built from RNA, the same substance that shuttles messages around a cell's nucleus, reports a Purdue University research group.

According to modern evolutionary theory, the recipe for life is a chance accumulation of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen; add a pinch of phosphorus and sulfur, simmer for millions of years, and repeat if necessary. As a Ph.D. organic chemist, I am trained to understand the principles of chemistry, but this is not how chemicals react. Chemicals reacting with chemicals is a chemical reaction, and chemical reactions do not produce life. Life must create life. In the chemical literature, there is not a single example of life resulting from a chemical reaction. If life from chemicals were possible, it would...

Is the Cosmos a Work of Poor Engineering or the Gift of an Artistic Designer?

Plant respiration not just an evolutionary leftover, study shows A biological process in plants, thought to be useless and even wasteful, has significant benefits and should not be engineered out -- particularly in the face of looming climate change, says a team of UC Davis researchers. The researchers have found that the process, photorespiration, is necessary for healthy plant growth and if impaired could inhibit plant growth, particularly as atmospheric carbon dioxide rises as it is globally. Their findings are published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Over the past two hundred years, scientists have...

Within information theory, information typically measures the reduction of uncertainty that results from the knowledge that an event has occurred. But what if the item of knowledge learned is not the occurrence of an event but, rather, the change in probability distribution associated with an ensemble of events? This paper takes the usual account of information, which focuses on events, and generalizes it to probability distributions/ measures. In so doing, it encourages the assignment of “generalized bits” to arbitrary state transitions of physical systems. In particular, it provides a theoretical framework for characterizing the informational continuity of evolving systems and...

A nearby star system thought of as a candidate for harbouring life has 10 times the number of asteroids and comets as found in our Solar System. The sheer number of bodies raging around the Sun-like star may mean that any potential life is choked off, say UK researchers. The star, Tau Ceti, lies just 12 light-years away and has been eyed as a possible oasis for life because of its similarity to the Sun and the inference of a surrounding debris disk that may harbour planets. Imaging the disk has now identified the 10-billion-year-old Tau Ceti as the oldest...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Biochemists at Duke University Medical Center have discovered key components that enable the cell's DNA repair machinery to adeptly launch its action in either direction along a DNA strand to strip out faulty DNA. Such flexibility exemplifies the power of the repair machinery, which guards cells against mutations by editing out errors that occur during the process of chromosome replication. Malfunction of the "mismatch repair" machinery is the cause of several types of cancer, including relatively common forms of colon cancer. The researchers, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Paul Modrich, Ph.D., at Duke, reported their...

Petite skull reopens human ancestry debate 18:47 01 July 04 NewScientist.com news service The remnants of a remarkably petite skull belonging to one of the first human ancestors to walk on two legs have revealed the great physical diversity among these prehistoric populations. But whether the species Homo erectus, meaning "upright man", should be reclassified into several distinct species remains controversial. Richard Potts, from the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, and colleagues discovered numerous pieces of a single skull in the Olorgesailie valley, in southern Kenya, between June and August 2003. The bones...

Despite the prominence of Caenorhabditis elegans as a major developmental and genetic model system, its phylogenetic relationship to its closest relatives has not been resolved. Resolution of these relationships is necessary for studying the steps that underlie life history, genomic, and morphological evolution of this important system. By using data from five different nuclear genes from 10 Caenorhabditis species currently in culture, we find a well resolved phylogeny that reveals three striking patterns in the evolution of this animal group: (i) Hermaphroditism has evolved independently in C. elegans and its close relative Caenorhabditis briggsae; (ii) there is a large degree...

It is not often that the audience at a scientific meeting gasps in amazement during a talk. But that is what happened recently when researchers revealed that they had deleted huge chunks of the genome of mice without it making any discernable difference to the animals. The result is totally unexpected because the deleted sequences included so-called "conserved regions" thought to have important functions. All DNA tends to acquire random mutations, but if these occur in a region that has an important function, individuals will not survive. Key sequences should thus remain virtually unchanged, even between species. So by comparing...

Why is it that they want to teach religion in the public schools? As I hear of the debate going on about teaching evolution or intelligent design, I have to protest. There are those who want to teach creationism from Genesis. No one wants this, as this is not science. Let's leave history to the historians, religion to those trained in theology and science to scientists. I do not want my child being taught religion, of any sort, by anyone but a member of the clergy -- one whom I have approved of. My neighbor may pick someone else. This...

Intelligent Design theory (ID) can contribute to science on at least two levels. On one level, ID is concerned with inferring from the evidence whether a given feature of the world is designed. This is the level on which William Dembski's explanatory filter and Michael Behe's concept of irreducible complexity operate. It is also the level that has received the most attention in recent years, largely because the existence of even one intelligently designed feature in living things (at least prior to human beings) would overturn the Darwinian theory of evolution that currently dominates Western biology. On another level, ID...