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Amazing Facts

Building a Cell: Staggering Complexity
February 2, 2010
“The living cell is a self-organizing, self-replicating, environmentally responsive machine of staggering complexity.”  Thus began a special section on “Building a Cell” in Nature last week.1  The section with five papers explores what is known about gene regulation, cell organization and signalling.  It’s an opportunity, as well, to see what scientists think about what they […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Woese Slays Darwin
January 28, 2010
The king is dead!  Long live the king!  Such were the oxymoronic cries of olden times when royal succession took place.  Has Charles Darwin been dethroned?  One would think so, after reading Mark Buchanan’s article, “Horizontal and vertical: the evolution of evolution” in New Scientist.  Buchanan sets the stage: Just suppose that Darwin’s ideas were […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Convergence: Explanation or Rescue Device?
January 26, 2010
The news media are telling us that bats and dolphins both hit on the same genetic pathway to evolve echolocation – even though they are on vastly different evolutionary lineages and use echolocation differently (one in air, one in water).  Since it is inconceivable that a putative shrew-like common ancestor of these very different animals […]
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Amazing Facts

Molecular Machines Use Moving Parts
January 19, 2010
Research papers into the processes of molecular machines continue to reveal moving parts: “fingers” that open and close, ratchets that lock into place, and feet that move along tracks.  Here are a few samples from the voluminous literature that continues to pour from biophysics labs. DNA Polymerase I:  Scientific papers tend to be reserved in […]
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Cosmology

What Value Do Evolutionary Explanations Provide?
January 13, 2010
We want value for our science dollars.  We know artists are into self-expression, but scientists need to offer more than just artistic prose: they are supposed to be in the knowledge generation business.  So we expect to gain one of two things from their scientific explanations.  One, we would like to gain practical knowledge that […]
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Darwin and Evolution

Evolutionists Caught in the Act – of Exaggerating
January 4, 2010
A headline on Science Daily and PhysOrg announced breathlessly, suggested that mistakes are a gold mine for creative Darwinian power: “Mutations are the raw material of evolution.”     The press release went on to glorify Darwin: “Charles Darwin already recognized that evolution depends on heritable differences between individuals: those who are better adapted to […]
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Amazing Facts

DNA Repair Requires Teamwork
January 3, 2010
As if the genetic code itself was’t incredible enough, researchers have been finding systems that repair it.  There are numerous pathways the cell can embark on to fix DNA errors.  Two key players were recently described in more detail in the journal Science.1     A damaged genetic code is worse than a book with […]
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Amazing Facts

Simplest Microbes More Complex than Thought
December 29, 2009
The smallest, simplest cells are prokaryotes.  These are the bacteria and archaea that lack a nucleus and are usually considered primitive.  Scientists are finding, though, that they know many of the same tricks as the more complex nucleus-bearing eukaryotes.     PhysOrg reported that a species of Mycoplasma, among the smallest independent-living bacteria, is more […]
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Genetics

“Messy” Genomes: Did They Evolve?
December 14, 2009
The genomes of most eukaryotes are riddled with introns – intragenic regions – that have to be cut out by sophisticated DNA-transcribing machinery so that the true gene sections (called exons) can be spliced together.  Introns can vary from 20 base pairs to over 500,000 – significantly impacting the energy required to duplicate the genome.  […]
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Genetics

How One Bright Young Scientist Challenged the Junk-DNA Paradigm
December 5, 2009
A young snowboarder turned to science and turned the consensus on its head.  PhysOrg, in “Turning trash to treasure,” told the story of John Rinn (Harvard Medical School), who challenged the paradigm of “junk DNA” and discovered a new class of functional molecules: lincRNAs (large intervening non-coding RNA).  He found important functional molecules “in a […]
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Genetics

Polar Bears and Grizzlies Hybridize
November 4, 2009
What do you get when you cross a polar bear with a grizzly bear?  It’s not a joke; look at the BBC News and see.  You get bears with mixed shades of fur and a blend of characteristics.  Live Science also commented on the BBC report.     Scientists have known that these species can […]
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Dumb Ideas

Inefficiency Made You Complex
November 3, 2009
Remember the old Darwinian story?  Slight variations that prove beneficial are naturally selected when they help an organism adapt to its environment.  Wrong.  According to Ariel Fernandez of Rice University, we humans are complex because natural selection is inefficient.  He said, “the origins of some key aspects of the evolution of complexity may have their […]
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Amazing Facts

DNA Organization Is Fractal
October 13, 2009
How would you pack spaghetti in a basketball (07/28/2004) such that you could get to any strand quickly?  You might try the “fractal globule” method.  You form little knots, or globules, on each strand.  These become like beads on a string.  Now you fold the beads into globules, and then fold those into higher-level globules.  […]
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Dumb Ideas

Emergence of Genetic Code Touted
August 31, 2009
Most origin-of-life researchers have acknowledged the extreme improbability of the genetic code arising by chance.  Their approaches to get around this problem have varied considerably since the Miller experiment succeeded in generating a few amino acids.  Despite the celebrations that 1953 experiment generated (05/02/2003), it did not even begin to approach the problem of solving […]
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Genetics

Return of the Peppered Mice
August 28, 2009
Slight changes in the coat color of deer mice is the latest triumph of evolutionary theory, if we are to believe the BBC News and New Scientist.   The BBC announced, without apologies to Jonathan Wells, that “A tiny pale deer mouse living on a sand dune in Nebraska looks set to become an icon of […]
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