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Genetics

Do Mammals Depend on Virus Help?
September 12, 2006
Researchers found that sheep depend on a retrovirus to become pregnant.  Retroviruses (those that can insert themselves into a genome of a host cell) include the dreaded HIV and generally have a bad reputation.  Remnant retroviruses are prevalent in many animal species and have been considered a class of “junk DNA,” having mutated away their […]
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Genetics

Is the Fruit from Darwin’s Tree Edible?
September 8, 2006
Darwin’s “Tree of Life” fruit stand found an upbeat salesman in John Roach at National Geographic this week.  In his update on the “Assembling the Tree of Life” (AToL) project, he reported cheerfully that “New cures, supercrops, and secrets of evolution may emerge from the fast-growing branches of the ‘Tree of Life,’ scientists say.”   […]
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Dumb Ideas

Express Your Inner Alley Oop
September 1, 2006
There’s a little Neanderthal in a lot of us, claims The Telegraph.  This is bad news and good news: People who have large noses, a stocky build and a beetle brow may indeed be a little Neanderthal, according to a genetic study.  But the good news is that other research concludes that Neanderthals were much […]
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Early Man

Chimp-Human Genes Evolved Much Faster Than Expected
August 22, 2006
It’s been all over the news lately – human DNA shows surprisingly divergent regions from chimpanzee counterparts.  The Houston Chronicle, for instance, summarizes the find: Searching across the four genomes, the team looked for regions of DNA about 100 letters long that had made the biggest leaps. One, they found, had changed nearly twice as […]
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Genetics

Team Returns Pseudogene to Junkpile to Counter ID Claim
August 3, 2006
An earlier claim that a pseudogene has a function (see 05/01/2003 story) has been debunked by a team of scientists reporting in PNAS.1  Their reanalysis of the claim made in 2003 “invalidates the data upon which the pseudogene trans-regulation model is based and therefore strongly supports the view that mammalian pseudogenes are evolutionary relics.”  The […]
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Cell Biology

Self-Correcting RNA: Is It a Missing Link?
July 28, 2006
A team of Russian scientists at Rutgers discovered a remarkable phenomenon: RNA that proofreads itself during its own synthesis.  The work was reported in Science1: “We show that during transcription elongation, the hydrolytic reaction stimulated by misincorporated nucleotides proofreads most of the misincorporation events and thus serves as an intrinsic mechanism of transcription fidelity.”  It […]
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Amazing Facts

A Second Code Controls the DNA Code
July 26, 2006
More has been discovered about the histone or nucleosome code (see 02/17/2004), a second genetic code independent of the DNA genetic sequence that directs the formation of proteins.  The New York Times (see also Science Daily) reported on work by scientists at Northwestern University who found that the wrapping of DNA around nucleosomes (made of […]
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Cell Biology

Cell Backup Systems Challenge Evolution, Show Design Principles
July 21, 2006
Has an intelligent design paper been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences?1  Read the abstract and decide whether this research supports Darwinism or design: Functional redundancies, generated by gene duplications, are highly widespread throughout all known genomes.  One consequence of these redundancies is a tremendous increase to the robustness of organisms […]
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Genetics

Genetic Code Began by Lamarckian Evolution
July 5, 2006
It takes guts to tackle the origin of the genetic code from a naturalist perspective.  It also takes guts to resurrect Lamarck in the age of Darwin.  Carl Woese and colleagues tried a new hypothesis in PNAS1 that boldly goes headlong into both challenges.  To preserve a natural explanation for the genetic code, they felt […]
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Genetics

Stem Cells Protect Against Defective Copies
June 27, 2006
The Pasteur Institute (see Louis Pasteur) has found evidence supporting a controversial theory known as the “immortal DNA” theory.  According to News-Medical.Net, researchers at the institute believe that stem cells keep the best copies and allow only defective ones to differentiate and specialize.  If so, this may be another mechanism for minimizing the effects of […]
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Dumb Ideas

Evolutionists Find Pegasus in the Gene Epic
June 26, 2006
When you conjure with genes, you never know what might appear.  Japanese scientists, publishing in PNAS,1 tried to find evolution in mammalian retroposons and found an unexpected relationship.  New Scientist explains: “You could call it a batty idea, but bats seem to be more closely related to horses than cows are.”     “Despite the […]
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Fossils

Science Reporters Spin Spider Web Data Into Evolutionary Program
June 23, 2006
A spider was found perfectly preserved in amber (fossil tree sap), complete with its web and prey.  It is identical to modern spiders.  Isn’t evolution amazing?     If you just experienced a software crash, there must be something wrong with your BIOS.  All the news media ran that program just fine.  A patch is […]
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Early Man

When Evolutionist Rebukes Evolutionist, Watch Out
June 14, 2006
“Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” Solomon said.  Sometimes comrades need to rein in their own when they stray too far.  Kenneth M. Weiss and Anne V. Buchanan (Dept. of Anthropology, Penn State) had some stern rebukes for Nicholas Wade, who was just trying to praise Darwin in his new book Before the Dawn: […]
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Birds

More Darwinian Assumptions Shot Down
June 14, 2006
Here are two articles that appear to kick out some once-solid props from evolutionary theory.  Readers are encouraged to get the details from the original papers, listed in the footnotes. Environmental Impotence:  Many evolutionists have claimed that the environment produces strong selection effects.  Indeed, the fitness landscape itself evolves, carrying with it the constraints driving […]
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Genetics

Evolutionary Trees “Positively Misleading”
June 8, 2006
According to an article in PLoS Genetics,1 there is a fundamental flaw in the way species trees are inferred from gene trees using molecular genetics that is guaranteed to produce erroneous results: Because of the stochastic way in which lineages sort during speciation, gene trees may differ in topology from each other and from species […]
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