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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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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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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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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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Early Man

Hobbit Man, Neanderthal Man Further Scrutinized
June 6, 2006
The positions of two alleged human ancestors in the family tree is becoming clearer, or murkier, depending on whom you ask.  This illustrates the uncertainty and disparity of opinions in this field. Hobbit workshop:  Regarding the diminutive skeletons dubbed Homo floresiensis found in Indonesia, opinions seems to be condensing around the idea they were true […]
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Early Man

A Challenge to our Victorian Ethics: Humans and Chimps Interbreeding
May 22, 2006
[Guest article]  Newspapers chipped away at Christian ethics last week with articles describing evidence that “early humans” bred (hybridized) with their supposed ancestors, the chimpanzees, for millions of years after becoming another species.  The New York Times reports: David Page, a human geneticist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, said the design of the new […]
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Cell Biology

Will Genetics Be Neo-Darwinism’s Downfall?
May 4, 2006
The Institute for Creation Research is gearing up for a multi-year GENE project to look for evidence for design (and against evolution) in the genome.  They may not need to work very hard.  Secular scientists, by continuing to find things not all that helpful for neo-Darwinism, are doing yeoman’s work for them.     While […]
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Genetics

Molecular Clock Keeps Wild Time
May 2, 2006
Evolutionists used to hope that the mutation rates in genes were relatively constant, so that they could provide a kind of “molecular clock” for inferring dates of divergence of ancestral species.  The first bad news was that not all molecular clocks tick at the same rate (rate heterogeneity).  Then they hoped that rate differences corresponded […]
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