Discovery Institute's Blog, page 462

Rebel with a Nobel Prize: The Lesson of Daniel Shechtman

Dr. Daniel Shechtman's discovery did not sit well with the scientific elite and he made some people angry because of it. In 1982 Dr. Shechtman observed a crystal that did not obey the physical laws that crystals are supposed to obey. These crystals are now called quasicrystals, and they have changed the way chemists view solid state chemistry. Almost thirty years later, Shechtman received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery.

What are quasicrystals? Before the discovery of...

Of Molecules and (Straw) Men: Stephen Meyer Responds to Dennis Venema's Review of Signature in the Cell

We are pleased to republish, from the current issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Stephen Meyer's reply to Dennis Venema's review of Signature in the Cell which also appeared in that journal. --Editor

As a longtime [American Scientific Affiliation] member, I was obviously pleased to see Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (PSCF) devote a review essay in its December 2010 issue to an assessment of my recent book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for...

Fact-Checking Wikipedia on Common Descent: The Evidence from Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry

I recently read the Wikipedia web-page on the "Evidence of Common Descent." The page comprises a succinct, yet comprehensive, description of the most frequently cited arguments for the proposition of universal descent with modification. Since this is a subject that interests me, I decided to take it upon myself to write a review of the arguments, and in so doing to evaluate their merits. Wikipedia lists eight categories of evidence for common descent, which I hope to address over the course o...

The English Translation of "New Work by Thornton's Group"

A non-scientist colleague asked me to write a brief, non-technical summary of my last post. Here's my best shot.

Over time, natural selection will tend to shape a protein as closely as possible to the job it performs. As an analogy, think of a screwdriver. Suppose we started out with a shapeless blob of metal that, by chance, had a little edge sticking out of it. Theoretically we might be able to use that as an inefficient screwdriver of sorts. As time went by and improvements were made...

The Receding Myth of "Junk DNA"

Charles Darwin's 1859 theory that all living things are descended from one or a few common ancestors, modified by unguided processes such as natural selection, did not rise to its current prominence until it was supplemented by Gregor Mendel's theory of heredity after 1900. By the 1940s, scientists had identified DNA as the carrier of Mendel's heredity factors.

When James Watson and Francis Crick solved the structure of DNA in 1953, Crick formulated the "Central Dogma" of molecular biology...

Darwinizing Metamorphosis with Magic

Pity the party that tries to Darwinize metamorphosis: to give an evolutionary explanation for the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly that resembles death and resurrection. One bold evolutionist has given it a try, but is his explanation an appeal to magic?

In the documentary Metamorphosis from Illustra Media, biologist Richard Stringer explains why he was attracted to the study of butterflies. "That's biology; it's also magic." Of course he intended the reference to magic as ...

Wheel of Fortune: New Work by Thornton's Group Supports Time-Symmetric Dollo's Law

In the June 2011 issue of PLOS Genetics the laboratory of University of Oregon evolutionary biologist Joseph Thornton published "Mechanisms for the Evolution of a Derived Function in the Ancestral Glucocorticoid Receptor," the latest in their series of papers concerning the evolution of proteins that bind steroid hormones (Carroll et al., 2011). In earlier laboratory work they had concluded that a particular protein, which they argued had descended from an ancestral, duplicated gene, ...

Wheel of Fortune: New Work by Thornton's Group Supports Time-Asymmetric Dollo's Law

In the June 2011 issue of PLOS Genetics the laboratory of University of Oregon evolutionary biologist Joseph Thornton published "Mechanisms for the Evolution of a Derived Function in the Ancestral Glucocorticoid Receptor," the latest in their series of papers concerning the evolution of proteins that bind steroid hormones (Carroll et al., 2011). In earlier laboratory work they had concluded that a particular protein, which they argued had descended from an ancestral, duplicated gene, ...

Leading Darwin Defender Admits Darwinism's Most "Detailed Explanation" of a Gene Doesn't Even Tell What Function's Being Selected

After David Klinghoffer invited responses to a recent article in our series responding to BioLogos scientist Dennis Venema, "Richard Lenski's Long-Term Evolution Experiments (LTEE) with E. coli and the Origin of New Biological Information," a lively online conversation ensued. Former National Center for Science Education (NCSE) spokesperson Nick Matzke joined in and I thought readers might find a recap of our exchange illuminating.

Matzke offered a striking comment: he admitted that Darwinian ...

Bernard d'Abrera on Butterfly Mimicry and the Faith of the Evolutionist

In this excerpt from the free new e-book from Discovery Institute Press, Metamorphosis: The Case for Intelligent Design in a Chrysalis, renowned butterfly scholar and photographer Bernard d'Abrera considers the mystery of mimicry. This gorgeously illustrated companion to the new Illustra documentary Metamorphosis can be downloaded here.

There are two principal kinds of mimicry, Batesian and Mullerian, but it hardly matters what they are called, because the point is that if the butterflies are...