evolution

An interesting paper appeared several months ago in an issue of the journal Genetics, “Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution” (Durrett, R & Schmidt, D. 2008. Genetics 180: 1501-1509). This is the fourth of five posts that discusses it. Cited references will appear in the last post.  Now I’d like to turn to a couple of other points in Durrett and Schmidt’s reply which aren’t mistakes with their model, but which do reflect conceptual errors. As I quote in a previous post, they state in their reply, “This conclusion is simply wrong since it assumes that there is only one individual in the population with the first mutation.” I have shown previously that, Read More ›

Dear Readers, In a long book review in The New Republic, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne calls Brown University cell biologist Ken Miller a creationist. No surprise there — “creationist” has a lot of negative emotional resonance in many intellectual circles, so it makes a fellow’s rhetorical task a lot easier if he can tag his intellectual opponent with the label. (Kind of like calling someone a “communist” back in the 1950s.) No need for the hapless “creationist” to be a Biblical literalist, or to believe in a young earth, or to be politically or socially conservative, or have any other attribute the general public thinks of when they hear the “C” word. For Coyne, one just has to think that Read More ›

Dear Readers, Brown University Professor Kenneth Miller has gotten into a little tiffwith Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin over what I said/meant about the blood clotting cascade in Darwin’s Black Box.  This is the first of two posts commenting on that. In Chapter 4 of Darwin’s Black Box I first described the clotting cascade and then, in a section called “Similarities and Differences”, analyzed it in terms of irreducible complexity. Near the beginning of that part I had written, “Leaving aside the system before the fork in the pathway, where details are less well known, the blood clotting system fits the definition of irreducible complexity…  The components of the system (beyond the fork in the pathway) are fibrinogen, prothrombin, Stuart factor, and proaccelerin.” Casey Luskin concludes that Read More ›

Dear Readers, Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University, has written a new book Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, in which he defends Darwinism, attacks intelligent design, and makes a case for theistic evolution (defined as something like “God used Darwinian evolution to make life”). In all this, it’s pretty much a re-run of his previous book published over a decade ago,Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution. So if you read that book, you’ll have a very good idea of what 90% of the new book concerns. For people who think that a mousetrap is not irreducibly complex because parts of it can be used as Read More ›

Dear Readers, California State University emeritus Professor Mark Perakh (author of Unintelligent Design) and I recently taped an episode of the program “Voice of Reason”,http://www.cn8.tv/channel/article.asp?lArticleID=5 195&lChannelID=603 with the venerable Philadelphia newsman Larry Kane. We discussed intelligent design, The Edge of Evolution, and other topics for thirty minutes. The show will air Sunday March 2nd at 9:30 p.m. on CN8, the Comcast Network.

This is the fifth of five posts in which I reply to Dr. Ian Musgrave’s “Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe” on the Panda’s Thumb blog. Finally, Dr. Musgrave objects to my placing viral protein – cellular protein interactions in a separate category from cellular protein-cellular protein interactions. In Chapter 8 of The Edge of Evolution I had written: Another, more important point to note is that I’m considering just cellular proteins binding to other cellular proteins, not to foreign proteins. Foreign proteins injected into a cell by an invading virus or bacterium make up a different category. The foreign proteins of pathogens almost always are intended to cripple a cell in any way possible. Since there are so many more ways Read More ›

Dear Readers, Recently I was interviewed for the skeptic program Point of Inquiry. You can listen to the interview here. Michael J. Behe, a central figure in the Intelligent Design movement, is professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He is the author of Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution and most recently The Edge of Evolution: Searching for the Limits of Darwinism. In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Behe discusses his prominent role in the ID movement, and how he first got involved. He explores the differences between creationism and Intelligent Design theory, and details some of his experiences as a key witness for the defense in the Read More ›

This is the fourth of five posts in which I reply to Dr. Ian Musgrave’s “Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe” on the Panda’s Thumb blog. And now let’s talk about Dr. Musgrave’s “core argument,” that subsequent to the virus leaping to humans from chimps Vpu developed the ability to act as a viroporin, allowing the leakage of cations which helps release the virus from the cell membrane. Yes, I’m perfectly willing to concede that this does appear to be the development of a new viral protein-viral protein binding site, one which I overlooked when writing about HIV. So the square point in Figure 7.4 representing HIV should be placed on the Y axis at a value of one, instead Read More ›

This is the third of five posts in which I reply to Dr. Ian Musgrave’s “Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe” on the Panda’s Thumb blog. In my reply to Smith I quoted from a review (3) which asked the question why, with so much genetic variation, do we just see “interesting variations” in biological properties. Smith, replying to me on her blog in high dudgeon, quotes the next paragraph of the review which details some of those interesting variations: The long terminal repeat region (LTR) of the HIV genome regulates transcription and viral replication, acting as a promoter responsive to the viral Tat protein. Although all subtypes share the same LTR function, they differ with respect to LTR sequence Read More ›

This is the second of five posts in which I reply to Dr. Ian Musgrave’s “Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe” on the Panda’s Thumb blog. Musgrave: But by far the worst, you ignored her core argument. That in the space of a decade HIV-1 Vpu developed a series of binding sites that made it a viroporin, a multisubunit structure with a function previously absent from HIV-1. Behe: It is not clear to me why you call that Smith’s “core argument.” In her post, her writing meanders quite a bit; it’s hard for me to glean what she thinks is most important. After sneering a bit at me, Smith began her post by asserting that vpu is a “new” gene (even though Read More ›