Over at Biologic Institute website, senior research scientist Ann Gauger reviews four years, so far, of papers in BIO-Complexity, the cutting-edge journal of intelligent design. It’s enlightening to have things briefly crystalized this way (“BIO-Complexity in Review“). Her findings:
You will notice certain themes recur:
- Evolutionary algorithms succeed only because of active information.
- The origin of new protein folds and new protein functions continues to cause a problem for evolution.
- The organizational and information-bearing properties of the genetic code are not explained by Darwinian processes.
- Old ideas in biology — anthropocentrism, structuralism and second law problems — gain a fresh hearing.
And new ideas are advanced:
- Design in biology is as much about what isn’t done as what is done.
- The sequence-structure-function relationship found in biology — where a linear DNA code translates to a 3D protein, which in turn produces a biological function — has an analogy in human language, namely Chinese ideograms. With the proper tweaking this analogy can be exploited to test what random changes to code (that writes Han characters) does to the functional product. Enter Stylus, a computational model for testing evolution.
As Dr. Gauger points out, the links she provides are waiting for you to explore. What an appropriate way to mark Darwin Day.
I’m now on Twitter. Find me @d_klinghoffer.