Biology
What Is the Central Dogma, Exactly?
Not in the Genes: Embryonic Electric Fields
How Good is Phil Johnson’s Biology?
Monarch Butterfly Genome Begins to Open the Black Box
Lynn Margulis, Acclaimed Biologist and Critic of Neo-Darwinism, RIP
Textbooks Cherry-Pick the Evidence for Evolution
Dante on the “Angelic Butterfly”
“Junk DNA” Takes Yet More Heavy Blows
A paper has just been published in Nature which uncovers a host of new coding-independent functions for pseudogene mRNAs, including a role in tumor regulation. More exciting is that Poliseno et al. describe an entirely new regulatory function of RNA. This stands in contrast to conventional wisdom which maintains that the only function of mRNAs is encoding for proteins. According to the abstract, The canonical role of messenger RNA (mRNA) is to deliver protein-coding information to sites of protein synthesis. However, given that microRNAs bind to RNAs, we hypothesized that RNAs could possess a regulatory role that relies on their ability to compete for microRNA binding, independently of their protein-coding function. As a model for the protein-coding-independent role of RNAs, Read More ›
Wired Science: One Long Bluff
According to a recent online report from Wired Science, “On one of the Galápagos islands whose finches shaped the theories of a young Charles Darwin, biologists have witnessed that elusive moment when a single species splits in two.” If it were true, this would be very important news. Evolutionary biologists have long recognized that Charles Darwin (despite the title of his most famous book) failed to solve what he called “the mystery of mysteries,” — the origin of species. Darwin argued that it happens by natural selection acting on small variations, but no one has ever observed the origin of a new species (“speciation”) by this process. Evolutionary biologist Keith Stewart Thomson wrote in 1997 that “a matter of unfinished Read More ›