Science and Culture Today | Page 1216 | Discovering Design in Nature

Display content from YouTube Click here to display content from YouTube. Learn more in YouTube’s privacy policy. Always display content from YouTube Open video directly Would you read a book that was denigrated as nonsense, “a pile of slop,” and “a silly waste of time”? How about if a member of the National Academy of Sciences told you that same book was “breathtaking and cutting-edge science”? What if other scientists from around the world said the book was a “must read,” “intriguing,” “a fascinating and intellectually stimulating book, and elegantly written”? Then you might begin to suspect that something is up. Of course, that book is Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, the most controversial and discussed book in the Read More ›

In 2007, Chris Comer was forced to resign from her job at the Texas Education Agency (TEA). She then filed a lawsuit alleging she was forced to “stay neutral on creationism,” and claimed that TEA’s “neutrality” policy violated the First Amendment. We reported last year when Comer lost on summary judgment at the federal district court level. Comer then appealed her case to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which filed its ruling on July 2 upholding the district court’s decision and tossing Comer’s case. The Fifth Circuit held, “we find no evidence to support the conclusion that the principal or primary effect of TEA’s policy is one that either advances or inhibits religion, we conclude that the policy does Read More ›

Pop quiz: Did the following quote come from (A) Panda’s Thumb, or (B) An article in a scholarly journal published by Springer science publishing? “An especially good example of silliness is the ID assertion that natural processes cannot create new genetic information. ID advocates have recently been pushing this line heavily as of late (Meyer 2009)…” If you answered (A), then… …you’re wrong. It came from a recent article by former NCSE staff-member Nick Matzke in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach — an NCSE-aligned outfit, where apparently such language passes for scholarly argument. But in the words of Jay Richards, “a sneer is not an argument.” Of course Matzke’s reference in the quote from his recent paper is to Read More ›

Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell thinks so. Display content from www.discovery.org Click here to display content from www.discovery.org. Always display content from www.discovery.org Open content directly

A few weeks ago, PZ Myers commented on so-called ‘Junk DNA’. Under the headline, ‘Junk DNA is still junk’, Myers wrote:

The ENCODE project made a big splash a couple of years ago — it is a huge project to not only ask what the sequence of a strand of human DNA was, but to analyzed and annotate and try to figure out what it was doing. One of the very surprising results was that in the sections of DNA analyzed, almost all of the DNA was transcribed into RNA, which sent the creationists and the popular press into unwarranted flutters of excitement that maybe all that junk DNA wasn’t junk at all, if enzymes were busy copying it into RNA. This was an erroneous assumption; as John Timmer pointed out, the genome is a noisy place, and coupled with the observations that the transcripts were not evolutionarily conserved, it suggested that these were non-functional transcripts.

Biola Magazine this month features an insightful interview with Stephen Meyer about intelligent design and his book Signature in the Cell. Continue reading . . . .

Univeristy of Texas, El Paso mathematician Granville Sewell has written a book of essays spanning a wide variety of issues related to the debate over evolution. Besides biological evolution, it also deals with the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, quantum mechanics, and even design in mathematics. Here he talks a bit about some of his views from In The Beginning And Other Essays on Intelligent Design Display content from YouTube Click here to display content from YouTube. Learn more in YouTube’s privacy policy. Always display content from YouTube Open video directly

In their critique of William Dembski, Wesley Elsberry and Jeffrey Shallit write, “there is abundant circumstantial evidence that Darwinian processes can account for complexity in nature, but Dembski excludes this evidence because it does not pass his video-camera certainty test.” This badly misrepresents Dembski’s argument. Looking at all the theoretical work Dembski is doing to test the ability of Darwinian processes to generate specified complexity (see his papers at www.evoinfo.org) it should be clear that Dembski is NOT demanding “video-camera certainty” but rather is willing to test the ability of present-day causes to generate high CSI empirically, and theoretically, and then apply his findings to make inferences from the historical record. That’s exactly how historical scientists ought to study these Read More ›

What we know about the complexity of the cellular information storage, processing and retrieval mechanisms continues to increase exponentially, and at an unprecedented rate. Almost on a daily basis, new papers are published revealing the ingenuity of the elaborate mechanisms by which the cell processes information — processes and mechanisms that bespeak design and continue to elude explanation by Darwinian means. For how exactly could such a system – apparently, an irreducibly complex one – be accounted for in terms of traditional Darwinian selective pressure?

A new paper has just been published in Molecular Cell, in which the researchers, Karginov et al. reported their discovery that messenger RNA (mRNA) can be targeted for destruction by several different molecules.

According to the paper’s summary,

The life span of a mammalian mRNA is determined, in part, by the binding of regulatory proteins and small RNA-guided complexes. The conserved endonuclease activity of Argonaute2 requires extensive complementarity between a small RNA and its target and is not used by animal microRNAs, which pair with their targets imperfectly. Here we investigate the endonucleolytic function of Ago2 and other nucleases by transcriptome-wide profiling of mRNA cleavage products retaining 5′ phosphate groups in mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs). We detect a prominent signature of Ago2-dependent cleavage events and validate several such targets. Unexpectedly, a broader class of Ago2-independent cleavage sites is also observed, indicating participation of additional nucleases in site-specific mRNA cleavage. Within this class, we identify a cohort of Drosha-dependent mRNA cleavage events that functionally regulate mRNA levels in mESCs, including one in the Dgcr8 mRNA. Together, these results highlight the underappreciated role of endonucleolytic cleavage in controlling mRNA fates in mammals.

Translated into English, the paper makes the following points:

• RNA interference (RNAi) refers to a cellular pathway that helps to regulate the activity of genes within the cell. Fundamental to the process of RNA interference are small interfering RNAs (siRNA) and microRNAs (MiRNA).
• Small RNAs can prevent the translation of a target messenger RNA into protein, thereby reducing the activity of the RNAs to which it binds.
• MicroRNAs also act as regulators, binding to their complementary sequences on a target messenger RNA to result in gene silencing. MiRNAs also serve as guides to a family of proteins called Artonautes. When a miRNA-Artonaute complex binds to its complementary mRNA target, it triggers its destruction.
• The researchers surveyed a population of cleaved mRNAs in mammalian embryonic stem cells, discovering that mRNAs had been sliced or cleaved by the enzyme Ago2 and other enzymes.
• It was previously thought that the destruction was due to the destabilization of mRNA by initiation of cellular pathways. In contrast, Karginov et al. have discovered a host of ways that mRNA may be destroyed by enzymatic cleavage.