John Mattick's seminar at the University of Toronto

I just learned that John Mattick gave a seminar this morning at the Department of Cell & Systems Biology at the University of Toronto. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend.

Most Sandwalk readers will recognize Mattick as one of the few remaining vocal opponents of junk DNA. He is probably best known for his dog-ass plot but this is only one of the ways he misrepresents science.

On the evolution of the glycolytic pathway (glycolysis)

Jonathan McLatchie has a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from Newcastle University (UK) and he is currently "resident biologist" and a fellow at the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. He is an intelligent design creationist who attacks evolution by questioning standard explanations in the fields of biochemistry and molecular biology.

I've debated him frequently over the years since those are my areas of interest as well. The last time we met was at an evolution conference in London (UK) in 2016 (see photo).

I've always found Jonathan to be more honest and more willing to learn than most of his creationist colleagues so that's why I'm addressing his latest post on Evolution News (sic) where he challenges the evolutionary origins of the glycolytic pathway. As you might expect, his argument is largely based on the idea that since the glycolytic pathway is very complicated, there's no way it could have arisen all at once. He then goes on to reject the idea that the pathway could have evolved incrementally, one step at a time.

Should Scientific American endorse United States political candidates?

Scientific American has endorsed Kamala Harris, a candidate for president of the United States. I think this is a mistake and so do many other scientists and even journalists [Scientific American Didn’t Need to Endorse Anybody].

I agree with those who say that science should stay out of politics as much as possible. But this is just one of many indications that Scientific American is sliding rapidly downhill and no longer qualifies as a real science magazine.

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The DNA papers

The DNA papers is a series of podcasts on the discovery that DNA is the source of genetic information. Each podcast is a discussion among experts on the history of molecular biology, including some who have been regularly featured on this blog. I draw your attention to episodes 6 and 15 where you can hear Matt Meselson one of the key figures in the 'phage group.

The key take-home lesson is that the importance of DNA was recognized by a small group of scientists who were paying attention to the scientific literature. By the time of Watson and Crick (1953) this small group was already convinced that DNA was the "stuff of life," which is why they realized that solving the structure was extremely important.

This is not unusual. There are many cases where a small group of knowledgeable experts are well in advance of the average scientist who often doesn't even realize that a revolution is under way.

• Episode 1 on Friedrich Miescher and the discovery of nuclein
• Episode 2 on Albrecht Kossel and the discovery of the building blocks of nuclein
• Episode 3 on Walter Sutton and the relation between chromosomes and heredity
• Episode 4 on Fred Griffith and the discovery of bacterial transformation/li>
• Episode 5 on Phoebus Levene, DNA chemistry and the tetranucleotide hypothesis
• Episode 6 on William Astbury, Florence Bell and the first X-ray pictures of DNA
• Episode 7 on Oswald Avery, Colin McLeod, and Maclyn McCarty and the chemical basis of bacterial transformation
• Episode 8 on Maclyn McCarty, Oswald Avery and the enzymatic evidence for DNA as the transforming substance
• Episode 9 on Erwin Chargaff and the evidence for non-uniformity of nucleotide base composition in DNA
• Episode 10 on Harriet Ephrussi-Taylor, Rollin Hotchkiss and the demonstration of bacterial transformation as a general phenomenon
• Episode 11 on Alfred Hershey, Martha Chase, and the conclusive evidence for the function of DNA as the material of heredity
• Episode 12 on Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, their collaborators, and the data that supported the double helix model for DNA structure
• Episode 13 on James Watson, Francis Crick, and the DNA Double Helix
• Episode 14 on Matthew Meselson, Franklin Stahl, and semiconservative replication of DNA
• Episode 15 A conversation with Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl

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Scite Assistant (AI) answers the question "How much of the human genome consist of junk DNA?"

Scite Assistant is billed as "your AI research partner" and as "ChatGPT for researchers." It's supposed to draw on peer-reviewed published scientific papers for its information and it will give you an answer with genuine citations.

That sounds like a good idea until you realize that the scientific literature is full of misinformation and conflicting information. What we need is an AI assistant that can help us sort throught the misinformation and give us a genuine well-informed answer on controversial issues.

Let's pick the question of junk DNA as a completley random (!) example of such an issue. The scientific literature is full of false information about the origin of the term "junk DNA" and what it was originally intended to describe. It's also full of false information about recent results and how they pertain to junk DNA.