Sandwalk

                                    Strolling with a skeptical biochemist

Thursday, October 29, 2026

Defining a gene: the selfish Mendelian gene and the molecular gene

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I recently commented on an article in Nature by Nathaniel Comfort where he criticized Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene . I also criticize...
10 comments:
Tuesday, October 27, 2026

The Selfish Gene: a critic and a defender are both wrong!

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Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976 and in 2017 the Royal Society conducted a popular poll that voted it the most inspiring ...
14 comments:

"Atheism of the gaps" or how to misrepresent atheism and abuse philosophy

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I am an atheist. That means I don't believe in god(s). I also don't believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness ...
5 comments:
Sunday, October 11, 2026

Can DNA fingerprints distinguish between identical twins?

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The other day we were watching one of our favorite British crime shows where science and forensics plays a prominent role in catching the cr...
5 comments:
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Dark matter and junk DNA

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It's been almost three years since I created a blog post on What is the "dark matter of the genome"? . I noted that the term w...
6 comments:
Sunday, August 23, 2026

What is "alternate RNA decoding"?

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I recently came across a paper in Nature on alternate RNA decoding. It looked interesting so I read the abstract. That didn't help. I w...
16 comments:
Thursday, August 20, 2026

"Eclipsed Horizons: Unveiling the Dark Genome" challenges the model of junk DNA

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Eclipsed Horizons: Unveiling the Darfk Genome is a book by Sudhakaran Prabakaran that promotes the idea of a dark genome and challenges the...
22 comments:
Saturday, August 15, 2026

Tofino Airport: 1942 and 2026

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We visited Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island (British Columbia, Canada). We took a seaplane from Vanvouver harbor to the harbor i...
Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Intelligent Design Creationists are still spreading lies about junk DNA

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Intelligent Design Creationists have convinced themselves that there's no junk DNA in the human genome. They predicted this more than 30...
5 comments:
Friday, August 07, 2026

The evolution of metabolic enzymes in LUCA, Bacteria, and Archaea

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The best scenario for the origin of life is that it first arose in hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean. The first catalysts of metabolic re...
15 comments:
Sunday, June 14, 2026

Do scientists at Amgen understand the human genome?

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Amgen Inc. is a major pharmaceutical company based in Thousand Oaks, California (USA). [ Wikipedia: Amgen ] It was founded in 1980 to exploi...
21 comments:
Monday, May 18, 2026

Anaerobic carbon fixation in ancient prokaryotes

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Most of us were taught that plants are the main source of fixing carbon from carbon dioxide. Some of us even had to memorize the enzymes and...
3 comments:
Monday, May 11, 2026

The functions of human protein-coding genes

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There are about 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. We'd like to know what all these genes are doing but the only way to fi...
1 comment:
Sunday, May 10, 2026

Why do scientists at "elite" universities dominate scientific discourse?

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We all know that scientists at elite universities publish a lot more papers than scientists at other universities. Why is that? Is it becaus...
2 comments:
Saturday, May 09, 2026

Pervasive transcription = genes + noise

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Most of the DNA in the human genome is transcribed at some point in development or in some cell type. This fact has been known since the l...
7 comments:
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