Deaddog (Re-)Discovers Idiots

Back in the olden days of talk.origins there was a bright young student named "deaddog" who posted frequently. His speciality was The origin of life.

Deaddog became Professor Andy Ellington at the University of Texas at Austin and he's still interested in the origin of life [The Ellington Lab] and the creation of new life forms [Dr. Andy Ellington].

Deaddog (Andy) has testified before in front of the Texas board of education in an attempt to educate them about science. As you might imagine, given his interests, he concentrated on showing that Jonathan Wells and the IDiots are dead wrong about origin of life research. This is about as hard as shooting fish in a barrel but somebody has to do it.

Last week he was back at the meetings to testify in favor of adopting good biology textbooks. Here's what he said on Andy Ellington's Blog: On the Circus.

Today I’m at the State Board of Education hearings on textbook adoption. Or, in other words, the once every-so-often meeting that helps to determine whether or not Texas makes itself a laughingstock with respect to the teaching of evolution. I guess this is sort of my first “live blog,” which is just weird.

I continue my love / hate relationship with Texas. On the one hand, this board meeting is democracy in action (not necessarily a good thing in a Republic): every idiot gets their say. On the other, their say means very little. The larger forces at work will drive both curriculum and the impact of that curriculum.

This provoked a response from some of the main IDiots like Casey Luskin [University of Texas Evolutionary Biologist Andy Ellington Mocks Fellow Texans as "Idiots" and "Laughingstocks" for Doubting Darwin] and Denise O'Leary [Tax dollar alert: Who pays this Texas biology profs salary?]. Don't you just love it when the IDiots voluntarily supply us with evidence of their reasoning ability?

They should have been careful about who they tried to pick on. Here's Andy's response [On Idiocy].

The Discovery Institute, largely a spent force both intellectually and politically since Dover, has chosen to take issue with my comments at the State Board of Education. This is especially amusing as the original disputation of their idiocy came many years ago, and has been published via a NSCE publication for quite some time. Indeed, I refer to this publication in my previous testimony, which was and is available to the Discovery Institute. From this, we can conclude that the Discovery Institute is woefully behind the times not only in terms of science, but even in terms of their own shallow attempts to provide a revisionary context to science. Guys, this just can’t be good for your funding posture. Try to keep up.

...

So, when the DI has a vague, anonymous scientist (apparently the only kind that the DI employs) point out, as they do in their current idiot posting (please note the use of the word ‘idiot,’ as it absolutely applies to the DI for their complete lack of understanding of the extant scientific literature) ...

...

The DI claims this all as a teachable moment, saying that “What we see evidence of here is a scientific debate over the origin of life ….” No, actually, the problem with that claim is that science for the most part requires experimentation. You guys don’t do experiments. We do. You guys just carp about our experiments, and you don’t even do that very well.

...

Which would you rather see helping to set policies relating to teaching biology, literally millions of scientists who spend their entire careers doing experiments, or a handful of folks at a faith-based think tank whose jobs largely depend on trying to make inconvenient facts go away?

...

Well, Casey, I hope this gets your page hit count up somehow. God knows you need it. But really I don’t think that picking a fight about the facts is going to help you guys much in your further, currently grossly unsuccessful attempts to show your relevance. You didn’t even have boots on the ground at the Texas SBOE hearings this time, you just sent a 80 page screed that in the end didn’t change one word in one textbook up for consideration. Sad, really. But, there ya go. Happy trails.

I miss deaddog.

UPDATE: How many have heard that old saying about what you're supposed to do when you've dug yourself into a deep hole?¹ Here's a couple of examples of what you're NOT supposed to do. These postings attacked real science and they were the ones that provoked Andy's response. Why do so many non-scientist IDiots think they can successfully debate with an expert in the field?²

Casey Luskin, the lawyer, says Andy Ellington's Citation Bluffs and the Scientific Debate Over the Miller-Urey Experiment

Denyse O'Leary, the jounralist, says Texas school board hearings: Startling gains in the hard science of citation bluffing are now widely noted.

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1. Stop digging.

2. It's a rhetorical question. They are IDiots and that's exactly what IDiots do.

Stop the Press!!! Scientists Discover the 7th and 8th Bases of DNA!

Science Daily published a press release from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine: Researchers Identify Seventh and Eighth Bases of DNA. The news was so extraordinary that the article was copied on RichardDawkins.net. Here's the opening paragraphs from the press release ...

ScienceDaily (July 21, 2011) — For decades, scientists have known that DNA consists of four basic units -- adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine. Those four bases have been taught in science textbooks and have formed the basis of the growing knowledge regarding how genes code for life. Yet in recent history, scientists have expanded that list from four to six.

Now, with a finding published online in the July 21, 2011, issue of the journal Science, researchers from the UNC School of Medicine have discovered the seventh and eighth bases of DNA.

These last two bases -- called 5-formylcytosine and 5 carboxylcytosine -- are actually versions of cytosine that have been modified by Tet proteins, molecular entities thought to play a role in DNA demethylation and stem cell reprogramming.

...

Much is known about the "fifth base," 5-methylcytosine, which arises when a chemical tag or methyl group is tacked onto a cytosine. This methylation is associated with gene silencing, as it causes the DNA's double helix to fold even tighter upon itself.

Last year, Zhang's group reported that Tet proteins can convert 5 methylC (the fifth base) to 5 hydroxymethylC (the sixth base) in the first of a four step reaction leading back to bare-boned cytosine.

Speaking of textbooks, this amazing discovery couldn't have come at a better time since I'm just wrapping up the final chapters of my introductory biochemistry book. I'd better review what I wrote to see if I can include the 7th and 8th bases. Here's what I've got so far ...

DNA and RNA contain a number of modified nucleotides. The ones present in transfer RNA are well known (Section 21.8B) but the modified nucleotides in DNA are just as important. Some of the more common modified bases in DNA are shown in Figure 18.17. Most of them are only found in a few species or in bacteriophage while others are more widespread.

We will encounter N6-methyladenine in the next chapter when we discuss restriction endonucleases. 5-Methylcytosine is a common modified base in mammalian DNA because it plays a role in chromatin assembly and the regulation of transcription. About 3% of all deoxycytidylate residues in mammalian DNA are modified to 5-methylcytidine.

Oh dear. Looks like I've made a serious mistake. I've shown bases #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, and #10 but everyone knows that up until yesterday only six bases were known.

Where did I go wrong? Can anyone help me out before I have to send this chapter to the printer?¹

(The original Science paper is Ito et al. (2011). The authors really do imply that there are only six known modified nucleotides but they add an important qualifier that seems to have been played down the press release.)

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1. One of my sources is Gomers-Apt and Borst (1995). In addition to the modified bases I've shown above they describe three forms of glycosylated hydroxymethyl cytosine (#11, #12, #13), uracil (#14), α-putrescinylthymine (#15), two different sugar substituted forms of 5-dihydroxypentyluracil (#16, #17), a-glutamylthymine (#18), 7-methylguanine (#19), N⁶-carbamoylmethyladenine (#20), N⁶-methylcytosine (#21), three versions of glycosylated 5-hydroxycytosine (#22, #23, #24) and β-D-hydroxymethyluracil (#25).

Gommers-Ampt, J.H. and Borst, A.P. (1995) Hypermodified bases in DNA. FASEB 9: 1034-1042 [FASEB]

Ito, S., Shen, L., Dai, Q., Wu, S.C., Collins, L.B., Swenberg, J.A., He, C., and Zhang, Y. (2011) Tet Proteins Can Convert 5-Methylcytosine to 5-Formylcytosine and 5-Carboxylcytosine. Science Published Online 21 July 2011 [doi:10.1126/science.1210597]

Happy Birthday from Google!

Google wishes happy birthday to ..... ?

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Horace Judson (1931 - 2011)

Horace Freeland Judson died on May 6, 2011. He is best known as the author of The Eighth Day of Creation first published in 1979 and later re-published in an expanded edition in 1996. This is a "must-read" book for all students of biochemistry and molecular biology.

Mark Ptashne has published an obituary in PLoS Biology [Horace Judson (1931 - 2011)]. Ptashne raises an issue that should be of concern to all biological scientists; namely, the fact that modern molecular biologists seem to be completely unaware of the history of their field and of all the fundamental work done with bacteria and bacteriophage. This was a problem that Judson tried hard to rectify before it was too late but it's beginning to look like he was not successful.

Here's Ptashne's take on it.

The Eighth Day, first published in 1979, is a gift that keeps on giving. It is not the completeness of his history, nor even the vivid prose that imparts its lasting effect. Rather, Judson had the drive and wit to probe until he understood not just who did what, and with what quirks of personality, but why they did it, and how they did it. At each stage he reveals what was at stake, what the crucial alternatives were, and how the problems were solved (or not, as the case may be). Who cares about this past, you might ask, we scientists being neither artists nor composers?

Could it be that—for scientists as well as composers and artists—the past can be a source of inspiration, and that we ignore it at our peril? Consider the question of how states of gene expression are conveyed from mother to daughters as cells divide. Are instructions passed along by regulatory proteins present in the cytoplasm (so-called “cytoplasmic determinants”), or is the information somehow built into, or attached to, the DNA and transferred along with it? Experiments performed by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod and their colleagues at the Institut Pasteur in the 1960s distinguish between the models, strikingly supporting the first of these possibilities. These experiments (including the famous “zygotic induction” and “PaJaMa” experiments—see Judson's book) were, of course, performed with bacteria.

I recently spoke with an editor of a major journal that regularly publishes sensational papers on the question as it applies to higher organisms, and learned that s/he, like many of the journal's authors, had never heard of these bacterial experiments! You realize, reading Judson's book, that the challenge is to engage the thought processes of these French scientists, ponder their approaches and results, and design experiments of comparable power and clarity to confirm or refute their conclusions in a different setting. Without that engagement, the new answers are apt to be (and in my opinion usually are) baloney.

Shortly after I read this obituary I was browsing Biology News Net and came across this remarkable opening statement in a press release from Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

Look up “transcription”—the copying of a gene’s DNA into RNA intermediaries—in any old molecular biology text book, and it all seems very simple: RNA polymerase II, the enzyme that catalyzes the reaction, assembles at the start site and starts motoring down the strand, cranking out the RNA ribbon used to construct proteins. But researchers now know that RNA polymerase II often stalls on DNA strands where it was once assumed to just barrel down.

A report from the Conaway lab at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in the July 8, 2011, edition of the journal Cell identifies a switch that allows RNA polymerase to shift gears from neutral into drive and start transcribing. This work sheds light on a process fundamental to all plant or animal cells and suggests how transcriptional anomalies could give rise to tumors.

This is a very misleading statement. Back in 1989 I wrote an extensive section on "RNA Polymerase Pauses While Transcribing Some Sequences" in my first textbook. I described the effects of sequence and secondary structure on the rate of elongation and explained how a protein component of the the transcription complex (NusA) promotes pausing in order to enhance transcription termination. The idea that rates of elongation were NOT constant was an important part of most molecular biology textbooks.

But this was in bacteria (E. coli), where most of these fundamental discoveries were first made. The press release refers specifically to eukaryotic RNA polymerase II. In the second edition of my textbook (1994) I talked about RNA polymerase II elongation factors (eukaryotes) and specifically mentioned that "TFIIS may play a role in pausing and transcription termination that is similar to the role of NusA in bacteria." The point is that older molecular biology textbooks were well aware of the fact that even the eukaryotic transcription elongation complexes did not move at a constant rate. The press release is quite incorrect.

The actual paper is not about transcription elongation but transcription initiation and how various factors assist in the transfer from the initiation complex to the elongation complex. All this was known for transcription in E. coli back in the 1970s. The old molecular biology textbooks explain abortive initiation and how RNA polymerase can stall at initiation sites until sigma factors are replaced by elongation factors. None of that is new in spite of what the press release implies.

How does this happen? I think it's because modern researchers are completely unaware of the history of their field. That's partly because the work on bacteria and bacteriophage—where the basic concepts were often discovered—is no longer taught in biochemistry and molecular biology courses. This leads to the false idea, as expressed in the press release, that all new discoveries in eukaryotes are truly new concepts that nobody ever thought of before.

The solution to this problem is to make all students read The Eighth Day of Creation.

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Insulting Religion by Pat Condell

The accommodationists aren't gonna like this ...

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Evolution According to the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution

The National (USA) Center for Science Education (NCSE) has just endorsed a four-year-old statement on teaching evolution from the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution [Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution adds its voice for evolution]. Here's the text from the CSEE website [CSEE/SCEE President's Forum].

There is overwhelming evidence that life has evolved over thousands of millions of years. The ancestors of modern organisms, as well as whole groups that are now completely extinct, have been found in great abundance as fossils. The main processes responsible for evolutionary change, such as variation and natural selection, have been repeatedly observed and verified in natural populations and in laboratory experiments. All the features of living organisms, including those discovered in the recent advances in molecular biology, are readily explained by the principles of evolution. Any scientific theory that provides a clear mechanism, offers a broad explanation of natural phenomena, receives strong support from observation and experiment and that is never refuted by careful investigation is usually called a “fact”. The cell theory of organisms, the germ theory of infection, the gene theory of inheritance and the theory of evolution are all facts. Teaching alternative theories as though they had equivalent scientific status is a perversion of education that damages children’s ability to understand the natural world. In particular, creationism is a religious doctrine long since known to be a fallacious account of Earth history that has no scientific standing and cannot be represented as a credible alternative to evolution. Evolution is the single most important principle of modern biology and the foundation of any sound biology curriculum.

Graham Bell
President, Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution

I don't like this statement because: (1) it implies that the "theory of evolution" is only about variation and natural selection, (2) it confuses evolutionary theory with the facts of evolution, and (3) it confuses creationism with Young Earth Creationism.

If you are going to claim that your version of evolutionary theory is correct then you would be well-advised to define it. And if you are going to claim that it's a fact then what's the point of calling it "evolutionary theory"? The "theory" part of evolution is an explanatory model that's used to understand and interpret various facts about the history of life.

With respect to point #3, one of the main threats to science these days comes from Intelligent Design Creationism and there are many IDiots who do not subscribe to an obviously "fallacious account of Earth's history."

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Can Somebody Please Translate This?

Denise O'Leary has discovered a paper that was written up in Science News Daily: Chromosomes' Big Picture: Similarities Found in Genomes Across Multiple Species; Platypus Still out of Place. She seems to think this causes a problem for evolution.

I couldn't make head nor tail of the posting on Uncommon Descent [Most life forms show S pattern in chromosome lengths, guess which one doesn’t?] but that didn't surprise me because, after all, it was written by an IDiot. However, I was a bit surprised by the Science News report because I couldn't understand it either.

So I looked at the original paper. Here's the reference and abstract.

Li, X., Zhu, C., Lin, Z., Wu, Y., Zhang, D., Bai, G., Song, W., Ma, J., Muehlbauer, G.J., Scanlon, M.J., Zhang, M., and Yu, J. (2011) Chromosome Size in Diploid Eukaryotic Species Centers on the Average Length with a Conserved Boundary. Mol. Biol. Evol. 28: 1901-1911. [doi: 10.1093/molbev/msr011]

Abstract

Understanding genome and chromosome evolution is important for understanding genetic inheritance and evolution. Universal events comprising DNA replication, transcription, repair, mobile genetic element transposition, chromosome rearrangements, mitosis, and meiosis underlie inheritance and variation of living organisms. Although the genome of a species as a whole is important, chromosomes are the basic units subjected to genetic events that coin evolution to a large extent. Now many complete genome sequences are available, we can address evolution and variation of individual chromosomes across species. For example, “How are the repeat and nonrepeat proportions of genetic codes distributed among different chromosomes in a multichromosome species?” “Is there a general rule behind the intuitive observation that chromosome lengths tend to be similar in a species, and if so, can we generalize any findings in chromosome content and size across different taxonomic groups?” Here, we show that chromosomes within a species do not show dramatic fluctuation in their content of mobile genetic elements as the proliferation of these elements increases from unicellular eukaryotes to vertebrates. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, notwithstanding the remarkable plasticity, there is an upper limit to chromosome-size variation in diploid eukaryotes with linear chromosomes. Strikingly, variation in chromosome size for 886 chromosomes in 68 eukaryotic genomes (including 22 human autosomes) can be viably captured by a single model, which predicts that the vast majority of the chromosomes in a species are expected to have a base pair length between 0.4035 and 1.8626 times the average chromosome length. This conserved boundary of chromosome-size variation, which prevails across a wide taxonomic range with few exceptions, indicates that cellular, molecular, and evolutionary mechanisms, possibly together, confine the chromosome lengths around a species-specific average chromosome length.

Here's the challenge. Read the abstract and try and guess what important scientific point the authors are making that deserves publication in a molecular evolution journal. For extra points, read the entire article and see if you can improve your guess. You'll be impressed when you read the discussion and it all becomes clear (not!)

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Polaris 25 - The Skeptical Track

Polaris 25 will take place this coming Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (July 15-17) at the Sheraton Parkway Toronto North in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto. It will celebrate the 45th anniversary of Star Trek. Three of the actors from Stargate SG-1/Stargate Atlantis will be there—that's my favorite TV series (now in re-runs).

The Centre For Inquiry and its Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism (CASS) has been invited to present a Skeptical Track at the convention. The four speakers are ....

• Me (Larry Moran): "What’s the Difference Between Science and Science Fiction?"


• Jeffrey Shallit: "Misinformation Theory: How Creationists Abuse Mathematics."


• Chris Hassall: "The Evolution of Superstition: People, PCs and Pigeons."


• Alex Manafu: "Could Science Prove the Existence of God? (Or, Must Science Be Naturalistic?)"

For more information see Jeffrey Shallit's blog Recursivity: See me at Polaris 2011 in Toronto - July 16 and Michael Kruse's blog at Skeptic North: Skeptical Track at Polaris 25.

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Carnival of Evolution #37

This month's Carnival of Evolution (37th version) is hosted by William, a 13 year old budding evolutionist who lives in Petawawa, Ontario, Canada [Carnival of Evolution #37-Happy Canada Day!]. His blog is The Lessons of Evolution.

The next edition will be hosted right here on Sandwalk! (Canadians are taking over the world.) Email me if you have posted something on evolution that deserves to be in the next carnival. Or just send me a link if you come across something posted by someone else. (l(dot)moran(at)utoronto(dot)ca)

I even accept postings from adaptationists and (maybe) evolutionary psychologists. I also promise to give serious consideration to postings from (some) philosophers.

There will be a new surprise category in next month's carnival—watch for it!

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The Scientific American Blog Network

Today marks the launch of another blog network. This one is The Scientific American Blog Newtork. Bora Zivkovic is the man behind it.

I read about thirty blogs on a regular basis. Some of them have migrated two or three times over the past five years and I always follow them because they are good blogs. I really don't care whether the blogs I follow are part of a network or not. I don't read the other blogs in a network because my aggregator gives me a direct feed.

What's the purpose behind belonging to a blog network? Does it provide something that you can't get by being an independent blogger? Is it money? Are there any downsides other than the fact that you are lending your name to support for a profit making corporation? If you're supporting a magazine like Discover, Seed (now dead), Nature, or Scientific American does it mean that you stand behind whatever they print?

The thing I find most annoying about commercial blogs is the advertising—some of which is contrary to what's being posted. Is the "profit" to the blogger really significant enough? Maybe it is for PZ Myers but the income for someone like me was peanuts when I last explored that option.

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Does This Belong in a Scientific Journal?

The other day I was browsing through recently published papers in PLoS Biology and came across this one.

Field D, Amaral-Zettler L, Cochrane G, Cole JR, Dawyndt P, et al. 2011 The Genomic Standards Consortium. PLoS Biol 9(6): e1001088. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001088.

Abstract

A vast and rich body of information has grown up as a result of the world's enthusiasm for 'omics technologies. Finding ways to describe and make available this information that maximise its usefulness has become a major effort across the 'omics world. At the heart of this effort is the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC), an open-membership organization that drives community-based standardization activities, Here we provide a short history of the GSC, provide an overview of its range of current activities, and make a call for the scientific community to join forces to improve the quality and quantity of contextual information about our public collections of genomes, metagenomes, and marker gene sequences.

I'm interested in this sort of thing since back in the olden days (1993) I spent a bit of time at GenBank exploring annotation issues with a view to correcting the growing number of errors that were being propagated in online databases.

It's an insoluble problem and I doubt very much that a new organization is going to help.

But that's not what I want to talk about. Near the end of the article in PLoS Biology you find this paragraph.

The Internet has resulted in a Cambrian explosion of productivity and data sharing through the adoption of a huge stack of agreed-upon protocols (standards) that allow many devices and programs to communicate to the transformative benefit of the everyday user [26]. Enabling access to user-generated content is key to harnessing the resources of a distributed community: Flickr has over 5 billion photographs uploaded, and Wikipedia has over 3.5 million English articles as of this writing. Standards for organizing sequence data will be similarly needed as sequencing instruments themselves, especially as these instruments are more and more commoditized and owned by individuals rather than institutions.

I'm sad to find this sort of content-free language creeping into scientific journals. We've been spared up to now but it looks like the 23 scientists listed as authors feel comfortable with this new style of writing.

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Losing Charlemagne

Back in October 2009 I published my genealogical connection to Emperor Charlemagne [My Family and Other Emperors]. It is wrong. I relied too much on the information found in Ancestry.com and much of that information is unreliable.

In my case the connection was through Ruhamah Hill (b ~1708) who married John Belden (1728 - ). They were British citizens who lived in Norwalk, Fairfield Country, Connecticut (a colony of Great Britain). The parents of Ruhamah Hill are often listed as William Hill and Abigail Barlow of Greenfield Connecticut but there's no evidence to support this connection. On the other hand, historical records say that Ruhamah Hill is the daughter of Captain John Hill (1669 - 1768?) of Westerley, Rhode Island and this seems much more reasonable since Captain John Hill married Ruhamah Wyer (1670 - ).

There goes my connection to Charlemagne and all of the other notables on the list.

Not to worry. The probability is high that I am a descendant of Charlemagne just like most others with any European blood [Are You a Descendant of Charlemagne?]. There are two other connections in my genealogy. I'm working on conformation.

Ms Sandwalk doesn't seem to have any ancestors that connect to European royalty but she is related to a number of very interesting people. Unfortunately, she's too embarrassed to let me mention them in public.

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For Your Amusement

vjtorley (Vincent Joseph Torley) has posted on Uncommon Descent. The title of his posting is Someone’s wrong. Who is it?. The issues is whether the similarities of mammalian embryos is PREDICTED by modern evolutionary theory. PZ Myers says "no" and Ken Miller probably agrees. They are both correct.

Do those similarities provide support for common descent even though they may not have been predicted by evolutionary theory? Yes, they do, in the same sense that common pseudogenes support evolution even though pseudogenes are not a necessary part of modern evolutionary theory.

So here's the question ... who is wrong about this issue?

1. PZ Myers
2. Ken Miller
3. Vincent Joseph Torley

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New York Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage

Same-sex marriage is legal in ten countries (Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and Sweden). In Canada it has been legal for gays and lesbians to marry since July 20, 2005.

In the United States same-sex is legal in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia). A few hours ago it became legal in New York. I wonder if this will cause other states to make same-sex marriage legal?

The map shows where gays and lesbians have the same rights as other citizens and where those rights are restricted. I think it reflects a deep cultural divide in America and I wonder where this is going to end up? Is it possible that some of the red colored states will eventually change their minds on this issue?

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[Image Credit: modified from Wikipedia]

The Religious Left in Canada

The New Democratic Party's "Faith and Social Justice Commission" has produced a video to prove that you can be religious and socialist.

My position is that religion should be kept out of politics. There should not be a "Faith and Social Justice Commission" sanctioned by the NDP. (Is there also an "Unfaith and Social Justice Commission" for all those atheists who believe in social justice?)

I have no problem with individuals adhering to one religion or another but keep it personal. There's no need to band together in order to influence policy within the government or even within a party. Frankly I don't care why you support socialist progressive policies as long as you do. Don't try and make it look like religion is what motivates you to favor the left because that just makes you look as silly as the right-wing fundamentalists who use religion to defend their position.

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[Hat Tip: Canadian Atheist]

For Your Amusement

Bill Dembski has just posted an article titled Who Will Be Michele Bachmann’s Science Advisers?.

This is deeply ironic on many levels. Why would Bachmann need people to advise her about science? So far she's gotten along just fine without knowing a thing about science. A real science adviser would just confuse her.

I wonder if Dembski has anyone in mind? He surely can't be thinking of himself or any of his closest IDiot friends because, as we all know, there are Nobel Laureates who would be far better qualified.

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Pretty Money

Canada is about to release a new set of polymer banknotes. Watch the video to see all the security features and the cool windows in the notes. (BTW, is there any country other than the United States that has monocolor money? Is there a reason why the USA makes every denomination of bill the same color?)



What's on these banknotes? The $100 bill depicts Sir Robert L. Borden, Prime Minister of Canada from 1911 to 1920. Here's the description of the other images fron The Bank of Canada.

# Theme: Medical Innovation

Canadians have long been at the frontiers of medical research and as a result have helped to save millions of lives worldwide. Notable Canadian contributions include pioneering the use of insulin to treat diabetes, DNA and genetic research, the invention of the pacemaker, and the first hospital-to-hospital robot-assisted surgery.

Researcher at a microscope

The image of a researcher using a microscope depicts Canada’s long-standing commitment to medical research.

DNA strand

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the genetic blueprint of life. Canadian researchers have been at the forefront of mapping our human genetic makeup in this field of medical science.

ECG

This electrocardiogram provides a visual cue to Canada’s contributions to heart health, including the invention of the pacemaker by John Hopps in 1950.

Insulin

The discovery of insulin to treat diabetes was made by Canadian researchers Frederick Banting and Charles Best in 1921.

It's nice that Canada is celebrating science.




The $50 dollar bill has a picture of William Lyon Mackenzie King who was Prime Minister from 1921–30 and from 1935–48. The other side has ...

# Theme: CCGS Amundsen, Research Icebreaker

The vastness and splendour of Canada’s northern frontier have helped to shape our cultural identity. The icebreaker plays an important role in the North, keeping Canada’s historic passages open, undertaking marine search and rescue, supporting isolated communities, and participating in international environmental research. The CCGS Amundsen helps Canada—the nation with the world’s longest stretch of Arctic coastline—to remain at the leading edge of Arctic research, providing the world’s oceanographers, geologists and ecologists with unparalleled access to the North.

CCGS Amundsen, Research Icebreaker

The Canadian Coast Guard Ship Amundsen became a research icebreaker in 2003. It is jointly operated by ArcticNet and the Canadian Coast Guard.

“Arctic” in Inuktitut

This syllabic text is taken from Inuktitut, a language of Canada’s Inuit population. It stands for “Arctic.”

Map of Canada’s northern regions

The map on the back of this note shows Canada’s northern regions in their entirety, including Inuit regions of the Arctic. This image was provided by Natural Resources Canada.

More mention of research and another language. The $50 dollar bill has words from three languages (French, English, and Inuktitut. (I think there's only two languages on American bills. )

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The Summer Solstice and Science Literacy

From time to time my colleagues and I discuss the basic requirements of science literacy. We envisage a group of intelligent people at a party discussing various topics. Let's restrict our discussion to Western European culture.

Everyone agrees that they should be familiar with the basic outlines of history (e.g. who did Paul Revere warn in 1775?) and politics (what's the difference between socialism and capitalism?). Everyone agrees that you would look like an idiot if you didn't know who Will Shakespeare was and what Hamlet said. Everyone agrees that you can't call yourself an intellectual if you don't know the difference between French Impressionists and Michelangelo. You're expected to know something about Socrates and Aristotle. You're expected to know at least a few foreign words and knowledge of a foreign language is almost a requirement.

You should know something about food even if it's only the difference between couche couche and curry. Any "intellectual" should be able to discourse for five minutes on a favorite wine. You get the picture—there are some things that you just have to know if you claim to be literate.

What about science? Are there any things in science that you just have to know if you want to be taken seriously as an informed literate person?

No, there aren't. We've all experienced the situation I describe where a group of non-scientists at a party or bar are showing off their knowledge. Knowledge of science and math is not a requirement. In fact, you get points if you brag about always being too stupid to understand mathematics and dropping it as soon as you could in high school, especially if you're a woman.

Are there scientific facts and concepts that you really should be expected to know if you claim to be literate? Yes there are, and it's up to us to make sure they are widely publicized.

Today's your chance to publicize one of those facts. The summer solstice happens two hours from now no matter where you are on the planet. Ask your non-science friends to explain the summer solstice (Northern Hemisphere). It's one of those simple science things that everyone should know about. Not being able to explain it is like not knowing that Libya is in Africa, Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo, Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, and Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect.

Can you explain the solstice? If so, you are on the way to scientific literacy. What are some other must-know scientific facts and concepts? Evolution is one. If you don't understand the basic concepts of evolution then you can't clam to be scientifically literate. My point is that I'd like to live in a world where you can't claim to be literate, period, if you aren't scientifically literate.

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[Image credit: Wikipedia]

Texas Prayed and God Answered

Back in April, Governor Rick Perry of Texas proclaimed a weekend of prayer (Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011). Texans were supposed to pray for God to relieve the terrible dought [Pray for Texas].

Bill Maher reminded me that it's been several months since Texans prayed so it's time to analyze the results.

On the site US Drought Monitor there are maps of the USA showing region of drought. The top map below shows the regions with severe drought (dark brown) for April 26, 2011, right after all the praying. The second map (below) shows regions of drought on June 14, 2011.

It looks like God hates Texas and/or Rick Perry. I'm told that Governor Perry is thinking of running for President of the United States. Is this a good idea?

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Creationist Logic

Help me out, dear readers. I can't for the life of me figure out the logic behind the latest posting at Uncommon Descent: If you make a prediction and it doesn’t happen ….

I'm serious. Although I often make fun of the IDiots, I usually try hard to understand the points they are trying to make so I can expose them as nonsensical. But this one has me completely stumped. On the surface the author seems to be saying that "Darwinism" made a prediction "based on core principles" that wasn't fulfilled. This is bad for "Darwinism."

What is that prediction?

The author ("News") starts with a quotation from The Myth of Junk DNA.

In 2010, University of California Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology John C. Avise published a book titled Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design, in which he wrote that "noncoding repetitive sequences–'junk DNA'–comprise the vast bulk (at least 50%, and probably much more) of the human genome." Avise argued that pseudogenes, in particular, are evidence against intelligent design. For example, "pseudogenes hardly seem like genomic features that would be designed by a wise engineer. Most of them lie scattered along the chromosomes like useless molecular cadavers." To be sure, "several instances are known or suspected in which a pseudogene formerly assumed to be genomic ‘ junk’ was later deemed to have a functional role in cells. But such cases are almost certainly exceptions rather than the rule. And in any event, such examples hardly provide solid evidence for intelligent design; instead, they seem to point toward the kind of idiosyncratic tinkering for which nonsentient evolutionary processes are notorious."

Jonathan Wells, The Myth of Junk DNA (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2011), pp. 26-27

This is a pretty accurate representation of what John Avise actually says except that it juxtaposes two separate facts. It's true that repetitive DNA sequences—mostly defective transposons—make up about half our genome. Then there's pseudogenes. They are found in the other half and they make up about 1% of the human genome.

Avise, and many others, point out that the presence of pseudogenes is inconsistent with good design and therefore poses a problem for Intelligent Design Creationism.¹ I note that the IDiots have consistently refused to address this problem. Instead, they try and convince their followers that pseudogenes don't exist.

Here's what Avise says in his book Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-intelligent design (p. 115). You can see that Wells accurately represented the actual argument that he (Avise) was making.

At face value, pseudogenes hardly seem like genomic features that would be designed by a wise engineer. Most of them lie scattered among the chromosome like useless molecular cadavers. This sentiment does not preclude the possibility that an occasional pseudogene is resuscitated such that it contributes positively to cellular operations, several instances are known or suspected in which a pseudogene formerly assumed to be genomic "junk" was later deemed to have a functional role in cells. But such cases are almost certainly exceptions and not the rule. And in any event, such examples hardly provide solid evidence for intelligent design; instead, they seem to point toward the kind of idiosyncratic genetic tinkering for which nonsentient evolutionary evolutionary processes are notorious.

It's important to make sure you understand the argument that Avise and others are making. When looking at the big picture the presence of thousands of pseudogenes in the human genome is a challenge for those who argue for Intelligent Design Creationism. The fact that a handful of these regions were misidentified as pseudgenes and now turn out to have a function cannot be taken as evidence that all of the 20,000 known pseudogenes have a function.

So, how does Wells deal with this challenge to his belief? On the next page of his book (p. 27) he says ...

But Is It True?
The arguments by Dawkins, Miller, Shermer, Collins, Kitcher, Coyne and Avise rest on the premise that most non-coding DNA is junk, wihout any significnat biological function. Yet a virtual flood of recent evidence shows that they are mistaken. Much of the DNA they claim to be "junk" actually performs important functions in living cells.

The following chapters cite hundreds of scientific articles (many of them freely accessible on the Internet) that testify to those functions—and those articles are only a small sample of a large and growing body of literature on the subject. This does not mean that the authors of those articles are critics of evolution or supporters of intelligent design. Indeed, most of them interpret the evidence within an evolutionary framework. But many of them explicitly point out that the evidence refutes the myth of junk DNA.

This is a classic "bait-and-switch." The argument from Avise and the others is mostly about the presence of pseudogenes. There is solid evidence that many pseudogenes are completely non-functional. There is evidence that non-functional pseudogenes have been inherited from common ancestors, strongly suggesting that the genes were inactivated in ancient ancestors and passed down to modern species as the evolved.

This argument is NOT about "most noncoding DNA." It's about that 1% of the genome that contains known pseudogenes. Unless that point is addressed directly (it isn't) then Wells is guilty of ignoring one of the main arguments of his critics.

But that's not the point of this posting. I'm concerned about the point that "News" makes in the recent posting on Uncommon Descent. He/she says ...

Darwinism predicts something, based on its core principles, and it doesn’t happen. And there are no consequences? Only on planet Darwin. Where all correct predictions originate in Darwin’s theory and are grandfathered as such by his loyal heirs. All incorrect predictions are “proved” to have originated elsewhere, no matter where they actually originated.

What are these predictions of "Darwinism"? It's surely not pseudogenes since no evolutionary theory that I know of predicted pseudogenes. Bacteria don't have many pseudogenes and that's perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory. Plant genomes have lots of pseudogenes and that's perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory. Yeast has a few pseudogenes but not nearly as many as plants and that's perfectly consistent with modern evolutionary theory.

Is "News" referring to junk DNA in general? That's not a prediction of "Darwinism" or any evolutionary theory that I know of. The fact that bacteria have very little junk DNA has never been taken as a fact that overthrows modern evolutionary theory. I'm unaware of any evolutionary biologist who predicted back in the 1960s that most of the mammalian genome would be junk and that this prediction was a requirement of modern evolutionary theory. The arguments of Avise et al. are not based on the "premise" that most of our genome is junk, they're based on the evidence that pseudogenes exist.

No prediction was made so no prediction has been refuted. The point that "News" is making seems illogical.

Unless I'm missing something obvious.

What about the predictions of the IDiots? Casey Luskin explains it [Intelligent Design and the Death of the "Junk-DNA" Neo-Darwinian Paradigm].

Proponents of intelligent design have long maintained that Neo-Darwinism's widely held assumption that our cells contain much genetic "junk" is both dangerous to the progress of science and wrong. As I explain here, design theorists recognize that "Intelligent agents typically create functional things," and thus Jonathan Wells has suggested, "From an ID perspective, however, it is extremely unlikely that an organism would expend its resources on preserving and transmitting so much ‘junk'." [4] Design theorists have thus been predicting the death of the junk-DNA paradigm for many years: ...

and in Another Intelligent Design Prediction Fulfilled: Function for a Pseudogene ...

Darwinists have long made an argument from ignorance, where our lack of present knowledge of the function for a given biological structure is taken as evidence that there is no function and the structure is merely a vestige of evolutionary history. Darwinists have commonly made this mistake with many types of "junk" DNA, now known to have function. In contrast, intelligent agents design objects for a purpose, and therefore intelligent design predicts that biological structures will have function.²

Here's another prediction, according to Barry Arrington on Uncommon Descent [FAQ4 is Open for Comment].

ID does not make scientifically fruitful predictions.

This claim is simply false. To cite just one example, the non-functionality of “junk DNA” was predicted by Susumu Ohno (1972), Richard Dawkins (1976), Crick and Orgel (1980), Pagel and Johnstone (1992), and Ken Miller (1994), based on evolutionary presuppositions. In contrast, on teleological grounds, Michael Denton (1986, 1998), Michael Behe (1996), John West (1998), William Dembski (1998), Richard Hirsch (2000), and Jonathan Wells (2004) predicted that “junk DNA” would be found to be functional.

The Intelligent Design predictions are being confirmed and the Darwinist predictions are being falsified. For instance, ENCODE’s June 2007 results show substantial functionality across the genome in such “junk DNA” regions, including pseudogenes.

Thus, it is a matter of simple fact that scientists working in the ID paradigm carry out and publish research, and they have made significant and successful ID-based predictions.

It seems like it's the IDiots that have hitched their star to a prediction about junk DNA. If any genome turns out to have a substantial amount of junk DNA then Intelligent Design Creationism is refuted. As it turns out, many genomes do have a lot of junk DNA in spite of what Jonathan Wells would have you believe. Thus, Intelligent Design Creationism is no longer a credible scientific hypothesis.

But you knew that already, didn't you?

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1. Most scientists actually argue a more specific point; namely, that the conservation of specific pseudogenes in different species is an especially serious problem for Intelligent Design Creationists.

2. It's interesting that Casey Luskin seems to know something about the motivations of the intelligent designer because when scientists point out that the genome doesn't look like it was designed this is not taken as an argument against the IDiot position. Instead it's taken as illegitimate science as pointed out by Wells in his book (p. 103), "Do arguments based on speculations about a creator or designer have a legitimate place in science? Not according to Canadian biologist Steven Scadding, who once wrote that although he accepted evolutionary theory, he objected to defending it on the grounds that a creator would or would not do certain things. 'Whatever the validity of this theological claim,' Scadding concluded, 'it certainly cannot be defended as a scientific statement, and thus should be given no place is a scientific discussion of evolution."

Junk Poll Results

Here are the results of the most recent poll on junk DNA. Below it is the result from several years ago. I realize that the questions are different but the shift toward favoring junk DNA is still a surprise. I'd like to think it's because more and more Sandwalk readers are becoming aware of the science behind junk DNA but it could be just that more "junkers" are reading my blog.

Is there anyone out there who changed their minds over the past few years? Is The Myth of Junk DNA going to convert everyone to rejecting junk DNA? I'll have to do another poll in six months to see if the Intelligent Design Creationists are having an impact.

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Zoë and Window Shopping

Don't you just hate it when bloggers post cute pictures of their children, grandchildren, cats, or molluscs?

Tough. Here's my granddaughter, Zoë, window shopping in Barcelona (Spain) a few weeks ago. The window looked so inviting she decided to check out the shop.

She's only 16 months old and already enjoys shopping!

(Zoë took her parents to Barcelona to meet up with Ms. Sandwalk and our nephew for a week of zoo's, Cava, and Gaudí. You can read all about it on leslie jane moran.)

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Omnisaurus Games

My number one son¹, Gordon Moran, is a texture artist working for a video game company in Vancouver. He has hooked up with his programmer friend Kevin Forbes to found Omnisaurus Games. They are working on an iPhone/iPad game and the unique thing about this is that you can follow their progress on their blog. Did you ever wonder what goes into to making a fabulous app?

Omnisaurus Games is an independent game developer currently developing games for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Founded May 2011 in Vancouver, Canada by Kevin Forbes and Gordon Moran, we stress open game development, meaning we share every aspect of our development cycle with you the players. Follow our game development journey through our blog, twitter, facebook, or rss feed. Watch our game grow from the conceptual phase, all the way through the entire development cycle. We regularly post our work in progress builds so that you can test them out online and most importantly give us your feedback and great ideas. After all, we’re making these games for you, so shouldn’t you have a say in how they’re made? Most importantly, keep in touch. We’d love to hear anything you have to say about our games, any games, or life in general. We’ll try really hard to implement the best and most popular ideas into our games and reward the most helpful suggestions and ideas with free copies of our game when it launches. We look forward to hearing from you!

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1. Note for the irony deficient - whenever someone says this it usually means they only have one son/daughter. Note that I did not say "number one child" 'cause that would have gotten me in trouble.

A Visit from Rick

It was late in the day when I heard a knock on my office door. I opened it to discover a strange man I hadn't seen in many years he introduced me to his wife and son. Rick Nicholson is a former graduate student in my lab. He got his Ph.D. 25 years ago ("The HSP70 Multi-Gene Family in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.") Rick was the first person to clone and sequence the yeast BiP gene.

Rick went from Toronto to Strasbourg (France) to work in Pierre Chambon's lab and from there he went to Australia. He is currently Professor at the Hunter Medical Research Institute in Newcastle, NSW where he works on peptide hormones expressed during pregnancy in humans.

I've reached the age where it's a real thrill to remember the "olden days" and how much better they were than today. Over dinner, Rick and I agreed that graduate students and young professors were much better 25 years ago than they are today.¹

We tried to remember everyone who was in the the lab during the early 1980's. Fortunately there was a list in Rick's thesis (undergraduates. graduate students, post-docs): Sean Blaine, Kim Bird, Eric Degan, Monica Fuchs, David Lowe, Marc Perry, Andrea Townsend, Sharon Shtang, Scott Young and Kee Wan. I know where most of them are but I haven't seen some of them for decades. That's sad.

Rick and his family are on their way to Strasbourg to celebrate Pierre Chambon's 80th birthday. When I reach 80 I'll have to throw a big party so I can invite all my former colleagues and students.

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1. I recently had dinner with my former Ph.D. supervisor and we reached the same conclusion only it was for 40 years ago. Isn't that strange?

Carnival of Evolution #36

This month's Carnival of Evolution (36th version) is hosted by Greg Laden at Greg Laden's Blog ["If You Love Evolution, Tweet About It!" COE # 36].

Here are the subtitles ...

• Hard Core Theory, Genetics, Mutations
• Kin Selection (or not)
• Ecology and evolution
• Microbes with ESP
• Applied Evolution
• Fish Physiology
• Crayfish Sex
• Human Evolution
• Darwinia
• Time and Deep Time
• Elephants
• Basic Concepts and Pedagogy
• Brains
• Extinction
• Blog The Controversy

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Gil Dodgen Explains the Salem Conjecture

The Salem Conjecture is the work of Bruce Salem. He suggested in the mid 1990s on talk.origins that of those creationists who claim professional expertise in evolution, a substantial percentage are engineers.

Bruce explained that most engineers are NOT creationists. It's only those who think they have special insight into biology who tend to be creationists.

This conjecture seems to hold but nobody knows why. It's one of the great mysteries of the world, right up there with why so many people hang toilet paper incorrectly and why it's only men who need to change after they get married.

Finally, after 15 years, Gil Dodgen offers an explanation for why engineers have such special insight into evolution [Who are the Real Freethinkers, Darwinists or ID Folks?].

The only thing I can think of is that the average Darwinist has no experience in designing any complex, functionally integrated system. The workings of the simplest cell make my AI program and the hardware on which it runs look like tinker toys.....

Self-replication does nothing to mitigate the probabilistic hurdles the Darwinian mechanism must overcome. How could this not be obvious to anyone with any experience in software or any other rigorous engineering discipline, and who has a basic understanding of combinatorial mathematics?

Oops, I forgot, most of these people have no experience in any rigorous engineering discipline. And those who do, and still believe in the Darwinian fantasy, have obviously undergone the atrophy and crippling of their basic reasoning powers — the product of many years of Darwinian indoctrination and suppression of free thought.

Who are the real freethinkers, Darwinists or ID folks? The Darwinian world is Orwellian.

Well, I'm glad that's settled. Now, I wish he'd turn his attention to some of the other serious mysteries that call out for an engineer's special insight. Maybe he can tell us the correct way to hang toilet paper?

(BTW, the posting just went up a few hours ago and there aren't any comments yet. I expect a flood of comments criticizing Gil for being rude to the scientists Darwinists. We all know that the IDiots are very sensitive about such behavior. They pride themselves on being polite and respectful toward their evolutionary biology Darwinist opponents.)

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Junk DNA Poll

If you haven't answered the junk DNA poll question in the margin then now's the time! There's only one week left.

The results so far are surprising—very different from my previous poll on this topic. It looks like one side is wining.

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The Central Dogma Strawman

Whenever you're trying to promote a new idea it's nice to have a scapegoat to beat up on. You're going to get a lot more attention if you can demonstrate that your latest results overthrow some key scientific concept that everyone took for granted. If you can't find a real "key concept" then the next best thing is to make one up.

For the past several decades that strawman target has been The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. The Central Dogma is supposed to represent the key concept of molecular biology yet it gets "overthrown" on a regular basis every six months. Isn't that strange?

The latest example comes from a Nature review of a recent Science paper. The Science paper presents evidence that many mRNA sequences differ from the sequences in the exons that encode them (Li et al., 2011). RNA editing has been known for decades and every few years it is trotted out again as proof that the Central Dogma is wrong. The recent Li et al. (2011) paper doesn't present evidence for a new phenomenon but it does suggest that RNA editing may be much more common than previously suspected.

Here's what Nature staff writer Erika Check Hayden says about this paper ("Cells may stray from 'central dogma'" Hayden, 2011a).

All science students learn the 'central dogma' of molecular biology: that the sequence of bases encoded in DNA determines the sequence of amino acids that makes up the corresponding proteins. But now researchers suggest that human cells may complicate this tidy picture by making many proteins that do not match their underlying DNA sequences.

Now if that really was what the Central Dogma actually said then it would have disappeared thirty years ago.

The real Central Dogma of Molecular Biology is ...

... once (sequential) information has passed into protein it cannot get out again (F.H.C. Crick, 1958)

The central dogma of molecular biology deals with the detailed residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information. It states that such information cannot be transferred from protein to either protein or nucleic acid. (F.H.C. Crick, 1970)

I've explained why this is the correct version in an old blog posting from 2007: Basic Concepts: The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. A very similar definition can be found on the Wikipedia site: Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. The key point is that once information flows into protein it can't flow back to nucleic acid. The standard misconception of the Central Dogma is actually the normal information flow pathway or what Crick called the "Sequence Hypothesis." It's a generality that was never meant to be an inviolate rule like the actual Central Dogma.

Hayden has another article in this week's print version of Nature (Hayden, 2011b). The second article emphasizes the controversy surrounding the Li et al. (2011) paper—lots of people are skeptical—but she doesn't back off the implications.

If verified, the findings would require a rewrite of the 'central dogma' of molecular biology, which posits that the RNA transcripts that carry genetic information to the ribosome, where they are used as templates for protein assembly, are generally faithful matches to the original DNA.

There are two remarkable things about such a statement. First, RNA editing has been an established fact for almost thirty years so if the Central Dogma needed rewriting it would have been done a long time ago. Second, Hayden was informed in the comments to her first article that there was a problem with her definition of the Central Dogma. Maybe she didn't have time to change the second version that was about to be published.

To be fair, this isn't just a problem with science writers who don't do their homework. Hayden is right when she says that most science students learn an incorrect version of the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. It's true that most textbooks promote the information flow pathway as the Central Dogma and they fail to point out that the real version only precludes reverse translation. I don't understand why so many textbook writers and teachers continue to teach something they know to be false as the "Central Dogma" of molecular biology.

Is it because they don't know about the exceptions?

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Crick, F.H.C. (1958) On protein synthesis. Symp. Soc. Exp. Biol. XII:138-163.

Crick, F. (1970) Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. Nature 227, 561-563. [PDF file]

Hayden, E.C. (2011a) Cells may stray from 'central dogma.' Nature Published online 19 May 2011 [doi:10.1038/news.2011.304.

Hayden, E.C. (2011a) Evidence of altered RNA stirs debate. Nature 473:432. [doi:10.1038/473432a]

Li, M., Wang, I.X., Li, Y., Bruzel, A., Richards, A.L., Toung, J.M., and Cheung, V.G. (2011) Widespread RNA and DNA Sequence Differences in the Human Transcriptome. Science. 2011 May 19. [Epub ahead of print] [Science]