Shaliniat at Scientia Natura: Evolution and Rationality found this cartoon [It must be hard living in fear of science]. It's cute so I'm stealing it from her. It's originally from cectic.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkXec-C27vZi8AHJaXW9MgZudaL8sAFqJrGO1Sl5xTkc-89cqaqrMsmIEeFObm0CGWcnRZQ9KSV_1JmhGdyOvpG-v4jnc-KxRbu16NeR686X0VysZNTPsNh5EC6I9lbE0QBZoaWg/s400/tmp.jpg)
Access Excellence, launched in 1993, is a national educational program that provides health, biology and life science teachers access to their colleagues, scientists, and critical sources of new scientific information via the World Wide Web. The program was originally developed and launched by Genentech Inc., and in 1999 joined the National Health Museum, a non-profit organization founded by former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop as a national center for health education. Access Excellence will form the core of the educational component of the National Health Museum Website that is currently under development.This is an admirable goal. The web is full of garbage and it would be nice to collect all the good stuff in one site so that teachers and students could use it. I thought I'd check it out to see how "excellent" it is.
[Hat Tip: Brian Larnder at Primordial Blog (Stephen Harper Embarrasses Canada Again)]
[Photo Credit: cbcnews]
[Photo Credit: Australian flag - Job Search: John Howard - Wikipedia]
I have been doing a great deal of work in ID over the past few years -- and have given presentations of my work in universities, both in Canada and the USA, that are well attended by both students and faculty. I have been very surprised by the fact that no significant objections to the evidence I present are being raised in these venues. I never bash Darwinism, I simply show them the positive evidence for ID -- and it goes over very well indeed.I'm surprised that he has never heard any significant objections to the evidence he presents in his talk. I didn't have any trouble recognizing several lies and distortions and I wasn't the only one on Tuesday night.
I am currently working on a paper dealing with functional information, under the guidance of a professor in bioinformatics who wants to see my work published. It will be very low-key, mentioning nothing about ID, yet laying the groundwork for some major advances in this field -- if it is, by some miracle, accepted for publication.
I thank Larry for extending the opportunity to post a method to test for whether ID is highly probable or not (the way I phrased it in my lecture). I've been mulling this over even before Larry posted the invite. I have reservations about doing it in this particular forum, primarily because the numbers that would be involved are too few to justify the time and, secondly, I would prefer a live lecture where the back and forth dialogue would be greatly enhanced. I've thought that, perhaps, this could be done at the U of T over a 2 hour period. Larry could book a room and chair the event. I could present my proposal (as I repeatedly referred to it in my lecture) of a method to test for ID. I would sincerely hope that Larry et al would be able to set aside the usual hostility and personal attacks and, instead, run a collegial, honest event. As I repeatedly stressed in my lecture this past week, I am NOT claiming to have a 'proof' for ID. Rather, I am proposing a scientific method to test for it that is a work in progress. When this could take place is another question. Certainly not this semester. I am currently swamped with getting the next phase of my research up and running, and a couple of papers in progress. I cannot even afford the time o respond to these posts and will likely have to bow out today. My suggestion would be sometime in 2008, preferably after the winter semester, say, late April or May.I'm happy to oblige and I've booked a room for either Tuesday April 22nd or Tuesday April 28th. I invite Kirk Durston to come and present his evidence that protein folding studies indicate the presence of an intelligent designer.
[Photo Credit: The Figure is from my textbook, Horton et al. (2006) p. 110. It's taken from the work of my departmental colleague Hue Sun Chan, one of the world's leading experts on the theoretical aspects of protein folding.]
I throw in my two cents' worth:Many people have said this before but we need to keep hammering away at this point [see Kirk Durston's Proof of God]. There's no logic to Intelligent Design Creationism other than discrediting evolution on the assumption that God is the only other option.
There is indeed a huge, huge logical fallacy at the base of Dembski's argument. It's the assumption that if you pick enough holes in evolution to let the air out, "God did it" is the only remaining conclusion. That's known as a false dichotomy.
In reality, there are a lot more than two choices. If the received explanation of evolution were not true, it would be back to the drawing board for everyone. If it isn't random mutation plus natural selection plus sexual selection plus genetic drift, then perhaps it's inheritance of acquired characteristics plus natural selection plus sexual selection plus genetic drift. There's no reason to jump to the conclusion that unnatural causes are needed.
The result of pushing the false dichotomy is that ID proponents are ready to use every rhetorical trick in the book, misrepresent evolution, continue to quote falsified "facts," and invent mathematical proofs based on strained assumptions that evolution can't occur without angels pushing the molecules. Dembski's arguments have been falsified again and again. Mutation produces new information. Mutation can produce improvements. Mutation can double the genetic material and then modify it (in spite of the "if I copied this paper I haven't doubled my knowledge" rhetoric). Natural selection is neither directed by God nor random at a particular time and place. It is probabilistic, however. When Dembski claims that something is impossible and actual researchers explain step by step how that could happen, his argument is demolished. The fact that our evidence is always "pathetic" and his evidence is non-existent tells you who has the logic on their side and who is blowing smoke.
Ahoy me mateys and welcome to the 93rd edition of the Tangled Bank, humbly hosted by yours truly. For those of you returning to from Archaea to Zeaxanthol, welcome back. For those new to my blog, let me give you a quick introduction.
Mira, A., Ochman, H. and Moran N.A. (2000) Deletional bias and the evolution of bacterial genomes. Trends Genet. 17:589-96. [PubMed]I asked Durston what would happen if I called Nancy Moran (no relation, that's her above) and asked her whether she agreed that primitive bacteria were complex and all modern bacterial lineages are losing information. He affirmed that she would and that's what modern evolutionary biologists are saying. There are other papers that say the same thing. He accused me of not being aware of them.
Although bacteria increase their DNA content through horizontal transfer and gene duplication, their genomes remain small and, in particular, lack nonfunctional sequences. This pattern is most readily explained by a pervasive bias towards higher numbers of deletions than insertions. When selection is not strong enough to maintain them, genes are lost in large deletions or inactivated and subsequently eroded. Gene inactivation and loss are particularly apparent in obligate parasites and symbionts, in which dramatic reductions in genome size can result not from selection to lose DNA, but from decreased selection to maintain gene functionality. Here we discuss the evidence showing that deletional bias is a major force that shapes bacterial genomes.I think it's pretty obvious from the abstract that they're discussing a particular problem in bacterial evolution; namely selection for small compact genomes. This point is clear in the paper as well.
This are (at least) two major flaws in this argument and it doesn't take an expert in computer science or biochemistry to detect them.
- By making assumptions A, B, C, and D and constructing equations E and F he is able to predict that no protein will have more than X amount of information.
- By making a few assumptions about protein families it is possible to measure the amount of information in a folded domain by plugging the data into his equations. It turns out that most proteins have more than X information.
- Therefore God exists (i.e., the protein must have been intelligently designed).
Axe, D. (2000) Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors. J. Mol. Biol. 310:585-595.
axe, D. (2004) Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds. J. Mol. Biol. 341:1295-1315.
"for their discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism"
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Since the start of the Nobel Foundation the professorial staff of the Karolinska Institute has chosen the prizewinners in Physiology or Medicine. This year the Karolinska Institute has been reorganized into a medical university and the duties of the professorial staff have been taken over by the medical faculty of the enlarged Karolinska Institute. As the last item on its agenda the professorial staff was to decide this year's Nobel Prizewinners in Physiology or Medicine and on October 15 Professors Konrad Bloch and Feodor Lynen were awarded the prize for their discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism.
The word cholesterol means gallstone and the reason for this name is that cholesterol was isolated almost 200 years ago from human gallstones. Another connection between cholesterol and human diseases has been established more recently. During the last decade there has been a lively discussion, also in the newspapers, about the correlation between atherosclerosis and the amount of cholesterol and other fats in diet and in blood. This discussion has perhaps concealed from many the fact that cholesterol is a necessary constituent of all our cells and that it fulfills important functions. The elucidation of its chemical structure is one of the foremost achievements in organic chemistry during the 1910's and 1920's. In 1928 the German chemists Windaus and Wieland received Nobel Prizes in Chemistry for their work on the structure of cholesterol and the closely related bile acids. The four-ring carbon skeleton characteristic of cholesterol was later found not only in a number of sterols of plant and animal origin but also in the precursors of vitamin D, in the male and female sex hormones, in the hormones from the adrenal cortex, etc.
Nothing was known about the way they were formed or about their interrelationships. When this year's prizewinners started their scientific career, Professor Hevesy had done his discoveries concerning the use of isotopes as tracers in the living organism. When first the stable and later the radioactive isotopes of hydrogen and carbon became available, they were first extensively used by a group at Columbia University that was headed by the late Rudolph Schoenheimer and in which Bloch played an important role. The work of the group with isotopically labeled compounds has laid the foundation of our general knowledge of the dynamic state in the living cell.
One of the fundamental discoveries was the elucidation of the role of acetic acid as a building block for cholesterol as well as fatty acids. Lynen, working in Wieland's laboratory on the metabolism of acetic acid, succeeded in isolating the so-called activated acetic acid, which is the precursor of all lipids in our body and the common denominator of a number of metabolic processes. With all possible refinements in the utilization of isotope techniques, Bloch and collaborators were able to show in a series of brilliant investigations how the two carbon atoms of acetic acid are used for the synthesis of a long hydrocarbon with thirty carbon atoms, squalene, which in turn is cyclized in a novel type of reaction to a steroid with thirty carbon atoms, lanosterol. This lanosterol is then transformed in a complicated series of reactions into cholesterol, which has twenty-seven carbon atoms. Of special interest are the reactions leading to the formation of the hydrocarbon squalene, and the elucidation of these reactions, which are common for the biosynthesis of many other lipids and natural products, is due not only to Bloch and Lynen and collaborators but also to Popjak and Cornforth in England and Folkers and co-workers in the U.S.A. In connection with this work Lynen made two other discoveries of great importance to our understanding of the mechanisms of cellular metabolism: the elucidation of the mechanism of action of the vitamin biotin and the determination of the structure of cytohemin.
At an early stage Bloch made another discovery of fundamental importance in showing that cholesterol is the precursor of bile acids and of one of the female sex hormones. These discoveries opened up a new field of research that has engaged a great number of scientists in different disciplines. We know now that all substances of steroid nature in our body are formed from cholesterol.
Mainly through the basic biochemical work of this year's prizewinners do we know today in detail how cholesterol and fatty acids are synthesized and metabolized in the body. These processes comprise series of reactions with a great number of individual steps. For instance, the formation of cholesterol from acetic acid is a process involving some thirty different steps. Derangements of this complicated mechanism of formation and metabolism of lipids are in many cases responsible for the genesis of some of our most important diseases, especially in the cardiovascular field. A detailed knowledge of the mechanisms of lipid metabolism is necessary to deal with these medical problems in a rational manner.
The importance of the work of Bloch and Lynen lies in the fact that we now know the reactions which have to be studied in relation to inherited and other factors. We can now predict that we, through further research in this field in the near future, can expect to be able to do individual specific therapy against the diseases that in the developed countries are the most common cause of death.
Professor Bloch, Professor Lynen. You have both started your research in Munich and you have proceeded the proud tradition of this town in a splendid way.
Feodor Lynen, you are now standing with dignity in the array of the earlier Munich Nobel Prizewinners, Adolf von Baeyer, Hans Fischer and Heinrich Wieland.
Konrad Bloch, you have like Emil Fischer and Richard Willstätter left Munich and continued your work in the New World.
I have made a very short summary of your successful research work in the field of lipids. You have provided us with detailed knowledge of many fundamental metabolic reactions. This knowledge forms the necessary basis for the study of the different medical problems in the field of lipid metabolism.
It can now be anticipated that in the near future we will learn how to deal with many of these diseases in a rational and successful way.
On behalf of the Caroline Institute I have the honour to congratulate you on your brilliant work and I now ask you to receive your prizes from the hands of His Majesty the King.
[Photo Credits: Konrad Bloch plaque is from Wikipedia. Restricted photos of Feodor Lynen are available on ViewImages]