Dark Matter Is Real, Not Just Noise or Junk

UPDATE: The title is facetious. I don't believe for one second that most so-called "dark matter" has a function. In fact, there's no such thing as "dark matter." Most of our genome is junk. I mention this because one of the well-known junk DNA kooks is severely irony-impaired and thought that I had changed my mind.

A few hours ago I asked you to evaluate the conclusion of a paper by Venters and Pugh (2013) [Transcription Initiation Sites: Do You Think This Is Reasonable?].

Now I want you to look at the Press Release and tell me what you think [see Scientists Discover the Origins of Genomic "Dark Matter"].

It seems pretty clear to me that Pugh (and probably Venters) actually think they are on to something. Here's part of the press release quoting Franklin "Frank" Pugh, a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Penn State.

The remaining 150,000 initiation machines -- those Pugh and Venters did not find right at genes -- remained somewhat mysterious. "These initiation machines that were not associated with genes were clearly active since they were making RNA and aligned with fragments of RNA discovered by other scientists," Pugh said. "In the early days, these fragments of RNA were generally dismissed as irrelevant since they did not code for proteins." Pugh added that it was easy to dismiss these fragments because they lacked a feature called polyadenylation -- a long string of genetic material, adenosine bases -- that protect the RNA from being destroyed. Pugh and Venters further validated their surprising findings by determining that these non-coding initiation machines recognized the same DNA sequences as the ones at coding genes, indicating that they have a specific origin and that their production is regulated, just like it is at coding genes.

"These non-coding RNAs have been called the 'dark matter' of the genome because, just like the dark matter of the universe, they are massive in terms of coverage -- making up over 95 percent of the human genome. However, they are difficult to detect and no one knows exactly what they all are doing or why they are there," Pugh said. "Now at least we know that they are real, and not just 'noise' or 'junk.' Of course, the next step is to answer the question, 'what, in fact, do they do?'"

Pugh added that the implications of this research could represent one step towards solving the problem of "missing heritability" -- a concept that describes how most traits, including many diseases, cannot be accounted for by individual genes and seem to have their origins in regions of the genome that do not code for proteins. "It is difficult to pin down the source of a disease when the mutation maps to a region of the genome with no known function," Pugh said. "However, if such regions produce RNA then we are one step closer to understanding that disease."

I'm puzzled by such statements. It's been one year since the ENCODE publicity fiasco and there have been all kinds of blogs and published papers pointing out the importance of junk DNA and the distinct possibility that most pervasive transcription is, in fact, noise.

It's possible that Pugh and his postdoc are not aware of the controversy. That would be shocking. It's also possible that they are aware of the controversy but decided to ignore it and not reference any of the papers that discuss alternate explanations of their data. That would be even more shocking (and unethical).

Are there any other possibilities that you can think of?

And while we're at it. What excuse can you imagine that lets the editors of Nature off the hook?

P.S. The IDiots at Evolution News & Views (sic) just love this stuff: As We Keep Saying, There's Treasure in "Junk DNA".

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Venters, B.J. and Pugh, B.F. (2013) Genomic organization of human transcription initiation complexes. Nature Published online 18 September 2013 [doi: 10.1038/nature12535] [PubMed] [Nature]

Hypocrisy

Chris DiCarlo talked about fallacies in our class today. We're trying to teach students how to recognize the most important logical fallacies that they are likely to encounter in debates and discussions. He also talked about the importance of consistency and how being caught out as a hypocrite can be devastating to your cause.

Speaking of hypocrisy, the Popular Science website has just banned comments. Apparently they were getting overwhelmed with crackpots and kooks [Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments].

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

There are plenty of other ways to talk back to us, and to each other: through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, livechats, email, and more.

That's not hypocritical. The hypocrisy comes from Uncommon Descent where someone names "nullasalus" blogged about the Popular Science decisions [Popular Science shuts down comments, citing the presence of dissent from the scientific consensus]. Here's what he/she/it said

Science is not what’s being championed at Popsci.com, nor is ‘bedrock scientific doctrine’ challenged by dissent. Consensus is. Orthodoxy is. Likewise, being ‘politically motivated’ with regards to science is not a problem – it is having political, social and even religious views that PopSci has decided are unacceptable. Dialogue and discussion is welcomed by the self-appointed champions of science – if and only if it results in an outcome they favor. If they suspect it doesn’t, then the dialogue and discussion is over.

Why, it’s almost as if science was never really the concern to begin with.

I was going to make a comment but I can't because I've been banned. Apparently the people at Uncommon Descent have decided that my views are unacceptable. I also can't make any comments over on Evolution News & Views because they don't allow comments.

That's what hypocrisy looks like.

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Do the IDiots Really Know What Evidence Looks Like?

I've been dealing with Intelligent Design Creationists for over twenty years. I've spent a lot of time addressing their scientific misconceptions and trying to explain where they've gone wrong. A few years ago, for example, I posted a whole series of article on Jonathan Wells' book The Myth of Junk DNA. A few weeks ago I explained why Jonathan McLatchie was wrong about pseudogenes.

Lately, I been focusing on one of the chapters in Darwin's Doubt—it's the one on molecular evolution and I know something about that subject. It has been pretty easy to show why Mayer is wrong about his conclusions.

That's why it's so frustrating to read what journalist Tom Bethell said the other day on Evolution News & Views (sic) ["What Is the World Really Like?" Darwinism, Materialism, and How They Relate].

The explicit materialism of the Darwinians is the mirror image of creationism. Creationists are easy for scientific materialists to rebut, because the materialists can say, "That is just your belief. We don't have to accept that." In a parallel way, we can say to the materialists: "That is just your belief. We don't have to accept that. And it is the real basis of your evolutionism."

In between the Creationists and the Materialists we encounter the scientific evidence that makes the materialist position increasingly improbable -- the evidence that Stephen Meyer recently presented in Darwin's Doubt: information theory, insufficiency of the fossil record, epigenetics, complexity of life at the molecular level, and so on.

Increasingly, it seems to me, the Darwinians are responding to this science by saying (in effect): "Bah! We won't read that! It's creationism in disguise." They get graduate students like Nick Matzke, or incompetents like John Farrell (in National Review of all places), to do the work for them. All along the Darwinists have found that their materialism has allowed them to lie back and relax without really bothering to study the evidence.

Now that may be changing. They are being put in a position where they just might have to hit the books. I suspect it is not a prospect that they relish.

Keep in mind that this is written by a man who denies that humans cause global warming and denies that HIV causes AIDS.

He has no idea what evidence looks like.

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IDiots Love Epigenetics

I read everything posted on Uncommon Descent and Evolution News & Views. These are the most important blogs for learning about Intelligent Design Creationism. The posts on those two blogs represent the very best that Intelligent Design Creationism has to offer. Their best minds are behind the posts.

Here, for example, is Denyse O'Leary in action: Turns out some Texas media DID believe Texas bans discussion of evolution.

... epigenetics is to Darwin’s darlings what relativity and quantum mechanics are to Newtonian physics, only worse, much worse. Newtonian physics was useful within its scale. Darwin’s magical mechanism of natural selection is more like phlogiston, which supposedly produced fire the way Darwinism supposedly produces mind from mud.

And if nothing really happens that way, what becomes of Darwin’s magical mechanism? It’s phogliston, the substance that need not exist!

Seriously, that's the best of the best?

You have to imagine that there are some Intelligent Design Creationists with a modicum of intelligence. Why aren't they speaking up to muzzle people like Denyse O'Leary? She's an embarrassment to their cause.

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What Happens When a Creationist Argument Is Refuted?

A few days ago, Jonathan McLatchie published an article on evolution News & Views (sic) where he claimed that humans embryos synthesize the enzyme that makes vitamin C [A Simple Proposed Model For Function of the Human Vitamin C GULO Pseudogene]. This is important for creationists because the gene for that enzyme is a classic pseudogene—a formerly active gene that has lost it's function.

Intelligent Design Creationists don't like pseudogenes because they are junk and their intelligent designer would not fill up the human genome with junk. Hence, pseudogenes must have some function that has yet to be discovered.

Some Questions for IDiots

Here's a short quiz for proponents of Intelligent Design Creationism. Let's see if you have been paying attention to real science. Please try to answer the questions below. Supporters of evolution should refrain from answering for a few days in order to give the creationists a chance to demonstrate their knowledge of biology and of evolution.

The bloggers at Evolution News & Views (sic) are promoting another creationist book [see Biological Information]. This time it's a collection of papers from a gathering of creationists held in 2011. The title of the book, Biological Information: New Perspectives suggests that these creationists have learned something new about biochemistry and molecular biology.

One of the papers is by Jonathan Wells: Not Junk After All: Non-Protein-Coding DNA Carries Extensive Biological Information. Here's part of the opening paragraphs.

James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 discovery that DNA consists of two complementary strands suggested a possible copying mechanism for Mendel’s genes [1,2]. In 1958, Crick argued that “the main function of the genetic material” is to control the synthesis of proteins. According to the “ Sequence Hypothesis,” Crick wrote that the specificity of a segment of DNA “is expressed solely by the sequence of bases,” and “this sequence is a (simple) code for the amino acid sequence of a particular protein.” Crick further proposed that DNA controls protein synthesis through the intermediary of RNA, arguing that “the transfer of information from nucleic acid to nucleic acid, or from nucleic acid to protein may be possible, but transfer from protein to protein, or from protein to nucleic acid, is impossible.” Under some circumstances RNA might transfer sequence information to DNA, but the order of causation is normally “DNA makes RNA makes protein.” Crick called this the “ Central Dogma” of molecular biology [3], and it is sometimes stated more generally as “DNA makes RNA makes protein makes us.”

The Sequence Hypothesis and the Central Dogma imply that only protein-coding DNA matters to the organism. Yet by 1970 biologists already knew that much of our DNA does not code for proteins. In fact, less than 2% of human DNA is protein-coding. Although some people suggested that non-protein-coding DNA might help to regulate gene expression, the dominant view was that non-protein-coding regions had no function. In 1972, biologist Susumu Ohno published an article wondering why there is “so much ‘ junk’ DNA in our genome” [4].

1. Crick published a Nature paper on The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology in 1970. Did he and most other molecular biologists actually believe that "only protein-coding DNA matters to the organism?"
2. Did Crick really say that "DNA makes RNA makes protein" is the Central Dogma or did he say that this was the Sequence Hypothesis? Read the paper to get the answer—the link is below).
3. Is it true that, in 1970, the majority of molecular biologists did not believe in repressor and activator binding sites (regulatory DNA)?
4. Is it true that in 1970 molecular biologists knew nothing about the functional importance of non-transcribed DNA sequences such as centromeres and origins of DNA replication?
5. It is true that most molecular biologists in 1970 had never heard of genes for ribosomal RNAs and tRNAs (non-protein-coding genes)?
6. If the answer to any of those questions contradicts what Jonathan Wells is saying then why do you suppose he said it?

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

David Klinghoffer Asks a Serious Question?

Well, maybe not really serious. His latest post on Evolution News & Views (sic) is about something called "Darwinian censorship" ["Shut Up," They Said: On the Medved Show, John West Discusses Darwinian Culture of Censorship].

At the end, he asks ...

When did you last hear of a Darwinist willing to seriously entertain -- not merely condemn and shout down -- counterarguments. The most frequently employed argument in the Darwinian arsenal at the moment is "Shut up."

It seems to me that real scientists and philosophers have spent a considerable amount of time addressing the claims of Intelligent Design Creationism. I could even argue that they have spent too much time given that IDiots rarely pay attention.

In my own area of expertise, I've addressed many of the claims made in Darwin's Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, Icons of Evolution, The Myth of Junk DNA, Science & Human Origins, and Signature in the Cell. I've also discussed dozens of blog posts over the years.

And I'm not alone. There are hundreds of articles and posts by dozens of scientists and philosophers. David Klinghoffer's question is ridiculous. Perhaps he's confused because he demands "seriously entertain" and he's disappointed when we seriously entertain their arguments and conclude that they are silly. Perhaps he will only accept that we have "seriously entertained" their arguments when we agree with them? That wouldn't surprise me, it's perfectly consistent with creationist logic.

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IDiots Don't Understand Punctuated Equilibria

Intelligent Design Creationism is a movement dedicated to discrediting evolution and attacking the rational explanation of nature.¹ The evidence is in the books and blogs and the propaganda distributed to local school boards and state legislators. The attack on science and scientists makes up about 99% of their activities.

Given their dedication to disproving evolution, you'd think that the IDiots must at least understand it. Maybe not all of them—because there are some really, really, stupid IDiots—but certainly some of the most prominent IDiots should know what they're talking about? Right? Doesn't that seem reasonable?

The facts say otherwise. Off hand, I can't think of a single IDiot who has an adequate understanding of the science they attack. Believe me, I've tried harder than most to find an intelligent believer.

How the IDiots View Genome Research

It's safe to say that a majority of knowledgeable scientists now agree that the most of our genome is junk. This is bad news for Intelligent Design Creationism because they have staked their credibility on the idea that if the DNA is present is must be the product of god(s) the intelligent designer and it must be there for a reason.

One of the latest posts on Evolution News & Views (sic) emphasizes this point [More Clues that Intergenic DNA Is Functional]. Its author doesn't identify herself/himself. The point of the post is to cherry-pick a couple of papers from the scientific literature, including the horrible paper by Hangauer et al. (2013) [see How to Make a Scientific Argument ].

An Example of IDiot "Civility"

Do you remember when Stephen A. Batzer listed several reason why "Darwinists" are so uncivil? [Why Darwinism and Incivility Seem to Go Together] I blogged about it at: Why Are "Darwinists" So Uncivil?. We all had a good chuckle about hypocrisy and stupidity.

You've also seen many IDiots defend their use of "Darwinism" by claiming that it's nothing more than an accurate description of the most important scientific prerspective on evolution.

Here's what David Klinghoffer wrote today in Scientific Anti-Humanism Is Being Refuted by Science Itself.

Scientific anti-humanism refers to the cheapening of human dignity and of the value of human life in the name of science. Among many other pieces of novel information on that theme, the most important point that came out of Michael Medved's discussion with John West just now on the Science and Culture Update is that this corrosive tendency is being refuted by science itself.

Darwin persuasively taught that life is the product of blind, meaningless, purposeless churning, making all life, not just human, hardly anything more special or dignified than cosmic refuse. Indeed in a Darwinian worldview, life is cosmic refuse. While accused abortion butcher Kermit Gosnell may be an outlier, he is an emblematic personality in our Darwin-tutored culture.

How civil of him to link Darwinism with Kermit Gosnell.

Remember, this is Evolution News & Views (sic), sponsored by the Discovery Institute. This is not some backwoods hack operating on his own. It's mainstream civility for the leading Intelligent Design Creationists.

UPDATE Klinghoffer posted the following a short time later in Darwinism Versus Reality: The Painful Divorce. It's just another example of how the IDiots link "Darwinism" with immorality and it puts the lie to the claim that "Darwinism" is just another word for "evolutionary biology."

I wanted to highlight what Josh Youngkin said yesterday in his very perceptive comments about the Jodi Arias verdict. Darwinian materialists like Jerry Coyne end up asserting there's no free will, therefore no such thing as moral responsibility. A murderer may be locked up for everyone else's safety, but not because we're correct to seek to impose retribution. We have no moral right to do so.

As Josh says, this casts the human being who murders as a fundamentally blameless animal, like a man-eating tiger. We would cage or even shoot such a tiger, but we could not blame it for acting as it does.

Profoundly, I thought, Josh's article suggests how remote from human experience a guy like Coyne must travel if he wants to carry his Darwinian materialism to its seemingly logical conclusions.

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IDiots Make a Falsifiable Prediction

The Intelligent Design Creationists, otherwise known as IDiots, are getting desperate. They have been relentlessly promoting Stephen Meyer's upcoming book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design but so far they have pretty much failed to trick evolutionary biologists into trashing the book before it's published.¹ That must be a major disappointment to them.

The baiting continues with an article by David Klinghoffer on the Evolution News & Views (sic) site: What Darwin's Enforcers Will Say About Darwin's Doubt: A Prediction. Here's what he predicts ....

Among possible lines of attack against Stephen Meyer's forthcoming book, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, I foresee some critics trying to argue that it's not fair game for Dr. Meyer to invite the general reading public to consider what's going on in peer-reviewed technical literature pertaining to evolution.

After all, biologists should have the opportunity to air their views in a semi-private professional setting without "creationists" barging in and telling the unwashed masses that many scientists have already given up on the Darwinian paradigm and are seeking post-Darwinian alternatives. Even though it's true, still it's wrong to publicize the fact, thereby leading the common folk astray and confirming their prejudice in favor of seeing life and the universe as reflecting some purpose.

This time I will rise to the bait if only for the purpose of preserving this prediction so we can revisit it in the future.

I'd also like to note, for the record, that the IDiots have published a number of books in the past and I don't recall anyone making the argument that Klinghoffer predicts. Can anyone out there point me to an article where scientists criticized the IDiots for pulicizing controversy within the evolutionary biology literature? It would be quite hypocritical for most bloggers to do so since criticizing the scientific literature is what we do.

Is it just my imagination or have evolutionary biologists also published books where they "expose" the controversies within evolution. If scientists do it routinely then why in the world would they criticize an IDiot for doing it? That doesn't make any sense, does it? (Oops, I inadvertently made the false assumption that IDiots are supposed to be rational.)

Finally, Udo Schüklenk alerted me to this creationist article because he is mentioned. Klinghoffer refers to a discussion about the ethics of infanticide and he thinks that his creationist² buddy Wesley Smith is being attacked for exposing a debate within the bioethics community. You should read the papers he links to along with Udo Schüklenk's paper [In defence of academic freedom: bioethics journals under siege] if you want to catch up on that discussion. As usual, the IDiots get it all wrong. Are you surprised?

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1. That's mostly because we don't care. We are not anticipating anything we haven't heard many times before although, I suppose, we could be surprised.

2. Smith is a lawyer and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. I don't know what kind of creationist he is.

Why Are "Darwinists" So Uncivil?

Let's ignore for a minute the people who comment on Sandwalk because it's clear that the most uncivil group is the creationists. Let's also ignore the people who comment on the creationist blogs because there it's also the supporters of religion who are the most uncivil. Oh hell, let's just ignore reality altogether and assume, for the sake of argument, that supporters of evolution are more uncivil than creationists.

Stephen A. Batzer speculates, very civilly, why this imaginary assumption might be true [Why Darwinism and Incivility Seem to Go Together].

1. They're human. That says a lot that's negative about them and of course about us, too.
2. They're typing, probably anonymously, on the Internet. I'm sure you have noticed the level of discourse on the Internet. The Lincoln-Douglas debates it isn't. On any topic.
3. You are challenging their religious beliefs, which they know, just know, to be true.
4. Thought leaders in the Darwinian movement, such as Dawkins, Prothero, Shermer and so on, inculcate and advocate incivility by their own example. Look at the way biologist James Shapiro and philosopher Jerry Fodor have been treated. It's ugly.
5. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." That Darwinism is a FACT has been proclaimed since before all of us were born. Saying that the Darwinian mechanism of speciation is not a fact strikes many folks as if you're intimating that there is no Japan. It's just a made up country. When I try to measure the level of personal knowledge that Internet advocates have of evolutionary theory, it is almost universally superficial. This includes biologists.
6. They have not taken the time to understand what the issues are or what evidence is convincing to those who disagree with them. They are ignorant in a nearly comprehensive way about why thoughtful, educated people find the "generate and filter" paradigm causally insufficient.

Isn't that amusing?

Now for the next bit ...

WARNING!!! Turn off your irony meter. It doesn't matter whether you have the updated Mark VIII with the extra power pack or not. Turn it off, NOW!!!

Here's how Stephen A. Batzer ends his post on Evolution News & Views (sic).

One thing that draws me to the ID movement is that it has the polite and understated ethic that science is supposed to have -- but does not have when the subject is evolution.

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Two Books on the Cambrian Explosion

I finished reading The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity by Douglas Erwin and James Valentine. It's a wonderful book. It brings you up to date on the fossil record, dating issues, evolutionary developmental biology, climate change, and molecular phylogeny. The book offers a reasonable evolutionary explanation for the apparent rapid diversification of animal groups during the Cambrian (about 530 million years ago).

The important point is covered in a paper by Erwin et al. (2011). It shows that the main animal groups probably split gradually over a period of tens of millions of years before the "explosion" became visible in the fossil record [see The Cambrian Conundrum: Fossils vs Genes]. The authors show that the molecular data indicates an earlier divergence and trace fossils are consistent with that data.

The other book is about to be published. It's called Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design and the author is an expert paleontologist and evolutionary biologist named Stephen Meyer.

It certainly sounds exciting if you read the announcement on Evolution News & Views (sic) [Coming in June, a Game-Changing New Book: Darwin's Doubt, by Stephen Meyer].

We've been keeping something from you, dear readers, but now it can be told. The evolution debate is about to undergo a paradigm shift....

Here is a sweeping account, stunningly illustrated with gorgeous color photos, of the frontiers of the scientific critique of Darwinism and the case for ID. Exacting and thorough, yet remarkably accessible to the thoughtful lay reader, Darwin's Doubt introduces us to the challenges to Darwinism based on the study of combinatorial inflation, protein science, population genetics, developmental biology, epigenetic information, and more.

Meyer explains how post-Darwinian alternatives and adaptions of Darwin's theory -- including self-organizational models, evo-devo, neutral or nonadaptive evolution, natural genetic engineering, and others -- fall short as well. He demonstrates that the weaknesses of orthodox evolutionary theory, when flipped over head-to-foot, are precisely the positive indications that point most persuasively to intelligent design.

Evolutionary biologists studying gene regulatory networks and fossil discontinuity, among other fields, have come tantalizingly close to reaching this conclusion themselves.

The Cambrian event, fundamentally, represents an information explosion, the first but not the last in the history of life. As no book has done before, Darwin's Doubt spells out the implications of this fact. Dr. Meyer stands on the verge of turning the evolution debate in an entirely new direction, compelling critics of the theory of intelligent design, at last, to respond substantively and in detail. The book will be a game-changer, for science and culture alike.

It would not be fair to criticize Meyer's book before we get a chance to read it. It will be fun to see how the science compares with that in the book by Erwin and Valentine. I'm really looking forward to reading about the Intelligent Design Theory that explains all of the scientific data. I'm especially curious about why the designer did the deed 530 million years ago and why everything since then looks so much like evolution. I'm sure that's going to be covered. We can be practically certain that a paradigm-shifting book like this isn't just going to be several hundred pages of evolution bashing.

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Erwin, D.H., Laflamme, M., Tweedt, S.M., Sperling, E.A., Pisani, D., and Peterson, K.J. (2011) The Cambrian conundrum: early divergence and later ecological success in the early history of animals. Science 334:1091-1097. [PubMed] [doi: 10.1126/science.1206375]

I'm a New Friend of Ann Gauger

A few days ago I posted a message about the IDiots' list, A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism, of people who disagree with Darwinism. I specifically mentioned Joshua Youngkin who said that, " 'A Scientific Dissent from Darwin,' is a thorn in the side of those who say there's no scientific debate over whether evolution works in a completely naturalistic fashion." [Our "Scientific Dissent from Darwin" List: A Reader Inquires] Let's be clear about what he said, he said that the list reveals scientific debate over whether "evolution works in a completely naturalistic fashion." In other words, people who sign the list must be non-naturalists. That's another word for creationist.

Here's the statement ...

We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.

Note that the statement says noting about whether evolution works in a completely naturalistic fashion. The IDiots know full well that most scientists would agree with the statement taken at face value but we all know that the IDiots will misuse the statement just as Joshua Youngkin did on the Evolution News & Views blog. You can find further proof of the treachery of the IDiots at the list website where the following quote from someone named Raul Leguizamon is prominently featured on the home page.

I signed the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement, because I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favour of Darwinian dogma. Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all. Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to pose as a philosopher, since it is primarily a worldview. And an awful one, as George Bernard Shaw used to say.

The implication is clear.

Ann Gauger is thrilled to discover that I'm not a Darwinist [Our New Friend, Laurence A. Moran]. I guess she's under the impression that if you're not a Darwinist then you must be an IDiot like her.

Here's how her mind works ...

1. People on the Dissent from Darwinism list are supporters of the statement.
2. Larry also agrees with the dissent statement.
3. Larry says only IDiots claim that supporters of this statement are creationists.
4. Larry says that Project Steve is a excellent parody of the "creationist" list, thus in effect calling supporters of the statement creationists.

Wait. Following the logic there, that would seem to make Dr. Moran an IDiot, in his own eyes anyway. Not that, in pointing this out, I mean it unkindly.

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The Purpose of "The Scientific Dissent from Darwin" List

A few years ago the IDiots tried to collect a list of credible scientists who supported creationism. They created a statement called "The Scientific Dissent from Darwin." It goes like this ...

We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.

Only an IDiot would claim that supporters of this statement are also creationists. Many atheist scientists, including me, would agree with the statement. Nevertheless, if you look at the list of people who signed [Scientific Dissent from Darwin List] you'll not find very many evolutionary biologists because we all know that the IDiots will misuse this list.

A few days ago someone named Joshua Youngkin posted to Evolution News & Views (sic) in response to a question about the list. According to Youngkin, the list "is a thorn in the side of those who say there's no scientific debate over whether evolution works in a completely naturalistic fashion."

Why is that? The statement doesn't say anything about god or naturalism. This is exactly the kind of doubletalk you expect from IDiots.

Later on in the post Joshua Youngkin says,

The Dissent from Darwin statement counters and preempts any claim that (1) there is no scientific dissent over how evolution happens, by what means, that is, or that (2) it is unscientific to be skeptical of the proposition that natural selection and random mutation together satisfactorily explain the development of life over time.

There are plenty of ways to "preempt" such a false claim. Reading the scientific literature is one.

The list does serve one important purpose and for that we are truly thankful. It's the best list of Ph.D IDiots that I know of. It's easy to find your local IDiots using a simple word search. For example, I found these names from the University of Toronto: Stephen J. Cheesman Ph.D. Geophysics and Alfred G. Ratz Ph.D. Engineering Physics. Unfortunately, as I pointed out some years ago [I'm not a Darwinist, but I Ain't Signing], neither of these gentlemen are listed in the university phone book and they are not on the University website so we don't know what they are up to these days.

Project Steve with 1249 signatures, is an excellent parody of the creationist list.

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Why Do the IDiots Have So Much Trouble Understanding Introns?

Most eukaryotic genes have introns. Introns make up about 18% of the DNA sequences in our genome. Most of these sequences are junk but introns are functional and up to 80bp of each intron is required for proper splicing. The essential sequences contain the 5′ splice site (~10 bp); the 3′ splice site (~30 bp): the branch site (~10 bp); and enough additional RNA to form a loop (~30 bp). The branch site and the splice sites are where specific proteins bind to the mRNA precursor [Junk in Your Genome: Protein-Encoding Genes]. It turns out that within introns about 0.37% of the genome is essential and about 17% is junk.

Intelligent Design Creationists Choose ENCODE Results as the #1 Evolution Story of 2012

The folks over at Evolution News & Views (sic) have selected the ENCODE papers as the Number 1 evolution-related story of 2012. Naturally, they fell for the hype of the ENCODE/Nature publicity campaign as you can see from the blog title: Our Top 10 Evolution-Related Stories: #1, ENCODE Project Buries "Junk DNA".

Most of the article is just the reposting of an article by Casey Luskin but some anonymous editor has added ...

Editor's note: For the No. 1 slot among evolution-related news stories of 2012, this one was an easy pick. The publication of the ENCODE project results detonated what had been considered among the sturdiest defenses that Darwinian evolutionary theory could still fall back upon: "Junk DNA." Casey Luskin's initial reporting is featured below. See also our response to the ensuing controversy over ENCODE ("Why the Case for Junk DNA 2.0 Still Fails").

Normally I would make fun of the creationists for misunderstanding the real scientific results in the papers that were published last September but, in this case, there are lots of real scientists who fell into the same trap.

Even Science magazine selected the ENCODE results as a top-ten breakthrough and noted that 80% of the human genome now has a function [Science Magazine Chooses ENCODE Results as One of the Top Ten Breakthroughs in 2012]. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to be content to point out that many scientists are as stupid as many Intelligent Design Creationists!

I can still mock the creationists for claiming that "Darwinian evolutionary theory" supports junk DNA.

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IDiots at Evolution News & Views Defend Ann Gauger's Video

I few days ago I posted a video by Ann Gauger where she criticizes population genetics. Sandwalk readers recognized right away that she doesn't understand population genetics, or phylogenetics. Read the comments on: Ann Gauger Describes the Intelligent Design Creationist Version of Population Genetics.

I've been waiting for a response from Ann Gauger or any of the other IDiots. I've been waiting to see how they twist the meaning of "population genetics" to fit what she says in the video. I've been waiting to see how they defend her words on tree-making given the criticism on Sandwalk and elsewhere.

Incidentally, it turns out that the "laboratory" in the background of the video is a stock photo from Shutterstock and not an actual lab where Ann Gauger works. Here's the video so you can see what I'm talking about.

David Klinghoffer has finally responded to the criticism in a post on Evolution News & Views: Scandal! Gauger Filmed in Front of Green Screen. As you can see from the title, he is most upset about the use of a fake lab ... or rather he's upset about being discovered and exposed by Richard B. Hoppe at Panda's Thumb and Casey Johnston at Ars Technica.

But what about the scientific criticism of what Ann Gauger is actually saying in the video?

Klinghoffer has an answer ....

It's hard to believe that Miss Johnson, who writes for Ars Technica ("a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, breakdowns of the latest scientific advancements"), is unaware of these things. So too Richard Hoppe. The most likely explanation for their posing at the game of "Gotcha!" is that they can't answer Dr. Gauger's arguments, which are given in full in a recent brief book co-authored by Gauger, Doug Axe and Casey Luskin, Science and Human Origins. We would be happy to send a review copy to Ars Technica.

Gauger, a PhD in developmental biology who was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, has the science on her side. It's a typical Darwinist feint: When you don't have the arguments and you don't have the science, change the subject and pile on the red herrings. Casey Johnson, who dismisses our little video as a "nonsensical rant," can't reply to Dr. Gauger on the merits. If she could, she would.

David Klinghoffer reads Sandwalk so he knows how real scientists deal with the nonsense being spouted by Ann Gauger. I suspect he would rather focus on the "red herring" than defend the bad science in the video.

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Texas Wants to Protect the IDiots in Universities

As most of you know, there's a reason why we call them IDiots. There's a reason why faculty members in a biology department might not get tenure if they believe most of the things you read on Evolution News & Views (sic). There's a reason why a student might get a low grade for questioning the existence of natural selection or for thinking that skin cells don't accumulate mutations.

The elected members of the Texas legislature are well aware of this discrimination against stupidity so they've taken steps to stop it. Bill HB285 "Relating to prohibiting discrimination by public institutions of higher education against faculty members and students based on their conduct of research relating to intelligent design" should do the trick, if it becomes law.

Here's the key provision,

An institution of higher education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member’s or student’s conduct of research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms.

I suppose it was inevitable that politicians in Texas would finally recognize that their children might flunk out of university.

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Do Some IDiots Actually Question the Existence of Natural Selection?

Paul Nelson has been challenging the pervasiveness of adaptationism by pointing out that many evolutionary biologists promte nonadaptive evolution. See the discussion and comments on Jerry Coyne's blog website: A Marshall McLuhan moment with creationist Paul Nelson. Nelson has been accused, falsely, of claiming that some evolutionary biologists deny that natural selection is an important mechanism in evolution.

Paul Nelson doesn't deny that natural selection is a real phenomenon. He may be an IDiot (and a YEC) but he's not THAT stupid. On the other hand, one didn't have to wait too long before getting confirmation that some other IDiots really are THAT stupid.

And guess what? They are allowed to post on the main Discovery Institute blog, Evolution News & Views (sic)!!! You have to read How "Real" Is Natural Selection? by Tom Bethell ... otherwise you'd never believe me.

Here's what Tom Bethell says about natural selection.