Stephen Jay Gould has been one of the most vocal opponents of such icons because they imply a sense of direct linear progress from some primitive ancestor to a modern species when, in fact, the actual evolution involves branching trees with multiple lineages, most of which have gone extinct. In one of his most famous essays, Life's Little Joke (Gould, 1987, 1991), Gould explains why the evolution of horses is falsely depicted as a march of progress.
I think it's only fair to post links to my efforts to demonstrate the serious flaws in his arguments. I'm particularly proud of the series of articles I wrote when he published his book The Myth of Junk DNA. I went through every chapter and analyzed his arguments against junk DNA. It won't surprise anyone to learn that I found those arguments lacking in substance and in some cases I discovered that Wells had misrepresented the science.
Here are my posts.
Jonathan Wells never responded directly to my criticism but he did respond to a comment that Paul McBride made on one of his blog posts. Paul asked him why he didn't respond to my post and here's what Wells said,
Oh, one last thing: “paulmc” referred to an online review of my book by University of Toronto professor Larry Moran—a review that “paulmc” called both extensive and thorough. Well, saturation bombing is extensive and thorough, too. Although “paulmc” admitted to not having read more than the Preface to The Myth of Junk DNA, I have read Mr. Moran’s review, which is so driven by confused thinking and malicious misrepresentations of my work—not to mention personal insults—that addressing it would be like trying to reason with a lynch mob.
This is typical of the attitude of most Intelligent Design Creationists. They are happy to publish lengthy books denegrating science and scientists but couldn't be bothered responding to criticism.
Here's are some other post of mine where I demonstrate the flawed thinking of Jonathan Wells.
Most Sandwalk readers will recognize Mattick as one of the few remaining vocal opponents of junk DNA. He is probably best known for his dog-ass plot but this is only one of the ways he misrepresents science.
I've debated him frequently over the years since those are my areas of interest as well. The last time we met was at an evolution conference in London (UK) in 2016 (see photo).
I've always found Jonathan to be more honest and more willing to learn than most of his creationist colleagues so that's why I'm addressing his latest post on Evolution News (sic) where he challenges the evolutionary origins of the glycolytic pathway. As you might expect, his argument is largely based on the idea that since the glycolytic pathway is very complicated, there's no way it could have arisen all at once. He then goes on to reject the idea that the pathway could have evolved incrementally, one step at a time.
I agree with those who say that science should stay out of politics as much as possible. But this is just one of many indications that Scientific American is sliding rapidly downhill and no longer qualifies as a real science magazine.
The key take-home lesson is that the importance of DNA was recognized by a small group of scientists who were paying attention to the scientific literature. By the time of Watson and Crick (1953) this small group was already convinced that DNA was the "stuff of life," which is why they realized that solving the structure was extremely important.
This is not unusual. There are many cases where a small group of knowledgeable experts are well in advance of the average scientist who often doesn't even realize that a revolution is under way.
That sounds like a good idea until you realize that the scientific literature is full of misinformation and conflicting information. What we need is an AI assistant that can help us sort throught the misinformation and give us a genuine well-informed answer on controversial issues.
Let's pick the question of junk DNA as a completley random (!) example of such an issue. The scientific literature is full of false information about the origin of the term "junk DNA" and what it was originally intended to describe. It's also full of false information about recent results and how they pertain to junk DNA.
In this post I'll address the 7 questions on foreign policy using the same format.
This is another post about a bad press release based on a lack of knowledge of the history of the field.
Here's the press release from Washington State University as reported in SciTechDaily
Scientists Discover “Spatial Grammar” in DNA: Breakthrough Could Rewrite Genetics Textbooks
“Contrary to what you will find in textbooks, transcription factors that act as true activators or repressors are surprisingly rare,” said WSU assistant professor Sascha Duttke, who led much of the research at WSU’s School of Molecular Biosciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine.
Rather, the scientists found that most activators can also function as repressors.
“If you remove an activator, your hypothesis is you lose activation,” said Bayley McDonald, a WSU graduate student who was part of the research team. “But that was true in only 50% to 60% of the cases, so we knew something was off.”
Looking closer, researchers found the function of many transcription factors was highly position-dependent.
They discovered that the spacing between transcription factors and their position relative to where a gene’s transcription began determined the level of gene activity. For example, transcription factors might activate gene expression when positioned upstream or ahead of where a gene’s transcription begins but inhibit its activity when located downstream, or after a gene’s transcription start site.
... By integrating this newly discovered ‘spatial grammar,’ Christopher Benner, associate professor at UC San Diego, anticipates scientists can gain a deeper understanding of how mutations or genetic variations can affect gene expression and contribute to disease.
”The potential applications are vast,” Benner said. “At the very least, it will change the way scientists study gene expression.”
A good teacher can teach any subject as long as they have high-quality resources. TIES provides middle school and elementary teachers the tools they need to effectively teach evolution and answer its critics based on new Next Generation Science Standards.
The Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science began as a program of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science and it's now part of the Center for Inquiry.
TIES recently posted a video with an interesting title on their YouTube channel: "Beyond DNA: How Epigenetics is Transforming our Understanding of Evolution." This is a presentation by Ben Oldroyd who wrote a book titled "Beyond DNA."
Watch the video and decide for yourself whether you think this is what teachers of evolutionary biology should be telling their students. What part of understanding evolution do you think needs to be transformed by epigenetics?
Zach Hancock is a postdoc in ecology & evoluvionary biology at the University of Michigan. He has a YouTube channel with several thousand subscribers. You might recall that he interviewed me last year when my book came out [Zach Hancock interviews me on his YouTube channel].
He has just posted a new video on junk DNA that's well worth watching. He tries to correct all the falsehoods and misinformation on junk DNA, especially those promoted by creationists. It's well worth watching.
I'm going to address a recent article by Casey Luskin on Evolution News (sic) and a podcast on a Current Topics in Science podcast produce by Christ Jesus Ministries. But first, some background.
A recent paper in Nature looked at a region on chromosome 21 where mutations associated with autoimmune and inflammatory disease were clustered. This region did not contain any known genes and is referred to in the paper as a "gene desert." The authors reasoned that it probably contained one or more regulatory sites and, as expected, they were able to identify an enhancer element that helps control expression of a nearby gene called ETS2 (Stankey et al., 2024).
The results were promoted in a BBC article: The 'gene deserts' unravelling the mysteries of disease. The subtitle of the article tells you where this is going, "Mutations in these regions of so-called "junk" DNA are increasingly being linked to a range of diseases, from Crohn's to cancer." The article implies that since only 2% of the human genome codes for proteins the remaining 98% "has no obvious meaning or purpose." The caption to one of the figures says, "Gene deserts are regions of so-called genetic "junk" that do not code for proteins – but they may play an important role in disease." Thus, according to the BBC, the discovery of a regulatory sequence conflicts with the idea of junk DNA.
There's no mention of junk DNA in the original Nature article and none of the comments by the senior author (James Lee) in the BBC article suggest that he is confused about junk DNA.
An article published in Nature Communications looked at expression of human endogenous retrovirus elements (HERV's) in human brain. The authors found that expression of two HERV sequences is associated with risk for schizophrenia but the authors noted that is wasn't clear how this expression played a role in psychiatric disorders (Duarte et al., 2024)
Although the term "junk DNA" was not mentioned in the original article, the press release from King's College, London makes the point that HERVS were assumed to be junk DNA. The implication is that this is one of the first publications to discover a possible function for this junk DNA. (Functional elements derived from HERVs have been known for three decades.)
Casey Luskin wrote about these studies yesterday in an article on the intelligent design website: Disease-Associated “Junk” DNA Is Evidence of Function and talks about it in the podcast that I link to below.
Today is the Fête Nationale in France known also as "le quatorze juillet" or Bastille Day.
We visited the site of the Bastille (Place de la Bastille) when we were in Paris a few years ago. There's nothing left of the former castle but the site still resonates with meaning and history.
My wife's 5th great-grandfather is William Playfair (1759-1823), the inventor of pie charts and bar graphs [Bar Graphs, Pie Charts, and Darwin]. His work attracted the attention of the French King so he moved to Paris in 1787 to set up an engineering business. Playfair was present at the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. He is recorded as one of one of about 1000 militia who took part in the action: "William Playfair, ingénieur anglais, petit hôtel de Lamaignon rue Couture Sainte Catherine."
His residence, the Hôtel de Lamaignon, still exists. It was about a kilometer west of the Bastille.
In honor of the French national day I invite you to sing the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. An English translation is provided so you can see that La Marseillaise is truly a revolutionary call to arms. (A much better translation can be found here.)
Check out Uncertain Principles for another version of La Marseillaise—this is the famous scene in Casablanca.
Reposted and modified from 2017.
