Would you like to give yourself a Christmas present? Like a free copy of The Design Matrix hot off the printing presses? Here's all that you need to do.

First, go here, click on the large version of the book cover, and print off a copy.

Second, take this page, get Santa to hold it, and take his picture (no PhotoShopping). If you already have a copy of the book and would like a second one, just use your book instead. The caption for the photo will be, 'Look What Santa Got for Christmas.'

Third, send me your picture by December 21, 2007 and put "Contest Photo" in the subject line. The link to my e-mail address can be found here.

Be creative. Have fun. The best picture will be hosted on The Design Matrix and Telic Thoughts blogs on Christmas Eve and a free copy of The Design Matrix will be sent out the day after Christmas.

[HT to Guts for putting together this truly outstanding video!]

Given that this is the thanksgiving season, I would like to shout out a deeply felt "thanks!" to all the people who pre-ordered The Design Matrix. What's especially remarkable was the way so many of you patiently endured the long delay and hung in there.

Over the years, critics have often complained that I did not focus on Intelligent Design and instead spent too much time arguing about tangential issues. But for those who have a copy of the book, you can now see that I have long had plenty to say about ID, as The Design Matrix is saturated with this topic. In other words, for a long time now, I have had to restrict myself to the left-over topics/arguments, along with the side-issues. But that should change now.

In the preface to the book, I note:

It is my belief that there are people in the world like me "“ people who are tired of the heated debates, name-calling, innuendo, and political fights. Such people might find themselves in the middle ground and would rather focus on the hypotheses, the arguments, and the evidence. We might not be completely convinced that life was designed, yet we find the hypothesis to be tremendously intriguing. Rather than being worried if design should be labeled science, metaphysics, or religion, it is my belief that there are people who would rather just ponder the issues that are raised by design and evolution.

One of the things I plan to do soon after the book is officially released is to revisit some old blog entries, but this time, in the light of the Matrix.

Once again, thanks to all, and have a great holiday!

Writing in Nature, professor of biology Chris D. Thomas bemoans the environmental damages caused by human activity. But not to worry, he says. In a few million years, humans will be extinct.

The geological perspective of Terra is bizarrely reassuring. Humans will presumably be gone within a few million years, perhaps sooner. If the past that Novacek describes is a guide to the future, global ecosystem processes will be restored some tens of thousands to a million years after our demise, and new forms of life over the ensuing millions of years will exploit the denuded planet we leave behind. Thirty million years on, things will be back to normal, albeit a very different 'normal' from before. It is good to be optimistic. The problem is living here in the meantime.

Robin Hanson wonders: "Yet if a plague, for example, were to produce this outcome within the next ten years, I'm pretty sure most everyone would see this as a catastrophe of the highest possible order. So how does this become a good thing if it happens in the next million years?"

More on scientists cheering for the death of humans here.

For some time now I have thought that the debate surrounding ID had grown stale. It seems that the ideas and arguments concerning intelligent design were just being recycled over and over again. That has changed. I just finished reading Mike Gene's new book The Design Matrix and it is chock-full of interesting information, ideas, and approaches to the design question. I know a lot of you will be receiving the book soon so I won't spoil your fun of discovery, but I think you'll find Mike's approach to the design issue very refreshing. You won't find any ideologically driven claims or conclusions. Instead Mike approaches the question of design as an investigation, looking for clues and developing ways to evaluate those clues in a reasonable and thought provoking manner. His Explanatory Continuum offers a fresh and, in my view, very realistic way of interpreting biological data. Then, while acknowledging the subjectivity of the Continuum, Mike provides a way to quantify and systematically assess those judgements. His exposition of new information on the structure of genetic code really caught my eye. And of course, Mike offers lots of intriguing ideas on frontloading. For the biologically astute there is plenty of detail that will be of interest, but even for a non-biologist like me it was easy to read and follow. Then there's much more. Each chapter provides lots of information and ideas to think about. But like I said, I don't want to spoil your fun so these are just some hints at what you'll find. The Rabbit beckons.

Aw, shucks, glad y'liked it, Paul.

A PLOS Computational Biology paper entitled Are There Rearrangement Hotspots in the Human Genome? is authored by Max A. Alekseyev and Pavel A. Pevzner. It addresses an issue important to our understanding of genomic dynamics and how we view causes of change. Recent controversy about rearrangement hotspots and different models are discusssed. The random breakage model (RBM) is contrasted with the fragile breakage model (FBM). The former argues that no rearrangement hotspots exist in the human genome while the latter argues that the human genome is a mosaic with regions having low propensity for rearrangements existing along with fragile regions or rearrangement hotspots. The summary of the paper follows:

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Eugenie Scott played by Janet Leigh
Ken Miller played by Stuart Whitman
Kevin Padian played by Rory Calhoun
Robert Pennock played by Paul Fix

There were a couple of very interesting research news reports this week coming in from the fields. Turns out that biological scientists are beginning to understand why their simplistic model of evolution [a.k.a. Neodarwinian Synthesis] can't account for the empirically obvious differences between human beings and our closest relatives. They've been looking at things the wrong way, guided by that simplistic model.

First up is the report that Ancient Retroviruses Spurred Evolution of Gene Regulatory Networks. About the estimated 8% of the human genome that consists of primate-specific retroviral DNA insertions.

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