Telic Thoughts is an independent blog about intelligent design.


Archive for December, 2007

« Previous Entries

January's Free Book Contest

Posted in The Design Matrix on December 31st, 2007 by MikeGene

Would you like to start the New Year with a free copy of The Design Matrix? While last month’s winner had to find Santa, this month we'll need something to symbolize the New Year – like a baby!

So here is what you need to do:

Read the rest of this entry »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Netscape

Leave A Comment »

Another Review of the Design Matrix

Posted in The Design Matrix on December 31st, 2007 by MikeGene

HERE

Oh, and Hoppy New Year, Everyone!

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Netscape

15 Comments »

What every cat needs

Posted in The Rabbit on December 30th, 2007 by MikeGene


These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Netscape

29 Comments »

Suspicions and Evidence

Posted in Intelligent Design, Evidence, The Design Matrix on December 29th, 2007 by MikeGene

The debate about evolution and intelligent design eventually comes down to demands for evidence. Yet evidence is simply data that are interpreted in the light of previous experience and belief. What’s more, evidence comes in different flavors. For example, the type of evidence that might be used to guide a police investigation may not suffice as “evidence” in the context of a court room trial. In fact, an investigator is likely to look at the data differently from a defense lawyer. The investigator may initially rely on lower standards of evidence to follow up hunches and be sensitive to cliues. The lawyer will insist on the highest possible standards to defend his client.

Read the rest of this entry »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Netscape

192 Comments »

Paper shredder part of surveillance system

Posted in Biology, Cell on December 27th, 2007 by MikeGene

Cells keep a close watch over the transcriptome – the totality of all parts of the genome that are expressed in any given cell at any given time. Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of Missouri-Kansas City teamed up to peel back another layer of transcriptional regulation and gain new insight into how genomes work.

Converting the “genetic blueprint” into molecular building blocks requires two basic processes: transcription, which copies the information from DNA into RNA transcripts and takes place in the cell’s nucleus, and translation, where the RNA serves as a template to manufacture proteins outside the nucleus.

But before transcripts can guide protein synthesis or take on regulatory functions, they have to undergo a strict mRNA surveillance system that degrades defective, obsolete, and surplus transcripts. In their study, published in the Dec. 28 issue of Cell, the scientists zoomed in on a specific subclass of transcripts that are under the control of the exosome, a molecular machine in charge of controlled RNA degradation.

“We found evidence for widespread exosome-mediated RNA quality control in plants and a ‘deeply hidden’ layer of the transcriptome that is tightly regulated by exosome activity,” says Joseph R. Ecker, Ph.D., professor in the Plant Biology Laboratory and director of the Salk Institute Genomic Analysis Laboratory…………… “It is likely that these RNAs that are usually ‘deeply hidden’ become important for genome function or stability under some circumstances”, adds co-first author Julia Chekanova, an assistant at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “We need to do more work to figure out what these circumstances are.”

HERE

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Netscape

4 Comments »

A Mosaic

Posted in The Rabbit on December 27th, 2007 by MikeGene

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Netscape

5 Comments »

Blurring the Line

Posted in Intelligent Design on December 26th, 2007 by MikeGene

Those who have read The Design Matrix might appreciate the significance of these recent observations:

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.

"We're heading into an era where people will be writing DNA programs like the early days of computer programming, but who will own these programs?" asked Drew Endy, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"I see a cell as a chassis and power supply for the artificial systems we are putting together," said Tom Knight of MIT, who likes to compare the state of cell biology today to that of mechanical engineering in 1864. That is when the United States began to adopt standardized thread sizes for nuts and bolts, an advance that allowed the construction of complex devices from simple, interchangeable parts.

If biology is to morph into an engineering discipline, it is going to need similarly standardized parts, Knight said. So he and colleagues have started a collection of hundreds of interchangeable genetic components they call BioBricks, which students and others are already popping into cells like Lego pieces.

From here

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Netscape

117 Comments »

Look What Santa Got For Christmas

Posted in The Design Matrix on December 24th, 2007 by MikeGene

There will be plenty of ho ho's once Santa gets time to read.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Netscape

5 Comments »

Christmas is Getting Close

Posted in The Rabbit on December 22nd, 2007 by MikeGene


These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Netscape

4 Comments »

Nick Matzke semi-reviews The Design Matrix

Posted in The Design Matrix on December 22nd, 2007 by MikeGene

It looks like The Design Matrix has even caught the attention of Nick Matzke, former Public Information Project Director at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) and who was profiled in the November 2006 edition of Seed magazine as a "revolutionary mind." Matzke, not surprisingly, did not like it at all:

I've read it. It's basically a case study in what smoking ruins were left of ID after the ARN forum debates of 2000-2003, which is where PCP degradation, cytosine deamination, and most of the other inconvenient-to-ID examples that Mike Gene discusses in his book were brought to his attention for the first time. Basically unparsimonious wishful thinking is all that's left once you've admitted, as Mike Gene does, that ID isn't science, that IC systems can evolve, and that natural selection is an effective design mimic. Basically all he can do is hide his IDer way back in the origin of life, ignore all the evidence that even the Last Common Ancestor was the product of a lot of evolution, and then try a few cheap tricks like asserting that cooption is a "pure chance" thing (wrong) and therefore taking the massive evidence of cooption as evidence for his emergency-backup completely-baffling-how-it-could-possibly-work ID option, front-loading, instead. I may get up the gumption to slay the slain one more time sometime this break, but no promises.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • del.icio.us
  • Furl
  • Ma.gnolia
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Digg
  • Netscape

98 Comments »

« Previous Entries
  • You are currently browsing the Telic Thoughts weblog archives for December, 2007.

  • Featured Books

    The Way of the Cell by Franklin Harold

  • The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues by Mike Gene


  • Pages

    • About Us
    • Afon
    • bipod
    • Bradford
    • Deuce
    • Guts
    • Joy
    • Krauze
    • macht
    • Mike Gene
    • Steve Petermann
    • Submit Story
  • Categories

    • Animal Rights Extremism (38)
    • Approaches (2)
    • Bioethics (23)
    • Biology (148)
    • Brain (29)
    • Bunny Fright Week (7)
    • Cell (12)
    • Computer Science (3)
    • Convergent Evolution (1)
    • Creationism (46)
    • Design Inferences (19)
    • DNA Repair (2)
    • Engineering (10)
    • Eugenics (21)
    • Evidence (10)
    • Evo-Devo (10)
    • Evolution (227)
    • Evolutionary Psychology (9)
    • Fine-tuning (4)
    • Friday Quote (33)
    • Front-loading (118)
    • Guest Post (10)
    • Hating Mike (1)
    • Henry Rollins Award (3)
    • History (26)
    • Hoax (1)
    • Humor (163)
    • Intelligent Design (466)
    • Irreducible Complexity (16)
    • Just For Fun (12)
    • Media (91)
    • Meeting of Minds (7)
    • Memory Hole (1)
    • Metatalk (29)
    • MikeGenes World (15)
    • Nanotechnology (2)
    • Nature (14)
    • Nature of Science (93)
    • Origin of Life (37)
    • Paul Mirecki (16)
    • Peer Review (11)
    • Philosophy (59)
    • Philosophy of Mind (12)
    • Post-Wedge World (18)
    • Quote Mining (9)
    • Random Stuff (109)
    • Religion (131)
    • Repost (32)
    • Richard Dawkins (85)
    • RNA (5)
    • School (54)
    • Science (135)
    • Shoddy Science (10)
    • Stereotypes (3)
    • The Critics (210)
    • The Debate (290)
    • The Design Matrix (61)
    • The Duck (6)
    • The New Atheists (57)
    • The Rabbit (223)
    • Threatiness (84)
  • blogroll

    • Bilbo's Blog
    • ID and Theology
    • Intelligently Sequenced
    • The Design Matrix
    • The Design Matrix Facebook Group
  • Teleology

    • Akilli Tasarim
    • An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution
    • ARN Board
    • Darwinian Fundamentalism
    • Dasafiando a Nomenklatura Cientifica
    • Design Inteligente
    • Evolution News & Views
    • Evolution Oriented
    • Evolution und Schöpfung
    • Exiled from Groggs
    • He Lives
    • ICON-RIDS
    • ID the Future
    • ID.plus
    • ISCID EoSaP
    • Michael Behe's Blog
    • Post-Darwinist
    • Real Physics
    • Reality Cheque
    • ResearchID.org
    • Robin Collins
    • Steve Jones
    • TeleoLogic
    • Telic Meme
    • The American Scientific Affiliation
    • The Creation of an Evolutionist
    • Thought Provoker
    • Uncommon Descent
    • withallyourmind.net
    • Wonders For Oyarsa
  • People With Interesting Ideas

    • Albert de Roos
    • Biosemiotics
    • Cell Intelligence
    • Darwin or Design
    • James Shapiro
    • Michael Syvanen
    • Panspermia
    • Paul Davies
  • Evolution

    • Anthropology Weblog
    • Charles Darwin on the web
    • Darwin@home
    • Genetic Code Evolution
    • Stephen Jay Gould Archive
    • The Loom
    • Tree of Life
    • Was Darwin Wrong?
  • Anti-Teleology

    • Center for Naturalism
    • Kenneth Miller
    • NCSE
    • Pharyngula
    • Richard Dawkins
    • Talk Reason
    • Talk.Origins Archive
    • The Brights
    • The Panda's Thumb
    • The Scientific Fundamentalist
  • Archives

    • May 2008
    • April 2008
    • March 2008
    • February 2008
    • January 2008
    • December 2007
    • November 2007
    • October 2007
    • September 2007
    • August 2007
    • July 2007
    • June 2007
    • May 2007
    • April 2007
    • March 2007
    • February 2007
    • January 2007
    • December 2006
    • November 2006
    • October 2006
    • September 2006
    • August 2006
    • July 2006
    • June 2006
    • May 2006
    • April 2006
    • March 2006
    • February 2006
    • January 2006
    • December 2005
    • November 2005
    • October 2005
    • September 2005
    • August 2005
    • July 2005
    • June 2005
    • May 2005
    • Meta

      • Register
      • Login

Telic Thoughts is proudly powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).