Mike Gene präsentiert mit dem Konzept eines front-loading zweifellos eine originelle Deutung der Evolution, deren Realität er nicht in Frage stellt. Dafür, dass es intelligentes Design in der Biologie gibt, vor allem was die Ausstattung der Zellen betrifft (genetischer Code, Fehlerkontrolle, Maschinencharakter usw.), legt der Autor starke Indizien vor. Ob das front-loading-Konzept schlüssig ist, wird die weitere Forschung zeigen müssen.

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Tired of fighting? Love movies? Have a FaceBook account? Then join our club!

Spirituality — defined as an inner belief system — accounted for eight to 17 per cent of the average child's sense of happiness, the study showed.
By contrast, money, the marital status of parents and the child's gender didn't even register one per cent.
[…..]
"What we found out with kids is they know how wealthy they are. They are well aware of how rich their parents are, but it contributes to less than one per cent of children's happiness," said Holder.
Spirituality could be playing a larger role for several reasons. It produces a sense of hope and meaning and often involves socializing, which is important to a child's happiness.

- HERE

CALLING ALL BOOKCOPS. CALLING ALL BOOKCOPS.

The dangerous book, The Design Matrix, is now held by the Santa Cruz Public Libraries . Unfortunately, it is checked out. But once the culprit returns the intellecual pornography, any BookCop in the vacinity should properly reshelve this idiocy to prevent it from corrupting anotner mind.

Behold the orange. Being perfectly round, it has no sharp edges with which to poke you in the eye if it happened to fall from the tree. Note how easily it fits into the palm of my hand. And it even comes with its own biodegradable wrapper! To open it, you…..hey wait, the thing doesn’t have a tab! Where’s the dagburnit tab?!

Ah, behold the thumbnail. Note how it so perfectly punctures the biodegradable wrapper and….. Read the rest of this entry »

From Robert Shapiro:

Since then, so-called prebiotic chemistry, which is of course falsely named, because we have no reason to believe that what they're doing would ever lead to life — I just call it 'investigator influenced abiotic organic chemistry' — has fallen into the same trap. In the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about two months ago there was a paper — I think it was theoretical — they showed that in certain hydro-thermal events, convection forces and other attractive forces, about which I am unable to comment, would serve to concentrate organic molecules, so that organic molecules would get much more concentrated in the bottom of this than they would in the ordinary ocean.

Very nice, perhaps it's a good place for the origin of life, and interesting finding, but then there was another commentary paper in the Proceedings by another invited commentator, who said, Great advance for RNA world because if you put nucleotides in, they'll be concentrated enough to form RNA; and if you put RNA in, the RNA will come together and form aggregates, giving you much more chance of forming a ribosome or whatever. I looked at the paper and thought, How did nucleotides come in? How did RNA come in? How did anything come in? The point is, you would take whatever mess prebiotic chemistry gives you and you would concentrate that mess so it's relevant to RNA or the origin of life — it's all in the eye of the beholder. And almost all of prebiotic chemistry is like this; they take chemicals of their own selection.

People were talking about Steve Benner and his borate paper where he selected, of his own free will, the chemical formaldehyde, the chemical acid-aldehyde, and the mineral borate, and he decided to mix them together and got a product that he himself said was significant in leading to the origin of RNA world, and I, looking at the same thing, see only the hands of Steve Benner reaching to the shelf of organic chemicals, picking formaldehyde, and from another shelf, picking acidaldehyde, etc. Excluding them carefully. Picking a mineral which occurs only in selective places on the Earth and putting it in in heavy doses. And at the end getting a complex of ribose and borate, which by itself would be of no use for making RNA, because the borate loves to hold onto the ribose, and as long as it holds onto the ribose it can't be used to make RNA. If it lets go of the ribose, then the ribose becomes vulnerable to destruction by all the other environmental agents.

The half-life of pure ribose in solution, a different experiment and a very good one, by Stanley Miller is of the order of one or two hours, and all of the other sugars prominent in Earth biology have similar instability.

What a bloody mess. Bunnies should not be fighting bunnies.

In his essay, The Question of Purpose, David Zeigler states his objective:

My “purpose” (we can create our own temporally and spatially limited purposes) in writing this piece is to point out one of the most important and real issues in the teaching of Darwinian evolution that so often goes unaddressed, or more amazingly—unrecognized, and this issue is really fairly obvious.

Yet before getting to the “most important and real issues,” it would help for Zeigler to explain his views of science:

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Well, I can’t disagree with this required reading list.

Writing in the journal, Evolution: Education and Outreach, David Zeigler has an article entitled, "The Question of Purpose." Zeigler’s argument is twofold: Darwinian science teaches us that there is no purpose or meaning outside of ourselves and teachers can improve evolution education by better stressing the non-teleological nature of evolution and reality. You can read this for yourself here (pdf file). I’m hoping to comment on several aspects, but I thought you’d like to check it out first and have an opportunity to correct me if I have wrongly mischaracterized it.