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Melville on Science vs. Creation Myth

From Melville's under-appreciated Mardi: On a quest for his missing love Yillah, an AWOL sailor...

Non-coding DNA Function... Surprising?

The existence of functional, non-protein-coding DNA is all too frequently portrayed as a great...

Yep, This Should Get You Fired

An Ohio 8th-grade creationist science teacher with a habit of branding crosses on his students'...

No, There Are No Alien Bar Codes In Our Genomes

Even for a physicist, this is bad: Larry Moran, in preparation for the appropriate dose of ridicule...

Michael White

Welcome to Adaptive Complexity, where I write about genomics, systems biology, evolution, and the connection between science and literature, government, and society.

I'm a biochemist

Evolution's Balancing Act

Sep 20 2007 | comment(s)

Evolution carries out an incredibly tricky balancing act: the genetic program of a species has to be resistant to small changes, yet also susceptible to the adaptive remodeling of natural selection. The human genome is so robust that over 6 billion variations give rise to viable organisms that have successfully traversed the complex developmental program that produces a live human infant from a single cell. Yet the human genome is the product of major evolutionary innovation, even over the relatively short period since the human and chimp lineages diverged. How can genomes be robust and malleable at the same time?

Sorry for the long absence - I've been overwhelmed by health

Sep 20 2007 | comment(s)

Sorry for the long absence - I've been overwhelmed by health issues, but I'm back. There is a lot of recent interesting research in genomics and systems biology to blog about, so stay tuned.

Domesticating Biotechnology In The 21st Century

Aug 22 2007 | comment(s)

Will we domesticate biotechnology in the next 50 years? More than 150 years of spectacular advances in physics, chemistry, and computing have thoroughly transformed the way we live. Yet so far, the big revolutions in molecular biology have had their impact primarily on professional laboratories, not our everyday lives. What do we need to do in order to domesticate biotech?

The NY Times Magazine today has cover piece arguing that whi

Aug 20 2007 | comment(s)

The NY Times Magazine today has cover piece arguing that while the West may have figured out how to largely separate politics and religion, the rest of the world is unlikely to follow: "Countless millions still pursue the age-old quest to bring the whole of human life under God’s authority, and they have their reasons." If that's really true, we can expect that modern science will be a phenomenon largely confined to the West, with the rest of the world using science, pioneered elsewhere, to build more hi-tech weapons. Perhaps though, the case is overstated in the NY Times piece - Japan and Korea have relatively secular politics, and a correspondingly strong scientific infrastructure.

Ancient Microbes Revived From Antarctic Ice May Be Spreading Their Genes

Aug 15 2007 | comment(s)

After being encased in Antarctic ice for 8 million years, ancient microbes thawed by a team of researchers revved up their metabolic engines again and began making proteins and replicating. These are the oldest organisms ever brought back to life after a deep freeze.

More Confusion About Junk DNA And Regulatory Sequences

Jul 09 2007 | comment(s)

Back in June, John Greally, a biologist at Albert Einstein, wrote a frustrating Nature commentary on the ENCODE project in which he repeatedly and wrongly suggested that before ENCODE, biologists were only paying attention to regulatory sequences: