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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...

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Michael WhiteRSS Feed of this column.

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

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State "laboratories of democracy" at work:
The Database of Useful Biological Numbers - great stuff, although before using any hard-to-measure number, be sure to know how the measurement was done before you trust the result.

Check these out:

Number of hairs in human eyebrows: 600

Respiratory cost for slow growing gradd: 2.4 mmole ATP/g dry weight * day

ATP requirement for the creation of an E. coli cell: 12-20 billion ATP molecules.

Average diameter of a protein in E. coli: 5 nm

Fraction of total body energy that is used to drive sodium/potassium pumps in the human brain: 10%

Serotonin content in pineapple: 17ug/g

Total nasal epithelial cell surface area in a mouse: 300 mm^2
When you turn the resources of modern science to the problem of killing people, you realize how vulnerable they really are.

- Physicist I.I. Rabi, quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. 779







Ken Miller vs. Jerry Coyne: Can you believe in God and evolution? Many creationists say no. But so does Jerry Coyne, as well as a fair number of other non-believing scientists active in the blogosphere. If you follow the science blogging community, you've probably tuned in to, or at least overhead snippets of, the debate between the believing Ken Miller, and the non-believer Jerry Coyne. Both are well-regarded scientists, with impressive research track records, and both are very outspoken opponents of creationism and intelligent design, as well as defenders of evolution.
A new journal is out - Genome Biology and Evolution. To my surprise, it actually looks quite good, with high-quality pieces. I generally don't see many new journals I like, but this one fills a needed niche. A lot of genome papers bear on evolution, but the authors aren't really evolutionary biologists; many evolutionary biologists don't have a lot of contact with hard-core genomics. But there is a growing community of researchers who function well in both worlds, and this journal fits that community.

As the editors say:
All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.

- Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book IV, Ch. 20, sec. 17