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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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Most conspiracy theories wouldn't gain much traction without unhinged academics:

"The most destructive people linked to conspiracy theories and denialism are those with academic appointments - and those who can manipulate their backgrounds to appear as if they have had academic appointments."


Why? Probably because they write are fluently and prolifically than the guy you meet at 2pm in the bar who can't stop going on about all of those people on Hillary Clinton's hit list. (Hey, if you're in the bar at 2pm, you're asking for it.)
DNA is like your phone line. As Northwestern University biophysicist Johnathan Widom put it in a talk recently, DNA simultaneously encodes multiple overlapping signals, just like your phone line that allows you to call home while you're surfing the net via DSL. Written into your DNA is the code for the amino acid sequences of the proteins produced by your genes, as well as the so-called 'non-coding' regulatory sequences which essentially encode when, where, and how much your genes are expressed.
No one disturbs his fellow men with a new view unpunished.

- Ernest Mach, "A New Sense", quoted in Edmund Bolles, Galileo's Commandment, p. 27








That DNA evidence that could exonerate you? You don't have a right to it, says the US Supreme Court.

Actually, not being a lawyer or constitutional scholar, I don't know what kinds of evidence you have a constitutional right to when you go on trial, so I'm not going to comment on the correctness of the decision. But legal scholarship aside, two things are obvious:

1) When we try someone for a crime, we want the best, most reliable evidence possible. It's probably reasonably safe to say that most people with at least some wisps of sanity would like our criminal justice system to convict the guilty and acquit the innocent.
Electrical arcs stabbed through the violet dusk. Heated solutions groaned toward their boiling points. Bubbles rose helically through luminous green liquids. Miniature explosions occurred in distant corners of the facility, sending up showers of glass as nearby workers cowered beneath seaside umbrellas set up for just such protection. Gauge needles oscillated feverishly. Sensitive flames sang at different pitches.