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

Science vs. Speculation on the Origins of Life

Jan 09 2009 | comment(s)

"Raw materials were not an issue" for the evolution of the first life on earth, argues Henderson Cleaves, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution, quoted in Carl Zimmer's Science essay on origins of life research (subscription required for full text). There is good reason to believe that there were plenty of organic compounds floating around on the earth 4 billion years ago. The big problem, as Zimmer notes, is how you get from the primordial soup, Darwin's "warm little pond", to an organized, self-reproducing system.

There's Never Been A Better Year to Learn About Evolution

Jan 09 2009 | comment(s)

That's because there is going to be so much great, non-technical writing in honor of Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin of Species.

We're going to have some great Darwin Day writing here at Scientific Blogging. Science magazine has started an entire blog devoted to the Year of Darwin, called Origins. Head on over there and add the feed to your reader; they're going to have some worthwhile reading (some of it on the blog, and some of it in the magazine itself - you'll need a subscription for those pieces).

If you can't beat the scientific method, then sue it

Jan 08 2009 | comment(s)

Or just try to change the law:

There's the famous false story of the state that tried to redefine the fundamental mathematical constant pi to 3, but of course no one would ever be that stupid. Though, in Indiana in 1897, they tried to pass a law setting it at 3.2, which is only 0.2 less retarded.

Check out 7 (Stupid) People Who Sued the Scientific Method over at Cracked.

Population Genetics Blogging in German

Jan 07 2009 | comment(s)

I just ran across a great population genetics blog, Selective Sweep, written by derele, a PhD student in Edinburgh. He writes in both German and English about genomics, population genetics, and Science 2.0. Recently he's started a interesting primer on population genetics - it's in German, for those of you who can read it (and you can always try Google's translation if you don't speak German).

If you go to a scientific conference, it's immediately clear that science consists of big international communities, but unfortunately major science blogging communities (dominated by writers from the US, the UK, and Australia) don't always reflect that international aspect.

Intelligent Design Advocates Confused By Their Own Arguments

Jan 07 2009 | comment(s)

If you read almost any science blog other than mine, you're probably aware of Brown University biologist Ken Miller's smackdown of Intelligent Design (ID) shill Casey Luskin, posted on Carl Zimmer's Loom: part 1, part 2, and part 3.

At issue is the tired old concept of irreducible complexity, and it's amazing that after all this time, many ID advocates don't understand what the original point of arguing irreducible complexity was. ID advocate Michael Behe, in various publications including his book Darwin's Black Box basically argued that there are molecular systems inside of cells that, even in principle could not have been produced by evolution - systems like the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting cascade. Such systems, according to Behe, are irreducibly complex - they need all of their parts in order to function, and if you're missing any parts, you have a non-functional system. Thus, without all of the parts there is nothing functional for natural selection to act on.

In other words, the only way evolution could produce a system like the blood clotting cascade would be to have all of the relevant genes suddenly appear at one time by mutation - an event improbable to the point of impossibility (which is one thing ID advocates and evolutionary biologists agree on).