Intelligent design news from the 22nd of June to the 28th of June, 2010.
Jonathan McLatchie, a relatively new author on Evolution News & Views, wrote about junk DNA, and how the concept is supposedly taking “more heavy blows” because of a new function for some mRNA molecules:
A paper has just been published in Nature which uncovers a host of new coding-independent functions for pseudogene mRNAs, including a role in tumor regulation. More exciting is that Poliseno et al. describe an entirely new regulatory function of RNA. This stands in contrast to conventional wisdom which maintains that the only function of mRNAs is encoding for proteins.
Oh dear. The semi-infamous blog You’re Not Helping, which criticises the tactics of prominent bloggers such as PZ Myers and Greg Laden, has met a nasty fate – the author (yes, singular) revealed himself (yes, himself) as William, a student from the University of Alabama, as well as the person behind many of the suspected sockpuppet commenters on the site.
It’s all rather sad, really. He made some legitimate points, but those points were spread thinly upon a backdrop of whiny hypocrisy and self-absorbed writing. I’m not one for conflict and humiliation, so I hope the backlash against this revelation isn’t nasty or overly mean, but [...]
Wow. I don’t usually talk about politics on this blog (or anywhere), but I simply have to mention this ground-shattering announcement:
Australia has a new Prime Minister as of a few hours ago, when former Labor PM Kevin Rudd stepped down from the position due to internal pressure from his own party, and former Deputy PM Julia Gillard took the spot as leader of the Labor Party (she’s technically not Prime Minister until she’s sworn in, but that’s as good as done already).
This is great news for Australia’s feminist population (which I hope is a majority of citizens), but it’s also fantastic for the non-religious in this country [...]
Thanks, Twitter, for leading me to this excellent find. Alex Varanese, as a project in advertising and product design, has re-imagined some common products from today and thought about how they would look and be marketed if they were stolen by time travellers and taken back to 1977, where they would be sold as revolutionary devices decades ahead of their competition.
I’ll let Alex explain it himself:
What would you do if you could travel back in time? Assassinate Marilyn Monroe? Go on a date with Hitler? Obviously. But here’s what I’d do after that: grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70′s, [...]
19th century biologist Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings remain one of evolutionary biology’s most controversial subjects, even more than 130 years after their original publication, least not due to the recent attempts by Discovery Institute fellows Casey Luskin and Jonathan Wells to bring the drawings back into the “discussion” about evolutionary biology and intelligent design. Casey and Jonathan’s obsessions with the drawings have lead them to attack certain biology textbook writers and, by extension, evolutionary biologists, playing up the issue as another supposed act of deception by the “Darwinian establishment”, brainwashing high school students and undergraduates with fraudulent evidence for evolutionary theory. However, their claims about both Haeckel’s drawings and [...]
Australia’s National Science Week is hosting a competition not-so-subtly called the Big Blog Theory (if you don’t get the reference, then I’m not sure this post was written for you), wherein you can nominate your favourite Australian science blogger/vlogger/podcaster/Twitterer etc. for the ultimate title of:
AUSTRALIA’S BEST SCIENCE BLOGGER!
(dramatic echo)
Who do you read/listen to when you want engaging online science journalism? Who explains scientific concepts in a way that always makes you interested? Who has a passion for science that shows through in their communicative work? If you know someone who communicates science particularly well, be it physics, astronomy, biology, climatology, or anything in between, then [...]
Intelligent design news from the 15th of June to the 21st of June, 2010.
Finally, a new This Week in Intelligent Design! As of last Friday, my exams were all finished for this semester, so now it’s officially Party Time. However, my version of Party Time involves more reading of both intelligent design-related blogs and books about evolutionary biology than others’ would, so you’re unlikely to see me passed out in a bar any time soon. Unless of course I saw Stephen C. Meyer in the bar and decided to talk to him, and then subsequently went into a coma because my brain rejected his baseless assertions about [...]
Video games have slipped from my radar over the past few years – I’ve been more absorbed in skepticism and science – but I’ve always had a passion for them since I was given a Nintendo 64 for my birthday over ten years ago (Super Mario 64 – greatest game of all time?). However, with my busy schedule of, um, being a skeptical university student, it takes something really special to grab my attention from the realm of games.
Portal 2 was easily special enough to grab my attention. Just watch these recently-released videos with gameplay footage and explanations of new gameplay mechanics. Oh wow. Now that’s a game.
One of the major criticisms, by the scientific community at least, of the intelligent design movement since its creation however many years ago in the mind of Phillip E. Johnson has been (and continues to be): if ID is science, then why don’t you guys publish scientific papers about ID, explaining its scientific nature through the communicative medium of the working scientist, perhaps with a few meaningful detours to the mystical land of Positive Evidence? So far, this criticism has withstood all attempts to negate it. Until… now? Perhaps not.
Uncommon Descent has just reported on the recent publishing of a peer-reviewed scientific paper by the (relatively unknown) ID [...]
The NCSE, that wonderful US organisation that fights to keep evolutionary biology taught properly in American public schools, has, since 2009, been giving away excerpts from various books about evolution on Facebook and their homepage. Robert Luhn, the NCSE’s Director of Communications, recently emailed me (and a whole lot of other people) to let me know that even though the original links to the excerpts are long buried in the site, they can still be downloaded – which is really good news, because it means you (myself included, actually) can all now get a substantial taste of the large number of excellent books about evolution out there.
Homologous Legs is the blog of Naon Tiotami (aka. Jack Scanlan), an Australian undergraduate biology student who has a serious problem with creationists, intelligent design proponents and anyone else who misrepresents the science of evolutionary biology.
Here you can find rebuttals to articles found on various high-profile creationist and intelligent design websites, news about the creation/evolution "war", and mostly coherent thoughts from an 18 year-old, music-loving student.
Recent Comments