Molecular Biology
Pharyngula
Category archives for Molecular Biology
I ain’t afraid of no Frankenstein
Posted by PZ Myers on May 24, 2010 They’re discussing Venter’s nifty new toy on Edge, and I’ve tossed my own contribution into the mix. It’s a response to the doomsday fears I keep seeing expressed in response to the success of this project. I have to address one narrow point that is being discussed in the popular press and here on Edge:…
Junk is what junk does
Posted by PZ Myers on May 24, 2010 Randy Stimpson is someone a few may recall here: he was a particularly repetitious and dishonest creationist who earned himself a spot in the dungeon. One of the hallmarks of his obtuse way of ‘thinking’ is that he is a computer programmer, and so he was constantly making the category error of assuming the genome…
First round of ill-informed objections to the first synthetic bacterium
Posted by PZ Myers on May 22, 2010 I’ve been following the reaction to the synthesis of a new life form by the Venter lab with some interest and amusement. There have been a couple of common directions taken, and they’re generally all wrong. This is not to say that there couldn’t be valid concerns, but that the loudest complaining voices right now…
It’s ALIVE!
Posted by PZ Myers on May 20, 2010 Get in the mood for this bit of news, the synthesis of an artificial organism by Craig Venter’s research team. Here’s the equivalent of that twitching hand of Frankenstein’s monster: Those are two colonies of Mycoplasma mycoides, their nucleoids containing entirely synthesized DNA. You can tell because the synthesized DNA contained a lacZ gene for…
Venter has done it
Posted by PZ Myers on May 20, 2010 We’re hearing the first stirrings of a big story: Craig Venter may have created the first organism with an artificially synthesized genome. Conceptually, building a strand of DNA and inserting it into a cell stripped of its genome is completely unsurprising — of course it will work, a cell is just chemistry — but it…
Junk DNA is still junk
Posted by PZ Myers on May 19, 2010 The ENCODE project made a big splash a couple of years ago — it is a huge project to not only ask what the sequence of a strand of human DNA was, but to analyzed and annotate and try to figure out what it was doing. One of the very surprising results was that in…
Now we’ve got some big numbers to throw around, too
Posted by PZ Myers on May 14, 2010 Only ours are methodologically valid. It’s a common creationist tactic to fling around big numbers to ‘disprove’ evolution: for instance, I’ve had this mysterious Borel’s Law (that anything with odds worse than 1 in 1050 can never happen) thrown in my face many times, followed by the declaration that the odds of the simplest organism…
How to make a snake
Posted by PZ Myers on March 16, 2010 First, you start with a lizard. Really, I’m not joking. Snakes didn’t just appear out of nowhere, nor was there simply some massive cosmic zot of a mutation in some primordial legged ancestor that turned their progeny into slithery limbless serpents. One of the tougher lessons to get across to people is that evolution is…
α-actinin evolution in humans
Posted by PZ Myers on December 23, 2009 Perhaps your idea of the traditional holiday week involves lounging about with a full belly watching football — not me, though. I think if I did, I’d be eyeing those muscular fellows with thoughts of muscle biopsies and analyses of the frequency of α-actinin variants in their population vs. the population of national recliner inhabitants.…
A creationist at the Chicago meeting
Posted by PZ Myers on November 4, 2009 Last week, I described the lectures I attended at the Chicago 2009 Darwin meetings (Science Life also blogged the event). Two of the talks that were highlights of the meeting for me were the discussions of stickleback evolution by David Kingsley and oldfield mouse evolution by Hopi Hoekstra — seriously, if I were half my…