Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Friday, January 25, 2008

Longest Piece of Synthetic DNA Yet: Scientific American

 

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Rockville, Md., report in the online edition of Science that they pieced together the genes of Mycoplasma genitalium, the smallest free-living bacterium that can be grown in the laboratory and a common culprit in urinary tract infections.
"The 582,970 base pair M. genitalium bacterial genome is the largest chemically defined structure synthesized in the lab," lead author Daniel Gibson told ScientificAmerican.com via e-mail. (Base pairs are complementary linked nucleotide bases, such as adenine–thymine.)

Longest Piece of Synthetic DNA Yet: Scientific American

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Intelligent Design and Vertebrate Eye Design




“The vertebrate eye is the best example of structural perfection – as used by proponents of intelligent design to claim that something so complex couldn’t possibly have evolved,” Dr Young said.


“Part of the trouble in tracing the evolution of the eye is that soft tissues don’t tend to fossilise. But the eye cavities in the braincase of these 400 million-year-old fossil fish were lined with a delicate layer of very thin bone. All the details of the nerve canals and muscle insertions inside the eye socket are preserved – the first definite fossil evidence demonstrating an intermediate stage in the evolution of our most complex sensory organ.


“These extinct placoderms had the eyeball still connected to the braincase by cartilage, as in modern sharks, and a primitive eye muscle arrangement as in living jawless fish.” Dr Young said that this anatomical arrangement is different from all modern vertebrates, in which there is a consistent pattern of tiny muscles for rotating each eyeball.



Link

This is evidence against the irreducible complexity argument put forth by ID proponents.  Their point is that the vertebrate eye is too complex to develop in stages.  This evidence takes issue with that view.



ID, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Eye




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