Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Roundup of Interesting Things I Don't Have Time to Blog About
Been busy lately. This post is going to be merely a quick listing of good readings on the web that I haven't had time to post yet.
- Structure-Guided Recombination Creates an Artificial Family of Cytochromes P450 shows the efficacy of informationally-directed mutational mechanisms. From the paper: "Mutations made by recombination of functional sequences are much more likely to be compatible with the particular protein fold than are random mutations".
- The statement above cited On the conservative nature of intragenic recombination as support. Both of these support the idea of information shuffling instead of information creation as the primary mechanism of genome diversity.
- Apparently evolution is more predictable than we previously thought (I don't have access to the paper yet, but you can read a discussion on it here and decide for yourself if I am representing the paper appropriately).
- If anyone wants to show some love to the author of this blog, you can send me a PDF of the paper above or to this other paper in the same issue.
- Design Paradigm has a fantastic post about criticism and Intelligent Design.
- Dembski has a blog post about using Intelligent Design assumptions for beneficial results: "That is, it is a tuned mechanism quite analogous to vibration dampers widely used in engineering... Most of what I needed to know about pulsatile blood flow to the brain was in engineering textbooks!"
- Dembski has written a theological defence of old-Earthism from a biblical standpoint. I have not read it, but GlobeLens gives it a fair hearing.
- PZ Meyers has an interesting post on whale evolution. I don't claim to know whether or not ancient whales had or didn't have extended appendages (fins or legs), though I highly doubt that they are connected to land mammals. However, I know some people doing research on this, so perhaps I will have a better answer soon on how ambulocetus fits into the mix.
- More research into recombinational hotspots. Every time you hear "hot spot" your design antenna should go up. It indicates that there are core, stable foundational elements and periphery, modifiable elements, which falls along the lines of baraminology.
- It turns out ISCID has a bibliography of teleology and non-Darwinian evolution.
And remember, next week is the BSG Conference. If you are coming, I'll see you there!
Daniel James Devine
GlobeLens.com
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