There's usually no point in piling on when the minions of the ID movement get their just deserts after some typically brainless culture-war test launch. Consider the responses (by, most notably, Ian Musgrave at the Panda's Thumb) to the most recent rendition of the ID movement's hilariously idiotic fixation on a particular computer program written by Richard Dawkins. It seems there is little to add.
Welcome to Quintessence of Dust and to the 14th Edition of the monthly Carnival of Evolution. Thanks for stopping by, and for supporting scientific carnivalia, members of a taxon that seems to be flirting with extinction. One good reason to visit a carnival: brain stimulation.
The 14th edition of the excellent Carnival of Evolution will go up here at Quintessence of Dust this Saturday, 1 August 2009. Send submissions and links, to your own work or to good stuff you've seen elsewhere. Images welcome too!
The Notch signaling pathway is a golden oldie of genetics in two ways.
1. Get your genome sequenced for $48,000. I would so do this. In the meantime, we bought the Matheson family DNA test for my dad for Father's Day. I'm following this series at Siris: Philosophical Sentences explained. You know the old chestnuts: Cogito ergo sum, God is dead, virtue is its own reward, cleanliness is next to godliness... heh. Brandon tells us where they came from and a little about them.
I previously posted the abstract of a talk I gave at Calvin last month in which I test-drove my "theistic embryology" metaphor that I'll present at the North American Paleontological Convention in Cincinnati in two weeks. Now the audio and my simple slides are posted on Calvin's e-zine, Minds in the Making. Lots of jokes. And now my name's spelled right. About halfway through, I refer to "10 dangers of theistic evolution" at Answers in Genesis.
Consider these not-so-random samples from the animal world: a cockroach, a zebrafish, a mouse. What do these creatures have in common? Left to right: American cockroach (Periplaneta americana), zebrafish (Danio rerio), house mouse (Mus musculus). Cockroach image from Wikimedia Commons, zebrafish and mouse from Wellcome Images. Well, they're all animals and that means they're all eukaryotes, for example. They all have DNA-based genomes.
Recently I was reading a superb review article [doi] on the subject of a famous and important cellular signaling pathway called the Notch pathway.
Get it? Heh. Anyway, go to Clashing Culture to see further discussion of the TE test.
Okay, so not really weekly. John Farrell has an interesting discussion of protein folding as a problem or challenge for evolutionary theory. His post includes quotes from experts with whom he has corresponded, and he cites the primary literature.
On Friday in the Christian Perspectives in Science seminar at Calvin College I gave a little talk on theistic evolution. The idea was to get some feedback on the simple ideas that I'll present at a symposium at the North American Paleontological Convention (NAPC) in Cincinnati in June. The symposium is titled "The Nature of Science and Public Science Literacy" and it's part of Education and Public Outreach Day at the NAPC.