Nicholas Wade used to be a serious science writer but he lost that title many years ago when he proved that he was incapable of distinguishing fact from wishful thinking [Nicholas Wade on th… Read More

It was just a few weeks ago that I discussed short articles by Denis Noble and James Shapiro that were published in the journal Biosemiotics [The illusions of Denis Noble] [The illusions of… Read More

Our genome is very large and very complicated because it is full of junk DNA. It contains thousand of sites where DNA binding proteins can bind just by chance. This leads to the reorganizati… Read More

It is widely believed that a substantial amount of viral spread is due to individuals who are transmitting the virus but have no symptoms (asymptomatic spread) but there's so much misinforma… Read More

It was 68 years ago today that the famous Watson and Crick paper was published in Nature along with papers by Franklin & Gosling and Wilkins, Stokes, & Wilson. Threre's a great deal… Read More

This is a really interesting video presentation by Dougla Axe, a leading proponent of Intelligent Design Creationism. He's criticizing the argument from poor design; an argument that attempt… Read More

James A. Shapiro is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago (Chicago, USA). He made signficant contributions to our understanding if… Read More

Denis Noble was a Professor of Physiology at Oxford University in the United Kingdom until he retired. He had a distinguished career as a physiologist making significant contributions to our… Read More

A remarkable paper has just been posted to a philosophy of science preprint website. (It will be published in Synthase.) Like many papers in this field it's difficult to read and the logic i… Read More

I spent a lot of time explaining evolution in my book. The goal is to educate readers to the level where they can understand the drift-barrier hypothesis and why slightly deleterious mutatio… Read More

Rama Singh,1 a biology professor at McMaster Universtiy in Hamilton (Ontario, Canada) has just published an interesting article on The Conversation website. It's about Medical schools need t… Read More

The new mRNA vaccines are the result of extensive research over the past thirty years or so. They are marvels of technological innovation but probably not just for the reasons you imagine. T… Read More

Several diseases, such as cancers, are caused by the presence of deleterious alleles that affect the function of a gene. In the case of cancer, most of the mutations are somatic cell mutatio… Read More

After spending several years working on a book about the human genome I've come to the realization that the field of genomics is not delivering on its promise to help us understand what's in… Read More

Opponents of junk DNA have been largely unsuccessful in demonstrating that most of our genome is functional. Many of them are vaguely aware of the fact that "no function" (i.e. junk) is the… Read More

The first draft of my book is ready to be sent to my publisher. Text by Laurence A. Moran Cover art and figures by Gordon L. Moran 11 chapters 112,000 words (+ preface and glos… Read More

I just received an invitation to a meeting ... On behalf of the international organizing committee, we would like to invite you to a conference to be held in Neve Ilan, near Jerusalem, from… Read More

Happy St. Patrick's Day! These are my great-grandparents Thomas Keys Foster, born in County Tyrone on September 5, 1852 and Eliza Ann Job, born in Fintona, County Tyrone on August 18, 1852… Read More

Most of us learned that science provides good answers to all sort of questions ranging from whether a certain drug is useful in treating COVID-19 to whether humans evolved from primitive ape… Read More

A group of scientists, mostly from the University of Ghent1 (Belgium), have posted a paper on bioRxiv. Lorenzi, L., Chiu, H.-S., Cobos, F.A., Gross, S., Volders, P.-J., Cannoodt, R., Nuyten… Read More

Richard Dawkins has written an essay for The Spectator in which he says,"[Science is not] a social construct. It’s simply true. Or at least truth is real and science is the best way we… Read More

Nature has now published a series of articles celebrating the 20th anniversary of the publication of the draft sequences of the human genome [Genome revolution]. Two of the articles are abou… Read More

This is the fifth (and last) post in celebration of the 20th anniversary of publishing the draft sequence. The first four posts dealt with: (1) the way Science chose to commemorate the occas… Read More

We know a lot more about the human genome than we did when the draft sequences were published 20 years ago. One of the most important discoveries is the recognition and extent of true functi… Read More

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of the first drafts of the human genome sequence. Science choose to celebrate the achievement with a series of articles that had littl… Read More

It's been 20 years since the first drafts of the human genome sequence were published. These first drafts from the International Human Genome Project (IHGP) and Celera were far from complete… Read More

The first drafts of the human genome sequence were published 20 years ago. The paper from the International Human Genome Project (IHGP) was published in Nature on Febuary 15, 2001 and the pa… Read More

When doing an exeriment, it's important to keep the number of variables to a minimum and it's important to have scientific controls. There are two types of controls. A negative control cover… Read More

Here's a quotation from an opinion piece published last spring. Borger, P. and Schmidtgall, B. (2020) Free Science from Dogma. or: How the “Pseudogene” Hampered Scientific Prog… Read More

I've been writing some stuff about epigenetics so I've been reading papers on how to define the term [What the heck is epigenetics? ]. Turns out there's no universal definition but I discove… Read More

Michael Denton is a New Zealand biochemist, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, and the author of two Intelligent Design Creationist books: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985) and N… Read More

Michael Behe has published a book containing most of his previously published responses to critics. I was anxious to see how he dealt with my criticisms of The Edge of Evolution but I was di… Read More

The key features of the mRNA vaccines are the use of modified nucleotides in their synthesis and the use of lipid nanoparticles to deliver them to cells. The main difference between the Pfiz… Read More

The Central Dogma of molecular biology states ... ... once (sequential) information has passed into protein it cannot get out again (F.H.C. Crick, 1958). The central dogma of molecular bio… Read More

I've been complaining for years about how opponents of junk DNA misrepresent and distort the scientific literature. The same complaints apply to the misrepresentation of data on alternative… Read More

I was looking at the Vision and Change document the other day and it made me realize that very little has changed in undergraduate education. I really shouldn't be surprised since I reached… Read More

The latest issue of New Scientist has a number of articles on evolution. All of them are focused on extending and improving the current theory of evolution, which is described as Darwin's ve… Read More

New Scientist has devoted much of their September 26th issue to evolution, but not in a good way. Their emphasis is on 13 ways that we must rethink evolution. Readers of this blog are famili… Read More

Discussions about the meaning of the word "function" have been going on for many decades, especially among philosphers who love that sort of thing. The debate intensified following the ENCOD… Read More

Alan McHughen is the author of a recently published book titled DNA Demystified. I took issue with his stance on junk DNA [More misconceptions about junk DNA - what are we doing wrong?] and… Read More

I'm actively following the views of most science writers on junk DNA to see if they are keeping up on the latest results. The latest book is DNA Demystified by Alan McHughen, a molecular gen… Read More

The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) is a large-scale, and very expensive, attempt to map all of the functional elements in the human genome. The preliminary study (ENCODE 1) was publis… Read More

The coronavirus life cycle is depicted in a figure from Fung and Liu (2019). See below for a brief description.The virus particle attaches to receptors on the cell surface (mostly ACE2 in th… Read More

Coronaviruses are RNA viruses, which means that their genome is RNA, not DNA. All of the coronaviruses have similar genomes but I'm sure you are mostly interested in SARS-CoV-2, the virus th… Read More

Coronoviruses are RNA viruses meaning that their genome is RNA, not DNA. All of the coronoviruses have similar genomes but I'm sure you are mostly interested in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that ca… Read More

Scientists have sequenced the genomes of modern domesticated chickens and compared them to the genomes of various wild pheasants in southern Asia. It has been known for some time that chicke… Read More

Cytokines are a diverse groups of small signal proteins that act like hormones to turn on genes in blood cells and cells of the immune system. In COVID-19 the production of cytokines can be… Read More

By the end of chapter 3, readers will be familiar with two main lines of evidence for junk DNA: the C-Value Paradox, and the fact that most of our genome is full of bits and pieces of dead t… Read More

I had to completely reorganize chapter 2 in order to move population genetics closer to the beginning of the book and reduce the number of words.Chapter 2: The Evolution of Sloppy GenomesFug… Read More

I've thought a lot about how to define the word "gene." It's clear that no definition will capture all the possibilities but that doesn't mean we should abandon the term. Traditionally, the… Read More

I just found this video that was posted to YouTube on May 2019. It's produced by the University of California and it features three researchers discussing the question, "Is Most of Your DNA… Read More

This post is about a recent review of alternative splicing published by my colleague Ben Blencowe in the Dept. of Medical Genetics at the University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario, Canada). (T… Read More

This post is mostly about a recent paper published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biol & Biomed Sci where two philosophers present their view of the function wars. They argue th… Read More

Charles Darwin, the greatest scientist who ever lived, was born on this day in 1809 [Darwin still spurs tributes, debates] [Happy Darwin Day!] [Darwin Day 2017]. Darwin is mostly famous for… Read More

The term "Function Wars" refers to the debate over the meaning of 'function,' especially in the context of junk DNA.1 That debate intensified in 2012 after the ENCODE publicity campaign that… Read More

A group of scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, NM, USA) and their collaborators in Vienna (Austria) and Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada) have worked out the structure o… Read More

The Three Domain Hypothesis died about twenty years ago but most people didn't notice. The original idea was promoted by Carl Woese and his colleagues in the early 1980s. It was based on the… Read More

There are many junk DNA skeptics who claim that most of our genome is functional. Some of them have even questioned whether pseudogenes are mostly junk. The latest challenge comes from a rec… Read More

We learned back in 2012 that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were going to transform higher education. People all over the world, especially in underdeveloped nations, would be able to l… Read More

There are many reasons for thinking that introns are mostly junk DNA.The size and sequence of introns in related species are not conserved and almost all of the sequences are evolving at the… Read More

Citrate synthase [EC 2.3.3.1] is one of the key enzymes of the citric acid cycle. It catalyzes the joining of acetyl-CoA and oxaloacetate to produce citrate. acetyl-CoA + H2O + oxaloacetate… Read More

I was browsing the table of contents of the latest issue of Cell and I came across this ....For decades, the miniscule protein-coding portion of the genome was the primary focus of medical r… Read More

De novo genes are new genes that arise spontaneously from junk DNA [De novo gene birth]. The frequency of de novo gene creation is important for an understanding of evolution. If it's a freq… Read More

It's difficult to know how many protein-coding genes there are in the human genome because there are several different ways of counting and the counts depend on what criteria are used to ide… Read More

This is the 2019 Killian lecture at MIT, delivered in April 2019 by Gerald Fink. Fink is an eminent scientist who has done excellent work on the molecular biology of yeast. He was director o… Read More

I'm a big fan of Richard Lenski's long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) and of Zachary Blount's work in particular. [Strolling around slopes and valleys in the adaptive landscape] [On the un… Read More

Evolution by Accidentv1.43 ©2006 Laurence A. MoranThis essay has been transferred here from an old server that has been decommissioned.Modern concepts of evolutionary change are frequen… Read More

A paper announcing the first complete sequence of a human chromosome has recently been posted on the bioRxiv server.Miga, K. H., Koren, S., Rhie, A., Vollger, M. R., Gershman, A., Bzikadze… Read More

It's been more than seven years since I posted information on how much of the human genome has been sequenced [How Much of Our Genome Is Sequenced?]. At that time, the latest version of the… Read More

This the last of a series of posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution. Arlin has established that the role of mutation in evolution is much mor… Read More

This is part of a continuing series of posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution. In this post, Arlin explains how defenders of the Modern Synth… Read More

This is part of a continuing series of posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution. In this post Arlin discusses his view of neo-Darwinism and why… Read More

I was checking out the science books in our local bookstore the other day and I came across Evolution 2.0 by Perry Marshall. It was published in 2015 but I don't recall seeing it before.The… Read More

This is part of a continuing series of posts by Arlin Stoltfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution. In this post Arlin discusses the role of adaptation and what de… Read More

This is the ninth in a series of guest posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution. Click on the links in the box (below) to see the other post in… Read More

This is the eighth in a series of guest posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution.Reactionary fringe meets mutation-biased adaptation. 5.2. The… Read More

This is the seventh in a series of guest posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution.Reactionary fringe meets mutation-biased adaptation. 5.1. Thi… Read More

This is the sixth in a series of guest posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution.Reactionary fringe meets mutation-biased adaptation. 5. Beyond… Read More

This is the fourth in a series of guest posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution.Reactionary fringe meets mutation-biased adaptation. 4. What m… Read More

This is the fourth in a series of guest posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution.Reactionary fringe meets mutation-biased adaptation. 3. The… Read More

This is the third in a series of guest posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution.Reactionary fringe meets mutation-biased adaptation. 2. Some ob… Read More

This is the second in a series of guest posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation as a dispositional factor in evolution. The first post was: Reactionary fringe meets mutation-biased… Read More

This is the first of a series of guest posts by Arlin Stoltzfus on the role of mutation in modern evolutionary theory.Reactionary fringe meets mutation-biased adaptation: Introductionby Arli… Read More

Today is the 75th anniversary of D-Day—the day British, Canadian, and American troops landed on the beaches of Normandy.1For us baby boomers it always meant a day of special significan… Read More

Splice variants are very common in eukaryotes. We know that it's possible to detect dozens of different splice variants for each gene with multiple introns. In the past, these variants were… Read More

If you look in the various databases you'll see that most human genes have multiple transcription start sites. The evidence for the existence of these variants is solid—they exist&mdas&hell…Read More

I think that about 90% of our genome is junk and I know lots of other scientists who feel the same way. I'm pretty sure that this view is not shared by the majority of scientists but I don't… Read More

Baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is one of the best studied eukaryotes. Its genome is just slightly larger than the largest bacterial genome and it was the first eukaryotic gen… Read More

The Canadian Broadcastng Company (CBC) has a TV show called Marketplace that promotes itself as an advocate of consumers' rights. It has a history of testing the claims of advertisers and us… Read More

Blogging was light last year because I was busy with other things and because the popularity of blogs is declining rapidly. The most popular post, based on the number of views, garnered only… Read More

I'm very impressed with the DNA test administered by Ancestry.com. They report that I have over 600 fourth cousins or closer but I have confirmed some even more distant relationships. See be… Read More

I was looking at some of my posts from the past few years and wondered which ones were the most popular. I had previously identified the most popular post of 2016 but not the most popular on… Read More

This is the latest update from Ancestry.com. Their algorithms are getting better and better. This corresponds very closely to what I know of my ancestors Read More

The importance of alternative splicing is highly controversial. In the case of humans, the competing views are: (a) more than 90% of human protein-coding genes are alternatively spliced to p… Read More

I'm convinced that widespread alternative splicing does not occur in humans or in any other species. It's true that the phenomenon exists but it's restricted to a small number of genes&mdash&hell…Read More

As most of you know, I'm interested in the problem of alternative splicing. I believe that the number of splice variants that have been detected is perfectly consistent with the known rate o… Read More

The Deflated Ego Problem refers to the fact that many scientists were very disappointed to learn we had less than 30,000 genes. Those scientists were expecting that the human genome would co… Read More

I'm looking forward to Michael Behe's third book, which is due to be published in February. As most of you probably know, Michael Behe is a biochemist and a former professor at Lehigh Univer… Read More

I've known Yana Eglit for many years. She frequently posts comments on this blog but you won't recognize her name because she uses a pseudonym.1 Yana is a graduate student in the lab of Alas… Read More

Humans are just another animal. All animals share a core set of several thousand genes and all mammals have about the same number of homologous genes (~25,000). The differences between speci… Read More