Things have not been going so well on the political front for the advocates of intelligent design (a k a the progeny of creationism). This election season their allies on state boards of education in Kansas and Ohio went down to defeat. On the scientific front, things have never really gone well. The Discovery Institute in Seattle claims that it has spent millions on research. They have precious little to show for it. As I wrote last year, a single evolutionary biologist produces more papers in peer-reviewed biology journals than the entire staff of the Discovery Institute. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single paper that actually claims that intelligent design is supported by original evidence.
Author: Lori Jia
Attention all Loom readers in the Cornell University area: I’m heading up to Ithaca to give a talk tomorrow on a subject near and dear to my heart–how parasites turn their hosts into puppets and slaves. I’ll be at the David Call auditorium in Kennedy Hall at 4 pm. The lecture is open to the public and will, of course, include a very creepy Powerpoint. Details here, map here.
Originally published November 7, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.
A while back I blogged about the tens of thousands of viruses we carry in our genomes. In today’s New York Times I write about how scientists reconstructed a working ancestral virus from its disabled descendants: Old Viruses Resurrected Through DNA.
Here’s the original paper.
Originally published November 7, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, November 7, 2006
Thanks to advances in DNA technology, scientists can now reconstruct new copies of old viruses. Last year United States government scientists reconstructed the virus that caused the influenza epidemic of 1918. Now a team of French scientists has rebuilt a virus that infected our apelike ancestors several million years ago.
The scientists did not isolate a virus from a fossil. Instead, they examined vestiges of the virus that survive today within the human genome.
About 100,000 segments of human DNA are remarkably similar to retroviruses, a class of viruses that includes HIV. Retroviruses insert a copy of their genes into the genome of their host cell. Scientists estimate that 8 percent of the human genome is made up of this viral DNA, known as human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs.
Just an update to my post about talking this weekend at the National Association of Science Writers meeting: in addition to the panel I was originally scheduled to join–on book publicity–I’ve also been added to a panel talk on Friday afternoon called “Navigating the New Media.” I’m subbing for writer Rebecca Skloot, who cannot come.
Originally published October 26, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.