This morning it was announced that two American scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and or Medicine, for their 1998 discovery of a hidden network of genes. It may seem odd that a network of genes could lurk undiscovered for so long. But the cell is very much a mysterious place. In the 1950s, scientists established the basic model for how genes work. A gene is made of DNA, the cell makes a single-stranded copy of a gene in a molecule called RNA, and it then uses the RNA as a template for building a protein. This so-called Central Dogma proved to be correct for many thousands of genes, but not all of them.
Author: Lori Jia
PZ Myers did an excellent job yesterday of dismantling the latest from intelligent-design advocate Jonathan Wells. Wells wrote a piece on WorldNetDaily called “Why Darwinism is Doomed.” It is based some new research identifying an important gene involved in the human brain–which I blogged about last month. Wells claims that this discovery is a serious threat to evolution. Why? Because scientists have only just found the gene, because many genes are involved in building the human brain, and because finding a gene that’s different in humans than in other animals doesn’t actually reveal what caused that difference. Myers shows why all three arguments are wrong.
I always like to consider questions of the day from the perspective of deep time. How hot is it these days? Look back 1.35 million years, and you can see it’s pretty hot. Here’s a chart, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (free paper here). It combines historical records with geological evidence from the West Pacific to reach back 1.35 million years (kyr= thousands of years ago). The scale is telescoped near the right end, since recent warming has been so fast that it would be hard to make out its details otherwise.
Last week I caught some of the talks at this year’s Dwight H. Terry Lecture at Yale. The lectures are in their hundredth year, and this time around the topic was “The Religion and Science Debate: Why Does It Continue?” The speakers include Ken MIller, talking about his experience at the Dover intelligent design trial, and Ronald Numbers of the University of Wisconsin, the leading historian of the anti-evolution movement in the U.S. (I’ll be writing an introduction to the volume that comes out of the lectures.)
If you’re interested, you can watch videos of the lectures now, here.
Continue reading “Science and Religion Streamed to Your Computer”
Congratulations to the new crop of Macarthur genius grant winners, including Ken Catania, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University whose muse is the star-nosed mole. It turns out that a single strange animal can reveal a lot about how nervous systems develop and evolve. For more on Catania’s work, see my blog post from last year and my article on some of Catania’s recent work for the New York Times.
Originally published September 19, 2006. Copyright 2006 Carl Zimmer.