See you September 13.
Today scientists took another step towards creating the sort of simple life forms that may have been the first inhabitants of Earth. I wrote a feature for the June issue of Discover about this group, led by Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School. Szostak and his colleagues suspect that life started out not with DNA, RNA, and proteins, but just RNA. This primordial RNA not only carried life’s genetic code, but also assembled new RNA molecules and did other biochemical jobs. Szostak and others have created conditions in their labs under which today’s RNA can evolve into a form able to cary out these primordial tasks. So far, their evolved RNA molecules can assemble short fragments of RNA, using another RNA molecule as a template.
“A world without memory is a world of the present,” Alan Lightman wrote in Einstein’s Dreams. “The past exists only in books, in documents. In order to know himself, each person carries his own Book of Life, which is filled with the history of his life…Without his Book of Life, a person is a snapshot, a two-dimensional image, a ghost.”
While doing some research on human evolution, I stumbled across the web site for a wonderful meeting that was held in March at San Diego to celebrate the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome. You can watch the lectures here. By comparing the chimp genome to the human genome, scientists are discovering exactly how we evolved into the peculiar species that we are. If you find yourself in an argument with someone who claims that evolution has nothing to do with cutting edge science, plunk them down in front of these talks. Without evolution, genomics is gibberish.
Is Intelligent Design the same thing as creationism? The people who back Intelligent Design have spilled an awful lot of ink saying they’re different. Even self-proclaimed creationists have tried to claim a difference. Somehow, both of these camps think that any confusion between the two is evidence of the lazy arrogance of evolutionists. In fact, the evidence points towards Intellgent Design being just a bit of clever repackaging to get creationist nonsense into the classroom. (See this useful article.)