DNA

Lucky Jim

For more information about David Berlinski – his new books, video clips from interviews, and upcoming events – please visit his website at www.davidberlinski.org.   Genes, Girls, and Gamow After the Double Helix by James D. Watson Knopf, 304 pp., $26 A DOCTORATE from Indiana University in 1949, the Cavendish laboratories at Cambridge University, the discovery of DNA. Thereafter, immortality. James Read More ›

Doing the DNA dance

The uncoiling, unraveling and decoding of the DNA structure by the Humane Genome Project and the Celera Genomics Group is a magnificent scientific achievement and monumental medical milestone. But what does it really mean to the rest of us mortals? To begin with, it means much less than most people think, hope or worry. As diagnostic physicians, we've been trying to come up with a good analogy. Perhaps figuring out the sequence of the chemical elements in human DNA is like finding a huge pile of ancient document scraps in an unknown language and using computers to help sort out the correct order and position of the symbols. But even when sorted out, how could we figure out what the symbols mean? In DNA, scientists have figured out the ordering of the language symbols but don't know what most of the message means. Read More ›
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Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., now director of the NIH, stands to the right of then-President Bill Clinton (J. Craig Ventner, Ph.D., left) at the announcement that an international consortuim had completed the first

Genome Project Raises Fears, Hopes

Two rival groups of scientists have announced that the race to decode the human genome has ended-in a tie. J. Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics, and Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, joined in a White House ceremony on June 26 to announce that they’ve deciphered the human hereditary script. The two organizations had Read More ›

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Edison style light bulb with double helix filament
Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

DNA and Other Designs

For two millennia, the design argument provided an intellectual foundation for much of Western thought. From classical antiquity through the rise of modern science, leading philosophers, theologians, and scientists — from Plato to Aquinas to Newton — maintained that nature manifests the design of a preexistent mind or intelligence. Moreover, for many Western thinkers, the idea that the physical universe Read More ›

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Nature's Destiny by Michael J. Denton

Nature’s Destiny

While others search the skies for extraterrestrial life, Michael Denton has examined the recent discoveries in all the sciences to ask — Could life elsewhere be substantially different from life on Earth? Drawing on a staggering knowledge of physics, biochemistry, geology, and evolution, Denton builds a step-by-step argument for human inevitability. Life requires water, DNA, and protein; it can only Read More ›

The Message in the Microcosm

Traditional approaches that fail to take account of new findings in molecular cell biology cannot survive the present day. Materialistic explanations for the origin of information have been systematically eliminated over the past forty years. Has origin-of-life research brought us to the brink of a new scientific revolution? Despite the now well-documented influence of Christian thinking on the rise of Read More ›

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Geyser at Yellowstone
Photo by Ava W at Unsplash

The Origin of Life and the Death of Materialism

Introduction Alfred North Whitehead once said that “when we consider what religion is for mankind and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.” Whitehead spoke early in this century at a time when most elite intellectuals believed that science Read More ›

Photo by Daniil Kuželev

A New Design Argument

Just when scientists thought they understood how natural processes explained the order of the universe, they discovered a very special kind of complexity, called information, in nature. Experience had taught them that, wherever they found information, they could be sure of finding an intelligence behind it. As a result of 20th century discoveries, scientists are learning that the very methods they had used to discover natural causes (reasoning from experience) now point to an intelligent cause. Read More ›