Todd's Blog

I recently noticed that Google Maps & Earth finally upgraded Dayton to high resolution photos and to streetlevel views of many of the streets in town. That inspired me to create this little tour of sites associated with the Scopes Trial. Dayton Coal & Iron Co. Mines Dayton's involvement in the Scopes Trial began with the failure of one of its major employers, the Dayton Coal & Iron Company. There had been a number of companies that had tried to sustain a mine in the area (in fact, there are old mine works in the hills behind my house). None of them were very successful. The latest closure led to the famous meeting in Robinson's Drugstore where F.E. Robinson and George Rappleyea came up with the idea of answering the ACLU's ad for someone to break the recently-passed Butler Act, which outlawed the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee high schools. There's not much to see in the street level view, but if you follow that gravel road, you'll eventua...

Yeah, that's right. I said it: BORING! They're so boring, I almost didn't bother writing this post. That's how bored I am with the subject. It seems that my little off-hand paragraph on Schweitzer's hadrosaur collagen stirred up a few responses. I got emails and read a few online posts about it. Some agreed with me and some did not. I'm always amused about what people actually react to on my blog. Stuff I care deeply about goes virtually unnoticed, and stuff I just throw out as an aside gets all sorts of response. Go figure. I guess I should be grateful that somebody's actually reading this stuff. God bless you for that! So why are ancient biomolecules boring? Well, I guess there's some intrinsic coolness to them. Recovering DNA from dead things like mammoths , extinct horses , and Neandertals is pretty nifty. (Especially the ancient horse results which partly corroborate my contention that all equids are a single baramin .) The Neandert...

I guess the AIG/CMI settlement is moving forward. Yesterday, I got a copy of Creation magazine in the mail from AIG with a very neutrally-worded note: "As a former subscriber to it, you may want to know that you can re-subscribe to the same publicaton through CMI." Strange, though: I was never a subscriber to Creation magazine at my home address where this complimentary copy of Creation was delivered. Yesterday, AIG also posted a copy of Joe Francis's 2003 ICC paper, The organosubstrate of life: a creationist perspective of microbes and viruses . It's a creative look at microbiology, and it's worth a look.

I resisted commenting on Ida (AKA Darwinius masillae ), mostly because I didn't have anything to say. It's a pretty fossil, very well preserved. It's a primate, and it's supposed to be a representative of the earliest branch of ape evolution. OK. That's nice. There are lots of fossil primates that are supposed to represent various branches of what would become the human evolutionary tree. This is one of them. I finally found the hype about this thing a little hard to resist when my mom (of all people) asked what I thought about it. My mom doesn't really follow science news all that closely. So you know if she's curious about it, it must be everywhere. So here's what I think: Yuk. Shall I elaborate? This fossil has a movie coming out. With a trailer . Don't like movies? How about an attractive companion book ? Still not cool enough for you? Check out their promotional website www.revealingthelink.com . I could sort of understand this le...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . Several years ago I began a project to study the history of creationist thought regarding the origin of species. My aim was to understand how Frank Marsh arrived at his ideas about "created kinds." That work led me to a number of obscure and now poorly-known books on the subjects of creation and antievolution. One of those books was Evoluion Criticised by T.B. Bishop, described on the title page as "Member of the Council of the Victoria Institute." Evolution Criticised , published in 1918 in England, was a peculiar work that consisted largely of quotes from evolutionary literature with very little overriding organization. Bishop cited Erich Wasmann's view of species favorably, but otherwise concentrated almost exclusively on trying to document disagreements between evolutonists themselves (a very typical ant...

Several years ago, I was discussing possible research projects with a creationist who happened to be quite taken with the issue of natural selection. I thought the evidence of seletion in the human and chimp genomes would make an excellent topic to evaluate, specifically by expanding the sample of genomes (to gorilla or orang) to see if the number of genes exhibiting evidence of selection holds up. My suggestion was not well received, but maybe I didn't communicate it very well. With a few recent papers touching on this topic, it seemed like a good topic for a post. Maybe I can explain why these types of study have value. How do we detect natural selection in genome sequences? One method (by no means the only one) is to look for genes that have an unusual number of changes to the coding sequence (estimated by the d N /d S ratio ). Basically, any mutation in a protein-coding gene can change the protein sequence (a nonsynonymous mutation) or not (a synonymous mutation). This happens...

Ciliate genomics is nifty. Ciliates are little one-celled organisms. You're probably familiar with the ciliate Paramecium , ubiquitous in high school and college biology lab exercises. Unlike most familiar eukaryotes, paramecia have two nuclei in each cell, a large and easily recognizable macronucleus and a much tinier micronucleus. The macronucleus is transcriptionally active, meaning that it's the one that carries on the day-to-day activities in the cell. The micronucleus is used in sexual conjugation. After sex, the existing macronucleus degrades, and a new one is synthesized from the micronucleus. Oxytricha is a ciliate like Paramecium , though they are not particularly similar ( pictures here ). Like Paramecium , Oxytricha has a transcriptionally-active macronucleus and a reproductive micronucleus. The macronucleus is replaced after each sexual conjugation. Here's where it starts to get confusing: When you actually count up the amount of DNA in the Oxytrich...