Todd's Blog

Paul Garner sparked a bit of debate when he posted the simple claim that young earth creationism is not the same as species fixity. Forty comments later, it's still being debated. A responder who goes by the name "WebMonk" basically claims that until only recently, species fixity was the majority creationist position advocated by mainstream creationists. In his words, Creationist biologists may have rejected species fixity for many decades, but the Creationists MOVEMENT certainly promoted it, and still does quite widely. Unfortunately, much of the follow-up comments have gotten lost in the minutiae, since I think WebMonk is quite right in this basic claim. The wider creationist movement does indeed accept species fixity, and the major creationist organizations have only recently begun trying to fix that problem. To show you why I think so, I'm first recommending reading over my paper on species variation and creationism [ PDF ], particularly the part about antiev...

The ARJ microbe series continues this week with Georgia Purdom's "The role of genomic islands, mutation, and displacement in the origin of bacterial pathogenicity." Previous entries in the series: Francis & Purdom: "More abundant than stars: an introductory overview of creaation microbiology" HTML - PDF - My comments Liu & Soper: "The natural history of retroviruses: exogenization vs endogenization" HTML - PDF - My comments Criswell: "A review of mitoribosome structure and function does not support the serial endosymbiotic theory" HTML - PDF - My comments Sherwin: "A possible function of Entamoeba histolytica in the creation model" HTML - PDF - My comments Loucks: "Fungi from the biblical perspective: design and purpose in the original creation" HTML - PDF - My comments This new paper is a good one. This was the first in the microbe series that made me excited to read it. To be honest, this is the fi...

Regular readers will recall my interest in genome evolution, particularly as it relates to the origin of new species ( here and here ). Two significant papers on this subject are available this week. In the first, Barrick et al. looked at adaptation in a laboratory population of E. coli evolving over 40,000 generations. They sequenced six genomes of E. coli from generations 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 and 40,000 as well as the ancestral E. coli genome for that population. They discovered a surprisingly high and constant rate of beneficial mutations, only a fraction of which were single nucleotide substitutions. Remarkably, all 26 point mutations found in coding regions were non-synonymous, which suggests that the changes were not just neutral drift. Fourteen of these genes with mutations were sequenced in eleven other 20K-generation populations derived from the same ancestor. They found that only twelve of the fourteen genes modified in their population were also m...

I've been putting this entry off, mostly because I'm not entirely sure what faith is. I'm quite sure I know what it isn't, though, so let's start there. Faith is not merely agreement, nor is it an optimistic feeling, nor is it acceptance of something without or against evidence. These are all modern stereotypes of faith that have little to do with real faith. Faith is also not just an emotion. Faith can certainly be emtional, but it's not just an emotion. There have been plenty of times that my faith has told me to do something I really don't feel like. And it's not just some guilt feeling either: There have been times I knew by faith that I should do something neither good nor bad but something I still didn't want to do. Figure that one out. Besides, if it was easy or emotionally desirable to be a Christian, lots of people would be Christians. Faith is also not entirely rational. If Christianity were merely a case of weighing evidence and co...

The BSG just released its second newsletter at the BSG website. There are short items by Roger Sanders and Joe Francis, and a blog entry from yours truly. BSG members can download the newsletter from the BSG website . Just log in and click on "newsletter." Thanks to Jonathan Bartlett for handling all the editorial duties for the newsletter. Also, don't forget the coming conference at Truett-McConnell College , held jointly with the Creation Geology Society. The past couple years we've been at conference centers, which unfortunately increased our cost substantially. By moving back to college-hosted conferences, we're hoping to lower the cost and attract more people. Once again, the conference will be the last weekend in July. Abstracts will be due at the end of March, so be thinking about research projects now. I'll have more details on abstract submission as the day approaches.

First, a correction on my previous entry . I mentioned the idea that bacteria might be considered external organelles. I knew that I'd heard the idea from Joe Francis, but I couldn't remember the precise citation. I cited his Answers Magazine article, but it was actually in the Microbe Forum proceedings from 2007. Now, on with the show. Here's a recap on previous papers in the ARJ microbe series: Francis & Purdom: "More abundant than stars: an introductory overview of creaation microbiology" HTML - PDF - My comments Liu & Soper: "The natural history of retroviruses: exogenization vs endogenization" HTML - PDF - My comments Criswell: "A review of mitoribosome structure and function does not support the serial endosymbiotic theory" HTML - PDF - My comments I'm going to cover two papers in this entry because I don't have a lot to say about them. First is Sherwin's "A possible function of Entamoeba histolytica...

Back in 1927, creationist pioneer Byron C. Nelson published a book called "After its Kind" , in which he detailed a theory of species origins based on the science of Mendelian genetics. The basic idea is that the isolation of particular genetic alleles in different populations explains the origin of "new" traits. This idea became quite popular in creationism. For example, Will Tinkle (one of the founders of the Creation Research Society) recycled it as the "theory of heterozygous creation" for his book Heredity: A Study in Science and the Bible . Though statements of this theory have gotten more sophisticated over the years, they're still basically nineteenth century genetics. Modern comparative genetics and genomics continue to show that Mendelian genetics simply does not explain the changes that occur when a new species originates. I've mentioned this before ( Mendel is not enough ), and I proposed at the 2003 ICC that genomic rearrangements...