In the News

As pointed out in the Creation-Evolution Web site, imagine a book written in a language where there were no spaces, and every word was three letters long. Now imagine that you could get one story by starting at the first letter, and a different story by starting at the second letter, and another by starting at the third letter. That's the situation with some genes in the genetic code. DNA can code for one protein in the first reading frame, but a different protein in an alternate reading frame. Since the DNA language has three nucleotide "letters" per codon "word," and since the opposite strand has three more reading frames, there are potentially six reading frames per gene. How commonly are alternate reading frames used by an organism?
A paper in PLoS Computational Biology hints that there may be widespread examples of alternate reading frames (ARFs) in mammalian genomes.

More... on the design staring us in the face.

Can watch parts be placed in a box, shaken vigorously, and result in a fully assembled watch? The Paley Watch Company in Eugene, Oregon says yes! They are applying natural selection in a controlled environment to assemble their watches thereby reducing required personnel. The savings are passed to the customer.

In what is now universally recognized by true scientists as a stupid comment, William Paley (1743-1805) wrote that watches could not be assembled using Darwinian mechanisms.

Today, we know that Paley's conjecture was stupid, and stochastic procedures such as box shaking are accepted as viable approaches to engineering design. Sir Oliver Witherspoon chronicles Darwin's initial questioning of Paley's claim, and Darwin's attempt to assemble a watch by box shaking.

Indeed, The Paley Watch Company in Eugene, Oregon, assembles watches using this method.

"The principle is a straightforward application of natural selection," claims Tristran Korpulous, chief engineer for the Paley Watch Company. "Watch parts are placed in the controlled environment of a shaker. Although the probability the parts will assemble is small, the chance is there. Given enough time, the Law of Large Numbers dictates the watch will, indeed, be ultimately assembled. This is a process familiar to all true evolutionary scientists."

Korpulous' watch making business is financed unconventionally. After repeated rejection by venture capitalists as infeasible, he circulated his natural selection based business plan among today's most prominent evolutionary scientists and quickly raised the needed funds. The scientists shared Korpulous' enthusiasm for the first business application of applied natural selection.

It's hard to tell if this new book means ID has finally made it out of the ivory towers to the man on the street, or if the book was written for the guys in the ivory towers. Either way most people will find something of value in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design. A brief review of this book and other recent ID news of interest can be found in the May edition of the ARN Announce email newsletter.