Tag Archives: DNA

Essays

Ascending the Spiral Ladder

Clyde Hutchison - Hamilton Smith - J Craig Venter - Daniel GibsonAmerican Dissident Voices broadcast of April 2, 2016

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by Kevin Alfred Strom

AN ALL-WHITE team of scientists led by J. Craig Venter has just created a new form of life. (ILLUSTRATION: Clyde Hutchison, Hamilton Smith, J. Craig Venter, and Daniel Gibson)

They didn’t “create life from scratch” as some breathless headlines implied — that’s not possible yet, and may never be. We just don’t know. But what Venter and his team have done is awe-inspiring — and profoundly revolutionary nonetheless. What they have done exceeds the Moon landing in significance and potential. They have removed the DNA from a living cell, rearranged and essentially reprogrammed it according to principles learned over years of experimentation, inserted it into another cell, which then was able to live and reproduce as an utterly new form of life, a new species. They first succeeded in doing this in 2010, but just this Thursday announced success in a much more advanced experiment in which the alteration of the genetic code was far more extensive.

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Editorials

Relatedness — and the Encyclopedia — Prove Evolution Is Real

by Kevin Alfred Strom

A CREATIONIST MIGHT NOT acknowledge that he is related to a chimp, but he probably would admit that he is related to his own mother. “After all,” he might say, “obviously I share 50 per cent. of my genes with her.”

But that estimate is wildly off the mark. Actually, he shares more than 99.9 per cent. of his genes with her — because, in addition to the obvious one-half direct ancestry, he shares almost all of his ancestry with her in common, because both his parents share almost identical common ancestry too. Go back a few dozen centuries, and they’re practically all the same people.

Common ancestry is the only rational explanation, and it is the full explanation, for the near-total agreement between the gene-patterns of father, mother, and child.

Common ancestry is also the only reasonable explanation for the astonishingly high degree of genetic similarity between humans and other mammals.

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Editorials

James Watson and The Economist magazine

by Kevin Alfred Strom

(sent to the Economist last November 10th but not published)

SIR:  THE AUTHOR of ‘The Nature of Nurture‘ deserves to be fired on the grounds of scientific illiteracy and an egregious lack of journalistic integrity.

He unjustifiably insults James Watson (pictured), the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, as ‘stupid’ for making the incontrovertibly true assertion that the average intelligence level of Africans differs from that of Europeans. Decades of scientific tests confirm that fact, and it is simply not in dispute.

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