Placentas Love Horizontal Gene Transfer

From a report titled "Mammals Made By Viruses":

What made syncytin peculiar was that it was not a human gene. It bore all the hallmarks of a gene from a virus.
Viruses have insinuated themselves into the genome of our ancestors for hundreds of millions of years. They typically have gotten there by infecting eggs or sperm, inserting their own DNA into ours. There are 100,000 known fragments of viruses in the human genome,  making up over 8% of our DNA. Most of this virus DNA has been hit by so many mutations that it’s nothing but baggage our species carries along from one generation to the next. Yet there are some viral genes that still make proteins in our bodies. Syncytin appeared to be a hugely important one to our own biology. Originally, syncytin allowed viruses to fuse host cells together so they could spread from one cell to another. Now the protein allowed babies to fuse to their mothers.

It could be that syncytin actually appears in viruses and is utilized for this purpose.  The article is really vague on this point, which would be interesting to know one way or the other.  The article seems to be saying that 8% of the human genome bears "all the hallmarks" of viral genes and are presumed on this basis to be viral in origin. Do the "so many mutations" refer to the differences between the animals that share the viral "junk" or between the viral "junk" and known ancestor genes in known viruses.  Toward the end:

The big picture that’s now emerging is quite amazing. Viruses have rained down on mammals, and on at least six occasions, they’ve gotten snagged in their hosts and started carrying out the same function: building placentas. 

Lightning has struck at least 6 times.  Curious and curiouser.  You'd think selection would work against tampering with essential reproductive tissues.  Well, think again.  Why is a breakdown of cells into multi-nucleate tissue is important for some animals and not for others?  There should be as much interest in what purpose is served by the difference than speculating on the mechanism for the difference.  The article says there are "all sorts of explanations for why that may be"... Why is it so hard to figure out why natural selection favored it?  What heuristic provides the predictive power for where the true explanation lies?

a theory so obvious

"Neo-Darwinian evolution is one of those theories that are so obvious, it must be protected from any criticism, lest it not seem so obvious."

Jerry Coyne Demonstrates the Real Power of Selection

Jerry looking very evolved.

Just a quick post here, since it is too easy to dig deeply into these silly exercises of Coynage, but Jerry Coyne wrote a blog post in response to an email from Paul Nelson discussing the limits of natural selection as the explanatory show pony of the evolutionary circus, citing the work of various biologists.

Coyne frames this a "McLuhan moment" (Annie Hall reference) since he is such a big mucky-muck in the speculative science of squishy things that, unlike the Woody Allen character, he can in real life pull these great biologists "from behind the sign" and have them comment on whether Nelson understands their fine work.

But first, the relevant claim by Paul Nelson:

So when you [Jerry Coyne] tell your WEIT audience that natural selection is the only game in town for building complex adaptations, . . .  Readers who already know about the thinking of workers such as Eric Davidson, Michael Lynch, Andreas Wagner, John Gerhart & Marc Kirschner, or Scott Gilbert (all of whom, among many others, have recently expressed frank doubts about selection) must discount what you say about the centrality of natural selection to evolutionary theory . . .

To sum up, even though Coyne hollers loud and long that natural selection is the central, driving, omnipotent core of evolution, various noted biologists have "frank doubts" about the centrality of natural selection and/or unrestricted appeals to its creative power--specifically relevant to the alleged claim of Coyne (which he appears not to deny) that selection is by-and-large omnipotent and all-sufficient even if there are other evolutionary processes interfering along the way.  This counter-claim by Nelson is what Coyne will supposedly debunk.

Freeman Dyson, also a Secular Creationist

Freeman Dyson is a Christian in the same way that many Jewish people practice their religious traditions without believing their scriptures:

I am a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian. To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension.

His point of view seems comparable to Paul Davies', Michael Denton's, Thomas Nagel's, and Rupert Sheldrake.

Watch it there, Freeman.  You are officially a secular creationist.  And a crank.

Randy Olson's Flock of Nonsense (Update on John Angus Campbell)

Well, it seemed like it was time to link all these Flock of Dodos write-ups of yesteryear in one place.

• Is Haeckel's Recapitulation a Strawman?
• Randy Olson's Creationist Shill
• Questions about Flock of Dodos and Jonathan Wells
• Randy Olson's Flock of Anti-Creationist Statism
• Punches Pulled: Michael Behe Doesn't Care
• Punches Pulled: Haeckel's Embryos in Peer Reviewed Literature

To sum it up, Olson's unprofessional (and unethical, I think, as a documentarian) treatment of John Angus Campbell, Jonathan Wells, John Calvert, and Michael Behe, either in the film or in the "Pulled Punches" follow-up, marks the film as schlockumentary.  Olson highlights some matters as essential that he is later free to dismiss as trivial when he's shown to be wrong.

In other words he engages in the very thing he defines as "Trivia Tackling": "trying to take down a large institution, idea or individual, not by assailing the large and significant parts, but by doggedly locking on to pieces of trivia."  The closest thing to "assailing the large and significant parts" in Flock is when he talks briefly about Behe's mousetrap analogy.  We see no intense discussion between Olson and Behe about the mousetrap, which would have been interesting, nor about any evolutionary matter with Behe that Olson has any expertise.

Something I noted recently is that John Angus Campbell (the "fake" Darwinist in the film) has his own website in which he clarifies his beliefs and his position on ID, and how Wikipedia mischaracterizes him.  He is politically liberal, and a subscriber to neo-Darwinism who has long advocated "teaching the controversy."  He ended his association with Discovery Institute when he started to find himself in the cross-hairs of Discovery Institute's political enemies.

When Wikipedia and The Weekly [a tabloid] mistakenly assumed I was supporting ID (and the religious right!) rather than promoting argument as a way of engaging a classic text [Darwin's Origin] - (and this before audiences who particularly needed to read it) the DI [Discovery Institute] affiliation had outlived its usefulness [for what?] and it was time for me to move on.*

Like Kenny Rogers, Campbell knew when to fold 'em, when to walk away, when to run.  Congratulations, Campbell. You too are a "secular creationist" for aiding and abetting "anti-science."  Question: Did Randy Olson consult anything other than Wikipedia to learn about Campbell?

See Campbell's concise rebuttal to Wikipedia and the Seattle Weekly:

• Overview  
• Errors in Fact  
• Errors in Implication  
• Conclusion 

.

Einstein's hidden worlds

Evolutionary Informatics

Evolutionary informatics, a branch of information theory, studies the informational requirements of evolutionary processes. Its most significant result is a conservation principle. According to this principle, the information needed to find a successful search is never less than the information required to make the original search successful. Consequently, the higher-level search for a search is never easier than the original lower-level search. Conservation of information implies that information, like money or energy, is a commodity that obeys strict accounting principles. Accordingly, searches, in successfully locating targets, cannot expend more information than originally deposited. Conservation of information has far-reaching implications for evolutionary theory, pointing out that the success of evolutionary processes in exploring biological configuration space always depends on preexisting information. In particular, evolutionary processes cannot create the information required for their success from scratch.
  - William Dembski, "What Does Information Tell Us About ID?", Salvo