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... The chimpanzee is our closest living relative in evolutionary terms and research suggests our kinship derives from a common ancestor. About five to six million years ago, our evolutionary paths separated, leading to the chimpanzee of today, and Homo Sapiens, humankind in the 21st century. In a new study, stem cell researchers at Lund examined what it is in our DNA that makes human and chimpanzee brains different -- and they have found answers. "Instead of studying living humans and chimpanzees, we used stem cells grown in a lab. The stem cells were reprogrammed from skin cells by our...

Keynote Speech at Biology Conference Falsifies Major Claim of Darwinism July 19, 2018 by Sal Cordova Hailed as “the greatest biologist since Darwin,” Ronald Fisher is credited as author of “biology’s central theorem” what is known as Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection.[i] An informally stated corollary of Fisher’s theorem is that a population will continually increase in fitness. However, for decades it has been noted that many populations are declining in fitness. Geneticists such as Michael Lynch[ii], Alexey Kondrashov[iii], Bryan Sykes[iv], and many others have been warning the human genome is crumbling and the damage is likely irreversible. Thus,...

Scientists vie to break junk DNA's secret code By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 06/10/2003) Huge tracts of human DNA, previously written off as meaningless junk, have been found to contain a hitherto unrecognised "genetic grammar", making the language of our genes much more complex than previously thought. The discovery is of potentially huge significance, since it could lead to an entirely new explanation for certain diseases and symptoms. A race is now on among teams of scientists worldwide to investigate this cryptic code. While the genetic recipe of a human being is spelt out with three billion letters of...

Scientists are reporting a significant milestone for cancer research after charting 21 major mutations behind the vast majority of tumours. The disruptive changes to the genetic code, reported in Nature, accounted for 97% of the 30 most common cancers. Finding out what causes the mutations could lead to new treatments. Some causes, such as smoking are known, but more than half are still a mystery. Cancer Research UK said it was a fascinating and important study. A tumour starts when one of the building blocks of bodies, a cell, goes wrong. Over the course of a lifetime cells pick up...

W.I.T. scientists, in conjunction with the Human Genome Project and Bob Jones University, have made what may be the most astounding discovery of this, or any generation. While working to understand and map the function of sequences of DNA in the human genome known as “Junk DNA” (for their lack of known function), scientists at W.I.T. noted that while the DNA sequences they were seeing bore little resemblance to the coding for biological function, they bore a striking similarity to the patterns of human language. Gene Bmp3 has a Retrotransposon sequence which translates to the well-known 1 Cor 6:19 “Do...

Long stretches of DNA previously dismissed as "junk" are in fact crucial to the way our genome works, an international team of researchers said on Wednesday.

... So-called junk DNA, the vast majority of the genome that doesn't code for proteins, really isn't needed for a healthy organism, according to new research. "At least for a plant, junk DNA really is just junk — it's not required," said study co-author Victor Albert, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Buffalo in New York. ... Albert and his colleagues sequenced the genome of the carnivorous bladderwort plant, Utricularia gibba, which lives in wet soil or fresh water throughout the world and sucks swimming microorganisms into its tiny, 1-milimeter-long bladders. The genome had just 80 million base...

What makes us human? Some say that it is the development of language, though others argue that animals have language as well. Some say that it is our ability to use tools, though many animals are able to use rocks and other objects as primitive tools. Some say that it is our ability to see death coming. Now, researchers believe that they have found the definitive difference between humans and other primates, and they think that the difference all comes down to a single gene. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland attribute the split of humanity from apes...

The deepest look into the human genome so far shows it to be a richer, messier and more intriguing place than was believed just a decade ago, scientists said Wednesday. While the findings underscore the challenges of tackling complex diseases, they also offer scientists new terrain to unearth better treatments. … Encode succeeded the Human Genome Project, which identified the 20,000 genes that underpin the blueprint of human biology. But scientists discovered that those 20,000 genes constituted less than 2% of the human genome. The task of Encode was to explore the remaining 98%—the so-called junk DNA—that lies between those...

Once considered unimportant "junk DNA," scientists have learned that non-coding RNA (ncRNA) -- RNA molecules that do not translate into proteins -- play a crucial role in cellular function. Mutations in ncRNA are associated with a number of conditions, such as cancer, autism, and Alzheimer's disease. Now, through the use of "deep sequencing," a technology used to sequence the genetic materials of the human genome, Dr. Noam Shomron of Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine has discovered that when infected with a virus, ncRNA gives off biological signals that indicate the presence of an infectious agent, known as a...

The human genome is riddled with dead genes, fossils of a sort, dating back hundreds of thousands of years — the genome’s equivalent of an attic full of broken and useless junk. Some of those genes, surprised geneticists reported Thursday, can rise from the dead like zombies, waking up to cause one of the most common forms of muscular dystrophy. This is the first time, geneticists say, that they have seen a dead gene come back to life and cause a disease. “If we were thinking of a collection of the genome’s greatest hits, this would go on the list,”...

The human genome is riddled with dead genes, fossils of a sort, dating back hundreds of thousands of years — the genome’s equivalent of an attic full of broken and useless junk. Some of those genes, surprised geneticists reported Thursday, can rise from the dead like zombies, waking up to cause one of the most common forms of muscular dystrophy. This is the first time, geneticists say, that they have seen a dead gene come back to life and cause a disease. “If we were thinking of a collection of the genome’s greatest hits, this would go on the list,”...

Deleting a non-coding region leads to narrowing of arteries in mice. Researchers have made headway in working out why a section of junk DNA — the 98% or so of the genome that does not code for proteins — raises the risk of at least one form of heart disease. About one in five deaths in the United States results from excessive build-up of fatty plaques inside arteries supplying blood to the heart — known as coronary artery disease (CAD). In 2007, genome-wide association studies1,2 on thousands of participants linked a non-coding stretch of chromosome 9p21 with the disease, and...

A new concept making its way through the scientific community holds that just a few key changes in the right genes will result in a whole new life form as different from its progenitor as a bird is from a lizard![1] This idea is being applied to a number of key problems in the evolutionary model, one of which is the lack of transitional forms in both the fossil record and the living (extant) record. The new concept supposedly adds support to the "punctuated equilibrium" model proposed by the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. Dr. Gould derived his ideas...

(See all these news nuggets and more by clicking the excerpt link below): 1. BBC News: “Darwin Teaching ‘Divides Opinion’” Darwinism is a controversial topic, and many believe creation should be taught in the classroom. But why is that news? 2. ScienceDaily: “Junk DNA Mechanism that Prevents Two Species from Reproducing Discovered” Has the U.S. government finally supported creationist research? Alas, no, but the results of a National Institutes of Health study fit squarely within the young-earth creation framework. 3. PhysOrg: “Charles Darwin Really Did Have Advanced Ideas about the Origin of Life” Charles Darwin was convinced that life’s origin...

Scientists have called it "junk DNA." They have long been perplexed by these extensive strands of genetic material that dominate the genome but seem to lack specific functions. Why would nature force the genome to carry so much excess baggage? Now researchers from Princeton University and Indiana University who have been studying the genome of a pond organism have found that junk DNA may not be so junky after all. They have discovered that DNA sequences from regions of what had been viewed as the "dispensable genome" are actually performing functions that are central for the organism. They have concluded...

Scientists have called it "junk DNA." They have long been perplexed by these extensive strands of genetic material that dominate the genome but seem to lack specific functions. Why would nature force the genome to carry so much excess baggage? Now researchers from Princeton University and Indiana University who have been studying the genome of a pond organism have found that junk DNA may not be so junky after all. They have discovered that DNA sequences from regions of what had been viewed as the "dispensable genome" are actually performing functions that are central for the organism. They have concluded...

In the Darwinist repertoire, a standard response to evidence of design in the genome is to point to the existence of “junk DNA.” What is it doing there, if purposeful design really is detectable in the history of life’s development? Of course this assumes that the “junk” really is junk. That assumption has been cast increasingly into doubt. New research just out in the journal Nature Genetics finds evidence that genetic elements previously thought of as rubbish are anything but...

I have been meaning for some time to write about an interesting paper in JACS by Naoki Sugimoto’s group in Kobe. It found its way into an article that I wrote this week for Nature’s online news. So I’ve decided to simply post this article here – it’s not all strictly relevant to water in biology, but hopefully is interesting stuff anyway. This is the version before editing, which has more detail. Shape might be one of the key factors in the function of mysterious ‘non-coding’ DNA. Everyone knows what DNA looks like. Its double helix decorates countless articles on...

More Functional Non-Coding DNA Found March 12, 2009 — Another finding undermines the concept of “junk DNA.” A team of scientists in Massachusetts found over a thousand functional RNA transcripts from intergenic sequences. These RNA transcripts, coming not from genes but from regions earlier thought to be non-functional, take part in diverse functions from stem cell pluripotency to HOX gene developmental processes to cell proliferation...