Epigenetics Comes of Age

In an extremely intriguing book, “Decoding Reality” (Oxford University Press, 2010) V. Vedral, among other things, compares living systems with the von Neumann’s machine consisting, in his description, of four basic components:- the protein synthesizing machine, M,- the biological nano-engine (akin to Xerox copier), X- enzymes which act as controllers switching the nano-engine on and off, C- the DNA information set.  (more…)

Craig’s Group’s New Breakthrough

On May 20 the J.Craig Venter Institute issued the following press release: (more…)

Dangers of Preamture Extrapolation in Biology (Part 2)

The Dogma of Genetic Sex Determination   For more than a century conventional textbook knowledge has been that sex is genetically determined by sex chromosomes. (more…)

The Dogma of the Genetic Program

Half a century ago we learned genes contain information for protein biosynthesis and that information is encoded in the form of the triplet code, according to which specific sequences of three nucleotides code for a specific amino acid. This is verified in thousands of organisms and by extrapolation we believe (or consider highly probable) that this is a universal code in the living world. (more…)

Which came first: the nervous system or the increased animal morphology? 

More than half billion years ago, during an evolutionarily very short period of time, an extremely rapid diversification of animal morphology took place that led to formation of all the extant and more extinct phyla that, for this reason, biologists call it Cambrian explosion. The New Synthesis has been unable to rationally explain the driving forces of the phenomenon, thus facilitating creationist attacks on the theory of evolution. (more…)