RSR: Renowned Scientist Sternberg on Junk DNA
* Another Man's Treasure: Real Science Radio host Bob Enyart interviews former Smithsonian researcher Dr. Richard Sternberg, one of the key scientists in the history of the debate over junk DNA. Ben Stein's movie "Expelled" profiled this highly credentialed and widely published evolutionary biologist. Bob's guest explains some of the astounding functionality of the human genome and describes the shrinking case for the neo-Darwinist claim that most of our DNA is functionless. Dr. Sternberg also comments on an audio clip from 17 years ago when famed atheist evolutionist Eugenie Scott presented Junk DNA to Bob Enyart as her best evidence against an intelligent designer.
* Sternberg's Bio, Research, & Publications: To keep up with Richard Sternberg (if you can), you can follow his research through his publication and see how his views on evolution changed, all at his site, RichardSternberg.com.
* Related Nature News Item: While Sternberg remains an old-earther, Nature's report of Cal State's firing of the creationist director of its Northridge microscopy lab garnered a first comment that exposes the disingenuous criticism that ID proponents (and creationists) do not publish in peer-reviewed journals. The Nature News story, University sued after firing creationist fossil hunter, reports that RSR friend Mark Armitage:
- "published his [Triceratops soft tissue] findings in Acta Histochemica, a journal of cell and tissue research (M. H. Armitage and K. L. Anderson Acta Histochem. 115, 603–608; 2013). Two weeks later, he was fired from his job at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where he managed the biology department’s electron and confocal microscopy suite."
- "It was just morphology," says Mary Schweitzer, a palaeontologist at North Carolina State University at Raleigh who reviewed the work before publication, and made the first discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur bones in 2005. “It was fine.”
- [Armitage had authored "roughly 30 technical articles on microscopy"
- "'I'm not a microscopist but as far as I could tell, Armitage was a good one,' Paul Wilson, a biologist at CSUN, told Nature."
Yet with all that, the first comment that Nature chose to publish, by a Robert Buntrock, says, "Somehow he flew his publications under the radar. ... Stealth publishing of pseudoscience lurking in the background is unprofessional and invalid." In this freudian slip, Buntrock is saying that Acta Histochemica and the other journals should reject papers on a presuppositional basis. For regardless of a specific paper's scientific validity, based on an ad hominem bias against any researcher who holds to an anti-Darwinian worldview, their work should be summarily rejected regardless of its significance and its rigid adherence to accepted scientifc methodology. Those who own journals do get to make the rules about who to publish and who not to publish. However to the extent that Buntrock is expressing the view of the Darwinian community, it is disingenuous to criticize creationists and ID proponents for not publishing in evolutionary science journals when in reality the system is rigged to automatically reject their submissions, regardless of any apparent scientific validity.
* Dawkins Validates the Intelligent Design Argument: In the film that profiled Dr. Sternberg's ouster from the Smithsonian, Ben Stein's movie Expelled, Richard Dawkins admited that microbiology could provide the evidence for the intelligent design of life on Earth. From about 85 minutes into the film (and 3 minutes into the clip below), Ben Stein asks, "What do you think is the possibility that intelligent design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in evolution?" Here's a transcript of the reply:
"It could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time somewhere in the universe a civilization evolved, by probably some kind of Darwinian means, to a very, very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose that it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry and molecular biology. You might find a signature of some sort of designer… And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe." -Richard Dawkins, in Expelled
* See more on Dawkins: For some ironic observations about Richard Dawkins, see realscienceradio.com/Dawkins.
* I Saw "Expelled" 15 Times: As part of the American RTL movie marathon, Real Science Radio host Bob Enyart saw Ben Stein's film 15 times with other ARTL members in Colorado theaters during opening weekend. The widespread claim by evolutionists that somehow atheist Richard Dawkins was misrepresented by editing or tricked about the topic of discussion is untenable. Dawkins is engaged in the discussion with Stein; he admits that the complexity observed in microbiology could be evidence that life on earth originated from a higher intelligence, somewhere out there in the universe. Of course, he claims that such a higher life-form must have evolved by some kind of Darwinian mechanism. But if genetic and cellular complexity provides evidence that life on earth is too complex to arise by chance, then evolutionists like Dawkins and Francis Crick are just punting to claim it must have originated somewhere else. The film is powerful.
* Bob Concludes His Interview with Dr. Rob Carter: Real Science Radio concludes its interview with molecular biologist Dr. Rob Carter on the stunning new video (and book), 
