At the risk of injecting some logic into this discussion: by the logic of that sign we are all murderers, since it draws an equivalence between bacteria and a heartbeat, and we have all k**led bacteria at one time or another. Just sayin...

BTW, perhaps a reflection of the educational level of the person holding that sign is the grammatical error "a bacteria". It should be "a bacterium".

I'm certainly not a Trump fan, but lets be real here. He is 10 days into planning his t***sition! IMO he should not even be meeting with foreign leaders until after the inauguration, when the State Department would organize state visits.

"Near perfect", but not perfect. Fifty years of epigenetic variation results in identical twins being not-so-identical genetically. That said, it is the best you can hope for, and is pretty good as a control for large effects.

Let me throw some facts on this fire. Firstly, the clotting mechanism you describe is only found in hominins. Other animals have ony part of the clotting cascade, yet still manage to clot their blood. An example of this is the whale, which is lacking several of the cascade's components, yet doesn't bleed to death. Secondly, manyof the components of the clotting cascade are proteolytic enzymes which are found in some organisms, where they are responsible for cleaving proteins rather than participating in the clotting cascade. So...the likelihood is that over the course of evolution already existing proteolytic enzymes were recruited into a varietyof cascades that produce the thickening of blood we call clotting. Thus, the mechanism demonstrated not irreducible complexity, but reducible simplicity.

Please reread the article. The court did not uphold the refusal to sell guns to possible terrorists, the court upheld the right of the gun store owner to say in public that he would refuse to sell guns to possible terrorists. The dismissal was based on the failure of the plaintiff to demonstrate any actual harm, since they had not attempted to purchase guns at the store. While the court's decision is a victory for free speech, it should not be seen as an endorsement of bigotry against Muslims (or , for that matter, b***k A******ns, in whose case the courts have already ruled that a store doing business with the public cannot prohibit sales based on color).

Oh, please, please read a physics text. Entropy is defined by every physics text as the heat t***sfer divided by the temperature. That's all! It deals with energy and heat, and says nothing about disorder, and certainly nothing about disease-causing organisms. It has become fashionable to pretend that the second law is concerned with degrees of disorder, but it doesn't, so any argument about disorder that relies on second law principles is, be definition, a false waste of time.

How far wrong you are is truly breathtaking! try reading even a middle school-level science text, and you will see that the second law applies only to closed systems. In open systems the addition of energy, for example, is able to allow entropy to decrease. Otherwise, how do you think that an infant develops into an adult with increased complexity.

As for new diseases appearing, that would, in fact, be evolution at work, not some imaginary perversion of thermodynamics.

True enough, but misleading. A rocket scientist at NASA cannot do a good job getting to the moon if he/she does not believe in mathematics, which is the underpinning and unifying concept in engineering. It is also true that modern biologists do not, in the course of their everyday research activities, constantly invoke evolution any more than a carpenter invokes physics every time he/she swings a hammer. Nevertheless, unifying concepts are important in the long run, and the theory of evolution is certainly one such concept. In my own work on nutrition and longevity we do not check in with evolution on a daily basis, but we do frequently question how some response we observe might render an animal more fit to survive to reproduce, and this gives us insight into where to look for answers.

Behe has been refuted on this issue. See http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v4/n10/full/nrmicro1493.html for an explanation. Briefly, the components of the bacterial f**gellum existed/exist in simpler forms playing other roles, mostly secretory. Occasionally, even today, these simpler units are seen to aggregate, and even rotate. The key idea here is that the f**gellum is reducible to components that carry out other tasks. Similarly, Behe insists that blood clotting is irreducibly complex, whereas it is not. Whales use only a fraction of the units used in other mammals to produce blood clotting. Furthermore, many of the components of the clotting cascade are proteases that, in other species carry out protein degradation, but not (yet) clotting.

"Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion. Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society."

Thomas Jefferson to Virginia Baptists in 1808

Planarians are highly evolved to fit their own ecological niche. It is purely a value judgement to say that they are less evolved - they do what they do better than other supposedly more evolved organisms. But the argument isn't about planarians, but about live organisms in general. Giraffes are better giraffes than we are, just as we are better human beings than giraffes (or planarians, for that matter).

You really don't understand the theory you so consistently demean! What do you mean by "why is everything getting worse, when it should be getting better?" You are taking a 100% anthropocentric view, which is leading you to an incorrect conclusion. "Things" are, in fact, getting better for something (in terms of reproductive success), and that may mean that "things" are more difficult for some other species. Evolution doesn't care whose ox is gored. While you think of a planarian as a poorly evolved organism, planaria think of you as really poorly developed and evolved planarians since you can't survive and reproduce in their world.

Sorry for the late response, but I was giving (and grading, ugh) mid-term exams. There are several incorrect assumptions inherent in what you have said. First, as pointed out in the paper itself, there is the assumption that changes must be exact. The multi-hundred million year prediction assumes that there must be an exact match for a 7-8 letter word, but, as the authors say,

"Fortunately, in biological reality, the match of a regulatory protein to the target sequence does not have to be exact for binding to occur. Biological reality is complicated, with the acceptable sequences for binding described by position weight matrices that indicate the flexibility at different points in the sequence. To simplify, we assume that binding will occur to any eight-letter word that has seven letters in common with the target word. If we do this, then the mean waiting time reduces to ∼60,000 years."

The second assumption you have made, that evolution is dependent on changing regulatory sequences, is incorrect. While it is true that in some (many?) cases regulatory sequences are involved, there are many other types of genetic/molecular events that can account for morphological changes. The new information on micro-RNA is one such example of non-regulatory changes that could alter regulation of gene expression.

No, if Eve were made from Adam's rib women would have an X and a Y c********e - they don't.

Please go and read the Durrett and Schmidt paper instead of the classic comic slanted summary. They do say that under some conditions that are not realistic it could take 100 million years, but using realistic boundaries, the time required is more in the very few hundreds of thousand years-very practicable for evolution. In fact, their paper is a direct disputation of Behe's nonsense.