In the past six months, I have encountered a review, by Thomas Nagel in The New York Review of Books (2012), of Alvin Plantinga’s latest book (Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, 2011 ) and a review, by Alvin Plantinga in The New...
An assumption fundamental to medical genetics is that the DNA sequence of an allele at a particular locus will (in the vast majority of instances) be faithfully transcribed into RNA and translated into protein. This assumption has been largely accepted in spite of...
The imitation of living and sentient beings by machines is recently much on the minds of many Americans. A computer designed and built by scientists and engineers at IBM, “Watson,” convincingly defeated two former “Jeopardy” champions in a televised competition...
Randy Nesse recently reviewed a new book (“The Evolution of Obesity” by Power and Schulkin) on weight regulation [Nature, 2009)]. In the course of the review, Nesse took note of the authors’ evidence that leptin-associated function is highly...
Geneticists and evolutionary biologists have for decades embraced the view, no doubt reinforced by terminology such as “silent” (i.e., synonymous) mutations, that for protein-encoding genes, genotype determines phenotype through control of the amino acid...
