James A. Shapiro

I was at a conference in Venice a few weeks ago on "Evolution in the Age of Genomics." The most interesting presentation at the meeting was by Peter and Rosemary Grant, Princeton biologists who have been studying Darwin's finches in the Galapagos for the past three-plus decades. This work is...

A good way to see how natural genetic engineering facilitates the evolutionary process is to review what we have learned about protein evolution. Many of the links in this posting will be to articles from Scientific American, which should be easier for non-biologists to understand.

In the 1940s, the link...

On my latest blog, ThinkCreeps posted a comment quoting my statement that "we do not know why natural genetic engineering systems are as successful as they have been in generating useful evolutionary novelties in the history of life." Then he goes on to answer, "Yes we do -...

In a very complimentary blog entitled "Seeing Past Darwin II: James A. Shapiro," James Barham poses the following question and then chides me gently for not answering it:

But if natural selection cannot explain natural genetic engineering, what can?

On this point, Shapiro is admittedly not as...

In my last blog, I received repeated accusations of being "anti-evolution" from John Kwok and Keith Roragen. These accusations puzzled me, and I tried to explain why I was puzzled in my online answers to them. But they continued to insist.

My basic argument on the blog (and...

In commenting on my last blog, Lyaeus 10 pointed out how serious the problem has become with the introduction of supernatural ideas into the classroom: "I live in a state that just passed laws to 'teach the controversy' in regards to controversial sciences which is rather obviously a...

In a recent posting on his Why Evolution Is True website, "Jim Shapiro continues his misguided attack on neo-Darwinism," Jerry Coyne attacks me again. Let us examine some of his arguments.

1.

"[I]n one of his posts he explicitly uses a creationist trope:

The first problem with...

Your immune system protects you with a set of remarkable molecules called "antibodies" (described in a YouTube lecture and on Wikipedia). Antibodies can recognize an infinite range of unknown invaders (e.g., viruses, bacteria, parasites, toxins) and tag them for destruction by other components of the immune...

Recent postings have provoked numerous questions about my application of the term "cognitive" to cell regulatory processes. I base this usage on the notion that cognitive actions are knowledge-based and involve decisions appropriate to acquired information. It is common today for molecular, cell and developmental biologists to speak of cells...

Among the 20th Century's truly great biologists, the pioneering American geneticist Barbara McClintock is still largely unknown to the public -- except, perhaps, for the fact that her views were decidedly different from those of her mainstream colleagues. Among her accomplishments, McClintock was the first person to document genome repair...

In his 2009 book, Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell, neurobiologist and bacterial behavior researcher Dennis Bray names Barbara McClintock the first biologist to ask, "What does a cell know about itself?" What lay behind this question, a question that...

My post last week elicited a number of sharply critical comments from conventional evolutionary thinkers, most notably from my University of Chicago colleague Jerry Coyne on his Why Evolution Is True website. Let me respond and add four additional points.

1. The comments from Jerry Coyne and other...

In The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin proposed to explain how one life form gave rise to another. He subtitled the book, "The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." He argued that a succession of small improvements in reproductive success...

Your life depends on purposeful, targeted changes to cellular DNA. Although conventional thinking says directed DNA changes are impossible, the truth is that you could not survive without them. Your immune system needs to engineer certain DNA sequences in just the right way to function properly.

Today's blog is...

Last week the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a half-page letter entitled "No Need To Panic About Global Warming" above the center fold of its Opinion page. The letter was signed by 16 prominent scientists and claimed, among other things, "Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the...

Among the most mysterious features of evolving genomes are stretches of DNA that carry two or more kinds of information in a single sequence.

In the 1950s to 1970s, molecular biologists were sure that each DNA sequence could not encode more than one polypeptide chain. The reason was...

After discovering the basic principle of electromagnetic induction in 1831, Michael Faraday was asked by a skeptical politician what good might come of electricity. "Sir, I do not know what it is good for," Faraday replied. "But of one thing I am quite certain -- someday you will...

Virulent drug-resistant "superbugs" are back in the news. We have a lot to learn from these small but smart creatures. To the dismay of many in the pubic health field, the FDA just dropped plans to enforce a 1977(!) decision to limit the use of antibiotics in animal...

"Scientific development depends in part on a process of non-incremental or revolutionary change...The usual prelude to changes of this sort is...the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit existing ways of ordering phenomena. The changes that result therefore require 'putting on a different...