1. Bush Vetoes Measure on Stem Cell Research

Comment #51023 by John Edwards on June 21, 2007 at 7:25 am

"fresh lines drawn from surplus embryos destined to be destroyed by fertility clinics"

It's legal for the clinics to destroy the surplus embryos? Anyone care to explain the underlying logic here?

2. The Great Mutator

Comment #49681 by John Edwards on June 12, 2007 at 11:41 pm

Given Jerry Coyne's vigorous, clear and most welcome refutation of the latest ID nonsense it may seem churlish to comment on a detail of the science. But the sane biological community may wish to avoid offering hostages to the other lot!

In section IV I seem to detect some confusion between the cilia and flagella of eukaryotic cells with the flagella of bacteria. These two types of flagella share name and motile function, but are totally different structures without common ancestry. The shaft of the bacterial flagellum is passively driven by a rotor at its base. This is the structure which has components homologous with the type III secretory proteins as discussed by Ken Miller, and forms the "discovery of the wheel" focus in "Rendezvous 39" of RD's "The Ancestor's Tale".

The cilia and flagella of eukaryotic cells on the other hand are constructed from totally different proteins, and have motor activity distributed along their length - they operate by generating and propagating bends, and the descriptive "whip-like" naming is particularly misleading in relation to their mechanism.