The claim that textbooks need to be revised is very inflammatory. I am a student right now, in microbiology/molecular bio. The phrase "one gene, one protein" is said, but more as a history lesson of how people used to think it was so simple. There are lots of genes we know now that don't work this way, immunoglobulins, and many many virus genes... and the article says maybe the non-gene parts are important. OF COURSE they are, they are at least as important as the genes, when and how often to transcribe a gene is very important!
I don't think the person they were interviewing said anything wrong, i just think the person writing didn't know much about what they were talking about, and/or wanted a good story. While it is possible this 30,000 number means more of our genes are multi-functional than we thought, we definitely knew of a lot that were already.
Most reporters weren't covering the stort like a vindication of evolution, because it's really not. I mean it doesn't disprove evolution, but real science has had proof of evolution for a long time. Non-scientists seem to think that evolution is some part of biology that may or may not be true, in fact it is the fundamental part of biology.
A comparison to physics for example might be if someone discovered something about a star exploding far away, and someone covered the story as "Physicists finally have proof of the Laws of thermodynamics!" well, the physicists might argue that in fact they had never questioned thermodynamics, and that proving the laws in no way was the goal of the research.
The difference is that physicists don't have people that are interested yet opposed to their viewpoints from a non-scientific view, while biologists do.
Creationsts really don't understand much of anything on a genetic level, they can pretend that their theories make sense; but they do so little to explain anything to any detail. For example the arrangement and usage of the hemaglobin genes screams evolution, but creationists don't talk about it. One could say they are trying to cover up things that don't quite jive with their story, my theory though is that they generally don't know much about gene arrangement etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the person they were interviewing said anything wrong, i just think the person writing didn't know much about what they were talking about, and/or wanted a good story. While it is possible this 30,000 number means more of our genes are multi-functional than we thought, we definitely knew of a lot that were already.
A comparison to physics for example might be if someone discovered something about a star exploding far away, and someone covered the story as "Physicists finally have proof of the Laws of thermodynamics!" well, the physicists might argue that in fact they had never questioned thermodynamics, and that proving the laws in no way was the goal of the research.
The difference is that physicists don't have people that are interested yet opposed to their viewpoints from a non-scientific view, while biologists do. Creationsts really don't understand much of anything on a genetic level, they can pretend that their theories make sense; but they do so little to explain anything to any detail. For example the arrangement and usage of the hemaglobin genes screams evolution, but creationists don't talk about it. One could say they are trying to cover up things that don't quite jive with their story, my theory though is that they generally don't know much about gene arrangement etc.
There's no room for science in "Creation Science"