C. Francesco, Il Vangelo di Giovanni. Commento papirologico al capitolo II

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Editore Morcelliana CollanaAntico e Nuovo Testamento
Data uscita 02/2011
Pagine304, brossuraLingua Italiano
EAN 9788837224776

Il Vangelo di Giovanni è un testo complesso, e si presta a più letture: una, più immediata, riguarda direttamente la vita di Gesù, l'altra dà voce a un simbolismo che rinvia alla riflessione teologica del redattore stesso. Ma questa molteplicità di significati permea il Vangelo con metodo, diventa il veicolo delle diverse visioni del mondo in esso contenute - di Gesù, dei discepoli, della comunità e dei 'giudei' in primo luogo. Da questa plurivocità prende le mosse il volume, tentando di compiere una indagine pionieristica: a partire dall'attenta osservazione di una complessa interconnessione di stili narrativi presente nel Vangelo di Giovanni, si sottopone il testo a un commento papirologico - lavoro che però richiede da una parte il chiarimento della complessità e del ruolo che assolve nel contesto letterario e storico-sociale nel quale è inserito, e dall'altra l'esemplificazione della ricchezza che il commento papirologico può dischiudere. Perciò, se la prima parte è dedicata alla contestualizzazione del dato documentario attraverso la letteratura scientifica esistente, nella seconda si passa all'analisi della narrazione in base al materiale documentario. Un'indagine che, proprio basandosi su papiri documentari, mostra i suoi aspetti 'indomabili', perché i documenti stessi non possono essere coerenti, ma mostrano disomogeneità su argomenti, tematiche e particolari forniti.

A. Suciu, A New Witness to the Spiritual Homilies of Macarius in a Sahidic Manuscript

Under the name of Macarius the Egyptian, the great solitary from the desert of Scetis, have circulated numerous homilies, letters and other literary pieces which are sometimes labeled together as the “Macarian corpus.” I have recently identified some new fragments which belong to this corpus, yielding significant information about its transmission history in the languages of the Christian Orient.
Etc. at Alin Suciu's blog

Carnival of Evolution #36

This month's Carnival of Evolution (36th version) is hosted by Greg Laden at Greg Laden's Blog ["If You Love Evolution, Tweet About It!" COE # 36].

Here are the subtitles ...

• Hard Core Theory, Genetics, Mutations
• Kin Selection (or not)
• Ecology and evolution
• Microbes with ESP
• Applied Evolution
• Fish Physiology
• Crayfish Sex
• Human Evolution
• Darwinia
• Time and Deep Time
• Elephants
• Basic Concepts and Pedagogy
• Brains
• Extinction
• Blog The Controversy

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Gil Dodgen Explains the Salem Conjecture

The Salem Conjecture is the work of Bruce Salem. He suggested in the mid 1990s on talk.origins that of those creationists who claim professional expertise in evolution, a substantial percentage are engineers.

Bruce explained that most engineers are NOT creationists. It's only those who think they have special insight into biology who tend to be creationists.

This conjecture seems to hold but nobody knows why. It's one of the great mysteries of the world, right up there with why so many people hang toilet paper incorrectly and why it's only men who need to change after they get married.

Finally, after 15 years, Gil Dodgen offers an explanation for why engineers have such special insight into evolution [Who are the Real Freethinkers, Darwinists or ID Folks?].

The only thing I can think of is that the average Darwinist has no experience in designing any complex, functionally integrated system. The workings of the simplest cell make my AI program and the hardware on which it runs look like tinker toys.....

Self-replication does nothing to mitigate the probabilistic hurdles the Darwinian mechanism must overcome. How could this not be obvious to anyone with any experience in software or any other rigorous engineering discipline, and who has a basic understanding of combinatorial mathematics?

Oops, I forgot, most of these people have no experience in any rigorous engineering discipline. And those who do, and still believe in the Darwinian fantasy, have obviously undergone the atrophy and crippling of their basic reasoning powers — the product of many years of Darwinian indoctrination and suppression of free thought.

Who are the real freethinkers, Darwinists or ID folks? The Darwinian world is Orwellian.

Well, I'm glad that's settled. Now, I wish he'd turn his attention to some of the other serious mysteries that call out for an engineer's special insight. Maybe he can tell us the correct way to hang toilet paper?

(BTW, the posting just went up a few hours ago and there aren't any comments yet. I expect a flood of comments criticizing Gil for being rude to the scientists Darwinists. We all know that the IDiots are very sensitive about such behavior. They pride themselves on being polite and respectful toward their evolutionary biology Darwinist opponents.)

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Junk DNA Poll

If you haven't answered the junk DNA poll question in the margin then now's the time! There's only one week left.

The results so far are surprising—very different from my previous poll on this topic. It looks like one side is wining.

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The Central Dogma Strawman

Whenever you're trying to promote a new idea it's nice to have a scapegoat to beat up on. You're going to get a lot more attention if you can demonstrate that your latest results overthrow some key scientific concept that everyone took for granted. If you can't find a real "key concept" then the next best thing is to make one up.

For the past several decades that strawman target has been The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. The Central Dogma is supposed to represent the key concept of molecular biology yet it gets "overthrown" on a regular basis every six months. Isn't that strange?

The latest example comes from a Nature review of a recent Science paper. The Science paper presents evidence that many mRNA sequences differ from the sequences in the exons that encode them (Li et al., 2011). RNA editing has been known for decades and every few years it is trotted out again as proof that the Central Dogma is wrong. The recent Li et al. (2011) paper doesn't present evidence for a new phenomenon but it does suggest that RNA editing may be much more common than previously suspected.

Here's what Nature staff writer Erika Check Hayden says about this paper ("Cells may stray from 'central dogma'" Hayden, 2011a).

All science students learn the 'central dogma' of molecular biology: that the sequence of bases encoded in DNA determines the sequence of amino acids that makes up the corresponding proteins. But now researchers suggest that human cells may complicate this tidy picture by making many proteins that do not match their underlying DNA sequences.

Now if that really was what the Central Dogma actually said then it would have disappeared thirty years ago.

The real Central Dogma of Molecular Biology is ...

... once (sequential) information has passed into protein it cannot get out again (F.H.C. Crick, 1958)

The central dogma of molecular biology deals with the detailed residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information. It states that such information cannot be transferred from protein to either protein or nucleic acid. (F.H.C. Crick, 1970)

I've explained why this is the correct version in an old blog posting from 2007: Basic Concepts: The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. A very similar definition can be found on the Wikipedia site: Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. The key point is that once information flows into protein it can't flow back to nucleic acid. The standard misconception of the Central Dogma is actually the normal information flow pathway or what Crick called the "Sequence Hypothesis." It's a generality that was never meant to be an inviolate rule like the actual Central Dogma.

Hayden has another article in this week's print version of Nature (Hayden, 2011b). The second article emphasizes the controversy surrounding the Li et al. (2011) paper—lots of people are skeptical—but she doesn't back off the implications.

If verified, the findings would require a rewrite of the 'central dogma' of molecular biology, which posits that the RNA transcripts that carry genetic information to the ribosome, where they are used as templates for protein assembly, are generally faithful matches to the original DNA.

There are two remarkable things about such a statement. First, RNA editing has been an established fact for almost thirty years so if the Central Dogma needed rewriting it would have been done a long time ago. Second, Hayden was informed in the comments to her first article that there was a problem with her definition of the Central Dogma. Maybe she didn't have time to change the second version that was about to be published.

To be fair, this isn't just a problem with science writers who don't do their homework. Hayden is right when she says that most science students learn an incorrect version of the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. It's true that most textbooks promote the information flow pathway as the Central Dogma and they fail to point out that the real version only precludes reverse translation. I don't understand why so many textbook writers and teachers continue to teach something they know to be false as the "Central Dogma" of molecular biology.

Is it because they don't know about the exceptions?

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Crick, F.H.C. (1958) On protein synthesis. Symp. Soc. Exp. Biol. XII:138-163.

Crick, F. (1970) Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. Nature 227, 561-563. [PDF file]

Hayden, E.C. (2011a) Cells may stray from 'central dogma.' Nature Published online 19 May 2011 [doi:10.1038/news.2011.304.

Hayden, E.C. (2011a) Evidence of altered RNA stirs debate. Nature 473:432. [doi:10.1038/473432a]

Li, M., Wang, I.X., Li, Y., Bruzel, A., Richards, A.L., Toung, J.M., and Cheung, V.G. (2011) Widespread RNA and DNA Sequence Differences in the Human Transcriptome. Science. 2011 May 19. [Epub ahead of print] [Science]

The Black Knight

It's been fun battling the IDiots over junk DNA but it's time for a break. For no particular reason I thought of this video.

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