 Richard Sternberg is a fellow at the Discovery Institute. He has a PhD in biology and a PhD in systems science, which is clarified on his resume as a theoretical biology specialization within an industrial engineering department. A PubMed literature search reveals only a single publication, although he lists several more publications on his resume of the type not indexed in Medline. His specialization seems to be the classification of marine crustaceans and theory underlying repetitive DNA elements. He's a practicing Roman Catholic and a former member of several creation science groups. For example, prior to his involvement in intelligent design creationism, he was on the editorial board of the baromenology study group that attempted to define the biblical kinds. He's most famous for his appearance on Expelled, the creationist propaganda film that inexplicably blamed the Holocaust on the evolution. He was fired from an unpaid position at the Smithsonian for publishing the work of philosopher Stephen Meyer in the proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a peer-reviewed journal he was editor-in-chief of. The content was out of place for the journal and the publishing process was suspiciously handled. Sternberg is one of the two actual biologists at the Discovery Institute, the other being Michael Beehe. I think I understand Beehe, but Sternberg was always a bit of a puzzle to me. I assumed he was reasonably intelligent and well-versed in molecular biology. He worked at the NCBI, the central repository for genomics data, as a curator of fish and crustacean databases. This is why I was astounded when on the Discovery Institute blog, Evolution News and Views, he made the kind of blunder a first-year graduate student might make. Here's the statement. So let's do the math. At least 90% of gene transcripts undergo alternative splicing and there are at least 190,000 introns in the human genome. That means we have at least 0.9 times 190,000 or 171,000 introns that participate in the alternative splicing pathways available to a cell. Let me explain a bit. The Discovery Institute are obsessed with junk DNA. It doesn't fit with the creationist idea of supernatural design, so they wait for any evidence for the slightest function of any non-coding DNA and when that happens they pounce on the article and crow about how they predicted this result. They're passive spectators on the sidelines of science making no contributions to the body of knowledge but taking credit for the actions of the players. Junk DNA has a very important function to play. It spaces genes, absorbs mutations that would otherwise be harmful and a very small percentage of it has structural and regulatory roles in the cell. It's been called junk not because it has no role but because we can delete it and replace it with any other sequence without effect. Sometimes scientists identified new roles for this non-coding sequence and a recent discovery found that a lot of it was being transcribed into RNA. This is far from saying that it was doing anything important but this is still an area where we might expect further developments or discoveries. I should point out that a medline query for junk DNA returns 103 papers since 1972. It's not a term used by scientists because it's not very descriptive of exactly what we're talking about. I've already made a video on this topic and I don't want to flagellate a deceased equine. Suffice it to say that junk in this sense refers to something that is not currently in use but not trash. We go to junkyards to find parts for reuse. We store our junk in closets and attics. We're not currently using it but it's not useless. What Sternberg is specifically addressing is a comment by a scientist, Steve Matheson, in a debate with philosopher and apologist Steven Meyer, another fellow of the Discovery Institute. Matheson was responding to Meyer's assertion that introns have functional roles in the cell. What are introns? Inside of the parts of our DNA that code for proteins are little chunks of sequence that get made into RNA but don't actually contain information about how to make that protein. These non-coding sequences called introns have to be removed to make a functional or mature mRNA. This is called splicing and the products are called splice variants because they vary in how they're spliced back together. The evolutionary advantage of having such sequences is that depending on other signals the cellular machinery can produce alternative versions of the same gene product. This means that one splice variant can be found in your liver and another in your brain and one only found in the fetal heart. So what mistake did Sternberg make in his blog post? Let's look at it again. His points of fact are 1. At least 90% of all transcripts undergo alternative splicing. 2. There are at least 190,000 introns in the human genome. Therefore 0.9 times 190,000 or 171,000 introns are involved in alternative splicing. Can you spot the mistake? How about if I create an analogy with the following facts? 1. There are up to 100 fatal vehicle wrecks in Seattle every year. 2. Vehicles can hold up to 24 people as in the case of buses. 3. Therefore 2400 people die every year in vehicle wrecks in Seattle. Now that certainly sets an upper limit for the number but it confuses vehicles with passengers. Using vehicles and assuming a very high value for passengers is a transparent attempt to come up with a very high value especially when we could come up with a more accurate figure using other data. Realistically, most of those vehicles only contained one or a few passengers. We could even estimate more accurately from the average number of passengers per car. In the case of alternative splicing, only a single intron must be removed to include it in this category. There are on average about 8 introns per gene. Sternberg's figure assumes that every possible intron is involved in alternative splicing assuming the theoretical maximum. The lower bound using Sternberg's figures is 22,500. Using more realistic figures, the number of introns involved in alternative splicing is probably between a thousand and ten thousand, not 171,000 as Sternberg suggests. This is a rather substantial error. Some other bloggers pointed out his mathematical errors and Sternberg, to my great amusement, repeated the same mistake in a second post but this time using a slightly different variation of the same error. But he's still multiplying a percentage of genes times a number of introns and ignoring the fact that most of the introns in an alternatively spliced transcript are uninvolved in the process. Conveniently, that makes his numbers very high, which suits his position. It's not just the error that's embarrassing. It's the fact that he doesn't see the basic flaw in his assumptions. Every single intron in a gene isn't involved in alternative splicing any more than every car on the highway is packed to capacity with passengers. Now I make a lot of errors of this nature. I've made more than my share in my videos and my thanks to those of you who corrected me. I'm surprised at Sternberg's lack of understanding of alternative splicing, but I think it's the second post that reveals something a bit deeper about him. A good scientist always allows that they may be wrong. There's a humility in professional science. We're often passionate about our topics, but when confronted with a mistake, it's a matter of scientific honor that we confess, correct and confirm a phrase I learned from my graduate advisor. We admit the mistake, correct it and verify that the new version is accurate. Being bullheaded and stubborn is not a scientific virtue, and it's been the downfall of many a scientific career. Then I realized that this is the fate of scientists unable to face their own mistakes honestly. They end up in French groups. They champion anti-science. What happens to a scientist that loses their ability to recognize their own mistakes is that they become creationists or AIDS denialists or anti-vaccine doctors. They begin to turn a blind eye to logic and reason, to turn their back on the community of science. They abandon critical thinking for dogmatism. I think we're seeing the effects of that in Sternberg's second post. The only person that has expelled Richard Sternberg from the scientific community is Richard Sternberg. By an inability to engage honestly in the process of science, he's turned his back on the virtues of science and embraced dogmatism. And he's now officially a laughing stock. Thanks for watching.