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Ready, Steady, Evolve
Stront writes "New Scientist is reporting that plants and animals can 'bottle up' evolution until they need it. A certain protein 'hides away' mutated genes acting like a genetic valet, however in extreme environments, such as high temperature or noxious chemicals, the cleaning process breaks down and the mutations are released all at once. This goes some way to explaining examples that are considered to defy standard evolutionary theory, such as the Bombardier Beetle."
Doesn't this kind of go against the theory of natural selection? I mean, if the mutated gene is hidden, then there really isn't a difference between the inferior and superior versions, so the gene pool won't be improved.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
and
Develop inhibitor in other tissues so as not to poison self
Did I miss anything? Oh yeah, anyone who thinks postulating God is a smaller step than postulating evolution is fooling themselves big time.
My copy of NS is back at home, so I can't comment on the new stuff, just the old rubbish about 'The bombadier beetle couldn't have evolved' <sigh>
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Ignoring all the people who want to get into a creationist vs. evolution debate, I find this very interesting. (For the record, I'm a Christian who is interested in science.)
I've always been curious about evolution, but have found a problem in it that I havn't been able to get around.
We can see natural selection at work withen a species before our eyes in a matter of generations, but have yet to see any dramatic jump that evolutionary theory supports.
Could this be the answer? Could these stored up Genes have enough in side of them to not only modify a breed of species, but create an entirly new one? I'd love to see more research on this.
If so, we have discovered the final missing link in evolutionary theory.
The Internet is generally stupid
For your fear of evolution, I suggest Darwin's book, The Voyage of the Beagle. You can find it in wiretap if not your local library.
As for the sanity argument, you're both right and wrong. I've decided myself that I must assume my own sanity for anything else to follow. If I don't, I can't do anything at all. I don't pretend to be able to prove my sanity, and indeed, I sometimes question it.
There is a fantastic angle to one's sanity that you should consider. Read Go"del, Escher, Bach by Dounglas Hofstadter. Page 191-192 even, the argument between Prudence and Imprudence. They discuss something much simpler than evolution; propositional calculus (aka. basic logic): the theory that given "if P then Q" AND "P" always means Q. Imprudence ends with "You want a proof. I guess that means you want to be more convinced that the Propositional Calculus is consistent than you are convinced of your own sanity...."
I realise that this is going to get modded down, but it frustrates me that so many people who pull this "I'm a Christian therefore I believe in God not evolution" crap are actually simple drones of the right. Think for yourself, will ya?
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
I've always wanted to believe that a true scientist does not care what the truth is just so long as he knows that he's got it. Find the answer, deal with the ramifications later. I've also liked to believe that any intellegent person will evaluate an idea on its own merits rather than pick from whatever popular ideas are currently available.
Enter evolutionary theory. It seems that to show any skeptisism is to be labled a creationist. Who decided that those were the only options? Regardless of the validity of any other ideas out there, modern evolutionary theory does have trouble neatly explaining some observations. As a result, the theory is continually becoing more complex (There is really not sufficient room to go into detail so I apologize). At some point, skeptisism is appropriate.
Years ago, people widely believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and anyone who didn't think so was automatically labled a heretic. Rather than concede that the Earth was moving, planets were plotted as moving in epicyclic patterns. This was a real mess to explain in the context of known physics. As far as I know, Gallileo was not an atheist yet I believe he was excommunicated for suggesting that the Earth moved.
Now it's the opposite problem. To challenge evolutionary theory is to be labled a creationist, even though evolutionary theory is looking more and more like planets moving in epicycles everyday.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
If your existence came into being based on totally random events, then your brain also was the result of a random event.
One line of thinking is to believe that God set it all up: the Big Bang, evolution, killer asteroids all to get to this point. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, there's no reason to believe God couldn't have figured out exactly the starting conditions to create humans. And in so doing, God not only demonstrates that ability, but also gives us li'l children of his a world with all sorts of clues about how it works and how it came to be how it is. And now our task, should we choose to accept it, is to create a universe where we have defeated the Four Horsemen and our own flaws because it's the Right Thing To Do.
To me, God starting with the Big Bang and getting to here is a lot more impressive than doing a little sculpting in 4004 B.C.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Everyone, please read this article at Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense . It states 15 common statements/questions that creationists pose to try and discount evolution, and answers them all quite nicely.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
This was the *basis* for Darwin's Radio. Greg Bear is an excellent Sci-fi author (check out Eon and Eternity which involve some really cute stuff based on general relativity) who obviously does his research when writing. I have a PhD in experimental physics from MIT and I never have the "ugggh" factor when some rabbit gets pulled out of a hat for plot purposes in his stories. Great stuff.
But more specifically...Bear's story presents the idea that HERVS (Human endogenous retro viruses) = viruses that got absorbed into the genome over millions of years act as a kind of computer program that can be activated in times of evolutionary stress (possibly hormonally triggered) in order to activate a rapid program of "testing" ideas from an encoded library of evolutionary tricks to increase survivability.
The idea has the effect of adding another layer of complexity to evolution and making the timescale for substantial modifications to the genome *much* shorter than even existed in
"punctuated equilibria" models.
Disclaimer: IANAB (I am not a biologist!)
My question isn't creationism vs evolution but why creationists can only see God working like some Las Vegas magician causing things to pop out of thin air. Why can't they believe that evolution is God's mechanism for creation? Creation didn't stop 7000 yrs or so ago (when bible literalists believe the world was made) but is an ongoing process.
Hundreds of years ago these same people would've been saying that "There's no proof that planets orbit the sun" or that "The surface of the earth isn't slowly moving". As more scientific knowledge comes in they are forced to drop dearly held beliefs and move on to new ones. Eternal "truths" don't work very well when they are based on the current temporal world. Instead of tying their faiths to the physical world they should focus on the philosophical and spiritual worlds where they should've been all along.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The catolic church did murder in the medieval times and it was all right. The United States goverment do murder people (death penalty) and it is all right. what is moral and what is not is just a matter of culture and culture changes. The highjackers of 9/11 murdered thousands of people, and I have no doubt that they think that this move were rigth thing to do. Shure in my opinion all those are incredliby wrong and moraly inaceptable, and I am an atheist. I do not fear that a god will punish me if I kill a person, but I do believe it is wrong.
Just because I don't believe there is a "god" watching over me this does not mean that all those things my parents, my family, my teachers and my friends have tought me are sudenly invalid. Religions do impose a moral, but it is not the only way. If this were so people who are jews or budist should have a diferent law then cristians or muslins? After all the laws reflect, or at least should reflect the morals of a culture.
And you ask what is the utility of morals beside avoid being punished? Why do you think the world is not a chaotic place? If there were no morals, people would kill each other because they steped on your feet. Every society have a moral, and it is dinamic, the hole point is that it changes slowly, in terms of generations. Your morals are diferent from those of you father and even more then of your grandfather. why do you think it was all right to have slaves before and now it is a crime? If morals weren't dinamic, we would still be slavaring people and buring witches in public places (maybe live in CNN).
People are moral not to avoid punishment, but because they do believe that folowing those rules they are doing the right thing. And if the olnly reason a person don't kill others is because you believe there is a "supreme being" that will punish you if he did, I do hope never to meet with that person, because when he or she overcome the fear of this "punishment", then he or she would most likely become a serial killer.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
The real problem with discussing natural selection is it assumes we're smart enough to understand the ENTIRE picture...
If a horse evolved a saddle, no, it doesn't provide the horse with an advantage in the wild, but if it helps it be adopted by humans and through that relationship fed, protected from predetors, and allowed to breed, then the saddle was a beneficial adaptation by the horse.
Look at aphids and ants... the ability to secrete sugar is not a particularly useful ability for the aphid, but the ants then enter into a symbiotic relationship, helping protect and nurture the aphids.
Another good example is the breeding of dogs. There are many breeds which now are totally unsuited for life in the wild (short legs, terrible arthritic joints, etc). These are not traits which are inherently useful to the dog, but we seem to like them. Just because we were the ones selecting the properties we liked, and not a life/death struggle in the wild, doesn't make it any less evolution.
Nature doesn't care how (or why!) the organism survives and procreates, only that it does.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
I think it's very wrong to generalize about "engineers" using those who post on Slashdot as a representative sample. On any given topic, including computer-related topics, a large number of /. posts exhibit a surprising degree of ignorance. I think, as with anything else (like TV news), when it's a field you're more familiar with, you're much more likely to notice the errors, as well as more likely to be judgemental about those errors.
Actually, I think it can be a mistake to even label someone "an engineer" and make significant assumptions of their strengths and weaknesses based on that. Most intelligent, thinking people (note I'm excluding well over 50% of the general population here) have multiple interests and strengths, and it's only the most narrow of these who have limited their life's scope to only those topics which directly affect their work.
As for talking monkeys, we are conceptualizing, abstracting, self-aware monkeys. Those qualities tend to make the particular animal family we belong to somewhat irrelevant.
Which brings me to understanding the cosmos - it's easy to prove that we aren't capable of understanding it in any complete sense. However, given time and access to sufficient information, we are capable of developing theories which encapsulate and communicate the essence of what's going on. It's difficult to imagine any rational, detectable process, which does not involve a deity, being impenetrable to the application of analysis and logic, and to the development of appropriate theories.
The idea that "there's no guarantee that it's all accessible to our brand of cognition or any other computation" tends to imply that there's an unknowable deity or equivalent process doing things that we can't possibly understand, and which defy logic. I don't think that's likely to be correct. What will stop us from knowing something are simply physical and logical limitations - we can't know what preceded our universe, or what's outside our universe, or what it's really like inside a black hole, etc. Some of these questions are essentially meaningless, at least to us. Already, at the quantum level, we're reduced to describing particles as clouds of probability - but this doesn't necessarily reflect a gap in our understanding at all. You could argue that the inside of a black hole or the exact nature of an electron are not "accessible to our brand of cognition", but it seems more likely that these things are fundamentally not accessible to three-dimensional creatures occupying four-dimensional spacetime in this particular universe.
Another physical limitation is the degree of complexity our brains are capable of entertaining. Our theories are all compressions of reality, and we never have access to nor time to process all possible relevant information. Our theories are always only simplified models and approximations. So it's a given that our understanding on any particular topic is always limited. But the flip side of that is that we are capable of coming to some understanding, however limited and gross, of any topic that is physically accessible to our inspection.
Call me a heretic but...
Who is to say that God didn't create the mechanism of evolution? It goes along with my belief that God wouldn't create a creature that couldn't adapt.
Also, the idea that form follows function fits nicely into the idea of niche.
A definition of niche from AP Dictionary:
the unique position occupied by a particular species, conceived both in terms of the actual physical area that it inhabits and the function that it performs within the community.
It is plain to see that life adapts. To suggest otherwise would be to deny the very truth. The finches on Galapagos are one of the first and most pristine examples of both adaptation and niches.
Furthermore, I believe that many, including myself, study science because it is the search for truth and meaning in the physical world. As such, you could consider it a religion of sorts. As for me, such a scientific search for the truth is merely a parallel path to the search for God, like orthodox christianity, because truth is what God is all about.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.