Happy Darwin Day!

proclus writes "In honor of the day, I have released some autobiographical material, which forms the background for GNU-Darwin and some other projects. Alternatively, you can celebrate by joining the Friends of Charles Darwin, or baking some Trilobite Cookies."

Comments

Re:Insane

[FleaPlus]

This is crazy. Do we have a Newton day when we sing together and celebrate gravitation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtonmas

Plus, I think you're also forgetting things like Pi Day. Back when I was at Carnegie Mellon, it was a pretty hard-core holiday.

How evolution works

[Semnae]

Happy Darwin Day everybody! For this sort of thread, I feel it is necessary to briefly explain how the theory of evolution, for which Darwin is best known, works. Male and female gametes (eggs and sperm) are created during a process called Meiosis. These are haploid cells, meaning they only have half the dna of a normal cell. When the gametes meet, the dna goes through a process called crossing over, in which the dna of the two cells are combined. It is very rare, but occasionally some acids will be lost or gained during this stage. This is what causes mutations. 99.9% of all mutants are still born, but a few will survive. A common example of a mutant that survives is an albino. If the trait derived from the mutation benefits the individual and gives it a competative advantage for food, water, shelter, or sex over the non-mutants, then it will be more likely to survive and reproduce, hence spreading the mutant gene. This process is called natural selection. Over a long period of time, The non-mutated population may be phased out completely. Over an even longer period of time, there are even more mutations created the same way. Eventually, the mutants will be so changed that they will no longer be able to mate and create fertile offspring with the origional, unmutated population (assuming they are not extinct). When this happens, they are then considered to be a different species!

Re:How evolution works

[chgros]

Happy Darwin Day everybody! For this sort of thread, I feel it is necessary to briefly explain how the theory of evolution, for which Darwin is best known, works
Darwin's theory of evolution isn't this at all (DNA was discovered in the second half of the twentieth century). His theory was that of natural selection, meaning that there are (random) variations in individuals (that can be caused by crossing over and mutations), and that those better adapted for the environment are more likely to be passed on to the next generation, making the species more adapted on average.
On a different note, albinism is probably very seldom the result of a direct mutation, rather it is due recessive genes received from both parents (these genes being mutations of regular alleles that can have happened many generations before)

Re:Er, that's Mathematicians

[Alsee]

Thanx for the link! It was a good laugh :)

And just in case you were serious, it's actually mathemticians who are demonstrating that the mathematics of evolution are immensely more powerful than biologists realized.

If you have reasonable scientific and mathematical capability then I recommend googling on Implicit Parallelism. Of course if you really do think that evolution is impossible then I suspect the mathematics and evolutionary systems of Implicit Parallelism are likely going to be over your head. But heay, give it a try. If you can grasp the mathematics it explains how evolutionary genetic recombination and selection is exponentially more powerful than it first appears. Only a limited amount of information is processed/improved in each generation step, but that information processing gets multiplied by an astronomically huge Implicit Parallelism factor. The exact same sort of astronomically large numbers that supposedly make evolution mathematically impossible.

As for any mathemeticians (or anyone else) who thinks they've prooven evolution impossible, well yeah, you can have "correct" math proving it's impossible for bumblebees to fly when you don't actually understand bumblebees. If you grab the wrong equations in the first place then you calculate something totally irrelevant. Those equations can all be worked out "correctly" and the results can look quite convincing (if you don't already adaquately understand bumblebees), but they were the wrong equations in the first place. Bumblebees can fly, and when you you look at the right things and the right equations it all works.

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