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Study Explains Evolution's Molecular Advance
pnewhook writes "The New York Times is reporting that 'by reconstructing ancient genes from long-extinct animals, scientists have for the first time demonstrated the step-by-step progression of how evolution created a new piece of molecular machinery by reusing and modifying existing parts. The researchers say the findings, published today in the journal Science, offer a counterargument to doubters of evolution who question how a progression of small changes could produce the intricate mechanisms found in living cells.'"
It's also immensely disrespectful to our ancestors of well over a million years' span, to deny their existence because it just might, maybe rock the boat a little.
How many thousands of generations of people lived and died over the millennia so that we might be where we are today? And some would deny their very existence. Shame on you!
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
To be fair, evolution does not disprove of A god...
But it does kinda reduce the likelihood that there is a PERSONAL god who is intimately concerned with all of our activities, and so is a reason to behave in a moral way and more importantly, to then worship that god and tithe to the church who claims to be the bridge between man and god.
(Note, I was not saying that atheists are not moral with the "is a reason to behave..." line, but for some people the existance of a personal god is one of the reasons to behave in a moral manner.)
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Can you believe it's 2006 and we still care about the near-high-school drop-outs who continue to question evolution?
I've found that most people who are ignorant of evolutionary processes lead sheltered lives. They are vaguely ignorant of where the beef on their table came from, they couldn't tell you how rainclouds form and they don't have a clue how much oil may be left in the ground. However, they darn sure know that men couldn't from monkeys.
What the hell, man? There's nothing about God in this article.
If evolution was universally accepted, there would still be believers in God, and if God was universally accepted, there would still be believers in evolution.
I don't know how you got modded either insightful or flamebait, much less both. Your post is simply off-topic.
First: Science does not deal with truths, only with models.
Second: Science cannot be applied everywhere. There are questions that cannot be answered by science, because no answer fulfills the requirements. (Like, "what is outside of the universe", or "why are we here".) There comes a point where the only thing you can do is - believe. In something. Some believe that there are no higher entities (science cannot disprove them, but because of this they are filtered out by Occam's Razor, just like all non-disprovable things). Some believe that life is guided by some god, some believe in a living an conscious Mother Nature etc. Claiming that atheism is "The Only Way" (tm) is just plain wrong because it does not have any advantages over other beliefs.
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It's worth noting that most mathematicians already think ideas like Irreducible Complexity and Complex Specified Information are a load of hooey, despite the appeals people like Dembski and Behe make to having made innovative breakthroughs in these areas:
b -at-dembski-vacuousness.html
- irreducible-complexity.html
w een-ic-and-it-arguments.html
One good blog on this subject I've found is Good Math, Bad Math, and some posts relevant to this topic are:
-CSI is basically incoherent: if you translate the definition of CSI into non-obscure words, it essentially boils down to either "something that contains a lot of information, but doesn't contain a lot of information" or a definition for which EVERY piece of information is specified:
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/one-last-sta
-IC, when translated into math, makes no sense. We can actually PROVE in math that there is no general proof that some system is the simplest possible (which IC requires), much like we can prove that we can never solve the halting problem.
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/problem-with
-Even if they did make sense, CSI and IC basically conflict with each other, arguing contradictory things:
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/conflict-bet
It is ridiculus and demeaning to all human scientific progress to suggest that articles published by researchers are to be used as a "counter argument" to ID.
Please compare: What is their argument and what is ths scientific argument ? Who and where are their researchers ? What "science" do these reseaerhers do ? Is it a coincidence that almost all of them are Fervent Christians ? Do these peope want REAL answers to questions in the Universe or have they decided their answers already ? Imagine what would happen if their "science" becomes mainstream in schools and Universities: Something similar to what would have happened if Nazi bigotry had become mainstream.
What I'm trying to say is, it is stupid, demeaning and a complete waste of time,for example, to present arguments of the level of Einsteins work to someones who's bigotry driven intelligence is barely comparable to a below average high schooler. (not to demean high schoolers).
The only way to tackle these lies is to hit the root of the Big Lie: Who, what and where is this I in ID that they speak of ? Showing them Science journal will come later.
You can't make blanket condemning statements like that then declare you don't want to get into a debate.
I don't think it's a question of lack of faith as you suggest. You have one side of the issue where a faith based person is bombarded with facts, statements, or just assertions that evolution occurred. On the other side you have a faith based person with a personal conviction that there is a God. How does he justify the two? In my observation, there are varied ways they do it. One is to declare evolution is flat out wrong without argument. Another is to point out evolution's flaws (something evolutionists get very testy about, btw. They don't like their faith questioned anymore than religious people do) Still another is to concede some evolution occurred and suggest that God guided evolution. The important thing to realize here is that Creationists are a loud bunch, but they don't speak for all Christians. For example, some suggest the 7 days in question were actually epochs of time of indeterminate length "like unto" 1000 years each.
Frankly, it's not as if Genesis is like Make magazine with a creation How To. It's more like the Cliff Notes version. There's honestly not enough data to say HOW God did anything. Faith based people just believe that he did. They base that faith on their experiences with the Holy Spirit. If you can't relate to this experience then I can't help you. Often in matters concerning evolution and religion, one simply doesn't have much to do with the other and thus the conflict.
Personally, I tend to support the Slartibartfast theory. All those fake fossil layers took a lot of work...they'd need longer than 7 days.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
To be fair, evolution does not disprove of A god...
But it does kinda reduce the likelihood that there is a PERSONAL god who is intimately concerned with all of our activities, and so is a reason to behave in a moral way and more importantly, to then worship that god and tithe to the church who claims to be the bridge between man and god.
Personally, I feel like events such as hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in the indian ocean, and September 11th offer a much stronger proof of the lack of a personal god.
Interestingly, other people look at the same events and come to the exact opposite conclusion.
Wierd, no?
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Indeed. Most scientists roll their eyes at the use of "missing link" because it obviously misleads far more than it informs. The basic idea is that we have a family tree of life. There are millions upon millions of branches (species), and billions upon billions of twigs (individual creatures) alive over time, but only a very very tiny proportion are still alive today. That means that there is a far far vaster space of animals that died that are NOT the ancestors of any living creature than there are.
Hence, since fossilization is basically a rare and random crapshoot, the chances of finding THE common ancestor are always unlikely, and we can't even reliably tell if we had. But, fortunately, it's also irrelevant. That's because we can learn more than enough simply by finding a fossil that's past a particular branching point about the creatures that led to those we see today. We are trying to learn the general, overall shape of the tree, and since features all tend to be unique to any given lineage, we can still always tell everything we need about the prior branchings from the random sampling of fossils we have.
Currently we have so many that all the basic connections are pretty clear. And when you add in genetic studies that confirm these relations, the conclusion becomes about as rock solid as can possibly be. Creationists often try to confuse the debate over how particular twigs branch with a debate over whether there even is a tree of life pattern and branching at all.
The disbelievers will in the near future miss out on genetic enhancements/cloning/implants and thus be weeded out of the population as they become unable to compete. Problem will fix itself.
...) and "moved the goalposts" to find new things to object to. Only a very small number of fanatics now refuse any of the treatments I listed above, but a much larger group of fanatics willingly takes advantage of them while trying to hold back, e.g., stem cell research with religious objections which sound strikingly similar to those raised against now-common practices in the past, as well as attacking the fundamental biological education which makes such discoveries possible. If the nuts actually had the courage of their convictions to live and die by their own nuttiness, the rest of us would be much better off.
Probably not. A number of medical technologies we now consider part of the standard of care -- anesthesia, aseptic surgical technique, vaccination, x-rays, antibiotics, and blood transfusions all come to mind -- met with fierce challenges on religious grounds when they were first introduced. Over time, as the benefits became obvious, the true believers changed their tune (evolved, one might say
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Yep. It's important to note that the functional abilities of proteins are often determined by just a few key sites (certain amnio acid sequences) which make the protein fold in a certain way. The rest of the protein is free to vary somewhat without making much of a difference. And sometimes, these sections can, through mutation, add a new function to the protein without taking away the old function: the new folding may not interfere with important part of the old shape.
Of course, this "retain the old, try the new" can happen in a lot of other ways in a genome as well: like if the code specifying a protein is duplicated, creating two identical copies... and then one can mutate and acquire a new function while the old one keeps doing the old function. This mechanism is what seems to have been the sort active with the evolution of blood clotting.
There are two reasons why we have a recent uprising of ID. One is that there are people whose religious beliefs are found in conflict with evolutionary science. The other is that people are simply ignorant of the science, in large part because of lousy science education and hard-to-read science literature.
In response to the ID debate, scientists have been motivated to clean up their acts. First, they have targeted specific areas of research that the ID proponents have harped on. Secondly, they are working harder to improve science education.
Things like ID arise ultimately due to a fault in the science. Well, we know science has faults, so the only result here can be an improvement in the science.
That was actually the subject of this great, award winning blog post on Pharyngula:
o per_reverence_due_those.php
"The proper reverence due those who have gone before"
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/01/the_pr
No, my "accusation" was missing a quantifier. It's not intellectually lazy, just grammatically lazy.
It seems you are arguing ideals of academia. I was referring to the proponents of evolution I find in slashdot forums. Many posters are hardly kind to the other side of any issue they stand against, be it religion, politics, etc.
My statement still stands. The parent poster cannot proclaim the virtues of modern knowledge, lump all people of faith into one statement, then chastise them. THAT, my friend, is intellectually lazy.
As for my statement about testy evolutionists, my statement was based on observation. Perhaps that was why it was an easy statement to make. You've done a fair bit of testy overgeneralization in your own reply which makes my point to some degree, though you were more polite than most. You seem to be assuming that the people I was referring to were only testy because they were dealing with ignoramuses. Isn't it possible that not all proponents of evolution are as high minded as you think? Perhaps, just perhaps, some of them abuse the slashdot rating system and participate in mocking debate in the forums? These are the proponents I was referring to. They don't publish in the tomes of academia. They troll the forums of the internet blindly debating the virtues of evolution just as ignorantly with as many falsehoods and gross misrepresentations of science as the fanatics on the other side do.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
But those several orders of magnitude are just a constant factor. What the research has done is really like proving a problem is solvable in Polynomial time when a bunch of people have been arguing that it's NP.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
"how evolution created a new piece of molecular machinery by reusing and modifying existing parts"
So now evolution "creates" and "reuses" stuff? Why not call it a win-win for both evolution and creationism and go home already.