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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 was only a matter of time before scientists discovered the steps and had enough knowledge to connect the dots.
Frankly, I'm glad they're finding more and more of how biology works. I don't want to get into a creationist debate, but it has always astounded me that people would argue that life is too complex for it to have been made "naturally" and that a higher being must have helped along the way. But, by saying that, they're saying that God is not powerful enough to create such a universe in which evolution can happen, that a universe created by God could not possibly work by itself.
How dare they...
Okay, I realise most people here have never had a chance to partake in this activity after they were born, but you get the picture.
That should be: Can God create a stone so heavy he can't lift it, if he can, he's not all powerful because he can't lift the stone, if he can't he's not all powerful because he can't create the stone in the first place.
Simon
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
(Douglas Adams)
Semper en excreta sumus solum profundum
There is nothing without God.
This is a science discussion - proselytizing has no place here.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It is amusing that religions touting a Creator God are excellent examples of Evolution in Action. The Creator God is the equivalent of the alpha male of a troop of primates. The idea of the Creator God speaks not to the present alpha male but to an idealized father founder of the tribe. The sense of history inherent in a Creator meshes with our sense of our own history. The concept of history, partially embodied in burial rites, points to the ideas of teleology and the status quo ante that underpin many religions. The idea of death as examplified in burial and a belief in a life after death are ideas that need to be examined as they define us as a species.
Religions posing an alpha male Creator Father have evolved through many generations of selective mating. Those who strongly believed in the tribe's faith were more likely to find suitable mates. Those who couldn't bring themselves to believe in a Creator God were often killed outright as heretics or were driven from the tribe. Many generations of mating based upon religious beliefs should give us a population the majority of which advocate a belief in God. Religion is Evolution in Action.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
The most common people to claim otherwise seem to be the more rabid IDers and creationists. Go figure.
And for the most rabid athiests, I would point out that lack of proof is not proof of lack -- eg: Just because you'll never find the body doesn't mean I never killed mikie (don't tell the cops). Similarly: the fact that a 'missing link' is currently missing doesn't mean that it will never be found.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Not yet anyway.
e .html?ex=1302062400&en=c4dfe0138d4cdb4b&ei=5088&pa rtner=rssnyt&emc=rss
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/07/science/07evolv
They aren't saying that God is not powerful enough to create a universe with evolution. They are saying God didn't create a universe with evolution. Significant difference there
God rests his case.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
It's truly an intellectually dishonest practice and it speaks directly to the kind of Doctor Behe is. This is the guy who testified in that 'lets put ID into the classroom' trial in Dover, PA. His testimony was an embarrassement and I'm surprised he has enough credibility left that the NY Times would include him in their article. I guess it's the whole "two sides of an argument" theme again.
Here's a great astronomy example of almost the exact same thing.
http://www.anomalist.com/commentaries/claim.html
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
Carl Zimmer,who is of course, THE MAN! of parasite parables and paraphenalia, has posted a more in-depth analysis of this story at his weblog, The Loom , going into the genetic/molecular mechanism. Additionally, Zimmer responds to the creationist take on the story (the usual move-the-goalpost panic of those advocating irreduceable complexity). Of larger concern, why does this incredibly fascinating discussion about scientific sleuthing and the potential and beauty of proteomics, get automatically sidelined into a discussion on "what does creationism say about this?" I don't blame Zimmer for responding; indeed, that's the duty of science writers as gifted as he. But it diminishes the power of the story itself to have to ask, imnsho.
If the Great Creator Spaghetti Monster wanted you to read the article, he'd have provided you with a free registration.
Oh You POS
The disbelievers will really be in trouble when we genetically engineer hyper-intelligent monkeys who can work in Walmart and Mcdonolds and take their jobs.
Pet dinosaurs?
I predict we can make millions selling the smaller ones to Creationist families. After all, don't they want to be closer to the original man?
I can see the ad campaign now: Get your child a pet dinosaur so they can ride them just like man did before the flood! Now you too can have a beast of the earth, just as God gave to Adam! (Discounts given to Church groups buying more than 3 pet dinos.)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Anyway, it was pretty easy demonstrating what a moron you are. You have demonstrated an inability to think beyond what most 5 or 6 year olds can achieve.
I'd dismiss you as a troll but as I've seen so much evidence that many people do 'think' like you I'm taking you seriously.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
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.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
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
I don't know that we have as of yet been able so show a living cell bootstrap from basic inert materials (I'm using non-living as the definition of inert in this context. There may be a better word, but I didn't think "dead" would be appropriate, as it has an implication of "once was living".)
However, it has been shown that many organic materials can be created in an environment similar to primordial earth. It has also been shown that many of these materials do tend to self-organize in a way that would be compatible with a cell possibly forming given enough organic material and time.
Cell wall: phospholipids, mostly being hydrophobic with one or two ends being hydrophilic tend to organize in sheets or water filled bubbles, and so could naturally form a cell wall. Amino acids do self aggragate to some extent, and a random aggregation could form a useful protein, ditto for RNA (which I believe preceded DNA evolutionarilly for a number of reasons.)
There is only one protein that would have to aggregate naturally before life as we know it could arise... ribosomes (or some suitable analog.) From there RNA could be transcribed into protein. At first most of the protein would pretty much be useless globs, untill a protein arises that can create copies of RNA. This protein could either aggregate naturally or be encoded by random chance into a strand or RNA. From there Darwinian evolution kicks in and as more beneficial RNA sequences come about that improve the transcription process and copying mechanism as well as the defense mechanisms, cellular life would not be too wild of an outcome. The progression of life would seem to be fairly slow at first, but the copying mechanism in RNA would probably be so imperfect that new variations arise very frequently, but most of those variations would likely be detrimental. Eventually better copying mechanisms arise, and eventually use of a more stable genetic material (DNA) make life blossom, expanding at a decent pace. Once some organism figured out a way to systematically capture and store energy from sunlight (or any energy source, really... thermal vents, gradiants across a thermo/chemocline etc) and a way to release that energy, then evolution can start proceeding at an exponential rate.
So, if it can be proven that a ribosome or some other RNA-Protein copying method could eventually arise from a random mix of amino acids it would greatly support the possibility of some method of abiogenesis. It does not have to be likely that this ribosome would arise in a human time scale... it could take millions or billions of years. It just has to happen eventually.
Complex hemes, carbohydrates and many other materials that are necessary for life at a complexity of ours would not be necessary to bootstrap the system from inert materials. Just some strands of RNA and something like a ribosome. Once you have those, something as complex as an RNA transcriptase could eventually arise from random permutations of RNA strands. And once you have RNA that has RNA -> RNA transcriptase encoded somewhere inside of itself and has some ribosome analogue working on it, then you have the bare bones beginning of organic life.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
The solution is that the original precursor gained the ability to bind a new hormone by a single point mutation, and this did not disrupt the ability of it to bind its old hormone. The new receptor then diverged and through a well known process of gene duplication, begat multiple and independently evolving molecules. One retained the function of binding the old hormone, whereas another mutated further to lose the ability to bind the old hormone and could now only bind the new hormone. Viola -- two seemingly "designed" systems out of one precursor -- evolution at its finest, and IMHO, damning evidence against the basic principle of Intelligent Design.
On a personal note, it never fails to amaze me how much people deny the intelligence of humans to figure things out... the old "just because we can't explain it now, it must have be an unexplicable force, like God." I'm sure lightning and earthquakes seemed supernatural too. Evolution is no different -- it can be dissected and explained.
God cannot be
Omnipotent
Omniscient
and Good
all at the same time
Fact: the world contains evil.
Fact:Creation of evil is an evil act
Conclusions:Either God performs evil acts and cannot be trusted, God is bound by some greater force requiring balance, or God cannot accurately predict the consequences of it's own actions.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
Can you believe it's 2006 and we still care about the near-high-school drop-outs who continue to question evolution?
As the article points out, near-high-school-dropouts aren't the only ones who have questions about evolution, and I'm not just talking about proponents of intelligent design.
But maybe it's not so much that we care about what those who "question evolution" think as that good science doesn't simply stick to whatever the prevalent dogma is. Maybe it's that good science continues to come up with and test hypothesis after hypothesis and continually refine its case.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with questioning evolution or even our current conception of how evolution works.
Tweet, tweet.
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.
Wasn't sympathy from Sir Mick Jagger enough?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I rejoice in science framing the what of existence in increasing detail.
Still not doing much for the why of existence.
Nor are the various religions and philospies, Christianity among them. It remains subjective.
I'll just relax and watch the show.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The reason the NYT is giving this the "doubters of evolution" spin is that there's this guy, Michael Behe, who wrote a book around 1995 somewhere called "Darwin's Black Box". The central idea of that book was the allegation that evolutionary science treats the cell like a "black box" that nobody attempts to look inside or explain. Evolutionary science, said Behe, only concerns itself with larger structures, and only assumes the stuff inside the cell "just works". Because evolution can't explain, subcellular structures, evolution lacks a foundation, is built on nothing, and is wrong.
This is, of course, silly if you're actually familiar with the science, because to whatever extent scienists ever treated the cell like a "black box", it was because we didn't know how to look inside yet. Viewing machinery the size of a molecule is really hard. Scientists could analyze things, but have only relatively recently gained the ability to view the full picture of things, much as they might have wanted to.
Once the technology for understanding the molecular structures that make up cells really started to take off (say, at the beginning of the 80s-ish), a revolution of sorts started in microbiology and genetics. And as this happened, Behe managed to exploit a neat trick of timing; he wrote his book just as a lot of fascinating questions were appearing through this revolution in microbiology, but before (since the questions had only just been asked) we really knew what the answers were. Behe was able to craft the illusion, since we didn't know the answers to some of those questions yet, that the questions didn't have answers or would never be answered and thus evolution was flawed-- not mentioning that work was underway or even partially completed to find answers to all of these questions. In the time since Behe wrote his book, cell microbiology has progressed by leaps and bounds, but the book itself is able to do a neat little job of making it seem like the cell really is just an inexplicable black box, because he wrote it just as science totally finished picking the lock.
Which brings us to this story: The one scientific "big idea" in Darwin's Black Box was what Behe calls "Irreducible Complexity", and the publication of Darwin's Black Box was the main way this idea was popularized. The idea behind irreducible complexity is that there exist structures that contain one or more parts, and that if you remove one of the parts, the entire thing stops working. But one would expect that evolutionary mutation can only change "one thing" at a time; the idea that a single new allele that could simultaneously create two separable and interlocking structures seems wholly unbelievable. So how did irreducibly complex structures evolve?
This is an extremely reasonable question, and one evolutionary science is obligated to answer. The problem is that Behe, and the rest of the ID crowd:
The answer to how irreducibly complex structures could evolve is pretty simple: all that would have to happen is for a structure to change its purpose over time. That is to say, it doesn't matter that irreducibly complex structures can only evolve one part at a time, because it is simple to imagine each of the small structures in an irreducibly complex system independently evolving for some other purpose than the big IC system performs, then being adapted into a bigger IC system with rube goldberg style ingenuity, then gradually losing the ability to function for their original purpose indepen
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The flipside of the evolutionary topic is, well, what if we just say there is no God and move on?
I do not see how this is, in any way, an "evolutionary topic". The theory of evolution says nothing whatsoever regarding the subject of deities.
Dismissing the existence of God in no way advances the human condition.
To which "God", out of the thousans of deities worshipped and acknowledged throughout human history, do you refer and why do you reference that particular deity to the exclusion of all others?
Consider, why does one need to foolishly accept that a better adapted emergent species is not fundamentally better than a less adapted one?
I do not see that one does need to do this at all. "Better adapted" is itself a relative condition, and there is no means to judge any one species as "fundamentally better" than another in an absolute sense. I do not understand what point you are attempting to argue.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Scientific American gives 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense.
Memorize them for your next party
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
I can't find any reference to this fact about the "reappearing Sabertooth" anywhere. Nor does it really make much sense that we could declare something extinct if there is fossil evidence that it existed after that period. Nor am I aware of any genes in domestic felines that can simply be turned on to produce a Sabertoth. So..... Cite?
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
"Dismissing the existence of God in no way advances the human condition."
You mean other than removing the need for some to kill the non-believers and heretics in "his" name?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
So you managed to pass philosophy 101 and think that because you can take the most pithy argument about the problem of evil and 'prove' god does not exist. Alvin Plantinga, a standing professor at Notre Dame, dealt extensively with the problem of evil and has several books on the topic. Many philosophers, even those who categorize themselves as secular, generally agree that Plantinga's Free Will Defense is a logical and mostly complete answer to the questions the problem of evil poses. Johnathan Kvanvig, at Missouri, has some incredibly excellent works on the Problem of Hell, a much more difficult topic. Both authors are well worth reading. Furthermore, theologians don't just say 'god exists, nyaa!' and leave it. The argument from contingency (St. Aquinas sustaining cause, further developed by Swinburne as an inductive study) has real legs in demanding the need for "something" to exist other than the universe. Mind you, NONE of this actually will equate the sustaining cause to the Judeo Christan God, but that's what other branches of philosophy and theology is for.
I tend to agree with Kenneth Miller. Anyone that claims to be of faith should read his book 'Finding Darwin's God' where he attempts to bridge the gap between hard evolution and it's implications for religion.
I stole this
While I agree with some of your post but your statement "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." is way off. The principle job of a scientist is to do research and you directly state we're not doing our jobs. That's pretty offensive especially since research in molecular evolution started back in the 60's when ID was still called creationism. Thornton's research is just (like I'll ever get a Science article!) the latest in a long chain of research. Thornton's study just didn't pop out of thin air either, since his first publication in that area goes back to 1998. Like any good scientist he did the study because it was something that interested him and could yield some new insights. That it punches yet another hole in the swiss cheese that is ID is just a side effect.
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.
Clean up their act? They're cleaning up other people's mess!
Having throwbacks to pre-rational thinking dictate areas of research to target is a nuisance, not a boon. And they are working harder because they have to undo the harm that the ID conmen have caused, hard work that could be better spent furthering science, instead of defending it against reactionaries.
It's not an improvement: it's dammage control.
You can't take the sky from me...
>>> "Can you believe it's 2006 and we still care about the near-high-school drop-outs who continue to question evolution?"
Yes.
I can't believe you got plus-5 insightful for that flame-bait.
If you don't question things you're not a scientist. I question evolution, I question every facet of existence that I come across.
Incidentally I've got an honours degree in Physics and Maths and an undergraduate diploma in computer science. No big guns I know but that's me. I consider myself to be a philosopher. What about you?
"definately"
I take that as no insult from someone who can't spell "definitely".
Just because he has Dr. in front of his name doesn't mean he knows what he's talking about or isn't trying to mislead you.
Oh You POS
Where did you come up with comparison of the Uncertainty principle to ID. IIRC Heisenberg's prinicple said that observing something changes it's behavior, thus making it uncertain. I can think of many areas where this is true, but ID or evolution already happened. We can neither observe it, or change it. We are all already here. All that can be done now is attempt to prove in a laboratory that evolution is possible, which still doesn't prove that it happened.
Ultimately, I just don't understand why this is an issue. Bottom line is we are here. If we have evolved then we are uniquely suited to our environment due to millenia of nature working on us. If we are here by ID, we are uniquely suited to our environment because somebody built us that way. It's a stupid argument, and stupid area of study.
Find coupons in Greeley
"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.
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.
Either that, or at least strong proof that if there IS a god, he/she's a sadistic bastard without anything resembling our idea of morality, justice, or fairness. In other words, any god that regularly lets shit like this happen deserves our scorn, not our adoration.
Either way, religion is shit.