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Bacteria Make Major Evolutionary Shift In the Lab
Auxbuss sends us to New Scientist for news sure to perplex and confound creationists: scientists have watched a new, complex evolutionary trait develop in the lab. "A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait. And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events."
You could counter your neighbour with "gravity is 'just a theory'" as well.
No, it'll still just be a theory. A theory that happens to match reality with a large pile of evidence behind it. But in science, there's really no such thing as a "fact", simply theories with greater levels of evidence supporting them.
Gravity is just a theory. The Sun-centered solar system is just a theory. Radio waves are just a theory.
E pluribus unum
Perhaps that's not what you meant in your question, but then that simply means you should have worded the question better.
This is an important result, and it's going to be more important when the mechanism by which it happened is figured out. Read the article.
The great thing here is that the researcher made a backup every 500 generations of bacteria, by freezing samples. So it's possible to go back and make this happen again and again, which has bee done. Then it's possible to find out exactly when it happened, and eventually decode the DNA before and after the evolutionary jump. This should produce some real insight into the underlying mechanism. We're a step closer to figuring out how evolution really works.
The interesting thing will be: why were e.Coli never able to metabolise citrate? Has new code been added to allow for citrate metabolisation, or was the mutation much smaller, maybe removing a blockage from existing but dormant code?
The press release is fascinating and infuriatingly incomplete at the same time.
The answer to ignorance of science or ignorance of faith is always going to be education - school, word of mouth, whatever. We need to talk it out, show why science is useful, and why the community of religion and other aspects can also be useful, and why either can be detrimental (sure the A-bomb was neat, but geez...). Agreed 100% -- I couldn't have said it better, no matter how hard and how long I tried.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
That sure is a lot of effort to rationalize an old book. Wouldn't it be easier to take it from a new standpoint ... look at the world then the book and decide whether or not its needed?
Anyways there are contradictions within the bible itself. How is that rationalized. How do you rationalize the 6000year issue?
Also, about the flat earth thing: http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/Flat_Earth.htm
I think you are right to a degree. I have read some of his stuff but quickly became irritated with him. His tone quickly became anyone who doesn't believe is stupid and they believe in nonsense. He made a large number of assertions that morality can only exist because of God, but he relies on a terribly flawed model to make his proof. He ignores the fact that humans by nature are herd/community animals and not loners. Humans tend to go quite insane without other humans around.
The greatest irony for me is that Jesus was VERY vocal about the whole Pharisee approach to the religion. He advocated the "love thy neighbor" and everything else falls into place naturally approach rather than the Pharisees and their "you must follow this monsterous list of rules and rituals" approach. Interestingly enough he also talks about how many of you will have claimed to know me and I will say I have never known you, get away from me. Even from the getgo he predicted that a large number of his "followers" would fall right back into that rules and rituals approach over kindness and compassion. He was ridiculed for spending so much time with the various sinners of his time and his answer was "A healthy man has no need for a doctor." What is preached today in the name of Christianity is almost identical to the very same religious structure that Jesus fought against.
Dunno about the whole religious aspect of it all, but I think Jesus himself seems to be a pretty good example of how humans should behave. Which is why I think Jesus as a man is more impressive than Jesus as a divine instrument. As a man it means we should all be able to emulate that behavior. As a divine figure it gives the copout crap about how "he died for our sins, all you have to do is accept that".
Either way my two most favorite things to mess with the overly religious is walking past them as the pass out their bibles, preach on the corner, or pray in public(all of which was specifically advised AGAINST by Jesus "pray alone in your room for when noone else can hear you pray God does") and saying "Jesus was such a jew" and watching them get up in arms because they are so ignorant of their own faith. The other fun one is a similar exploit, when asked some variant of "Do you accept Jesus?!" I answer something to the effect of "I follow the teachings of Yeshua" and laugh as they blather on about how I must accept Jesus instead.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
There is the rather ruthless approach as well.
If you genuinely believe God will cure your son's pneumonia, and I genuinely believe a doctor will cure my daughters pneumonia, then only the survivors of our respective decisions will go on to reproduce.
As it happens, Pneumonia has a significantly lower mortality when treated than untreated.
Education is only the answer if you genuinely *like* those people. Alternatively, you can simply allow those that believe in science to reap the awards of science. Personally, I'm all for banning creationists from any technology *not* specifically mentioned as a good thing in the Bible.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Why would life not form? Because the laws of nature say so? But we just established the laws of nature are not the same in this alternate universe. Its a variation on the first fallacy. "Life" has the characteristics of this universe because it exists in this universe. If there was another set of rules, life might be much more likely, much less likely, extremely different or very similar.
The problem is that most variations produce "bland" universes where a single force tends to dominate, wiping out variation in structure. Life as we know it lives and forms best on boundaries between different matter types and energy differentials. Our universal constants seem to produce more of these than most the other possible variations. There may be variations where "interesting" universes exist, but they are relatively rare combinations according to the models. Is it just a coincident that we are in a "boundary and variety abundant" universe when most combos are not?
It sort of reminds me of those Java applets where you tweak constants to produce pretty patterns. Most combinations are not very interesting because they tend to over-do or under-do one thing or another such that it dominates everything, creating something too uniform or too random: muck. The nice combos are the lucky "sweet spots".
The anthropic principle against a field of multiple universes seems like the best explanation for the "fine tuned constants" to me.
Table-ized A.I.
This isn't the first time we've seen evolution in the lab. Andrew Spiers has been doing it for years - e.g.
here (2003) or more recently here.
Basically Spiers grows bacteria in an unstired beaker. As the limiting resource for growth (nitrogen? Oxygen? I forget) is most available at the top of the beaker, it soon evolves a mutation which allows the bacteria to stick together and form a mat at the top ("wrinkly spreader"). Then somewhat later the mat collapses as freeloaders have evolved and come to dominate the population.
Spiers' experiment is highly predictable - the populations always go through the same phases, but different colonies turn out to have used different mutations to get there. This differs significantly from the research here, where it appears a low probability event has occured.
(Warning: the above is primarily based on my memory of a talk he gave several years ago. My memory is known to be lossy.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
The reason why Stalin and the commies were "atheists" was because they saw the Orthodox Church as a potential adversary to their rule. After all, the church was quite close to the Tsar, and deep down, Russians were a religious people. And if their religious leader had told them that their political leaders are godless heathens, things could have gotten ugly for the commies. But when Germany invaded USSR, Staling went to a mass and prayed.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
The simple way is to look at the Bible for what it is: A collection of writings by different human beings at different points of time who all had different views of the world. That pretty much covers all of the conflicts. It does, however, require you to use your brain from time to time.
Hi! I'm a Christian, and I'd like to introduce you to a version of Christianity you might not have known existed: The kind that believes that if facts conflict with dogma, then facts win.
Rant follows:
There's an interesting history to Fundamentalism, and it (and the history of the Bible) is well-covered in the phenomenal book Whose Bible Is It?. But the short version is that at some point, along with all of the Scientific knowledge that was challenging a lot of how we understood how the world works, a lot of Biblical scholarship occurred since the Enlightenment that was challenging to some standard dogmas. For example, the original Hebrew prophecy of the Messiah spoke of a "young girl," which in the Greek Septuagint -- which was the most popular "Bible" back when the New Testament was being written -- translated into a word meaning "virgin." Well, this eventually snowballed into the Immaculate Conception, but starting from the 1700s or so Christians started to recognize that what really happened was that young teenage Mary got herself knocked up.
As people began to recognize these sorts of things, obviously there was some resistance from those who felt that commonly-held and well-treasured dogmas that had been held for nearly 15 centuries really weren't up for debate, and sometime in the early 20th century these "not up for debate" dogmas were published as pamphlets titled, "The Fundamentals." (From which we get the name, "Fundamentalism.")
Now the key thing to note about this is that this didn't begin as a war between Science and Religion. It started out as a conflict within Religion itself. And it's notable that the Fundamentalists were taking the view that tradition trumped whatever the Bible actually originally said, that mistranslations and misunderstandings of what was in the book that had become traditional -- such as Young Earth Creationism -- were really more important than what had actually been written. You'll note that this is a very different thing from believing in a "literal" interpretation of the Bible.
Well, what's happened is that the Fundamentalists won the war. There are some good churches out there left, but generally the populations in those churches are elderly and dying off; in the rest of the churches, intellectuals are ostracized. Young Christians today know little more than a dumbed-down version of Christianity that's based on living through certain traditions, rather than a "way" or a "walk" to try and understand and learn about God; they think they know all they need to about God, and are ready to show the rest of the world just how it is. (Get off my lawn.)
And this is the Christianity that they now inflict on the rest of the world. It is not my Christianity, not the Christianity I grew up with. But even that good old church was taken over by the Fundamentalists shortly after I left for college. And that war is over.
Oh, as for Genesis 1? When you look at the text repeated in the verses, you see the same things over and over: "And God created... and said it was good." I think the point here is that God created the universe and everything in it, and called it "good." Note how the sun was not created until the 4th day -- so how could there have been an evening and morning? The "days" are just a poetic device, part of the oral tradition, a (very effective) memory trick used to help people remember the story during the many centuries the story existed but hadn't yet been written.
(But if you are one of those Christians who needs the Bible to say something before you believe it, just take a peek at Psalm 90:4; given that Genesis is "The Fir
I have the beginning of the book of Genesis open in another tab (via biblegateway.com) and even taking the days as long periods of time it still doesn't square with the scientific account.
According to what I'm reading here:
Day 1 - Light and day/night created, "water above" separated from "water below" by an expanse of sky.
Day 2 - Land and sea separated, plants and vegetation placed on the land
Day 3 - The sun and moon placed in the sky to govern the seasons, and provide light
Day 4 - Sea creatures and birds created
Day 5 - Land animals and humans created
Day 6 - nothing specified, until the 7th day when he rested.
Few things there...
I'm not sure what the waters above are; we have yet to find an expanse of water sat on top of the sky, although that would perhaps explain the blue colour if you didn't know about the atmosphere scattering the sunlight.
The Earth very clearly exists before the Sun in this account, and the Sun and Moon are created at the same time. Both not true. Even more noticeable is that plants were on the face of the Earth before the Sun was there to allow them to grow. The original light could be explained as stars from before the Sun, but starlight sure isn't enough to grow plants by.
When it comes to the genealogies, I'm not so bothered by the sum total of their ages implying a 6000 year old Earth as I am by the fact that each man between Adam and Noah apparently lives for centuries. Noah had 3 sons at age 500 (note Abraham's disbelief at the idea of a son at the age of 100 in Genesis 17, they knew this stuff was impossible) then he went on to live to 950 years old for crap's sake... did they misplace a decimal point here? Perhaps there's further dilation of time here and "year" actually means 1 tenth of a year.
That, and the fact that the story has the entire human race originating with a single couple. Basic genetics pretty much rules that out, unless there was some incredibly rapid mutation/evolution immediately after the fall. But of course evolution doesn't exist, does it? Round it all off with an impossible flood of the world and the Tower of Babel and the crazy whirlwind ride that is the start of Genesis is more or less complete.
I'm not buying it.
First it says that God ordered the lights to appear. The word here is Hebrew 'haya', meaning "let there appear". This is NOT the same as ex-nihilo creation, Hebrew 'bara', which is used for the heavens and the earth in verse 1.
The second verse in Day 4 is a parenthetical note that says that God created the sun and moon, and the stars also. The verb there is the other Hebrew word for create, 'asa'. It also is not ex-nihilo creation, but the formation of something from what has previously existed. Also, the tense there is an imperfect past tense, stating that God had accomplished that at some point before the end of Day 4. Even more noticeable is that plants were on the face of the Earth before the Sun was there to allow them to grow. Yes it was.
So what happened? God created the universe, which expanded and the earth formed by generally accepted planetary formation physics. According to planetary formation theory, the earth should be covered in thick atmosphere, even more so than Venus, and it probably was. It was also covered by water after the initial cooling. Note that both of these conditions are mentioned in Genesis 1:2 -- "darkness was over the face of the deep."
I also believe the phrase "the Spirit hovered over the waters" is a reference to the creation of the first life, widely believed to be in the ocean very early in life's history. The word for 'hovered' is the same Hebrew word used later for God brooding over Israel, protecting her like a hen protects its chicks. Obviously something profound was happening.
Also early on was the collision with the Mars-sized object that ended up creating our moon. This ate up much of the atmosphere causing it to become translucent. Light from the sun was visible on the earth's surface for the first time, hence "let there be light."
As the atmosphere dissipated over the eons, it eventually became transparent in Day 4, when the heavenly bodies were finally visible from the surface. This happened sometime before the Cambrian Explosion, which I think is rather nicely described in Day 5. Perhaps there's further dilation of time here and "year" actually means 1 tenth of a year. I don't think so. There are conceivable explanations. I admit none can be proven (nor disproven), but speculations as to how it could have worked. First, all humans were said to have been vegetarians in the beginning. This would allow one to be healthier if they had lived hundreds of years. Second, there may have been less cosmic radiation early on (one or more supernovae have occurred since man came to earth). But what I think had to have happened is that God modified human telemeres, which essentially limit our lifespan. Yes, the God I believe in is plenty capable of that, and the Bible says that God ordained our days to be no more than 120. A divine manipulation of telemeres seems to fit the bill here. Also note that other ancient cultures have legends of kings living 1000 years. This is not unique to the Bible. That, and the fact that the story has the entire human race originating with a single couple. I think again I have to appeal to manipulation by God. Note that at the Tower of Babel God is said to have confused languages. It seems reasonable to me that He would have changed a few genes in the process.
I realize this isn't acceptable to a methodological naturalist. It certainly isn't falsifiable nor provable. To me there are a lot of other factors that make belief in the God of the Bible reasonable, and that belief causes me to accept Genesis. Round it all off with an impossible flood of the world I believe the Flood was geographically local, but it covered all the areas where humans were living at the time. I think I can even prove that from the Bible itself, which drives young earth fundies nuts.
Ya gotta be pretty smart to live through being raised by them. Fortunately my mum was - hence me being here.
Funny story - although Grandpa walked around with club feet his whole life (praying that condition away apparently takes a very long time); something did happen that finally convinced them to see a doctor. My uncle (who was about 15 at the time) went from being irrational, to disturbed, to homicidal. I guess when you've got a homicidal 15 year old male in the house, and you can't out run him because your "please fix my damn club feet" prayer hasn't kicked in yet - self-interest makes you do crazy things - like call the nice men in the white coats. But as with many things, if you wait until something is life threating before changing your approach - it's usually a bit too late. No, he didn't kill my grandparents or anything - he got the typical "locked up and shocked up" treatment most people in his condition got back in the '50s. I don't know if Granpa asked if he was also too late to get his feet fixed, or just kinda figured it out on his own. The whole experience did cure them of their religion though.
Again, a bit late. The story losses it's "funny" status around the time my uncle escaped from the hospital. He burned down a block of flats for some reason, then later beat an old lady to death with a skillet because he thought she was trying to kill his children (he didn't actually have any children). Later he escaped from prison and showed up at my house with 2 other convicts, and car full of guns (no easy trick in England). My mum set them up and got them caught with no harm done to us (told ya she was smart).
So, to get back to the "Christian Scientists only hurt themselves" question - no, they don't. They can get other people killed at the same time. My uncle could have just as easily been afflicted with typhoid and sent off to school with nothing but prayer just as easily as he was sent into society with severe mental illness (which may or may not have been the result of some other untreated medical condition).
No one likes to take away something that makes people happy (like faith) - but until people take responsibility for their actions, it's the burden of others to deal with the mess. I think it's OK to argue that people should take responsibility for their actions - even if there's no way of doing it that won't offend them.
And while I don't want to see religious discrimination anymore than anyone else here does - I recognize that there's a world of difference between *offending* someone and discriminating or persecuting them. It's OK, when necessary, to offend.