It is true that in chemistry, a lower potential energy state is favoured. However, most of the lowest energy states for a molecules are quite boring, e.g. water, which is incredibly stable, CO2, CH4, CO, etc. So technically speaking, the "natural selection" of small molecules would lead to only basic substances.
The issue here is that the level of molecular complexity required to do anything useful with one of the these molecules is much too high to have formed spontaneously. For example, the protein that can break down alcohol (alcohol dehydrogenase) is significantly more complex than the alcohol molecule it breaks down. The same can be said for proteins that form bonds in other chemicals.
Could functional proteins form randomly? How many different proteins are expressed in humans/plants/.../etc.? Roughly 30,000 in humans excluding splicing. They are each, again roughly, 100 amino acids in length. Let's be really generous and say there are 1,000,000 functionally different alternative designs to each protein that perform the same function (generally across species a given protein looks similar). There are 20 different kinds of amino acids in human proteins. People often do experiments by changing one of the amino acid residues in a protein to see if the protein becomes non-functional - let's say about half may be swapped. So how many functional human proteins could there ever be? 30,000 * 1,000,000 * 20^50. If we randomly try to reproduce a human protein there are a total of 20^100 combinations. So of our pool of random proteins, (30,000 * 1,000,000 * 20^50)/(20^100)=1/(10^55) of them are actually functional.
From here we can work in either time or space. Most proteins fold in milliseconds to seconds and nearly all proteins require a decent amount of water to work. The hardest part is that proteins don't know if they are functional or not, they just randomly wobble through jelly (water at the nanoscale) so any activity would require all the functional proteins to be in the same physical location.
Unfortunately, the chemical world, particular biochemistry, is really complex, even though we have managed to produce simple models that generally work well. Don't get me wrong - I certainly enjoy science and I think it is an amazing way to appreciate God's creation.
Now on the subject of Christianity, you wanted me to explain what it is. A Christian is someone who recognises that God is real, has the character of perfect love, wants to save and desires to walk with us. Jesus (meaning "God saves") was a gift to humans to supernaturally provide eternal access to a perfect God from a fallen nature. Good works are a form of godliness but are not powerful enough to bridge the gap.
That's the fundamental scientific problem with evolution. Take the simplest lifeform that is able to reproduce by itself, given nutrients and water. It is impossible for this organism to have formed spotaneously. Is life a single molecule? No. Is it a collection of ten molecules? No. Is it a virus? A virus might consist of a protein coat that can enter larger, more complex cells and, once inside, can insert some RNA that can influence the transcription process of a far more complex molecular system. Therefore, the host organism must be more complex than the virus. No matter how "life" is defined, at some point the definition requires a level of complexity that cannot form spontaneously. Even the most basic lifeform isn't just molecular soup, but has self-assembling structures at many orders of scale that are mutually functionally dependant. Don't confuse self-assembling with spontaneous ab initio assembling. Its like confusing the girl of your dreams with a random choice of a lifeform from planet Earth. Don't make the mistake of picking a bacterium for a life-long partner!
So where did the first life form come from? Wrong question. Evolution depends on an assertion that is clearly impossible and therefore unscientific. Is science about rational deduction or providing a naturalistic explanation for everything? I have no problem with either rational deduction or providing naturalistic explanations for natural processes, but it is an irrational assumption to presume that everything has an naturalistic explanation.
For example, a couple who are close family friends prayed for another family friend who was born with one leg shorter than the other. Jesus Christ (who is a supernatural being) graciously healed the shorter leg within seconds. The husband was telling me he could feel the leg grow under the garment. We're talking 2-3 inches of new bone, muscle, skin, nervous system, etc. instantly. This is a true testimony and by no means an isolated incident. This shows that Jesus is real and loves to heal people. It also shows that not everything in this universe can be explained naturalistically.
I'm not going to prove Christianity is true -- I'll let you work that out for yourself. Nor will I try to justify the behaviour of Christians who do not really know Jesus. But I do want to show you that both evolution and a purely naturalistic approach to examining the universe fall flat on their faces.
This is also good: The Scientist. It has some interesting research stories and is very scientist focussed and by that aspect is very political. It is not a journal but does have thorough articles about specific projects and the research challenges and questions therein from the perspective of leading scientists. Very insightful for those interested in becoming (life) scientists.
It is rare to see someone posting who has thought deeply about these issues and it also willing to express a complete and convincing viewpoint.
I'm just a regular Christian. Let me encourage you that this is a good thing to do: keep seeking and you will find Him who is the Beginning and the End.
This thread has been the most insightful and realistic out of the whole forum. There is so much meta-regulation (mRNA, DNA, proteins) that goes on that we are only scratching the surface of that "A" is most likely. DNA(+mRNA+proteins) is like a supercode: self-modifying, dynamically loadable, self-regulating, able to respond to slight environmental changes occurring on a scale many orders of magnitude higher, incredibly dense, self-healing, supporting tens to hundreds of backup mechanisms for each function.
Biologists have uncovered some basic pathways (Google: metabolic map), but you must remember that every protein of which there are tens of thousands (most lie in the gel-like sea that is the cellular membrane) bumps into and interacts with heaps of combinations of others, effecting some function in doing so. And this is just proteins.
Anyway, I agree that A and B need to be distinguished but this takes a lot of work and $$$ (a protein costs $50k to get the structure of).
BTW, I am Christian and believe that what God says is true.
You don't need a fast pc at all to play! Fortunately the amazing shadowing effects can be turned right up so even a TNT1 can play it smoothly (60FPS)
Here's a screenshot of the first part of the demo
Here's a hallway, look at that detailed rendering!
I'm not against research or experiments which push the boundaries of what we know, but the article may be as well have been talking about what sort of passports we would need if there was teleportation.
The holy grail in biology is to take a fragment of DNA, figure out what protein it encodes, find out the structure (conformation), and hence its function (This is the area of science called bioinformatics, which I am studying -> a kind of bottom-up approach to biology). And that would have to be done on a massive scale, encompassing all kinds of metabolic pathways, to truly "make a better human".
If your interested in the technical challenges facing bioinformaticians you could read up on BlueGene (IBM supercomputer doing protein folding, which is figuring out the shape of proteins given just the fragment of RNA ("copied DNA") / DNA). It takes something like two weeks running full time to simulate a small protein. Yet there are somthing like 100,000 proteins in the human body, each interacting in a complicated way.
The rate of genomic data being produced is exponential, increasing faster than moore's law.
These technical challenges are very large, and personally, in our time or perhaps ever, I don't believe they will be circumvented.
I agree that people should discuss the ethics of GM (food, gene therapy, etc) with a good degree of biological knowledge, but talking about the rights of superhumans 100-200 years from now is realistically a waste of time. Far more important is discussing and imposing bans on human cloning / genetic projects that would significantly damage the indivudual. This is not to say that people are acutally cloning humans, but as I said in my last comment, you can't just throw out a dud human like a used petri dish.
Gene therapy is when they insert genetic material into you (into a localised area, like your liver or something -> with no chance of adding these genes into your children) to replace damaged or otherwise disfunctional DNA.
This is not the same as changing/copying/making the whole person.
Recombinant (recombining fragments of DNA back into a cell) DNA techniques are presently flawed and very inaccurate.
1) It is very difficult to find and be certain of where the coding regions begin and end. Introns (placing where the coding region begins) can be predicted with about 75% accuracy, but even with the knowledge of where the splice site (where the bits of DNA are stuck together) should be, transcription is too complex and not yet fully understood to perform a perfect splice.
2) Inadvertantly altering some crucial part of a metabolic pathway, for example, by placing the new DNA in the wrong spot, and preventing the normal transcription of a gene encoding for a certain required protein, would prove fatal or cause serious defects.
3) Even working with fungi and bacteria of which we know the complete genome requires multiple experiments and splices. Yet with regards to humans, which are the ones with civil rights, we know large fragments of the genome but we neither currently have the complete form from start to finish, nor a knowledge of where the coding regions begin and end, not do we have a knowledge of what all the coding regions (genes) do.
You must remember that if any "cloned" or otherwise "genetically altered" human has even the slightest medical problem later in life, the size of the lawsuits would put even Microsoft and McDonalds to shame! Or what about the "failed" experiments (of course I'm referring to humans here). Remember the scene in that Alien movie where she was going through the lab and finding a whole heap of dud clones, picture that but 100 times worse, with the whole legal system watching.
Anyone who says they can perfectly clone a human or even any reasonably complex animal is a fraud. I wonder how many Dolly's they needed before they got one more or less right.
I won't delve into the article much; my reactions would be constant in content - but I will say that the article is highy misleading:
>> With this new knowledge comes new power, the >> ability to shape our fundamental form--and, one >> day, to better it
Sure, we have the genome more or less, but we know only what a fragment or it does, and not very well at that. Perhaps publishing this article in 100 years would be better. (At the rate of/. reposting this shouldn't be much of a problem). This is nothing more than fantasy and an emotive title.
I very much doubt that failed human genetic experiments by ethically challenged corporations or governments would be much of a threat as athletes anyway. Because no matter how many billions they invest, with todays open technology they'll get little more than that.
Perhaps the ideas of super-humans (e.g. in X^2) should be left to Hollywood and not to The Village Idiots Voice.
Slashdot Mirror
It is true that in chemistry, a lower potential energy state is favoured. However, most of the lowest energy states for a molecules are quite boring, e.g. water, which is incredibly stable, CO2, CH4, CO, etc. So technically speaking, the "natural selection" of small molecules would lead to only basic substances.
The issue here is that the level of molecular complexity required to do anything useful with one of the these molecules is much too high to have formed spontaneously. For example, the protein that can break down alcohol (alcohol dehydrogenase) is significantly more complex than the alcohol molecule it breaks down. The same can be said for proteins that form bonds in other chemicals.
Could functional proteins form randomly? How many different proteins are expressed in humans/plants/.../etc.? Roughly 30,000 in humans excluding splicing. They are each, again roughly, 100 amino acids in length. Let's be really generous and say there are 1,000,000 functionally different alternative designs to each protein that perform the same function (generally across species a given protein looks similar). There are 20 different kinds of amino acids in human proteins. People often do experiments by changing one of the amino acid residues in a protein to see if the protein becomes non-functional - let's say about half may be swapped. So how many functional human proteins could there ever be? 30,000 * 1,000,000 * 20^50. If we randomly try to reproduce a human protein there are a total of 20^100 combinations. So of our pool of random proteins, (30,000 * 1,000,000 * 20^50)/(20^100)=1/(10^55) of them are actually functional.
From here we can work in either time or space. Most proteins fold in milliseconds to seconds and nearly all proteins require a decent amount of water to work. The hardest part is that proteins don't know if they are functional or not, they just randomly wobble through jelly (water at the nanoscale) so any activity would require all the functional proteins to be in the same physical location.
Unfortunately, the chemical world, particular biochemistry, is really complex, even though we have managed to produce simple models that generally work well. Don't get me wrong - I certainly enjoy science and I think it is an amazing way to appreciate God's creation.
Now on the subject of Christianity, you wanted me to explain what it is. A Christian is someone who recognises that God is real, has the character of perfect love, wants to save and desires to walk with us. Jesus (meaning "God saves") was a gift to humans to supernaturally provide eternal access to a perfect God from a fallen nature. Good works are a form of godliness but are not powerful enough to bridge the gap.
I hope that answers your questions.
Blessings, Matt
Life evolved out of simple molecules, ...
That's the fundamental scientific problem with evolution. Take the simplest lifeform that is able to reproduce by itself, given nutrients and water. It is impossible for this organism to have formed spotaneously. Is life a single molecule? No. Is it a collection of ten molecules? No. Is it a virus? A virus might consist of a protein coat that can enter larger, more complex cells and, once inside, can insert some RNA that can influence the transcription process of a far more complex molecular system. Therefore, the host organism must be more complex than the virus. No matter how "life" is defined, at some point the definition requires a level of complexity that cannot form spontaneously. Even the most basic lifeform isn't just molecular soup, but has self-assembling structures at many orders of scale that are mutually functionally dependant. Don't confuse self-assembling with spontaneous ab initio assembling. Its like confusing the girl of your dreams with a random choice of a lifeform from planet Earth. Don't make the mistake of picking a bacterium for a life-long partner!
So where did the first life form come from? Wrong question. Evolution depends on an assertion that is clearly impossible and therefore unscientific. Is science about rational deduction or providing a naturalistic explanation for everything? I have no problem with either rational deduction or providing naturalistic explanations for natural processes, but it is an irrational assumption to presume that everything has an naturalistic explanation.
For example, a couple who are close family friends prayed for another family friend who was born with one leg shorter than the other. Jesus Christ (who is a supernatural being) graciously healed the shorter leg within seconds. The husband was telling me he could feel the leg grow under the garment. We're talking 2-3 inches of new bone, muscle, skin, nervous system, etc. instantly. This is a true testimony and by no means an isolated incident. This shows that Jesus is real and loves to heal people. It also shows that not everything in this universe can be explained naturalistically.
I'm not going to prove Christianity is true -- I'll let you work that out for yourself. Nor will I try to justify the behaviour of Christians who do not really know Jesus. But I do want to show you that both evolution and a purely naturalistic approach to examining the universe fall flat on their faces.
Blessings, Matt
This is also good: The Scientist. It has some interesting research stories and is very scientist focussed and by that aspect is very political. It is not a journal but does have thorough articles about specific projects and the research challenges and questions therein from the perspective of leading scientists. Very insightful for those interested in becoming (life) scientists.
It is rare to see someone posting who has thought deeply about these issues and it also willing to express a complete and convincing viewpoint.
I'm just a regular Christian. Let me encourage you that this is a good thing to do: keep seeking and you will find Him who is the Beginning and the End.
Blessings, Matt
This thread has been the most insightful and realistic out of the whole forum. There is so much meta-regulation (mRNA, DNA, proteins) that goes on that we are only scratching the surface of that "A" is most likely. DNA(+mRNA+proteins) is like a supercode: self-modifying, dynamically loadable, self-regulating, able to respond to slight environmental changes occurring on a scale many orders of magnitude higher, incredibly dense, self-healing, supporting tens to hundreds of backup mechanisms for each function.
Biologists have uncovered some basic pathways (Google: metabolic map), but you must remember that every protein of which there are tens of thousands (most lie in the gel-like sea that is the cellular membrane) bumps into and interacts with heaps of combinations of others, effecting some function in doing so. And this is just proteins.
Anyway, I agree that A and B need to be distinguished but this takes a lot of work and $$$ (a protein costs $50k to get the structure of).
BTW, I am Christian and believe that what God says is true.
Blessings, Matt
I could only dream of a basement, I lived in the corridor! You had it lucky!
Perhaps also resurrecting the virus that might have killed off the Ancients isn't such a great idea either!
Matt
- ...
- death
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/kidsrabies/WarningI wonder if it includes parrots.
In prehistoric russia birds eat you! -matt
Here's a solution:
Past = Read only
Future = Write only
Present = Read/Write (infinitesimally small overlap between past and future)
Dupe Dupe Dupe Dupe Dupe Dupe Dupe Banana-Phone!
Geek Pride ??
You don't need a fast pc at all to play!
Fortunately the amazing shadowing effects can be turned right up so even a TNT1 can play it smoothly (60FPS)
Here's a screenshot of the first part of the demo
Here's a hallway, look at that detailed rendering!
I took the liberty to copy a few frames from the movie for all to see. Unfortunately I reduced the resolution just a little.
; ) Here's luke
-- Here's the light sabre
( o ) ( o ) Here's pricess leah
(: o Here's when luke realised
leah's his sister
-m
I'm not against research or experiments which push the boundaries of what we know, but the article may be as well have been talking about what sort of passports we would need if there was teleportation.
The holy grail in biology is to take a fragment of DNA, figure out what protein it encodes, find out the structure (conformation), and hence its function (This is the area of science called bioinformatics, which I am studying -> a kind of bottom-up approach to biology). And that would have to be done on a massive scale, encompassing all kinds of metabolic pathways, to truly "make a better human".
If your interested in the technical challenges facing bioinformaticians you could read up on BlueGene (IBM supercomputer doing protein folding, which is figuring out the shape of proteins given just the fragment of RNA ("copied DNA") / DNA).
It takes something like two weeks running full time to simulate a small protein. Yet there are somthing like 100,000 proteins in the human body, each interacting in a complicated way.
The rate of genomic data being produced is exponential, increasing faster than moore's law.
These technical challenges are very large, and personally, in our time or perhaps ever, I don't believe they will be circumvented.
I agree that people should discuss the ethics of GM (food, gene therapy, etc) with a good degree of biological knowledge, but talking about the rights of superhumans 100-200 years from now is realistically a waste of time. Far more important is discussing and imposing bans on human cloning / genetic projects that would significantly damage the indivudual. This is not to say that people are acutally cloning humans, but as I said in my last comment, you can't just throw out a dud human like a used petri dish.
-matt
Gene therapy is when they insert genetic material into you (into a localised area, like your liver or something -> with no chance of adding these genes into your children) to replace damaged or otherwise disfunctional DNA.
This is not the same as changing/copying/making the whole person.
Recombinant (recombining fragments of DNA back into a cell) DNA techniques are presently flawed and very inaccurate.
/. reposting this shouldn't be much of a problem). This is nothing more than fantasy and an emotive title.
1) It is very difficult to find and be certain of where the coding regions begin and end. Introns (placing where the coding region begins) can be predicted with about 75% accuracy, but even with the knowledge of where the splice site (where the bits of DNA are stuck together) should be, transcription is too complex and not yet fully understood to perform a perfect splice.
2) Inadvertantly altering some crucial part of a metabolic pathway, for example, by placing the new DNA in the wrong spot, and preventing the normal transcription of a gene encoding for a certain required protein, would prove fatal or cause serious defects.
3) Even working with fungi and bacteria of which we know the complete genome requires multiple experiments and splices. Yet with regards to humans, which are the ones with civil rights, we know large fragments of the genome but we neither currently have the complete form from start to finish, nor a knowledge of where the coding regions begin and end, not do we have a knowledge of what all the coding regions (genes) do.
You must remember that if any "cloned" or otherwise "genetically altered" human has even the slightest medical problem later in life, the size of the lawsuits would put even Microsoft and McDonalds to shame! Or what about the "failed" experiments (of course I'm referring to humans here). Remember the scene in that Alien movie where she was going through the lab and finding a whole heap of dud clones, picture that but 100 times worse, with the whole legal system watching.
Anyone who says they can perfectly clone a human or even any reasonably complex animal is a fraud. I wonder how many Dolly's they needed before they got one more or less right.
I won't delve into the article much; my reactions would be constant in content - but I will say that the article is highy misleading:
>> With this new knowledge comes new power, the
>> ability to shape our fundamental form--and, one
>> day, to better it
Sure, we have the genome more or less, but we know only what a fragment or it does, and not very well at that. Perhaps publishing this article in 100 years would be better. (At the rate of
I very much doubt that failed human genetic experiments by ethically challenged corporations or governments would be much of a threat as athletes anyway. Because no matter how many billions they invest, with todays open technology they'll get little more than that.
Perhaps the ideas of super-humans (e.g. in X^2) should be left to Hollywood and not to The Village Idiots Voice.
just my $0.02
-m
It has indeed been known to get very exciting in SF bay.