>The 'submitter' seems to have made a lot of 'assumptions' about how closely >we have been following this 'case'.
Maybe there is a reason why Slashdot editors post news of this case quite often. Maybe you should follow it a bit more closely. It is very important, in my humble opinion. It is The Normal People vs the MAFIAA, their scare tactics and their scandalous racketing scheme.
NewYorkCountryLawyer has huge balls for fighting them face to face, and as average geeks, we should thank him for his work.
And I will start right now : NewYorkCountryLawyer, thank you.
In fact, you are wrong.
Latino-Americans do feel "American", and I've met more than one (mainly from Argentina and Brazil) who are a bit pissed off at the appropriation of a continent name by a single country. They are and feel American, and so there can be confusion. Just ask them.
You should listen to one of the most famous song by brazilian singer Gilberto Gil, it's in spanish and portuguese, and it is called "Soy loco por ti, America" ("I'm crazy about you, America"). He talks about the whole continent, not the USA.
Nobody is going to die over this naming problem, but it really does exist. I try to use "people of the USA" instead of "American", to try to be precise, without pissing off anybody. Sometimes you don't need it, depending on the context. But sometimes there really is confusion.
Don't worry, it happens all the time. Especially at 7 AM after a night of work:)
Natural selection by itself is not evolution.
Well, natural selection is what drives evolution. It's the reason for evolution. Without natural selection, there is no evolution.
If you have a species with many different traits and some outside influence makes some of those traits more desirable while others less so, the dying out of the less desirable traits is not evolution. No new trait has been introduced into the gene pool.
Oh, I see what you mean now. And I think you are wrong, semantically speaking at least. Natural selection can apply a positive or negative pressure. You are making a distinction between apparition of a new positive trait, what you really call 'evolution' (increased fitness for the newly formed lucky mutant) and bad changes in the environment (decreased fitness for the unlucky ones who don't have the right gene that was already here in the population).
I see your point, but in fact, I think it doesn't matter. Increased fitness for a few ones or decreased fitness for the rest of the population is the same thing at the end. It's all relative. The fittest survives. In one case, the evolution will comes from the apparition of a positive trait. On the other case, the evolution will come from the disappearance of a negative trait. Extinction is also evolution at work. You don't need to introduce a new gene to call it like that.
In other words, I think we can call evolution the consequence of both a change in a gene, and a change in the environment. You are arguing that only the former is actual evolution, if I understand.
It doesn't matter, I think, if the positive gene suddenly appears at random, or is pre-existing in a latent form in a population.
Now don't take my word for it. I am a biologist, but not a geneticist. And I'm sleepy right now.
why is mutation always mentioned, but crossover, never so?
You're right. Point mutations (like a bit flipping in geekspeak) are only one kind of evolution mechanism, although it can be caused by several mechanisms (error during copy of the genome, which in fact happens all the time, 1 or 2 per billion base pair per duplication if I remember, a rate that would never be tolerated in computers, it's like 1 bit flipping every 125 Mb, also chemicals, cosmic rays, etc). But to participate in evolution, it has to be transmitted to the germline. So the mutation has to happen in your balls, in other terms.
Generally speaking, mutation is almost always fatal
In fact, no. There are many point mutations between human beings, they are called SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) and there is a big worldwide project that mapped many of them them. Most of them are silent, or at least do not have a black and white effect (but it sometimes unfortunately happens : one single mutation in 3 billions nucleotides and you will suffer a painful and slow death). Remember that people used to say that most of the human genome is junk (this junk actually seems to be more and more important, but it's mainly "apart from defined genes - a few percent - we have no idea what the rest is doing here").
A point mutation in a primate genome would be like flipping a random bit in an overbloated Visual Basic application. It's very likely the program will still be funtional. As opposed to changing a random bit in a very size optimized assembler program, which is almost certainly going to crash.
My own theory is that mutation is the driver behind speciation, while crossover is the driver behind evolution.
I'm not sure it's supported by facts, although it's an interesting theory. Don't forget that there are even other ways to modify a genome. An important one is polyploidy : suddenly for some reason an organism doubles the number of chromosomes (a cell that duplicate the genome but fails to separate into two daughter cells). As you suddenly have twice the number of redundant genes, then the new genome is like a playground for other kinds of mutation, as time and random can play around with the copies of the genes without much effect, as long as there is one functional copy.
Another mechanism, as opposed to point mutation or whole genome doubling, is deletions or copies (in tandem, or inverted, or somewhere else, or in the middle of another gene) of huge portions of the genome (several thousands of nucleotides). In fact, there was a paper in Nature two or three weeks ago that compared the chimp and the human genome for this type of big chunk mutation.
A last one is through the action of transposons which may be some old retrovirus succesfully inserted in the genome. For some reason, sometimes a transposon get excited, wakes up and it will excise itself from its current location and jump somewhere else in the genome. But this process is never perfect, and the jump removes or leaves a few nucleotides that are going to induce a mess if it's inside a gene.
There are others ways to fuel evolution at the genome level, but that were the ones that came on top of my head quickly. Plus I need a coffee.
So I'd say natural selection happened as recently as ~5000 years ago, not evolution
What you just wrote does not make a lot of sense. Every small process of natural selection contributes to the big picture of evolution. In such a small amount of time (a few thousands of year), you probably won't witness a big event as a speciation, like separation of chimps and humans, although it could happen. You are lucky if you can spot and follow one mutation, like in this case. You are luckier if you find it in humans, and even more lucky if you can link this mutation to a functional change that can be easily explained and correlated with a change in behavior, like this lactose tolerance.
That's why it's kind of an important news in genetics. This type of discovery does not happen every day. Plus it's good to rub this stuff in the face of creationists nuts. Remember that in many countries, a huge amount of people don't believe that evolution is a proven fact, and if you start talking about evolution of one kind of primate in particular (homo sapiens), they may shoot you on sight.
Anyway. Your phrase is like saying, in geek translation : "But I just changed one line of this source, so it's not a different program !". "I just changed one pixel, it's not a different image !".
It's not the first time that we hear some kind of hoax like that. Remember the wonderful 100:1 losless video that "superseded Claude Shannon's work", right here on Slashdot in 2002 (or enter "zeosync" on Google for a bit of geek fun) :
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/0 8/137246&mode=thread
Yes, this is a beautiful site, and they also explain the purposes and goal of each figure or tool. My favorite is probably this one :
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details .cfm?id=5&index=5&domain=
"Alice in Wonderland" as a visual graph that shows the interactions between characters, and when they appear through the book. Of course it will never replace the pleasure of reading it, but it's very nice for research purposes.
It's here :
http://infosthetics.com/
You can find there many more examples of visualization of complex sets of data. It's very interesting, and sometimes strangely beautiful. It is needed in biology for example, where any student can now easily check, in one or two days, the expression of all the genes in an organism (thanks to micro-arrays). If you want to make sense of these huge amounts of quantitative data, if you want to extract some important fine interaction that could be lost in the millions of numbers, you definitely have to use these kind of visualization tools nowadays.
Curiously, and despite a lot of success in many domains, NASA never fully mastered automated orbital rendez-vous, which is almost routine for USSR and then Russia space agencies, since almost 30 years (and is very important for keeping the International Space Station fridges and tanks full). Here for example we can read :
"The Soviet Union performed the first automated rendezvous in 1967 and since then, Russia has used fully automated systems to dock Soyuz and Progress spacecraft to its space stations."
Slashdot Mirror
Beautiful fractal landscape made from voxels. It was made by Tim Clarke. Yeah, that demo was so great, and so smooth on these old machines. You can get it here : http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=4662 (with a screenshot). Or directly : ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/show/mars10.zip
>The 'submitter' seems to have made a lot of 'assumptions' about how closely
>we have been following this 'case'.
Maybe there is a reason why Slashdot editors post news of this case quite often. Maybe you should follow it a bit more closely. It is very important, in my humble opinion. It is The Normal People vs the MAFIAA, their scare tactics and their scandalous racketing scheme.
NewYorkCountryLawyer has huge balls for fighting them face to face, and as average geeks, we should thank him for his work.
And I will start right now : NewYorkCountryLawyer, thank you.
In fact, you are wrong. Latino-Americans do feel "American", and I've met more than one (mainly from Argentina and Brazil) who are a bit pissed off at the appropriation of a continent name by a single country. They are and feel American, and so there can be confusion. Just ask them. You should listen to one of the most famous song by brazilian singer Gilberto Gil, it's in spanish and portuguese, and it is called "Soy loco por ti, America" ("I'm crazy about you, America"). He talks about the whole continent, not the USA. Nobody is going to die over this naming problem, but it really does exist. I try to use "people of the USA" instead of "American", to try to be precise, without pissing off anybody. Sometimes you don't need it, depending on the context. But sometimes there really is confusion.
Don't worry, it happens all the time. Especially at 7 AM after a night of work :)
Natural selection by itself is not evolution.Well, natural selection is what drives evolution. It's the reason for evolution. Without natural selection, there is no evolution.
If you have a species with many different traits and some outside influence makes some of those traits more desirable while others less so, the dying out of the less desirable traits is not evolution. No new trait has been introduced into the gene pool.Oh, I see what you mean now. And I think you are wrong, semantically speaking at least. Natural selection can apply a positive or negative pressure. You are making a distinction between apparition of a new positive trait, what you really call 'evolution' (increased fitness for the newly formed lucky mutant) and bad changes in the environment (decreased fitness for the unlucky ones who don't have the right gene that was already here in the population).
I see your point, but in fact, I think it doesn't matter. Increased fitness for a few ones or decreased fitness for the rest of the population is the same thing at the end. It's all relative. The fittest survives. In one case, the evolution will comes from the apparition of a positive trait. On the other case, the evolution will come from the disappearance of a negative trait. Extinction is also evolution at work. You don't need to introduce a new gene to call it like that.
In other words, I think we can call evolution the consequence of both a change in a gene, and a change in the environment. You are arguing that only the former is actual evolution, if I understand.
It doesn't matter, I think, if the positive gene suddenly appears at random, or is pre-existing in a latent form in a population.
Now don't take my word for it. I am a biologist, but not a geneticist. And I'm sleepy right now.
You're right. Point mutations (like a bit flipping in geekspeak) are only one kind of evolution mechanism, although it can be caused by several mechanisms (error during copy of the genome, which in fact happens all the time, 1 or 2 per billion base pair per duplication if I remember, a rate that would never be tolerated in computers, it's like 1 bit flipping every 125 Mb, also chemicals, cosmic rays, etc). But to participate in evolution, it has to be transmitted to the germline. So the mutation has to happen in your balls, in other terms.
Generally speaking, mutation is almost always fatalIn fact, no. There are many point mutations between human beings, they are called SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) and there is a big worldwide project that mapped many of them them. Most of them are silent, or at least do not have a black and white effect (but it sometimes unfortunately happens : one single mutation in 3 billions nucleotides and you will suffer a painful and slow death). Remember that people used to say that most of the human genome is junk (this junk actually seems to be more and more important, but it's mainly "apart from defined genes - a few percent - we have no idea what the rest is doing here").
A point mutation in a primate genome would be like flipping a random bit in an overbloated Visual Basic application. It's very likely the program will still be funtional. As opposed to changing a random bit in a very size optimized assembler program, which is almost certainly going to crash.
My own theory is that mutation is the driver behind speciation, while crossover is the driver behind evolution.I'm not sure it's supported by facts, although it's an interesting theory. Don't forget that there are even other ways to modify a genome. An important one is polyploidy : suddenly for some reason an organism doubles the number of chromosomes (a cell that duplicate the genome but fails to separate into two daughter cells). As you suddenly have twice the number of redundant genes, then the new genome is like a playground for other kinds of mutation, as time and random can play around with the copies of the genes without much effect, as long as there is one functional copy.
Another mechanism, as opposed to point mutation or whole genome doubling, is deletions or copies (in tandem, or inverted, or somewhere else, or in the middle of another gene) of huge portions of the genome (several thousands of nucleotides). In fact, there was a paper in Nature two or three weeks ago that compared the chimp and the human genome for this type of big chunk mutation.
A last one is through the action of transposons which may be some old retrovirus succesfully inserted in the genome. For some reason, sometimes a transposon get excited, wakes up and it will excise itself from its current location and jump somewhere else in the genome. But this process is never perfect, and the jump removes or leaves a few nucleotides that are going to induce a mess if it's inside a gene.
There are others ways to fuel evolution at the genome level, but that were the ones that came on top of my head quickly. Plus I need a coffee.
What you just wrote does not make a lot of sense. Every small process of natural selection contributes to the big picture of evolution. In such a small amount of time (a few thousands of year), you probably won't witness a big event as a speciation, like separation of chimps and humans, although it could happen. You are lucky if you can spot and follow one mutation, like in this case. You are luckier if you find it in humans, and even more lucky if you can link this mutation to a functional change that can be easily explained and correlated with a change in behavior, like this lactose tolerance.
That's why it's kind of an important news in genetics. This type of discovery does not happen every day. Plus it's good to rub this stuff in the face of creationists nuts. Remember that in many countries, a huge amount of people don't believe that evolution is a proven fact, and if you start talking about evolution of one kind of primate in particular (homo sapiens), they may shoot you on sight.
Anyway. Your phrase is like saying, in geek translation : "But I just changed one line of this source, so it's not a different program !". "I just changed one pixel, it's not a different image !".
Something like that. More or less.
It's not the first time that we hear some kind of hoax like that. Remember the wonderful 100:1 losless video that "superseded Claude Shannon's work", right here on Slashdot in 2002 (or enter "zeosync" on Google for a bit of geek fun) : http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/0 8/137246&mode=thread
Yes, this is a beautiful site, and they also explain the purposes and goal of each figure or tool. My favorite is probably this one : http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details .cfm?id=5&index=5&domain=
"Alice in Wonderland" as a visual graph that shows the interactions between characters, and when they appear through the book. Of course it will never replace the pleasure of reading it, but it's very nice for research purposes.
It's here : http://infosthetics.com/ You can find there many more examples of visualization of complex sets of data. It's very interesting, and sometimes strangely beautiful. It is needed in biology for example, where any student can now easily check, in one or two days, the expression of all the genes in an organism (thanks to micro-arrays). If you want to make sense of these huge amounts of quantitative data, if you want to extract some important fine interaction that could be lost in the millions of numbers, you definitely have to use these kind of visualization tools nowadays.
Curiously, and despite a lot of success in many domains, NASA never fully mastered automated orbital rendez-vous, which is almost routine for USSR and then Russia space agencies, since almost 30 years (and is very important for keeping the International Space Station fridges and tanks full). Here for example we can read :
"The Soviet Union performed the first automated rendezvous in 1967 and since then, Russia has used fully automated systems to dock Soyuz and Progress spacecraft to its space stations."