Treeees!!!

[shane]

Re: Treeees!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, supporters and dissenters, I give to you (drumroll) evolution!

http://www.cbctrust.com/PRENATAL.html

The full cycle from cell to Eukarya > Animalia > Chordata > Vertebrata > Mammalia > Primate > Hominidae > Homo > Sapien > Sapiens in less than a solar year, easily observable by an individual.

 

[fanavans]

Re: Treeees!!!

I agree with Dmitri.

What's more, niether creationists or Darwinist attempt to answer Why what is is how it is.

 

[thenumbersix]

Re: Treeees!!!

If I may, but aren't we missing an important point, that plants and animals are somewhat different. To compare a Lilly with a Human and to argue that one can not evolve in one way because the other doesn't, is like comparing two disimilar systems. I think the difference between the two is almost an arguement for evolution. Simply that plants are rooted and stuck for their lifetime in one spot and animals are capable of moving to a better environment as they need. Both have evolved and flourished, but in vastly different ways..

Plantlife deserves our respect, they are a more pure form of life for our Earth and coexist with it in a much more direct and symbiotic manner. Our job here is simply to pass on our DNA, something that plant life is making a much better job of. The tortoise has always won..

I would also argue that plant life is a lot older than animal life. What are the chances of the Earth starting with an Oxygen atmosphere after a violent and firey start. Is there any other method of producing oxygen than plants as they convert clorophyll, this is a chemical reaction, a process that would have been going on long before any animal life started to process gases via lung or gill !

To dismiss Darwin as quakery is wrong, his work is not some idea he just came up with one day... He made a valid point in that all life he viewed evolves to fit to its' environment, the more a lifeform adapts to its' environment the more successful it will be. There are examples of this and good examples of diversity in the system, also anomolies in physical isolation ie. Australia (why doesn't tha platypus count ? Did someone invent it) and the Galapagos Islands. Also sharks and many reptiles, why have they not changed for millenia ? They are at their peak for their environment.

Not to say that they won't be evolving in a more subtle way, maybe once we reach this point evolution takes a different direction toward intelligence. If the phsical form is almost at perfection the only room left for evolution is in outsmarting the opposition..which includes us.

I would agree that the accepted theory is not the whole picture, IMO there can be some learning carried down in evolution, I would be interested to see if anyone is trying to discover if learning can be carried forward in DNA, if we can change our DNA to 'fix' us is there a reason our bodies don't change our DNA as something is learnt, the greater the depth of learning the greater the imprint on our DNA, this may even take generations before any noticable 'natural tendencies' in un-trained offspring (purely speculative on my behalf)

Instinct in animals may be a good example, it is just called instinct and left at that, what does it actually entail and how is it carried over generations ? Ok, Certain aspects like breathing and body functions are built deep into the core brain structures, but this alone suggests an early primitive brain that has been built upon as our needs have changed and evolved. As the physical body evolves so does it's motor control and navigation, upgrades to the CPU, the brain ! A study of rabbits in headlights might be a good experiment, have they evolved to ignore cars to any extent ?

Mutation is also an inevitabilty due to the amount of radiation pouring down onto our planet, cells will be hit, damage is done during reproduction. Though this does suggest that mutation is happening at a generational level which would require some continuation of the mutation to further generations. This would argue for a more 'dynamic' DNA, providing I am understanding evolutional mutation correctly..

This may also imply that to raise our exposure to the natural levels of radiation should have an effect. Microwave ovens, and their mini brother the mobile phone, may be even encasing ourselves in large artificial grids of powerful electricity and motors. All suppliers of extra electromagnetic energy in our surrounding.

How much can we push it before we start 'blowing fuses' in evolution, to do so would start an unforgiving decline in our stock. Dangers in the system exist, reduction of the gene pool for one. If it is such a perfectly designed system, so to be impossible to arrive naturally, why does it show traits of weakness ?

Surely if there are bad conditions that are hereditary such as a weak heart or sickle cell then there must also be good traits that continue ? In same families you are not always guaranteed to suffer from the same conditions as previous generations. Is that not evolutionary mutation in one generation ?. They are even starting to argue that we are predisposed to violence or alcoholism and other 'social conditions' because of our genes..

Have read a lot of references to 'Junk' DNA that does nothing, once again we are told the minimum, science behind closed doors, they have their research funding to keep hold of I guess. Whole stretches of DNA are dismissed as irrelevant. I think not, nature is anything but wasteful ! It that were the maps for detailed frontal lobe structure we wouldn't have found it yet anyway...

If things didn't evolve where did they come from, I would like to hear arguements for an alternative that doesn't involve some unknown outside influence...

I think one key point stopping the evolution arguement is some misgotten sentimentality that we are special or better in some way then the other life we share this planet with. People don't like to think we evolved from monkeys (who actually says this, real scientists ?). I also think this is a fallicy.

Man evolved from an earlier man, monkeys evolved from earlier monkeys. Neandethal man was another different but more closely similar species, still no more homo sapien than the monkey is though. At some point they died out, maybe it was our first war. Their craniums were too small to hold a brain as large as ours and we won that particular race because circumstance dictated, we probably had crude explosive by then..

Why are we here ? because we are ! My God is the Universe, the Earth and the environment that gave me life. Why is it being desecrated ?

 

[Harte]

Re: Treeees!!!

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"shane\")</div>

Ladies and gentlemen, supporters and dissenters, I give to you (drumroll) evolution!

http://www.cbctrust.com/PRENATAL.html

The full cycle from cell to Eukarya > Animalia > Chordata > Vertebrata > Mammalia > Primate > Hominidae > Homo > Sapien > Sapiens in less than a solar year, easily observable by an individual.[/b]

Shane,
Thanks, man for providing the argument that I had completely forgotten about. Good one!

I want to also say that scientists find it difficult to accept any theory that is not subject to the scientific method. Interference from beyond is such a theory. It might be true, but it isn't subject to scientific analysis and is therefore not science.

Harte

 

[Eutychus]

Re: Treeees!!!

You know, if someone would just come up with a working time machine, we could settle this once and for all. Go back and have tea with an australopithicus, record the utterance of "fiat lux" with a digital camcorder and a really dark filter over the lens, pop by the Galapagos and offer to take Charles Darwin along to witness God creating or life crawling up out of the ooze. You know, one working time machine could make the discussion boards a really boring place.

 

[Dmitri]

Re: Treeees!!!

Hi everybody,
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"thenumbersix\")</div>

Why are we here ? because we are ! My God is the Universe, the Earth and the environment that gave me life. Why is it being desecrated ?[/b]

Because science was competing with religion for political influence and biologists like Darwin wanted their part.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"shane\")</div>

The full cycle from cell to Eukarya > Animalia > Chordata > Vertebrata > Mammalia > Primate > Hominidae > Homo > Sapien > Sapiens in less than a solar year, easily observable by an individual.[/b]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Harte\")</div>

I want to also say that scientists find it difficult to accept any theory that is not subject to the scientific method. Interference from beyond is such a theory. It might be true, but it isn't subject to scientific analysis and is therefore not science.[/b]

So there are two issues here to address. First, recapitulation in the embryonic development and whether it indeed reflects evolutionary stages of structural change in its ancestral lineage. Second, testability of ID (intelligent design) or panspermia.

Let?s start with the proof of the impossibility of randomness to build complexity or otherwise improve an organism. Please forgive my repeating some of my previous blogs here, I rephrased them to fit the points better. There is no way DNA or other informational molecules could have come about biochemically on their own. If you consider Gould's punctuated equilibrium, no one in human history has seen a lizard with a cat's tail in thousands of years, so how come we trick ourselves with five million years (less than 1000x as long) being able to do the magic.

I started seriously questioning the concept of the common ancestry tree, although I had a bunch of those in my thesis - these trees can be made for you by programs, just drop all characters you want there and the trees are ready. Call it support for evolution if you want. Nobody included a train as an outgroup for vertebrates, but it will fit there too, because it has sort of eye looking front windows, kind of ear like mirrors and sort of leg looking wheels. This is mainstream biology called phylogenetics. 5 years ago I switched to cell biology where things get more basic and people do not invoke evolution almost at all, however Nature and Science journals always welcome any and every implication of it quite badly.

Evolution by random mutations and selection has been proven anti-scientific from the hard science and pure logic basis (see L. Spetner "Not by Chance" and F. Hoyle "Mathematics of Evolution"). It exists as a common misconception blind to the fact. Random mutations can only destroy information, not create it. It takes a while to consider, so please do not jump to conclusions such as that selection can do the trick; it has never done it because it cannot in principle. We have been taught it can, but it is simply false.

Let's get down to the root of the error. What the evolution theory proposes is natural selection on random variation resulting genetic change and thus new forms. The trivial simplicity of the following one gene model is the reason it penetrates minds starting from high school and does not go away easily. If "A" gene variety has a higher survival probability than variety "a" of the same gene, and no other variation exists, in a countable number of generations variety "A" will replace variety "a". This is what most of population genetics is about. Where is the flaw? An organism does not have one gene only. And a gene is not just a few nucleotides long but it is much longer. What if the individuals with the good gene "A" carry a bad gene "b" with the bad effect overweighing the good of "A"? What about the natural situation that the number of bad mutations significantly exceeds the number of good ones? The species dies very soon, life is impossible, or the theory must die. One may argue: natural selection can eliminate all bad ones, even when they are many, and keep the few good ones. Well, it cannot. You can either check the behavior of the function, or you can intuitively conclude the following. Suppose the genome size is 3 billion base pairs (close to ours), the non-neutral mutation rate is one per a hundred million base pairs, resulting 30 mutations per individual per generation. Most mutations are naturally neutral and do not affect survival. However, for those that are not neutral, we can hardly suggest a rate of more than 1:100 of good ones to bad ones (many functional protein motifs are pretty much fixed so that you cannot change their sequence at all). For the selection to work to the advantage of the species there should be some individuals with at least 16 good to 14 bad mutations. The selection will not find this or better one. Even if it did, it would have to wipe the rest of the population in every generation. But it will not find it in a billion years anyway. Some biologists would argue: the mutation rate is lower; it is like one per the whole genome per generation. To make the selection work just a little bit and to keep the topic a bit alive, Hoyle in ?Mathematics of Evolution? assumed the mutation rate 0.3 per organism per generation. This is way too low. Well, what genetic change would you get with such a low rate? A new gene in a hundred billions of years? - Not even that soon. Darwin did not know about genes. Muller found the contradiction and termed it genetic load. Those neo-Darwinians who knew of it hid it, they do not want to talk about it, they get angry if you mention it, fun isn't it? It is not just lack of evidence; it is clear evidence to the contrary.

There is also this tree of life to the evolutionary theory, of course, the tree of common ancestry. Why should similar imply a common ancestor? We do not have any intermediates, apart from Archaeopteryx, which may have been faked anyway or does not prove much. All insect families are already present in the Cretaceous, no intermediates. All we have handy and misleading is the apparent similarity of living forms. All buildings are also similar in that they have some concrete and other construction material in common. They do not multiply though, but if they were made to, would we say that skyscrapers were grandchildren of our yard huts that happened to grow taller?

If not randomness or ID, what else? You may suggest structuralistic ways of evolution meaning self-development along innate principles. Lamarckian learning may work indeed, but it would be supplementary only. An insect wing cannot gradually evolve by learning before it is used. This is not just an organ, it is the whole huge body-system that is not needed unless fully functional. And if there are laws by which the wing evolves gradually and without external influence, I will still call these laws purposeful and intelligently put forth.

Recapitulation in the embryonic development may just reflect the fact that similar organisms were built on the similar basis. If you modify a program, you may still leave some old and irrelevant scripts as long as they do not interfere with the function. ID in this respect does not produce something ideal or flawless. It can also imply that organisms indeed are directed to evolve from ancestral forms by consecutive (viral and bacterial) upgrades.

The situation with the testability of ID is much better than it is generally thought. We should be able to show soon that genomes were/ have been built by intelligent agents. This should be partially based on careful statistics that will be able to distinguish between complexity built on gradual addition and modification of (genetic) characters and complexity built by unconstrained rearrangements and introduction of complete novelty. It would be possible even now, if the ID statistical models were to be considered and funded in genome research. Still, a few ID friendly people in bioinformatics should be able to make a difference fairly soon. Plus there are a few wet lab experiments to run to support ID, I cannot elaborate on them now yet. On top of it, we should be able to see what viruses have been incorporated in the genomes and we should also be able to find them high in the Stratosphere as Wickramasinghe points out. If somebody finds a watch, they understand it is made by somebody else. If we find viral signatures inside genomes, that were historically responsible for novel and complex characters of their hosts, we will not assume that a series of different viruses evolved for the sake of themselves the ability to develop the wing in the insect when coming together to the same host genome, for example. We will conclude that these are ID upgrades to existing species.

Here is a small suggestion. Fact: There have been mass extinctions of life forms on Earth every 26-30 million years. They have been followed by spread of different life forms; some of them more different than generally perceived. Almost no intermediates are found. Suggestion: Earth intersects an orbit of an intelligent cosmic space where, now earth being within a workable distance, life forms on earth are replaced knowingly. Details like these are not testable yet. I want to buy a telescope anyway. However, the general ID principle is testable.

~Dmitri

 

[shane]

Re: Treeees!!!

They do not multiply though, but if they were made to, would we say that skyscrapers were grandchildren of our yard huts that happened to grow taller?

From an anthropological standpoint, yes. Skyscrapers are the grandchildren of our old yard huts that happened to grow taller. The idea began rather simply, and it was slowly built up. That's evolution.

I'm not going to bother to nitpick through your entire post, as it is a fallacious travesty of epic proportions. In other words, if I spent all day digging through BS, my hands would stink for a week. The amount of information you choose to ignore is astounding. It seems to me that you formed your theories about evolution prior to finding any supporting information, and only then began looking for bits of informational flotsam to support the theories. Generally, science works the other way around.

I think your analogy about the skyscrapers summarized the problem with your method of thought quite well. You're looking at huts and then at skyscrapers, not looking at all the points in between. It's like playing connect the dots, but you only choose to recognize two out of thousands of dots. Of course, when doing this, you're only going to draw a line, and it isn't going to look anything like the schooner on the next page. Oviously, you think, that picture of the schooner is quite inaccurate.

 

[Dmitri]

Re: Treeees!!!

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"shane\")</div>

From an anthropological standpoint, yes. Skyscrapers are the grandchildren of our old yard huts that happened to grow taller. The idea began rather simply, and it was slowly built up. That's evolution.[/b]

This is not: evolution of ideas is not evolution of objects in terms of their self-organization.

I'm not going to bother to nitpick through your entire post, as it is a fallacious travesty of epic proportions.

Actually, yours looks much more like you just described, especially in your following proportion.

In other words, if I spent all day digging through BS, my hands would stink for a week.

<span style='font-family:Times New Roman'><span style='font-family:Verdana'>

The amount of information you choose to ignore is astounding.

Name the least.

It seems to me that you formed your theories about evolution prior to finding any supporting information, and only then began looking for bits of informational flotsam to support the theories.

Only seemingly so, because as I pointed out, I had worked in the field of phylogenetics for years and years, describing new taxa, analyzing morphological and genetic characters. I actually started insect collections when I was about 7 and got interested in evolution when I was 15 (then I naturally believed in all this stuff you are stuck to believe now). So I doubt you find information that I ignored, but please give it a try.

I think your analogy about the skyscrapers summarized the problem with your method of thought quite well. You\'re looking at huts and then at skyscrapers, not looking at all the points in between. It\'s like playing connect the dots, but you only choose to recognize two out of thousands of dots. Of course, when doing this, you\'re only going to draw a line, and it isn\'t going to look anything like the schooner on the next page.

Oh, boy. The thing is, there are gaps in between, huge gaps, and whole oceans are there. Where do you find thousands of dots? When I look at brand new genes in our genomes popped up from nowhere, with 0 homology to any others, I call it gaps, no dots in between. When I look at other human genes, which are homologous to several different ones in chimp or even in fly but made so that they incorporate several fragments of functionally unrelated genes, I say chance has not been around here. And where do you say you find your thousands of dots? I bet you imagined them.

~Dmitri

 

[thenumbersix]

Re: Treeees!!!

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Dmitri\")</div>

I say chance has not been around here.[/b]

What is your grand theory to top Darwin here then ? Please tell, I am open to other ideas and you seem very convinced... And have raised some points that deserve a thought.. No mention of some unknown outside influence please, at least put a theory to it !


<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(\"Dmitri\")</div>

Because science was competing with religion for political influence and biologists like Darwin wanted their part.[/b]

I don't think it is fair to say that it is Biologists that are desecrating this planet, try looking toward the troughs for the influence of this !

 

[Dmitri]

Re: Treeees!!!

I don't think it is fair to say that it is Biologists that are desecrating this planet, try looking toward the troughs for the influence of this !

You are right, there must have been more of a context to it. You may like Fred Hoyle?s ?The Intelligent Universe?. I do not have it handy now; I gave it to my fellow-worker to read. Hoyle explores, in particular, social aspects of the desecration. I am not strong at those. I love the book and think Hoyle was a great scientist. On top of his developments in physics and cosmology he gave us his beautiful and coherent worldview, which we are still a long way from fully appreciating. BTW, in his ?Mathematics of Evolution? he concludes, like you did: ?And the outcome of the essay? Well as common sense would suggest, the Darwinian theory is correct in the small but not in the large. Rabbits come from other slightly different rabbits, not from either soup or potatoes. Where they came from in the first place is a problem yet to be solved, like much else of a cosmic scale.? One can skip math in this book without losing the line, because he explains every step in the argument. I still think the Darwinian theory is correct at a negligible scale, because the mutation rate Hoyle assumes is unrealistically low, 0.3 mutations per 3 billion base pair genome per generation: so that the selection has some material to play with. The thing is most mutations are not random, but this is another story.

What is your grand theory to top Darwin here then ? Please tell, I am open to other ideas and you seem very convinced... And have raised some points that deserve a thought.. No mention of some unknown outside influence please, at least put a theory to it !

I practically concluded that selection on random variation cannot work, mostly based on the argument of the one vs. many genes model, which I described in my previous blog. Then I read about this in Spetner?s ?Not by Chance? and Hoyle?s ?Mathematics of Evolution?. Now I consider panspermia as a plausible hypothesis. The idea is old, it was developed by ancient Greeks. Now it is gaining force as new evidence comes to play. The idea of the origin on earth BTW was rejected by Orgel (who was #1 in testing organic origin for many years) and Crick (co-author of DNA structure discovery). Good site on panspermia is at http://www.panspermia.org/ Wickramasinghe pioneers the field. Hoyle and he came to understanding of life forms on earth as being part of an open system, which probably encompasses all Universe. They proved, by comparing spectra of different substances, that interstellar clouds consist of enormous masses of frozen bacteria that are spread all over the Universe. Besides, there is no particular sense to assume that we are the only intelligent creatures in the world (this is where, I guess, I disagree with fundamentalists). This is contrary to the principle of continuum. I hope to contribute to testing the idea of panspermia in several years. Circumstantial evidence is already being collected and reflected on in the peer-review Astrobiology magazine. NASA, in particular, spends good money on this line of research. As to "evolutionary biology" as it was officially defined, nowadays it is a field for demagogues mostly. Serious biologists in molecular or cell biology do not talk about it.

Most people do not know how DNA is organized and structured. It forms a highly organized complex with hundreds of different regulatory and structural proteins. This is a state-of-the-art complex, with its numerous laws of behavior and differential composition at all levels of compaction, starting from 10nm fiber to 300nm higher order of compaction. It folds and unfolds at transcription; it changes its shape dramatically throughout cell cycle, it looks down on replication errors (which have been called the material of evolution) because it has a proofreading mechanism that corrects practically all errors. One out of 100, 000, 000 gets away uncorrected: this is one letter out of 20 large volumes of 500 pages each. A hack of a reading proof this is. Now, this one out of a 100 million is the one that leads evolution they say. I should say, considering the delicate structure of chromatin, get yourself a heavy hammer, go smash on the walls of a museum and see what you improve this way.


~Dmitri