New Ribosomal Research Offers Fresh Evidence, Understanding of Evolution

DailyTech ^ | August 19, 2008 | Jason Mick

[Soliton]

Evolution in its earliest days was derided by some for what they believed was a lack of observable evidence. However, a major piece of supporting evidence for evolution has come from computer analysis of cellular compounds. By examining minute details in organisms’ genomes, we have observed how traits were transferred to descendants and how other traits arose at different points in the evolutionary ladder.

[the invisib1e hand]

I thought we just covered this.

[Soliton]

I thought we just covered this.

Do you agree with everything this person contends?

[the invisib1e hand]

I think my comment on the last thread about this subject answers that question.

[Soliton]

I think my comment on the last thread about this subject answers that question.

Then why bother with this thread? Somewhere Pissant is praising Larry Sinclair. It would probably interest you more.

[raygunfan]

more of the same....whatever the super elastic bubble plastic theory needs, ANYTHNG WILL BE USED TO CONFIRM IT...no matter how trivial...and pedestrian....

[libh8er]

Evolution in its earliest days was derided by some for what they believed was a lack of observable evidence

..and most of us deride it to this day too.

[Soliton]

and most of us deride it to this day too..

[Gargantua]

This is me deriding this concocted bullsh*t theory.

;-/

[ElectricStrawberry]

Do you agree with everything this person contends?

Yep. He's sort of knowledgeable about his RNA.

I did took part in a same sort of study involving deer ticks and was able to generate the migration pattern of deer ticks from Siberia to Massachusetts by tracking base-pair mutations.

[Coyoteman]

From the article:

Skepticism aside, evolution is steadily being verified and analyzed thanks to cutting edge computing

One of my favorite examples is an online lecture:

Making Genetic Networks Operate Robustly: Unintelligent Non-design Suffices, by Professor Garrett Odell.

Description: Mathematical computer models of two ancient and famous genetic networks act early in embryos of many different species to determine the body plan. Models revealed these networks to be astonishingly robust, despite their 'unintelligent design.' This examines the use of mathematical models to shed light on how biological, pattern-forming gene networks operate and how thoughtless, haphazard, non-design produces networks whose robustness seems inspired, begging the question what else unintelligent non-design might be capable of.

[LiteKeeper]

YEC INTREP

[BuckeyeForever]

“This examines the use of mathematical models to shed light on how biological, pattern-forming gene networks operate and how thoughtless, haphazard, non-design produces networks whose robustness seems inspired, begging the question what else unintelligent non-design might be capable of.”
__________________

Fascinating stuff. Thanks. We need more “Unintelligent Non-Design” and a lot less Creationist B.S. around here.

[fortheDeclaration]

These similarities indicate that archaea are a closer "relative" to us on the evolutionary tree than bacteria.

I feel alot better now knowing that mankind didn't evolve from bacteria!

[fortheDeclaration]

Graduate student Elijah Roberts led the study and wrote computer programs that combed through thousands of organism's ribosomal sequences.

Ofcourse, the computer progrems were random and unplanned, like evolution itself.

[Soliton]

I did took part in a same sort of study involving deer ticks and was able to generate the migration pattern of deer ticks from Siberia to Massachusetts by tracking base-pair mutations.

So you are another one of these scientists who get up every morning just to do Satan's work?

[Soliton]

I once posted a high school lab experiment that broke the class into two teams.

Their task was to build an airplane glider out of drinking staws and paper.

Team one had raw materials, whole drinking straws and sheets of paper. They were required to come up with a theoretical design brfore building their plane using aeronautical engineering sources.

Team two had dozens of wing sections and tail sections and straws cut two different lengths. These were numbered and were selected randomly by lot. Their planes were then test flown and losing components were rejected.

Over and over again, the randomly selected airplane evolves to look like the designed plane.

The reason for this is, of course, that the function of stable flight selects the components. Form followed function as they say.

[Soliton]

I feel alot better now knowing that mankind didn't evolve from bacteria!

Yes, we are only the cousins of bacteria :)

[grey_whiskers]

The dirty secret is that this approach works only under the conditions that you have enough time and materials for some large number of trials; that the initial materials available are those *suitable* to the task at hand; that the environment is stable enough that the process has time to work before the definition of fitness changes -- or that the fitness criterion changes slowly; and that the "guesses" themselves represent improvements (i.e. in your example, some thought went into what features were put into each trial prototype vs. truly *random* changes -- if the changes were all random, but some subset of the space of all possible changes were improvements, a larger number of steps would be necessary to see the improvements).

The whole process is a lot smoother and faster once you *have* a more or less working system to do tweaks upon.

Again, it's not "this is false, so 'GodDidIt' "; but "this is an overly simplified version and some important features are being swept under the rug".

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Molecular-level cladistics are bound to be an improvement on naked-eye, gross macroscopic feature based cladistics.

But I'll bet they still may end up having significant inaccuracies, depending on the *expression* of certain genes in the particular organism.

If organism A and organism B both have a certain gene G coding for protein P, but organism A also has another protein Q, while organism B has a different protein R, then they may or may not be closely related depending on G's interaction with P differs from Q's interaction with R.

This problem to get more pronounced as the organisms get more complex.

Merely cataloging differences in the lists is prob'ly not sufficient, though it is a good start.

Cheers!