Posted on 11/10/2008 7:54:59 PM PST by Soliton
Over the summer, Sonja Prohaska decided to try an experiment. She would spend a day without ever saying the word “gene.” Dr. Prohaska is a bioinformatician at the University of Leipzig in Germany. In other words, she spends most of her time gathering, organizing and analyzing information about genes. “It was like having someone tie your hand behind your back,” she said. But Dr. Prohaska decided this awkward experiment was worth the trouble, because new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. “It cannot work that way,” Dr. Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes.
It turns out, for example, that several different proteins may be produced from a single stretch of DNA. Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but another chemical known as RNA. The familiar double helix of DNA no longer has a monopoly on heredity. Other molecules clinging to DNA can produce striking differences between two organisms with the same genes. And those molecules can be inherited along with DNA.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“We’re really in kindergarten when it comes to our understanding of biology”
Cause we’ve spent so much of our time looking for the *perfect* way to kill.
Seems like we could reverse engineer.
“Mutations are both beneficial and harmful. The really harmful ones are weeded out. The beneficial ones spread.”
The word defining the process is evolution.
Since secular humanism rejects the supernatural and spiritual as the basis for moral reflection and decision making, it can hardly be called a religion. No faith needed to validate science, and no science needed to validate faith...
the list of signers to the humanist manifestos 1 and 2, are all secular humanists, just cause they dont have God as their object of worship, but substitute the earth itself, doesnt make it any less a religion.
yes, the process is called evolution, but the giant LEAP OF FAITH (hint: religious belief) that random mutation coupled with time and natural selection can get from goo to you...is a religion, not science.
It takes no leap of faith to know what geological and fossil records tell us: that our Earth is about 4,500,000,000 years old; and our own species, Homo-sapiens, first appeared about 150,000 years ago.
The evidence as to Earth’s age being about 4.5 billion years comes from radioactive half-life studies on Moon rocks collected on the Apollo XI mission.
Scientists tell us that the Moon flew off from our Earth after a giant impact.
Given that, and the fact that Moon rocks are less susceptible to environmental turmoil such as that on Earth, Moon rock age data supercedes that from half-life studies on Earth’s “oldest” rocks (found in Greenland and Western Australia) that are just under four billion years old.
Not only does character count - facts count too. Are you aware that there are several assumptions at play in the math behind the old-age earth/universe assumptions? No one can state unequivocally the beginning ratio of father-daughter elements. There are several common-sense approaches to aging that show a young earth - say in the range of only 6-10 thousand years. Salinity of the oceans is one.
Do you truly believe the moon was spun off from the earth? Have you actually studied the composition of both the earth and the moon?
Steve Jones, in "Darwin's Ghost" (page194), writes ...
"The first attempt to age our planet (rather than just to order the pages of its biography) compared the saltiness of the sea with that of the rivers feeding it. If the sea was once fresh, and its salt came from the land, it should be possible to work out how long the ocean had taken to become saline. The estimate - of a hundred million years -- was a deathblow to those who meaured time in human terms. It was the first hint of the unimaginable antiquity of life.
It was far too low, because salt is laid down in great deposits on the sea bed and is returned to the land as it rises."
Have you actually studied the composition of both the earth and the moon?
I've looked at Moon rocks at the Smithsonian, and they might have originated on Earth.
Do you truly believe the moon was spun off from the earth?
One good report as to the origin of the Moon is at ...
http://www.psi.edu/projects/moon/moon.html
The most accurate (and recent) assessment of ocean salinity levels speculates an earth age of no more than 1 million years and that includes the assumption that there was no salt in the oceans originally - a fairly big assumption.
You also chose not to comment on the other earth age-dating assumptions. I have to admit I get tired of hearing folks claim the age of the earth (or most anything else regarding evolution) as if it were precisely known. All these methods are still simply educated guesses and any assumptions involved are more often than not completely left out of the discussion. In science assumptions should always be stated upfront.
All we really need in science education today is a complete discussion of what is known and what is conjecture.
Try reading www.creationscience.com for more evolutionary ideas that are not based in fact.
Is there a source for the above statenebt?
Meanwhile, the website at ...
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/macs/
... has pictures of a "Cluster" called MACS J0025.4-1222 that is estimated to be 5.6 billion light years from Earth.
Isn't that evidence that "creation" must have happened at least 5.6 billion years ago?
Try Wikipedia for ocean salinity source. I know it’s not the best source but the 100 million figure you gave was even moreso vague and questionable.
Also checkout book ‘Starlight and Time’ by Russell Humphreys - seems even Einstein had some things to say about how space and gravity can warp astronomical time measurements.
Estimate for billions of years for earth and universe simply doesn’t jive with several common sense approaches. Where has all the dust gone?
Why does EVERY thread about anything attached to science turn into a fight about creationism?
Sheesh, people.
If you are having a knee jerk response that science is a threat to your religion, then you need to re-examine your reflexes.
From the Steve Jones book "Darwin's Ghost," page 218.
"A million comets orbit the sun, The gravel that surrounds them appears, should it hit our atmosphere, as a shower of meteors. The Earth gains a ton in weight every hour from their dust."
Q.E.D
My mistake ... my eyes aren’t good and. upon rereading the Jones material, I discovered that the “million comets” should be a trillion comets.
That’s huge, so I looked for another source and the website at http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Rosetta/SEMSCM474OD_0.html
verifies the trillion number.
This is the type of stuff that put Copernicus and Galileo into big trouble with religious authorities.
Your last 2 posts only bolster what I’ve been saying about arguments for a young earth. From CreationScience.com website:
79. Meteoritic Dust
Meteoritic dust is accumulating on Earth so fast that, after 4 billion years (at today’s low and diminishing rate), the equivalent of more than 16 feet of this dust should have accumulated. Because this dust is high in nickel, Earth’s crust should have abundant nickel. No such concentration has been found on land or in the oceans. Therefore, Earth appears to be young.
or how about this one:
78. Shallow Meteorites
Meteorites are steadily falling onto Earth. This rate was probably much greater in the past, because planets have swept from the solar system much of the original meteoritic material. Therefore, experts have expressed surprise that meteorites are almost always found in young sediments, very near Earth’s surface.a Even meteoritic particles in ocean sediments are concentrated in the topmost layers.b If Earth’s sediments, which average about a mile in thickness on the continents, were deposited over hundreds of millions of years, as evolutionists believe, we would expect to find many deeply buried iron meteorites. Because this is not the case, the sediments were probably deposited rapidly, followed by “geologically recent” meteorite impacts. Also, because no meteorites are found directly above the basement rocks on which these sediments rest, these basement rocks were not exposed to meteoritic bombardment for any great length of time.
Similar observations can be made concerning ancient rock slides. Rock slides are frequently found on Earth’s surface, but are generally absent from supposedly old rock.c
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