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To: AndrewC
Read Dr. James Shapiro, and/or you might actually read some of the links that Gore3000 has provided.

I don't see anything non-Darwinian here.

I've read some of gore3000's links, but I don't see anything non-Darwinian there amidst some of the other stuff either. RNA and DNA viruses, prions and other DNA transfer mechanisms have been recognized as having a role in mutations for several years. That's why we built manufacturing processes utilizing them.

437 posted on 10/14/2002 10:09:01 AM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: <1/1,000,000th%
I don't see anything non-Darwinian here.

Well then Dr James Shapiro is huffing and puffing about nothing.

A Third Way

What significance does an emerging interface between biology and information science hold for thinking about evolution? It opens up the possibility of addressing scientifically rather than ideologically the central issue so hotly contested by fundamentalists on both sides of the Creationist-Darwinist debate: Is there any guiding intelligence at work in the origin of species displaying exquisite adaptations that range from lambda prophage repression and the Krebs cycle through the mitotic apparatus and the eye to the immune system, mimicry, and social organization? Borrowing concepts from information science, new schools of evolutionists can begin to rephrase virtually intractable global questions in terms amenable to computer modelling and experimentation. We can speculate what some of these more manageable questions might be: How can molecular control circuits be combined to direct the expression of novel traits? Do genomes display characteristic system architectures that allow us to predict phenotypic consequences when we rearrange DNA sequence components? Do signal transduction networks contribute functional information as they regulate the action of natural genetic engineering hardware?

Questions like those above will certainly prove to be naive because we are just on the threshold of a new way of thinking about living organisms and their variations. Nonetheless, these questions serve to illustrate the potential for addressing the deep issues of evolution from a radically different scientific perspective. Novel ways of looking at longstanding problems have historically been the chief motors of scientific progress. However, the potential for new science is hard to find in the Creationist-Darwinist debate. Both sides appear to have a common interest in presenting a static view of the scientific enterprise. This is to be expected from the Creationists, who naturally refuse to recognize science's remarkable record of making more and more seemingly miraculous aspects of our world comprehensible to our understanding and accessible to our technology. But the neo-Darwinian advocates claim to be scientists, and we can legitimately expect of them a more open spirit of inquiry. Instead, they assume a defensive posture of outraged orthodoxy and assert an unassailable claim to truth, which only serves to validate the Creationists' criticism that Darwinism has become more of a faith than a science.

439 posted on 10/14/2002 10:34:20 AM PDT by AndrewC
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To: <1/1,000,000th%
I don't see anything non-Darwinian here.

Let me explain it to you then.

The discovery that human-specific retroviruses emerged at the same time other researchers believe humans and chimps diverged was startling.

...

They found that at least 16 percent of those elements had undergone rearrangements that resulted in large-scale "deletions, duplications, and chromosome reshuffling during the evolution of the human genome."

This is a very big change, something out of nothing, something which changed humans a great deal. It is a large jump totally unexplainable by evolution. These elements clearly did not act jointly and at random to create a new more advanced species. It also disproves the 2% nonsense evolutionists speak about as does the article on 'Monkeys and Men - Gene expression' which shows that the brains of men are much more powerful than those of monkeys by the simple expedient of expressing the genes affecting the brain more than on monkeys. It is hard to believe that such a simple and at the same time such a helpful change would have 'just happened' with men. Certainly such a simple change would have been helpful to almost any species yet it never occurred before. So yes, humans are special.

I've read some of gore3000's links, but I don't see anything non-Darwinian there.

If you have any questions why I consider any of them anti-Darwinian, just ask.

474 posted on 10/14/2002 4:44:10 PM PDT by gore3000
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