Posted on 08/21/2005 1:18:04 AM PDT by MRMEAN
Compared with fields like genetics and neuroscience and cosmology, botany comes up a bit short in the charisma department. But when scientists announced last week that they had figured out how plants grow, one had to take note, not only because of the cleverness required to crack a puzzle that dates to 1885, but because of what it says about controversy and certainty in science -- and about the evolution debate.
In 1885, scientists discovered a plant-growth hormone and called it auxin. Ever since, its mechanism of action had been a black box, with scientists divided into warring camps about precisely how the hormone works. Then last week, in a study in Nature, biologist Mark Estelle of Indiana University, Bloomington, and colleagues reported that auxin links up with a plant protein called TIR1, and together the pair binds to a third protein that silences growth-promoting genes. The auxin acts like a homing beacon for enzymes that munch on the silencer. Result: The enzymes devour the silencer, allowing growth genes to turn on.
Yet biology classes don't mention the Auxin Wars. Again and again, impressionable young people are told that auxin promotes plant growth, when the reality is more complex and there has been raging controversy over how it does so.
Which brings us to evolution. Advocates of teaching creationism (or its twin, intelligent design) have adopted the slogan, "Teach the controversy." That sounds eminently sensible. But it is disingenuous. For as the auxin saga shows, virtually no area of science is free of doubt or debate or gaps in understanding.
(Excerpt) Read more at american-buddha.com ...
Single? What points to a single designer. Life looks more like it was designed by committee, much as the Bible was designed.
Thanks, I stand corrected. I think the term is "radiometric"
see link
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html
You guys are right, my evolutionary knowledge is hopeless (35 years ago in school). Since then I moved on to electronics, micro-minature circuit repair, robotics, lasers, avionics, computers, wireless microwave telecommunications, networking... etc... My poor little brain gave up on retaining Darwin's ideas. That said, it appears that the human race appears to have awoken around 10,000 years ago. Who is to say it wasn't "Divine introvention?"
The guy on the right, now I can understand the tatoo of Mao but I didnt know that Mike Tyson took up golf.
Caller #1: Thanks, PH. I've never studied this stuff, and I'm just a humble seeker of information ... [Oh boy! Here it comes ...] ... so I was wondering if you could answer a question that's been bothering me.
PH: Sure, humble seeker. What's the question?
Caller #1: Why do you capitalist running-dog jackals always conspire with the international bankers to suck the blood out of the proletariat?
PH: Here's the answer, humble seeker: Eat my shorts, you commie slime ball! Okay, next caller -- welcome to the PatrickHenry show!
Caller #2: Hi, PH. Thanks for taking my call. I'm new to the evolution debate, and I'm just looking for information ...[Oh boy! Here it comes ...] ... so I was wondering if you could tell me something.
PH: Sure, just looking. What's the question?
Caller #2: Why do you godless, atheistic, satanic, racist freaks always lie about the fact that all your fossils are fakes, you've never found the missing link, there are no transitional fossils ...
A right guaranteed by our laws. It is the laws that are important. The alleged religious connection is completely bogus. Religion supports monarchy and instructs subjects to obey their kings and slaves to obey their masters.
"Who is to say it wasn't "Divine introvention?"
Amen to that. Either way, humanity has by and large taken God's gift for granted or wasted a hell of a lot work.
Amazing to think what will happen when these folks get the keys to the car.
I'm a Gator, and I'm calling...
"I think you may be on the wrong site... "
That may be true, but just because someone has said it, and it sounds good, and you happen to like it, doesn't make it true.
If our rights came from our creator we wouldn't have had to wait 6000 (or 200,000, depending) years to get them.
From Speciation by Punctuated Equilibrium...
A group of creatures gets isolated from the rest of their species. They can evolve easily, because they are a small group. Later, they spread and replace their parent species. Examples are known.You could read the link, but that might make it harder to beat people over the head with what you don't know about evolution, which appears to be about all of it....
There's no theoretical reason why it needs to take more than hundreds or thousands of years. In practice, 500,000 years is still "suddenly", when it comes to dinosaurs.
That will take awhile. I am sure that you can obtain a copy of Descent of Man as quickly as I can. But I will look.
Mmm, young-earth-creationists could perhaps take note of a very similar exercise based on the last 6000 years, showing how for thousands of years the lot of the ordinary person hardly changed at all; then everything started to change a lot about 300 years ago, and change has accelerated violently in the last 150 years. Funnily enough this most recent change in human achievement and knowledge occured at exactly the same time as methodological naturalism took hold in Western Europe, rather than relying on religion to answer everything. "If I see further than others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants".
Each advance has been based on the previous advances. Our ancestors 100,000 years ago were probably as innately clever as we are now, but they lacked our opportunities. If Beethoven were born to a stone-age tribe of hunter-gatherers with a life expectancy at birth of 25 years, how many symphonies would he write? What discoveries would Einstein make in a tribe of 50 individuals whose language consisted of a few-score grunts that signify immediate needs and wants? How successfully could Thomas Edison invent anything in such a situation; and even if he did how fast would his invention spread through the few-million humans scattered across the entire globe?
No problem. Here's the complete text, plus a search engine.
http://www.online-literature.com/darwin/descent_man/
PH: "You're on the PatrickHenry Show....."
Caller: "Am I on the air?"
PH: "Go ahead; you're on the PatrickHenry Show...."
Caller: "Uh, oh, well; me and my friend Billy-bob are down her at the Saw-mill, and we wuz on break, and we have a really tough question for you and your Evilootionist pals...."
PH: "Go for it...."
Caller: (here it comes!) "If we came from monkeys, how come there's still monkeys?" (muffled laughter in background, as the sound of yet two more Budweiser "Tall-boys" can be heard being cracked open)....
PH: "Happy to oblige, just as sonn as we hear from our sponsor....."
***but just because someone has said it, and it sounds good, and you happen to like it, doesn't make it true. ***
Whether it is objectively true or not is a seperate issue. My issue to PH was that these ideals self evident truths (self evident to the founding fathers) form the basis of our Rights. They believed that it is because of God that we have the right to claim - to demand freedom and liberty.
No God - no Rights. (...except that which the State grants.)
Read those "good sounding" words again...
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. "
***If our rights came from our creator we wouldn't have had to wait 6000 (or 200,000, depending) years to get them.***
So you think no one had life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness before 1776?
Evolution, Eugenics, Socialism.
folks were building 400 foot structures many thousand of years ago. A 2000 year old mechanical computer has been found that is similar in principle to Babbage's.
Few of us could survive in the wild. There had to be some geniuses in pre-history.
Beatcha.
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