Researchers Evolve A Complex Genetic Trait In The Laboratory

ScienceDaily ^

[muawiyah]

You have no sense of humor and apparantly no experience with chihuahuas.

Nasty little beggars!

[muawiyah]

BTW, I'm still into believing there are only half a dozen real species of salmon, and all of them taste good ~ these guys are just playing with words (not biology at all) as they create these strange ways of identifying species.

Right now, all we have to do is figure out how the tens of millions, or even billions or trillions of virus genes in the sea get moved from that environment into our own genomes where some of them "do stuff".

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"So the definition of the word kind in the number 2 has been removed as a meaning which is a scientific determination of a division by you and the rest of the world must follow suit."

Not by me, by taxonomists. Blame Linnaeus. *Kind* hasn't been used for centuries. It's a Biblical word with no scientific meaning.

"The word is legitimate to use as a scientific word it may not be the word of the day but it can define a situation as well as the word species."

No, it can't, as you proved earlier when you called the family canidae the *dog kind* and then said all the species within it were also the *dog kind*. The word can be stretched by creationists to mean a species to a taxonomic family, or order, or class, depending on how desperate the creationist gets. That's why you couldn't tell me how many *kinds* there were of insects, or of birds, as there are millions of insect species, and about 10,000 bird species. There is no consistent way to divide biological populations by *kind*, nor is there even a hint of one. Species distinctions can get blurry, mainly because of the fact that they are not fixed in time. But *kind*? Could mean anything. Which is the way creationists want it.


Again, it wasn't I who discarded *kind* from taxonomy; it was scientists hundreds of years ago, long before Darwin. Blame Linnaeus.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"You have no sense of humor and apparently no experience with chihuahuas.

Nasty little beggars!"

On that we are agreed. :)

PS: Let's end this on this happy note? :)

[Mamzelle]

re: these guys are just playing with words (not biology at all) as they create these strange ways of identifying species)))

Implicit is the demand that you accept the terms that they decide to set. It's called "controlling behavior" and is a symptom of OC disorder.

I am often ingrigued by the similarities of trout and salmon. The flesh of both tastes somewhat alike to me (of course, the trout is more delicate.) But trout even look like salmon.

[shield]

bttt

[muawiyah]

I'll check that out this weekend. We have some frozen salmon, and there's a trout sale on.

Bet they are a lot alike!

[gleeaikin]

A quote from "Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated" by Steve Jones, 2000, should clear up your argument. Species in scientific definition means separated by the inability to breed. Family has a precise scientific definition which has nothing to do with relatives.

From DG: "Linnaeus--a classifier of what he saw as a fixed biological universe--named the domestic dog as a separate species, Canis familiaris. For him, it had the same status as the elephant or the tiger: an animal so removed from its relatives as to demand a label of its own. The International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature defines its species more stringently. Dogs as an entity were doomed because, once out of its owner's sight, any dog is happy to have sex with any other--even, given the chance, with a wolf....

In 1993 the Smithsonian Institution's "Mammal Species of World", the Who's Who of mamals, admitted the domestic dog only as a subspecies of the wolf Canis lupus. As Canis lupus familiaris it joins the American wold Canis lupus occidentalis and the European wolf, Canis lupus lupus; each so much alike as to be ranked as mere varieties of the same animal." So there you have it:

Genus: Canis; Species: Lupus; Varieties: familiaris, occidentalis and lupus.

[Tokra]

Variation within it's kind does not mean evolution. A Doberman and Pekingese are still dogs. A Shetland and a Clydesdale are still horses.A short person and tall person are still humans.

And a hummingbird and a condor are both birds - but can they mate with each other and produce offspring?

[Creationist]

Websters, Second College Edition, New World Dictionary of the American Language ----kind---- 1. [Archaic] (a) origin (b) nature (c) manner; way 2. a natural group or division (the rodent kind) sometimes used in compounds (human-kind) 3.essential character 4. sort; variety: class

They are a variety of the bird kind. It does not mean that all bird are interfertile. I am not saying that. My argument is that kind is a definitive word of the variations of the diferent classes of animals. You do not have to use the word species to define a variety class or sort.

Daddy long legs can not breed with a Black widow does that mean by your reasoning that they are not of the arachnoid kind.

[gleeaikin]

Millions of viruses in the sea.

The genetic material from lower life forms in the sea probably got into the human genome via our ancestors the amphibians who probably got when they were still in the sea and passed it on to us.

[muawiyah]

That's one hypothesis. How about the last mosquito bite you ran into? How do you know some virus inserted into your bloodstream didn't make it's way to your gonads?

Did you ever notice that all the mammals and birds who had ancestors living in the trees have full color vision?

Yup, it's a fact.

Did you ever wonder how such an amazing feat of parallel evolution took place?

[Mamzelle]

You have written a considerable number of posts in your first few weeks here, all showing an interest and commitment to ideas and are, I think, thoughtful.

Why is Noah a particular problem?

The Bible is full of claims of miracles. Noah is not a particularly hard one to wrap your mind around. There are others--Joshua commanding the sun to stand still, for instance. This is one that bothers a lot of literally-minded--but I've heard more outlandish claims from PhDs in physics. Cats and boxes of bouncing light...?

How about that turning water into wine? Think of the problems, what vintage, what varietal? And the account in John insists that the wine was the best--

Either God is omnipotent or He's not. Either he commands Time or He doesn't. If He is the master of time and space and matter, he can cram a hundread thousand species in a rowboat if He pleases.

Noah is not the problem of faith. The problem of faith is a pediatric oncology ward--there's where you'll find your challenges.

[gleeaikin]

Faith is not my problem. Right now my computer is. Goodnight.