And for their next act, the evolutionists will proceed to demonstrate how the cow evolved from the pine tree.
For those of you who'd like to play at home, here's a model of a cow, which when printed, will be made from the byproducts of a tree :)
Posted on 02/06/2002 5:59:35 AM PST by callisto
SEATTLE, Feb. 6 /U.S. Newswire/ -- A mutant shrimp is being claimed as "a landmark in evolutionary biology" that proves creationists wrong, but it's not. Whatever its implications for creationism, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, a senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash., calls the claim "greatly exaggerated," and describes the mutant shrimp as "an evolutionary dead end that tells us little or nothing about how insects might have originated."
A research team headed by William McGinnis at the University of California at San Diego just reported discovering a DNA mutation that produces shrimp without hind legs. Since shrimp normally have lots of legs, and insects have only six, the researchers claim they have discovered the genetic mechanism that caused terrestrial insects to evolve from aquatic ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago. The researchers also claim that this discovery undercuts a primary argument used by creationists against the theory of evolution, because it shows that major mutations do not result in dead animals.
The paper is being released today by the journal Nature.
Wells points out, however, that the mutation reported by McGinnis and his colleagues occurs midway through development, after the embryo is already a shrimp. "The mutation does not transform the embryo into anything like an insect, but only into a disabled shrimp. Whatever produced the first insect would have had to transform the embryo from the very beginning." Wells adds that critics of Darwinism have never claimed that major mutations result in dead animals, but only in animals that are less fit, and thus likely to be eliminated by natural selection. According to Wells, "this report does nothing to refute that criticism."
Wells says he is not surprised that the researchers are making so much of their discovery. "Evidence for the major changes required by evolutionary theory is lacking, so Darwinists often exaggerate the evidence to make the theory seem better supported than it really is."
And for their next act, the evolutionists will proceed to demonstrate how the cow evolved from the pine tree.
For those of you who'd like to play at home, here's a model of a cow, which when printed, will be made from the byproducts of a tree :)
That's *so* silly. After all, everyone knows that we all came from Adam & Eve and the Earth is only 6,000 years old....
National Geographic,
Scientific American,
99% of American school books,
......... [feel free to add more here]........
I'm so ashamed! Yes, my research was shoddy and ill-thought! The correct evolutionary tree for the Lombardy Poplar would be this:
For those of you still playing along at home, here some bonus pics. Here we can see the Lombardy Poplar caught in the act of evolutionary natural selection...
...And a rare shot of the Lombary Poplar installing the Internet, which he had just invented days prior...
None of which addresses the core issue of the press release - were the test results exaggerated or not? Why does it matter who the whistle-blower is, if the allegations have any merit?
Good question. I'll have to see when the new jounal is published online (theoretically today), since my institution has an online sub. Usually, they have a valid point if it makes it into a journal like nature, though.
Don't know if you can read this(subscription necessary?) Abstract (or at least the first paragraph):
A fascinating question in biology is how molecular changes in developmental pathways lead to macroevolutionary changes in morphology. Mutations in homeotic (Hox) genes have long been suggested as potential causes of morphological evolution(1,2), and there is abundant evidence that some changes in Hox expression patterns correlate with transitions in animal axial pattern(3) . A major morphological transition in metazoans occurred about 400 million years ago, when six-legged insects diverged from crustacean-like arthropod ancestors with multiple limbs(4-7_. In Drosophila melanogaster and other insects, the Ultrabithorax (Ubx) and abdominal A (AbdA, also abd-A) Hox proteins are expressed largely in the abdominal segments, where they can suppress thoracic leg development during embryogenesis(3) . In a branchiopod crustacean, Ubx/AbdA proteins are expressed in both thorax and abdomen, including the limb primordia, but do not repress limbs(8-11) . Previous studies led us to propose that gain and loss of transcriptional activation and repression functions in Hox proteins was a plausible mechanism to diversify morphology during animal evolution(12) . Here we show that naturally selected alteration of the Ubx protein is linked to the evolutionary transition to hexapod limb pattern.
1. Goldschmidt, R. The Material Basis of Evolution (Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1940)
2. Lewis, E. B. A gene complex controlling segmentation in Drosophila. Nature 276, 565-570 (1978)
3. Carroll, S. B., Grenier, J. K. & Weatherbee, S. D. From DNA to Diversity (Blackwell Science, London, 2001)
4. Boore, J. L., Collins, T. M., Stanton, D., Daehler, L. L. & Brown, W. M. Deducing the pattern of arthropod phylogeny from mitochondrial DNA rearrangements. Nature 376, 163-165 (1995)
5. Friedrich, M. & Tautz, D. Ribosomal DNA phylogeny of the major extant arthropod classes and the evolution of myriapods. Nature 376, 165-167 (1995)
6. Aguinaldo, A. et al. Evidence for a clade of nematodes, arthropods and other moulting animals. Nature 387, 489-493 (1997)
7. Regier, J. C. & Shultz, J. W. Molecular phylogeny of the major arthropod groups indicates polyphyly of crustaceans and a new hypothesis for the origin of hexapods. Mol. Biol. Evol. 14, 902-913 (1997)
8. Averof, M. & Akam, M. Hox genes and the diversification of insect and crustacean body plans. Nature 376, 420-423 (1995)
9. Averof, M. & Patel, N. Crustacean appendage evolution associated with changes in Hox gene expression. Nature 388, 682-686 (1997) | Article
10. Panganiban, G., Sebring, A., Nagy, L. & Carroll, S. The development of crustacean limbs and the evolution of arthropods. Science 270, 1363-1366 (1995)
11. Abzhanov, A. & Kaufman, T. C. Crustacean (malacostracan) Hox genes and the evolution of the arthropod trunk. Development 127, 2239-2249 (2000)
12. Li, X. & McGinnis, W. Activity regulation of Hox proteins, a mechanism for altering functional specificity in development and evolution. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 96, 6802-6807 (1999)
13. Gonzalez-Reyes, A. & Morata, G. The developmental effect of overexpressing a Ubx product in Drosophila embryos is dependent on its interactions with other homeotic products. Cell 61, 515-522 (1990) | PubMed |
Evolution of a transcriptional repression domain in an insect Hox protein
RON GALANT AND SEAN B. CARROLL
Homeotic (Hox) genes code for principal transcriptional regulators of animal body regionalization. The duplication and divergence of Hox genes, changes in their regulation, and changes in the regulation of Hox target genes have all been implicated in the evolution of animal diversity. It is not known whether Hox proteins have also acquired new activities during the evolution of specific lineages. Amino-acid sequences outside the DNA-binding homeodomains of Hox orthologues diverge significantly. These sequence differences may be neutral with respect to protein function, or they could be involved in the functional divergence of Hox proteins and the evolutionary diversification of animals. Here, we identify a transcriptional repression domain in the carboxy-terminal region of the Drosophila Ultrabithorax (Ubx) protein. This domain is highly conserved among Ubx orthologues in other insects, but is absent from Ubx in other arthropods and onychophorans. The evolution of this domain may have facilitated the greater morphological diversification of posterior thoracic and anterior abdominal segments characteristic of modern insects.
Who'd they kill and what results were faked?
(In any case, I still think the evolutionists are grasping for straws ton support their theory that mutations explain everything.
For example, I notice their originally very excited claim that the valine-leucine switch at position eight in hemoglobin improves malaria survivability. Well, I would gladly take my chances with malaria rather than have sickle-cell anemia.)
Who's "they," and who did "they" kill?
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