rwp,
thanks for responding - even though we disagree.
I know it's not bull. It is human. I doubt, for example anyone has gotten inside this "program" to examine it's presuppositions since the article was just published so recently.
If you have not taken time to at least read the article I cited, how can you possibly know what it says? You are revealing, I think, a less than objective bias yourself by jumping so quickly to discounting what he wrote. Did you read the essay?
Actually, I did not write that I am a programmer. That was someone else on the thread.
I maintain what I wrote. The history of science is that many major shifts in view come from outside the field of study because of the groupthink inside a discipline that renders them crippled (often) when it comes to examining their own beliefs in the mirror.
best to you,
ampu
That would explain the Copernican revolution, which was not, as commonly believed, brought about by people who studied astronomy, but by telephone sanitizers.
Same with quantum theory, which was rejected for centuries by the ensconced physics establishment, and only came to our attention through the valiant efforts of outsiders like Velikovsky.
Reconstucting ancestral genes is a standard procedure. As I said, we did it as a class project in a freshman course in the chemical basis of evolution.
Very simple example: let's say you four living organisms have, for a protein fragment, amino acid sequences as follows
glsdgewqlv glsdgewqmv vlsegewqlv vltdaewhlv
Well, in third position in the chain, three organisms have an s and the last has a t, so the chances are the common ancestor was s, and we had a single mutation in the ancestral line of organism 4 to give a t. In the fourth position, three have a d and one has an e, so it's most likely the common ancestor had a d. In the fifth position, the common ancestor probably had a g, in the eighth position a q, and the ninth position an l. The first postion is evenly divided, so we can't tell, based on this data (based on a bigger data set, it's almost certainly a g). So the sequence for the common ancestor was likely:
[g/v]lsdgewqlv
Now for a short strand of protein and a few organisms, the probabilities are not definitive, but when you do it for hundreds of species, you can get the common ancestor sequence with very high probability of being correct, as well as the family tree. In the above example, for example, you can tell organisms 1 and 2 share a common ancestor, as do 3 and 4. In fact, the four organisms are the house mouse, the brown rat, the sperm whale, and the finback whale, and the protein is myoglobin.
What is new in the study is not the fact they deduced the common ancestor, it's that they made and expressed the gene. I've always thought this had incredible potential for studying the metabolism of organisms that became extinct millions of year ago.