The poor evos just can’t get a break...LOL!
Joseph W. Thornton, professor of biology at the University of Oregon, was honored recently at the White House as a recipient of a 2006 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) -- the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on young researchers at the outset of their careers.According to the White House, Thornton was recognized "for innovative research on the evolution of complex molecular systems, for reconstructing and experimentally characterizing ancient genes, for elucidating the mechanisms by which hormones and their receptor proteins evolved, and for educating students and non-governmental organizations about issues at the interface of biology and public policy."
"I'm very grateful for NSF's very strong support of the research that my students, postdocs and I do," Thornton said. "It's quite encouraging that he White House is giving this award to an evolutionary biologist, especially one whose work demonstrates how evolution assembled the so-called 'irreducibly complex systems' that Intelligent Design advocates say can't possibly have evolved."
It's not enough that you have genetic coding that produces a given protein or enzyme.
Now, you have to have exogenous coding that tells the genetic coding which part of a protein or enzyme to produce, and in which direction, and connected to what.
Much of this coding is in the non-protein coding portion of DNA strands ~ however, they (the famous "they" who work in laboratories) have determined that much of the important intellectual work taking place inside cells occurs in the form of the "non protein coding" regions actually producing RNA instead of DNA.
Even the place of supposedly primitive RNA is being revised quickly as we speak.
The current view of the entirity of the DNA/RNA machinery underlying our forms of live is now Billions of Times more complex than was imagined in the days of yore (a few months ago) when all we had to be concerned with were genes!
But you’re always telling us that mainstream science stifles dissent!
“Second, it is repeatedly said that science is intolerant of theories without data and assertions without adequate evidence. But no serious student of epistemology any longer takes the naive view of science as a process of Baconian induction from theoretically unorganized observations. There can be no observations without an immense apparatus of preexisting theory. Before sense experiences become “observations” we need a theoretical question, and what counts as a relevant observation depends upon a theoretical frame into which it is to be placed. Repeatable observations that do not fit into an existing frame have a way of disappearing from view, and the experiments that produced them are not revisited. In the 1930s well-established and respectable geneticists described “dauer-modifications,” environmentally induced changes in organisms that were passed on to offspring and only slowly disappeared in succeeding generations. As the science of genetics hardened, with its definitive rejection of any possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, observations of dauer-modifications were sent to the scrapheap where they still lie, jumbled together with other decommissioned facts.”
One very important point made above and not to be overlooked is that there is a prevailing framework of thinking in science, evolution, that is not to be questioned, except in the minutiae of details in someone else's peer reviewed papers.
“...what counts as a relevant observation depends upon a theoretical frame into which it is to be placed.”
And if an “observation” does NOT fit? It will quietly be buried with nary a trace.
Combined with the point made by Bridgham et al (2009), that even tiny structural/functional changes may not be achievable by random mutation/selection, these considerations pretty much squelch the likelihood of Darwinian processes doing much of significance during evolution.For me the fossil evidence screams loud and clear that phyletic evolution didn't occur. Punctuated... well, perhaps.
GGG reminds me of Keith Olberman.
Our findings indicate that even if selection for the ancestral function were imposed, direct reversal would be extremely unlikely, suggesting an important role for historical contingency in protein evolution. [emphasis mine]
Wow! That is like saying "Methinks it is lake Ottersea" cannot evolve into "Methinks it is like a weasel".
From what little I could get from the abstract of the Science paper, this paper shows that in this case, you can’t go back to the earlier form by just making a single mutation. Nothing having to do with what you put in the false title.
Why don’t these rags spend the $ for a journal subscription and set it up so you can view the source material for free?
Why they don’t- because then people would read the paper and see that these creationist fishwraps are what they are, the equivalent of the Weekly world News.
Interesting little tidbit abotu Joe Thornton’s claim that nature could ‘construct irreducible complexity’
“And these are the words that disappeared (in brackets):
Our goal is to illustrate how a complex, tightly integrated molecular system - [one which appears to be irreducibly complex] - evolved by Darwinian processes hundreds of millions of years ago....”
“Two days ago, I pointed out that it’s a tad inconsistent to say there is no scientific controversy about ID, when one is participating in that very controversy (as Thornton and in fact a whole lot of other scientists and scholars are). Seems Thornton didn’t like me calling attention to this. So goodbye to the phrase “irreducible complexity” from his University of Oregon webpage see: http://www.uoregon.edu/~joet/ the last sentence of the second paragraph
http://www.idthefuture.com/2006/04/say_it_aint_so_joe_thornton_pu.html
And here’s the link where Joe Thorton was refuted by Behe
“The Lamest Attempt Yet to Answer the Challenge Irreducible Complexity Poses for Darwinian Evolution”
“In tomorrow’’s issue of Science, researchers Jamie Bridgham, Sean Carroll and Joe Thornton of the University of Oregon claim to have shown how an irreducibly complex system might have arisen by a process they call “molecular exploitation.” Their paper, “Evolution of Hormone-Receptor Complexity by Molecular Exploitation,” Science 312 (7 Apr 2006):97-101 and an accompanying commentary by Chris Adami are sure to stir lively discussion. Mike Behe has already weighed in, [Here: http://www.idthefuture.com/2006/04/the_lamest_attempt_yet_to_answ.html] arguing that Bridgham et. al. haven’t even come close to answering the challenge of irreducible complexity. Tomorrow we’ll provide a detailed scientific response to the paper as well.”