Posted on 11/22/2002 9:09:10 PM PST by forsnax5
NSF awards grants to discover the relationships of 1.75 million species
One of the most profound ideas to emerge in modern science is Charles Darwin's concept that all of life, from the smallest microorganism to the largest vertebrate, is connected through genetic relatedness in a vast genealogy. This "Tree of Life" summarizes all we know about biological diversity and underpins much of modern biology, yet many of its branches remain poorly known and unresolved.
To help scientists discover what Darwin described as the tree's "everbranching and beautiful ramifications," the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $17 million in "Assembling the Tree of Life" grants to researchers at more than 25 institutions. Their studies range from investigations of entire pieces of DNA to assemble the bacterial branches; to the study of the origins of land plants from algae; to understanding the most diverse group of terrestrial predators, the spiders; to the diversity of fungi and parasitic roundworms; to the relationships of birds and dinosaurs.
"Despite the enormity of the task," said Quentin Wheeler, director of NSF's division of environmental biology, which funded the awards, "now is the time to reconstruct the tree of life. The conceptual, computational and technological tools are available to rapidly resolve most, if not all, major branches of the tree of life. At the same time, progress in many research areas from genomics to evolution and development is currently encumbered by the lack of a rigorous historical framework to guide research."
Scientists estimate that the 1.75 million known species are only 10 percent of the total species on earth, and that many of those species will disappear in the decades ahead. Learning about these species and their evolutionary history is epic in its scope, spanning all the life forms of an entire planet over its several billion year history, said Wheeler.
Why is assembling the tree of life so important? The tree is a picture of historical relationships that explains all similarities and differences among plants, animals and microorganisms. Because it explains biological diversity, the Tree of Life has proven useful in many fields, such as choosing experimental systems for biological research, determining which genes are common to many kinds of organisms and which are unique, tracking the origin and spread of emerging diseases and their vectors, bio-prospecting for pharmaceutical and agrochemical products, developing data bases for genetic information, and evaluating risk factors for species conservation and ecosystem restoration.
The Assembling the Tree of Life grants provide support for large multi-investigator, multi-institutional, international teams of scientists who can combine expertise and data sources, from paleontology to morphology, developmental biology, and molecular biology, says Wheeler. The awards will also involve developing software for improved visualization and analysis of extremely large data sets, and outreach and education programs in comparative phylogenetic biology and paleontology, emphasizing new training activities, informal science education, and Internet resources and dissemination.
-NSF-
For a list of the Assembling the Tree of Life grants, see: http://www.nsf.gov/bio/pubs/awards/atol_02.htm
A good example of this kind of "thinking" is the way the dems are reacting to the recent elections. The factors they are selecting to blame are utterly trivial, and the main reasons for their loss are absolutely invisible to them.
Can you expand on what those considerable assumptions are? And what if we presume to find out how the Great Designer fit it all together, how would the assumptions differ?
Feel free. It may have more impact there than here, where it was glossed over in favor of "considerable assumptions". These creationists don't seem to realize that a parsimonious arrangement of the data, or even a maximum likelyhood method will yield a tree.
... I agree with you as would any good programmer.
Snicker. It hadn't occurred to me that the many examples of spagetti code I've seen over the years were an excellent example of this concept... :)
Especially when evolutionists continue to claim at the same time that the reason their still has so many gaps (in exactly the places they need to have fossils) is that the fossil record is incomplete?????????
Cheap at twice the price.
Does that mean that you will be enlightening us with numerous placemarkers????
Try this one. (Linked the wrong section earlier.)
Can you expand on what those considerable assumptions are?
As an example, every now and then Vade posts skeletons which have been constructed partially from fossils and partially from assumptions. The scientists usually color the fabricated bones so the observer can tell the difference.
Likewise, I suggest there will be a lot of the classic tree which cannot be spoken to directly by genetic research for lack of genetic material in fossils. As with Vade's skeletons, those parts (if shown) would be fabricated. Since most of the tree represents extinct life over time, the part which is reinforced by genetic information on extant species correlates to the leaves, or "lawn" to me or "onion" to others.
My daughter's research over the years involves knocking out genes to discover function. Considering the vast number of extant species, and the state-of-the-art I do not see how you can go any further without considerable assumptions.
And what if we presume to find out how the Great Designer fit it all together, how would the assumptions differ?
My "lawn" remark does not speak at all to Intelligent Design. It speaks only to what information can be discovered by genetic research.
And it is based on my understanding that genetic information cannot be derived from fossils. If that is not true, then please tell me so - because it would be very interesting to see a genetic comparison of Lucy to any modern female!
Exactly. The IDers are not consistent in this. The Great Designer would have designed everything. Supposedly, He left His signature behind in the form of "specified complexity". The claim is that natural laws don't give rise to specified complexity. And, in selection, only goal-directed selection can give rise to specified complexity. Thus, highly developed Leghorn chickens are designed by humans.
Natural selection is not goal-directed because the selection criteria themselves evolve in a non-deterministic manner. However, we have many examples of natural selection creating specified complexity. On one scale we see bacteria evolving methods for dealing with nutrient starvation or poisoning. On another scale we see termites building mounds.
Thus, the ID argument that natural laws do not lead to specified complexity utterly fails.
At this point, the IDers will perform a bait and switch. They'll pretend that the argument still holds for macro-scale processes. Why, you ask? They "know it when they see it".
Evolutionists ascribe all similarities to evolution, but this is not a logical assumption. Similarities can be the result also of intelligent design. An intelligent designer will not recreate the wheel, instead he will reuse it in other creations and modify it as needed. For example the wheel of a cart can be modified into a gear by adding teeth to it. In the same way the same functions can be provided to different species by modifying the DNA to fit the functions of another species.
So the question is how to choose from the two interpretations? Since evolution claims these modifications arise out of descent from other species and ID claims the opposite one must look to see if the modifications clearly follow a line of descent or not. They do not invariably do so. There are numerous exceptions to the descent hypothesis and evolutionists call it 'convergence'. That they have a word for this shows that it is a fact which they could not brush away. This 'convergence' cannot be considered as due to descent as evolutionists themselves admit. What they do not admit is that it shows the theory of intelligent design to be correct.
Let's use your example of the skulls. One assumption might be that the major bones making up the skull are maintained. If a parietal bone shows up in two pieces, it is reasonable to glue those two pieces together rather than assume that for that fossil extra parietal bones are involved. You see, the assumption is based on what we know.
Your daughter also uses considerable assumptions when she looks for lack of function by knocking out genes.
Where I'm trying to lead you is that the assumptions for phylogeny do not start with the idea that everything must point to a universal common ancester. The assumption is that organisms beget other organisms. DNA is inherited in this process. Your lawn analogy doesn't use this information. Why not?
There is a promising tool in osteocalcin, a protein that is preserved in fossils for millions of years. There was a recent thread on FR about it.
Nice job obfuscating the matter! However, the fact is that the information we have is way too little to make such determinations. For one thing while the human genome has been mapped, the chimp genome has not as yet been mapped (and when the 98% was determined the human genome had not been fully mapped either). So the comparisons were made based on a small part of the genome. Whether the sections used were representative or not, is a guess. Second of all, while we have a pretty good idea of what most genes do, we cannot say the same for the 95% of DNA which is not in genes. What we do know is that the claim by evolutionists that that DNA was junk is absolutely false. As a result of ignoring the predictions of evolutionists we have found for example that the vast differences in human and chimp intelligence is not based on very much. It is based on expressing a gene which both of them have some 5 times more in humans than in chimps. Therefore these percentage comparisons are just plain nonsense.
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