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Discovering the Tree of Life
National Science Foundation Office of Legislative and Public Affairs ^ | November 18, 2002 | NSF Press Release

Posted on 11/22/2002 9:09:10 PM PST by forsnax5

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To: Alamo-Girl
Are you familiar with Halton Arp? His biography and struggle also makes a great read.

In his day, Chip Arp was a quintessential observer. The work he did with Allan Sandage, and the work that he did on the Arp Peculiar Galaxies Catalog was very quite good, after all, it helped launch the field that is the lynchpin of "sexy astronomy": Extragalactic Astronomy, and Cosmology.

However, as a theorist and as a statistician, both Arp and Tifft have been guilty of some pretty major statistical blunders and misapproximations--and not knowing when to quit. With the confirmation of the existence of cosmological effects like the Lyman Alpha Forest, as well as the confirmation of the Gunn-Peterson Trough at high redshifts, any hope of a non-cosmological origin of quasars is pretty much done in.

Consider this: Why isn't the Lyman Alpha Forest quantized?

It

1,101 posted on 12/05/2002 12:20:38 PM PST by ThinkPlease
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To: HalfFull
Thank you so much for the link to his essay!
1,102 posted on 12/05/2002 12:28:17 PM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: Junior
Placemarker.
1,103 posted on 12/05/2002 12:32:29 PM PST by Junior
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To: Junior
Yeah, placemarker.
1,104 posted on 12/05/2002 12:41:03 PM PST by PatrickHenry
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To: ThinkPlease
I'd have to say that this is about as blatant an example of argument from incredulity as one could get. (i.e. I don't know how it could happen, therefore it cannot). His argument here is even more specious than his c-decay arguments, if that is possible.

Well I would say that the arguments put forth by evolutionists are much worse, ie, I know that evolution occured...I can't tell you how, but there go those crazy creationists again....

1,105 posted on 12/05/2002 12:52:00 PM PST by HalfFull
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To: ThinkPlease
Thank you for your post!

I am still very much an "inflationary universe" "Big Bang" kind of gal, but I am also troubled by the out-of-hand dismissal of some original thinking.

Truly, no mortal being has all the answers and even the greatest minds blunder now and again, e.g. Einstein's cosmological constant. I suspect some may start with a great idea and then become too enthused to "make it so" causing the idea to be "back-burnered."

Why isn't the Lyman Alpha Forest quantized?

You might find this interesting:

Observational Cosmology - Students for the Exploration and Development of Space:

High-redshift quasars with a substantial Lyman-alpha forest can be used to investigate the existence of a redshift quantization (if any) in the Lyman-alpha lines.

For lurkers interested in Tifft etc.: Redshift Quantization and Quantum Cosmology


1,106 posted on 12/05/2002 12:57:31 PM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: edsheppa; general_re
I agree with what general_re wrote, above.

I have one comment. The study tested mutations on the function of motility, not for specific protein action. The Mot proteins have at least three functional domains. One is the proton pump, one is the torque producing region and another, which may be found in several stretches of the protein, is the anchor to membrane and neighboring proteins. The mutations tested appear to be for only one of those functional regions.

1,107 posted on 12/05/2002 1:03:23 PM PST by Nebullis
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To: balrog666
Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
1,108 posted on 12/05/2002 1:26:21 PM PST by balrog666
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To: HalfFull
I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that venal valves and "wondernets" (i.e. rete mirabile) were quite common features in many animals, not just giraffes.
1,109 posted on 12/05/2002 3:08:38 PM PST by Youngblood
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To: Junior
You posted an article last week on the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. I saw a tv programme on this subject, and the conclusion they came to was that the Siberian Traps flood basalt was not the whole answer. The model they came up with was that the Siberian traps started the first wave of the extinction, causing first a nuclear winter, followed by a period of global warming that would have raised temperatures by about 5 degrees Celsius. As the planet warmed, then so did the seas, which in turn caused the release of C12 from massive methane hydrate sea bed deposits (which explains a C12 spike in sediments). All this carbon then would have raised the global temps another 5 or so degrees, which over a couple of thousand years would have been far too extreme a change for species to track, hence the loss of 95% of species. One of the guys involved in the C12 work was a guy called Wignal (sp?) from Leeds university. The programme was made by the BBC's Horizon series. Perhaps they'll have more info if you need it. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
1,110 posted on 12/05/2002 3:24:35 PM PST by Youngblood
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To: All
1111
1,111 posted on 12/05/2002 3:30:13 PM PST by f.Christian
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To: f.Christian
All for one! One for all!
1,112 posted on 12/05/2002 3:35:18 PM PST by AndrewC
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To: AndrewC
All for one! One for all!

[rollin' my eyes back]

Oh brother. :-)

1,113 posted on 12/05/2002 4:48:06 PM PST by scripter
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To: scripter
Oh brother. :-)

I'm just a wild and crazy guy.


1,114 posted on 12/05/2002 5:53:13 PM PST by AndrewC
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To: AndrewC
I'm just a wild and crazy guy.

I'm beginning to see that. In a good way, of course. :-)

1,115 posted on 12/05/2002 6:13:10 PM PST by scripter
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To: All

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1,116 posted on 12/05/2002 6:13:26 PM PST by Bob J
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To: AndrewC
You would compare the spell-checker routines and not the text compare subroutines alone. I haven't suggested that the entire genomes of the bugs be compared when trying to establish the connection between two proteins. Compare the complete proteins.

No, because you already know in advance that they differ in ways that are going to affect the results. ExbB codes for three membrane segments, motA codes for four. Right off the bat that's going to skew the percentage of correspondences in a way that really isn't particularly revealing or useful.

Essentially, you're putting two different fruit baskets side by side and trying to compare them. You're much better off if you break them down into their smallest functional subunits, and then compare those. That way, you can pull out an apple from each basket and compare them directly, rather than comparing the bunch and watching the correspondences get lost in the noise created by the fact that one basket has a banana where the other has a pear, and the second has two oranges where the first has none. Apples to apples ;)

1,117 posted on 12/05/2002 8:07:42 PM PST by general_re
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To: ThinkPlease; HalfFull
In case y'all are interested in the harmonics aspect (or if any lurkers are following) - here are some interesting links:

Physics News 481, April 27, 2000

BEST MAP YET OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND (CMB). The CMB is a redshifted picture of the universe at the moment photons and newly formed hydrogen atoms parted company roughly 300,000 years after the big bang. First detected in the 1960s, the CMB appeared to be utterly uniform until, eight years ago, the COBE satellite provided the first hint of slight temperature variations, on a coarse scale, with an angular resolution of about 7 degrees….

The 36-member, international "Boomerang" (Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geomagnetics) collaboration, led by Andrew Lange of Caltech and Paolo de Bernardis of the University of Rome, confirms that a plot of CMB strength peaks at a multipole value of about 197 (corresponding to CMB patches about one degree in angular spread), very close to what theorists had predicted for a cosmology in which the universe's overall curvature is zero and the existence of cold dark matter is invoked. The absence of any noticeable subsidiary peaks (higher harmonics) in the data, however, was not in accord with theory.

The shape of the observed pattern of temperature variations suggests that a disturbance very like a sound wave moving through air passed through the high- density primordial fluid and that the CMB map can be can be thought of as a sort of sonogram of the infant universe. (de Bernardis et al., Nature, 27 April 2000.)

Big Bang Evidence Found – May 2, 2001

"The early universe is full of sound waves compressing and rarefying matter and light, much like sound waves compress and rarefy air inside a flute or trumpet," explained Paolo deBernardis of the University of Rome La Sapienza, one of the members of the Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics (BOOMERanG) team. "For the first time the new data show clearly the harmonics of these waves." Harmonics In The Early Universe: The CMB Power Spectrum June 5, 2001

The MAXIMA, BOOMERANG, and DASI collaborations, which measure minute variations in the CMB, recently reported new results at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. All three agree remarkably about what the "harmonic proportions" of the cosmos imply: not only is the universe flat, but its structure is definitely due to inflation, not to topological defects in the early universe.

The results were presented as plots of slight temperature variations in the CMB that graph sound waves in the dense early universe. These high-resolution "power spectra" show not only a strong primary resonance but are consistent with two additional harmonics, or peaks.

Cosmological Parameters and Galaxy Biasing – May 22, 2002

Because this information fits nicely with my "take" on origins, I'm also posting it to the Freeper View on Origins thread.

1,118 posted on 12/05/2002 8:40:51 PM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: general_re
No, because you already know in advance that they differ in ways that are going to affect the results... Right off the bat that's going to skew the percentage of correspondences in a way that really isn't particularly revealing or useful.

What? That is the purpose of measuring. Then an exact correspondance of the functional part means they are the same.

Apples to Apples and Fruit baskets to fruit baskets.

1,119 posted on 12/05/2002 11:59:08 PM PST by AndrewC
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To: Junior
Placemarker.
1,120 posted on 12/06/2002 2:14:33 AM PST by Junior
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