I'm just a wild and crazy guy.
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
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
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....
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:
For lurkers interested in Tifft etc.: Redshift Quantization and Quantum Cosmology
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.
[rollin' my eyes back]
Oh brother. :-)
I'm just a wild and crazy guy.
I'm beginning to see that. In a good way, of course. :-)
On NOW at RadioFR!
Doug from Upland interviews JAYNA DAVIS discussing the OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING
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 ;)
Physics News 481, April 27, 2000
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.)
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.
Because this information fits nicely with my "take" on origins, I'm also posting it to the Freeper View on Origins thread.
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.
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