On the Origin Of Species (1859) Charles Darwin
Also winning the top prize of 5 B.S.(Banana System) points.
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 great example of total dishonesty. Dembski is listing the explanations of evolutionists, not saying that they are correct. In fact he is explicitly saying that they are not correct. Let's look at the 'quote' in context:
Evolutionary biology attempts to explain the absence of intermediates from an evolutionary path on the assumption that the intermediates did once exist. But now let’s turn the question around. Suppose that discontinuity is a fact not just about the history of life as we know it but about the history of life itself in other words, the intermediates never existed. In that case, how did biological forms in all their vast complexity and diversity come about? In asking this question, let's hold off asking for the underlying cause or causes of biological complexity and diversity. Rather, let's merely ask what a video camera would see if it were scouring the past and recording key events in life’s history. There are exactly four possibilities:
None of these possibilities is out to lunch. Nonbiogenic emergence had to happen at least once, namely, at the origin of life. Symbiogenic reorganization has been Lynn Margulis's main focus of research, and there is increasing evidence for it. Biogenic reinvention (organisms changing in midstream) is also not that crazy when one considers the life cycles of certain organisms which from one stage to the next are completely unrecognizable (for example, the metamorphosis of the butterfly or, even more extremely, the various forms of the liver fluke). Finally generative transmutation suggests a programmed view of evolution, where, like a computer program that kicks in at a certain time (recall the Michelangelo virus that kicked in March 6th, 1993), organisms change in one generation. French paleontologist Anne Dambricourt has seriously argued for this view in respect to the emergence of Homo sapiens.
With regard to these four possibilities, the crucial question now is this: How does one make sense of these possibilities in light of intelligent design? Clearly, none of these possibilities makes sense without some directed coordination.
With your dishonesty you have again given proof of much that I said - that the interest of evolutionists is not truth or science, that they are motivated by atheism and are willing to go to any extent to win against opponents including obvious lies. What this shows to me is a totally unChristian disregard for the truth. It also shows that evolutionists themselves are quite aware that their theory is a lie and therefore feel compelled to use lies to defend it.
The arguments of Intelligent Design are not arguments from ignorance, but arguments from knowledge. Science is not a fairly tale where the best scientist is the one who can write the most imaginative explanation. If that were so, then Hans Christian Andersen would be called a scientist and H. G. Wells would have won the Nobel Prize. Science is about demonstrating through repeatable experiments how nature works, not about imagination. It is evolutionists and atheists that base their arguments against ID on ignorance. Indeed, if it had not been for the biological ignorance in the mid-19th century, evolution would never have gotten off the ground. For example, the following is all based on what science KNOWS not on ignorance:
There is a tremendous amount of proof against abiogenesis. First of all is Pasteur's proof that life does not come from inert matter (and this was of course at one time the prediction of materialists). Then came the discovery of DNA and the chemical basis of organisms. This poses a totally insurmountable problem to abiogenesis. The smallest living cells has a DNA string of some one million base pairs long and some 600 genes, even cutting this number by a quarter as the smallest possible living cell would give us a string of some 250,000 base pairs of DNA. It is important to note here that DNA can be arranged in any of the four basic codes equally well, there is no chemical or other necessity to the sequence. The chances of such an arrangement arising are therefore 4^250,000. Now the number of atoms in the universe is said to be about 4^250. I would therefore call 4^250,000 an almost infinitely impossible chance (note that the supposition advanced that perhaps it was RNA that produced the first life has this same problem).
The problem though is even worse than that. Not only do you need two (2) strings of DNA perfectly matched to have life, but you also need a cell so that the DNA code can get the material to sustain that life. It is therefore a chicken and egg problem, you cannot have life without DNA (or RNA if one wants to be generous) but one also has to have the cell itself to provide the nutrients for the sustenance of the first life. Add to this problem that for the first life to have been the progenitor of all life on earth, it necessarily needs to have been pretty much the same as all life now on earth is, otherwise it could not have been the source of the life we know. Given all these considerations, yes, abiogenesis is impossible.
Followed here by a spectacular straw-man argument.
If you think that the evolutionists do it, and it is a bad thing, then tell me, why do you think that it is ok for Creationists to do it, and it all of a sudden becomes a good thing?
Which is exactly what I'm talking about - break it down into the smallest functional parts and compare those, so you have analogous functions in hand, and do it one at a time. Otherwise, you've got chaff in your wheat. Then, you turn around and look at global comparisons of collections of functional subunits. Bottom-up, not top-down.
Which is exactly what I'm talking about - break it down into the smallest functional parts and compare those, so you have analogous functions in hand, and do it one at a time. Otherwise, you've got chaff in your wheat. Then, you turn around and look at global comparisons of collections of functional subunits. Bottom-up, not top-down.
To what extent would that approach show "SQR(81-(2+2)^53)" v. "53^(2+2)-SQR(81)" to be comparable?
You are correct. That honor belongs to theism.
Then you are not looking for MOTA or MTH1022 you are looking for domains. You have to start somewhere and these guys did not start looking for domains they looked at the genes and highlighted the similarities. The approach you favor is what got the bone guys in trouble with the whale. Teeth were important so the mesonychus was daddy whale. Lo and behold, teeth suddenly didn't matter but the ankle does, so out goes the mesonychus and up comes pakicetus. You would have the microbiologists look as silly as the bone readers. The photosynthesis story points out the way things apparently happen for a process.
The specific MOTA gene and MTH1022 have some similarity-- in a range of 55 amino acids they coincide in 23 residues. Now the rest of the gene is necessary to draw conclusions about their total relatedness. We are talking about the genes not the domains/subfunctions. The chaff is part of the story that the microbiologists are trying to spin.
It wouldn't show those as being similar. Any apparent similarity is an accident of the alphabet being used - all my sentences are composed of the same 26 letters, so they're all "similar" in a very broad sense, but they are all also very different from each other when you look at the details.
Just as in algebra and sentences, in genomes the order of operations matters. You get two different answers for both those problems because A) the parts are in a different order, and; B) the algebraic order of operations insures it in those cases. And just like those algebraic expressions are "instructions", so is the genome - it's a set of instructions for doing something. And as the "reader" travels along the genome, the order in which it encounters the "instructions" matters very much.
Think of an example like this: suppose you have two segments, one that reads AGVLUR, and a second that reads LRGVAU (which I just made up out of thin air). Both those segments are composed of exactly the same parts, just as your algebraic expressions have the same numbers and the same operations, just in a different order. And just like your expressions, the order matters - they have the same parts, but the products are likely going to be completely different because the order of operations is different in either case. So even though they're made up of the same parts, position and order are critical, and the two segments will not match each other at all for comparative purposes. That's why scientists try very hard to align the segments they want to compare, to insure that they get the best comparison possible.
The specific MOTA gene and MTH1022 have some similarity-- in a range of 55 amino acids they coincide in 23 residues. Now the rest of the gene is necessary to draw conclusions about their total relatedness. We are talking about the genes not the domains/subfunctions. The chaff is part of the story that the microbiologists are trying to spin.
That's right, and the only way to see meaningful correspondences is by aligning the genes according to their functional subunits, so that you are comparing similar domains. As for the relatedness of the entire gene, you are coming perilously close to castigating them for conclusions they do not draw - namely, that the judgement of relatedness is solely based on the similarities in this one substring. It is not - it's all about the totality of the evidence, where there are several facts in evidence beyond just this single set of correspondences. Nowhere do they claim what the relationship is, only that the weight of the evidence suggests that there is, in fact, a relationship, as per post 1090.
On the Origin Of Species (1859) Charles Darwin
Also winning the top prize of 5 B.S.(Banana System) points.
Again, the fact that bats, flies, and birds have wings and they flap them to fly does not establish a common ancestry. The point established by the photosynthesis result is that common features and common solutions do not indicate the ancestry of the process. The pieces and parts could indicate "plagiarism" or common solutions.
And when you find an article that claims that common features are necessarily a result of common ancestry, your criticism will be valid. All this article says is that there is likely a relationship between the two.
But the only number that can be put on that conjecture is the sequence comparison.
And just like those algebraic expressions are "instructions", so is the genome - it's a set of instructions for doing something.
Does the genome support conditional operations and recursives?
The only "number" that was put on the conjecture that OJ killed his wife was the sequence comparison of his DNA to the blood recovered at the scene. Of course, in both cases, there are certain other non-statistical, non-numeric facts that tend to support a particular conclusion.
Oh, tempting, but....
"If the glove don't fit, you must acquit."
Does the genome support conditional operations and recursives?
Interesting question. Many genomic actions are triggered by external events, so in a sense, those operations are predicated on a conditional statement. "If A, do X. If !A, do Y." Or, "If A, do X. If !A, do nothing." And so forth. As for whether there are branching conditions within long streams of instructions, I suspect that there probably are, but Nebullis could answer that, and the question on recursion, better than I can....
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