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
By that I assume you mean his rejection of abiogenesis theories. But don't go for the soundbite! Yockey's book is a highly recommended text for its treatment of information theory.
The best example is the coding of amino acids AND a stop marker by sets of 3 DNA bases. However, there are more such as the coding for how to assemble different proteins from one gene and doubtlessly many more examples to be found in the future.
Ok. I have no real argument with that view. It kind of obviates the need for a separate theory of Intelligent Design, however.
The argument here is whether science supports ID or evolution.
Science supports what science finds. In support of evolution, it has the fossil record, DNA, and speculation. In support of ID, it has speculation.
Evolution is ahead on points, but it's not even the end of the first quarter.
Religion is holding its own, but it's playing in another stadium.
By that I assume you mean his rejection of abiogenesis theories.
Abiogenesis had nothing to do with my quest, though I found his conclusions quite illuminating.
To the contrary, I was looking for a discussion of genetics from the information theory perspective. Genetic algorithms and genetic programming fall way short of that goal because they are focused on simulations and analysis. It is the difference between treating symptoms v treating disease.
Yockey looks at genetics exactly the way I had hoped - e.g. information v. meaning, complexity v. order - and of course, messaging. He addresses the area I was exploring from around post #1041, e.g. Kolmogorov/Chaitin randomness, complexity, etc.
I have not been able to obtain a copy of his book, but this forum has a string of messages from Yockey which goes into some detail on the very subjects that interest me.
I am still looking for discussions of symbolizations - which are required for conditionals.
In summary, I have long suggested on this forum that the evolutionists' lèse-majesté reaction to intelligent design was ill advised, due to the soft underbelly of randomness ---- that intelligent design, even if quashed, would resurface as a result of information theory and ilk.
However, I was expecting that confrontation to originate from cosmology and mathematical physics (especially, harmonics as discussed at post 1118) --- and I was expecting it to occur sometime in the future. It appears I was short-sighted and the confrontation is happening now and from all sides. The Intelligent Design movement is not the cause of this, but the result, IMHO, will be the same.
That is the actualization description I'm seeking for symbols. From what you have described, it appears the conditional operatives are encoded. IOW, the process, the databasing (learning), the acquisition of data, the self-replication, the conditionals and their operatives are all encoded serially.
How could anyone believe such encoding resulted by chance?
Nope. Science has been politicized by the left - and that means the evolutionists.
Science is about truth, not about materialism as it has been turned into by the atheists. Even then, the Universe, the origin of life and human development are believed by science to have been designed. As to the fossils, they do not prove evolution, the Cambrian is unexplainable and the huge gaps are also unexplainable. DNA disproves evolution, period. In no way does it prove evolution.
I don't see how anyone can. I also do not understand how anyone can see so much order, so many rules, laws in the Universe and no one questions who wrote them who enforces them, why there are such laws at all. In a way the evolutionists and materialists are the descendants of the atomists who likewise rejected order for chance, laws for chaos because they understood even then that order requires an intelligence to organize it. Just like Hume denied his own intelligence in order to deny God, the evolutionists and materialists of today deny their own humanity for the sake of rejecting something, anything greater than themselves. Seems that their desire to be on top of the heap is so great that they do not care if it is a dung heap.
It doesn't matter whether the design evidence points as far back as 5,000 years or 15 billion years or whether it is in math, information theory, physics or genetics.
Metaphysical naturalism lays claim to science of all kinds because science avoids religion. And science cultures its doctrine by defaulting the difficult and unexplainable into the anthropic principle. You can see if you agree by reviewing the end of this link: Cosmological Patterns and Galaxy Biasing (pdf)
One of these days, the public will realize that metaphysical naturalism is a religion.
What has happened I think is that since Darwin, science has been misused. Science is about discovering the truth regardless of where it leads. Most scientists, before Darwin and many after him, have considered their work as discovering the ways of God. As to the anthropic principle, it is nonsense. It is anti-science and anti-rational. Science is about causation and to say that something exists because it exists is a rejection of scientific inquiry and a rejection of the very human insight to ask: WHY?
What I find ironic is the objection to Intelligent Design theory on the basis that saying "God did it" would derail further inquiry - when bucketing the unexplained instead into the "anthropic principle" has the same effect.
If that were true, you would think the hundreds of thousands of biologists that have worked in the field since Darwin's time would have figured it out. What I really think is that evolution is science and you simply cannot handle the concept because of the impact it would have on your psyche. That's why you and your friends constantly post "evolution is not science" or "Darwinism is dead" without a shred of evidence that this is what the scientific community believes. Hell, half the articles in biology in any layman-level magazine (Discover, Scientific American) have some implications for evolution, and none of them are negative. I've seldom tried to actually tackle biology papers from peer-reviewed journals, but I'm fairly certain that if one or another came back and said "Evolution is bunk, we found proof that God did it" the layman-level publications would pick it up pretty damned quickly.
Creos remind me of my college philosophy teacher back in the mid '80s. This fellow kept going on about "when the revolution comes..." and then spouting 60s flower child drivel. Well, his wish has never been fulfilled and probably never will be, and the same can be said for yours.
He thinks he has special dispensation to lie for God. Of course, God may have other ideas...
... do not care a hoot about Darwinism. Else they would not be constantly showing it to be false - as I and others have shown on these threads. A good example is that almost as soon as evolutinists postulated that the DNA not in genes was junk biologists shot it down and PROVED that it was not. Only a small band of fake 'scientists' sucking on the government teat pay any attention to it. In addition, science is about truth, not about authority. The very attempt of evolutionists to turn it into an ideology shows that evolution is not science.
Language-like features in junk DNA: Transposable element footprints in the genome?
We are currently in the process of implementing a computer simulation of our model and will be testing its performance in distinguishing arbitrary non-self sequences from a pool of artificially generated self sequences. Our model, which effectively comprises a local definition of self / non-self could have profound implications for autoimmune diseases…
In addition to CCT there is compelling evidence in the literature that many enzymes involved in lipid biosynthesis are modulated by the membrane composition. This led us to postulate that feedback through membrane stored elastic energy could provide a common control mechanism that underlies the homeostatic control of membrane lipid composition/properties….
Our results show that introducing feedback does indeed increase robustness dramatically. We are currently comparing the type of feedback (i.e. positive or negative) which our models predict for the various steps, with literature data on the modulation of the individual enzymes by lipid composition. Once the model is validated against experimental data, we will conduct a series of 'what if' experiments aimed at understanding changes in membrane lipid composition following specific types of perturbation, e.g. the administration of anti-neoplastic ether lipids.
Complexity International - Brief Comments on Junk DNA. Is it really junk? (pdf)
The assumptions of evolution have indeed been proven to be false numerous times. At first they assumed that abiogenesis was possible, but when Pasteur's proof that life did not come from mud, dirt etc. had gained scientific recognition Huxley wrote it off from the theory of evolution. This is perhaps the first important example of evolution being 'modified' because an important assumption of it had been proven false. Next came Mendel's genetics which totally disproved the 'how' of Darwinian evolution by showing that traits did not meld. This set a very big problem for Darwinism which was not really resolved favorably for it because the only way to continue with the theory of descent after that was to admit that new functions were very unlikely to spread throughout a sizable population. This of course they hid from the public by continuing to insist that natural selection would overcome this. The next big problem for evolution was DNA. Clearly with such a complex thing as a gene it would be very hard to gradually change it to a new function. So they proposed the neutral theory of mutation whereby natural selection was thrown out and 'neutral drift' was proposed as the way new species gradually came about. This explanation came into question due to the Cambrian explosion where clearly there were no lines of possible descent in such a short time for the numerous animal phyla which suddenly arose. This led Gould and Eldredge to propose punctuated equilibrium as the answer to the problem as well as to the problem that in all the important places intermediate species could not be found. So that got rid of both gradual evolution and neutral drift.
With all these problems, the 'proofs' of evolution were quickly vanishing and evolutionists needed to find something, anything to present to the public as proof for their theory. They tried to give proof by using DNA to show descent. One choice was using mitochondrial DNA to show the relationships between species were as evolutionists had predicted. Problem was that mtDNA did not show that species had arisen the way evolution predicted. The most flagrant case was that the egg bearing platypus was placed closer in descent to regular mammals than the kangaroo. So there went another assumption and another 'proof' of evolution. Next when it became clear that the largest percentage of DNA (in 95%) did not code for genes, the evolutionists ASSUMED that this was the remnants of previous species still in the genes of the species that succeeded them (an attempt at reviving the 'proof' that species develop their embryos in the way that they had evolved - which was proven to be a FRAUD). Problem with that is as I said that those non-coding for gene regions have proven to be even more important than the genes themselves!
So you see evolution has been disproven numerous times that is why it (like that metal guy in Terminator II) has to keep 'reinventing itself' and putting itself back together. It is for this reason that evolutionists are unwilling to state what exactly the theory of evolution is nowadays. They want to be able to pick and choose the different explanations (including the discredited ones) to explain away a particular problem being discussed.
Aside from the above direct disproofs of evolution, the materialist base on which evolution relies has been disproven also. A good example is the problem of symbolism which Alamo-Girl is discussing. Such symbolism requires an intelligent designer to make it work. So yes, evolution has been refuted, what is left is to dump it in the garbage heap of history where it belongs.
One of the most interesting examples of feedback loops is the one that controls cell replication. Let's consider this - right after conception cell replication occurs very quickly, after birth it still occurs and continues to add new cells to the body but at a slower pace. After adulthood cells are not added any more but they are replaced with new cells being created and old ones commiting suicide. At old age the process of replacement stops. We know how the last part of the loop works, the ends of the chromosomes get shorter at each replication and thus serve as 'counters' for when replication is to stop. This of course is totally symbolic, there is no purpose to those counters other than as counters.
Scientists have been looking for genes that can explain behavioral disorders for 20 years without much success. According to L. Alison McInnes of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, that may be because they have been concentrating their efforts in the wrong places in the genome.
Speaking on Dec. 8 at the annual meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, McInnes advised that those interested in genetic links to behavior should start looking at places in the genome that produce special molecules called small non-messenger RNA (smnRNA) rather than concentrating on genes that code for proteins.
Current genetic screening techniques do not pick up these sequences because they are very small and not much is known about their structure. So McInnes and her colleagues at Mt. Sinai have created a computational and molecular screening technique designed specifically to look for smnRNA molecules produced by regions in the genome that have been associated with behavioral disorders. Furthermore, they have used this method to successfully identify such molecules in the first few genes that they investigated, she reported.
The existence of smnRNAs has been known for some time. Until recently, they have been generally dismissed as unimportant. New studies are finding that they are actually quite abundant and involved in a wide variety of biological processes. As a result, some scientists are beginning to speculate that they may represent an entirely new class of gene and type of gene activity.
McInnes cited the theoretical work of John Mattick and Michael Gagen at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Last year they published a lengthy paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution in which they argued that, rather than being useless, smnRNAs and introns – the sequences in the genome between genes that code for proteins that have been called junk DNA – form a powerful network that can turn ordinary genes on and off at the proper times.
"It appears that smnRNA may be especially relevant for understanding behavioral differences," McInnes said, "because they appear to be particularly enriched in the brain. They represent a swift and energy efficient means of regulating gene expression and may be especially important for rapid regulatory events."
Lack of expression of an smnRNA has already been strongly associated with one neuropsychiatric disorder, Prader Willi syndrome, McInnes reported. Prader-Willi syndrome is characterized by abnormally poor muscle tone and feeding difficulties in early infancy, followed by excessive eating and gradual development of morbid obesity. It is also accompanied by cognitive impairment.
In the initial trial of their new screen, the Mt. Sinai researchers identified a possible smnRNA molecule produced by an intron of the human corticotrophin-releasing hormone gene. Corticotrophin releasing hormone (CRH) plays a key role in the response of humans and other mammals to external threats. It acts at a number of sites in the nervous system to control automatic, behavioral and immunological responses of stress. Alterations in CRH neural activity appear to contribute to a number of mental illnesses including depression, anxiety disorders and anorexia nervosa. In addition, the CRH smnRNA appears to form a complimentary match with a sequence in an untranslated region associated with a receptor, called the NMDA-glutamate receptor, which is widely implicated in schizophrenia and other degenerative neurological disorders.
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