Re: Color vision

In message <nj4nb29s07ppk25tagibhlav9619s0oo34@xxxxxxx>, *** <remdickhm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
On Sun, 16 Jul 2006 20:54:09 GMT, josephus <dogbird@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Nashton wrote:

Kermit wrote:

Nashton wrote:

r norman wrote:

On 24 Jun 2006 14:36:03 -0400, Steve Schaffner
<sfs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Kermit" <unrestrained_hand@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Nashton wrote:

Bob Casanova wrote:

On Sat, 24 Jun 2006 02:13:53 GMT, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by Nashton <nananan@xxxxx>:

shipmodeler1 wrote:

"Ooh! I want to be repaired. How long before I can be genetically
retrofitted with the avian fourth receptor?"

Maybe within the next 50 years?

If and when that happens, it most certainly will have nothing
to do with
the ToE, but with advances in molecular biology and genetics.

Let's see...evolution, biology, genetics...

Let's see...Biology, genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry...

Nope, no relationship there.

Nope, the advances in genetics, gene therapy and anything
concerning the
HGP have nothing to do with advances in the ToE.

This will come as a great surprise to geneticists, who do all their
research in an environment that uses evolutionary insights as a
matter
of course.

[Piggybacking, because Naston is in my killfile.]
It's worth looking at the Human Genome Project big genome paper. It's
chock full of evolution. The chimpanzee genome paper too, of course.

Unfortunately there is a tiny shred of truth in Naston's point (much
to my surprise). It is true that there are extremely close ties
between some aspects of molecular biology and evolutionary biology
(like interpreting genomes in a larger context). And it is true that
there are many evolutionary biologists who do molecular biological
work and molecular biologists who do evolutionary work. And it is
also true that the old cliche is still quite valid, biology only makes
sense in terms of evolution. Nashton is wrong about all of that, the
"big picture".

On the other hand, it is also true (the "small" picture) that many,
perhaps even most, molecular biologists and biochemists go through
their education without ever taking even a single course in
evolutionary biology except for what they get in intro. And many
molecular biologists and biochemists may have come from chemistry
undergraduate program and not even had intro biology, at least not
the part with evolution. And a molecular biologist or biochemist can
conduct work in gene therapy and genetic engineering and use the
details of genomic analysis and do all sorts of things completely
ignorant of or uncaring about or even disbelieving in the ultimate
evolutionary background that helps explains why the particular tools
and techniques work. As long as they do work, (s)he can just grind
out papers and produce results and be successful . Not well educated,
but successful nonetheless.






So one can be a molecular biologist, geneticist, biochemist and never
even hear of the ToE or more importantly, use it.


Sometimes it's difficult to tell whether someone (namely, you) is
having trouble with reading comprehension or is delieberately
dishonest. Since you rarely offer anything but insults and empty
assertions, it is difficult to tell.

I am painfully aware of my own limitations in these matters, and was
very careful how I worded what I said. So, apparently, was r norman. He
never said that these fields would have done as well without
evolutionary science. These people, for example, think that it suffers
now because molecular biologists are too often unaware of knowledge
that would help them in their own work:
http://www.smbe.org/


Where did I say that you or r norman said so? I concluded this, given
what I know and given Wilkins' comment.


"The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution is an international
society that exists to provide facilities for association and
communication among molecular evolutionists, and has as one of its
primary goals to increase communication between the fields of evolution
and molecular biology. In order to accomplish these goals the Society
publishes the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution (MBE), and it
sponsors an annual meeting."


And what does this prove? That the ToE needs molecular biology a lot
more than molecular biology needs the ToE.


I hate to quote at such length, and I apologize if this makes some of
you guys uncomfortable, but this is interesting and important and
readable for us layfolks. Here's the opinion of the national Academy of
Sciences on this issue:
" The unifying principle of common descent that emerges from all the
foregoing lines of evidence is being reinforced by the discoveries of
modern biochemistry and molecular biology.

The code used to translate nucleotide sequences into amino acid
sequences is essentially the same in all organisms. Moreover, proteins
in all organisms are invariably composed of the same set of 20 amino
acids. This unity of composition and function is a powerful argument in
favor of the common descent of the most diverse organisms.

In 1959, scientists at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom
determined the three-dimensional structures of two proteins that are
found in almost every multicelled animal: hemoglobin and myoglobin.
Hemoglobin is the protein that carries oxygen in the blood. Myoglobin
receives oxygen from hemoglobin and stores it in the tissues until
needed. These were the first three-dimensional protein structures to be
solved, and they yielded some key insights. Myoglobin has a single
chain of 153 amino acids wrapped around a group of iron and other atoms
(called "heme") to which oxygen binds. Hemoglobin, in contrast, is made
of up four chains: two identical chains consisting of 141 amino acids,
and two other identical chains consisting of 146 amino acids. However,
each chain has a heme exactly like that of myoglobin, and each of the
four chains in the hemoglobin molecule is folded exactly like
myoglobin. It was immediately obvious in 1959 that the two molecules
are very closely related.

During the next two decades, myoglobin and hemoglobin sequences
were determined for dozens of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians,
fish, worms, and molluscs. All of these sequences were so obviously
related that they could be compared with confidence with the
three-dimensional structures of two selected standards--whale myoglobin
and horse hemoglobin. Even more significantly, the differences between
sequences from different organisms could be used to construct a family
tree of hemoglobin and myoglobin variation among organisms. This tree
agreed completely with observations derived from paleontology and
anatomy about the common descent of the corresponding organisms.
will appear in separate window
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And how does this prove that the foundation of molecular biology is the
ToE? Wouldn't this rather prove that the ToE needs molecular biology?

These are not lofty, difficult to comprehend notions. I'm amazed you can
participate and understand any of the research, its significance and the
role of each scientific field as it relates to the ToE.


Similar family histories have been obtained from the
three-dimensional structures and amino acid sequences of other
proteins, such as cytochrome c (a protein engaged in energy transfer)
and the digestive proteins trypsin and chymotrypsin. The examination of
molecular structure offers a new and extremely powerful tool for
studying evolutionary relationships. The quantity of information is
potentially huge--as large as the thousands of different proteins
contained in living organisms, and limited only by the time and
resources of molecular biologists.

As the ability to sequence the nucleotides making up DNA has
improved, it also has become possible to use genes to reconstruct the
evolutionary history of organisms. Because of mutations, the sequence
of nucleotides in a gene gradually changes over time. The more closely
related two organisms are, the less different their DNA will be.
Because there are tens of thousands of genes in humans and other
organisms, DNA contains a tremendous amount of information about the
evolutionary history of each organism.
Genes evolve at different rates because, although mutation is a
random event, some proteins are much more tolerant of changes in their
amino acid sequence than are other proteins. For this reason, the genes
that encode these more tolerant, less constrained proteins evolve
faster. The average rate at which a particular kind of gene or protein
evolves gives rise to the concept of a "molecular clock." Molecular
clocks run rapidly for less constrained proteins and slowly for more
constrained proteins, though they all time the same evolutionary
events.

The figure on this page compares three molecular clocks: for
cytochrome c proteins, which interact intimately with other
macromolecules and are quite constrained in their amino acid sequences;
for the less rigidly constrained hemoglobins, which interact mainly
with oxygen and other small molecules; and for fibrinopeptides, which
are protein fragments that are cut from larger proteins (fibrinogens)
when blood clots. The clock for fibrinopeptides runs rapidly; 1 percent
of the amino acids change in a little longer than 1 million years. At
the other extreme, the molecular clock runs slowly for cytochrome c; a
1 percent change in amino acid sequence requires 20 million years. The
hemoglobin clock is intermediate.

The concept of a molecular clock is useful for two purposes. It
determines evolutionary relationships among organisms, and it indicates
the time in the past when species started to diverge from one another.
Once the clock for a particular gene or protein has been calibrated by
reference to some event whose time is known, the actual chronological
time when all other events occurred can be determined by examining the
protein or gene tree.

An interesting additional line of evidence supporting evolution
involves sequences of DNA known as "pseudogenes." Pseudogenes are
remnants of genes that no longer function but continue to be carried
along in DNA as excess baggage. Pseudogenes also change through time,
as they are passed on from ancestors to descendants, and they offer an
especially useful way of reconstructing evolutionary relationships.

With functioning genes, one possible explanation for the relative
similarity between genes from different organisms is that their ways of
life are similar--for example, the genes from a horse and a zebra could
be more similar because of their similar habitats and behaviors than
the genes from a horse and a tiger. But this possible explanation does
not work for pseudogenes, since they perform no function. Rather, the
degree of similarity between pseudogenes must simply reflect their
evolutionary relatedness. The more remote the last common ancestor of
two organisms, the more dissimilar their pseudogenes will be.

The evidence for evolution from molecular biology is overwhelming
and is growing quickly. In some cases, this molecular evidence makes it
possible to go beyond the paleontological evidence. For example, it has
long been postulated that whales descended from land mammals that had
returned to the sea. From anatomical and paleontological evidence, the
whales' closest living land relatives seemed to be the even-toed hoofed
mammals (modern cattle, sheep, camels, goats, etc.). Recent comparisons
of some milk protein genes (beta-casein and kappa-casein) have
confirmed this relationship and have suggested that the closest
land-bound living relative of whales may be the hippopotamus. In this
case, molecular biology has augmented the fossil record."
From:
http://fermat.nap.edu/html/creationism/evidence.html


See above. You really don't know how to argue a point, do you?


And it's just pathetic and desperate to claim that *geneticists* can do
their work without knowing anything about evolution.


Nasty, We ALREADY KNOW you dont read text books, or books of any kind
or method. You may own books but you DO NOT READ THEM.
josephus

Thanks, for a second I thought you were going to quote another textbook.

And yes, researching for coronary heart disease, cracking the HG,
cloning and all those wonderful things that are the product of the field
of genetics do not need the ToE.

It's pathetic and desperate of you to claim that genetics somehow need
the Toe for its theoretical foundation.


Truth of the matter is, and it's been discussed before, but the
evo-goons are so uneducated, unsophisticated baboons, that it probably
went over their collective heads, that darwin would never have existed
and medicine, genetics and pharmacology would have been as advanced as
they are now.

Get over it.

--
Nicolas

<snip nonsense that may possibly be art - who can tell?>
<snip sad lawyer's angry rant>

Kermit


You failed to prove anything at all. Sorry if I appear insulting, but
your rant did nothing to counter my point.



Informative exchange.

One question, if I understand the Evolutionary position, Common
Descent is supported by shared functional components such as blood.

Doesn't it also support Creationism? Auto makers use a basic steering
wheel over and over, why recreate the wheel? If I were the ID, I
would be more interested in novelty rather than humdrum basics.

***


No it doesn't support Creationism. It is merely compatible with Creationism. (Everything is compatible with Creationism, which in extremity can retreat to the position that living creatures were created to look as if they evolved from a common ancestor.)

Common descent is supported by correlated nested hierarchies of traits. For example all tetrapods have limbs built on the same plan. Different groups of vertebrates have limbs modified in different ways - whales in one, bats in another, birds in a third, pterosaurs in a fourth. A designer might be expected to mix and match features to a greater degree than is observed.

Shared non-functional characters are clearer evidence for common descent that shared functional characters. Shared functional characters can in principle result from convergence (but in practice the convergence is often incomplete, such as the wings of birds, bats and pterosaurs, or the lysozymes of cows, colobuses and hoatzins); convergence of non-functional characters depends on chance, and is statistically improbable. Common descent explains why a large group of primates have the vitamin C synthesis pathway (genome buffering didn't work here) broken, and broken in the same way. (It's broken, in a different way, in guinea pigs, and there's other groups with it broken in yet other ways.) The same holds for the distribution of retroviruses inserted in primate genomes, of the pattern of sequence variation in various non-coding DNA sequences.

Another piece of data is the variation in genetic codes. A designer could use the same code for all organisms. Or it could give each organism as different code. (The latter would prevent viruses jumping species, or miscegenation between "kinds".) A designer could use the same bases in all genetic codes. Or it could use different bases in the codes for different organisms. In nature the genetic codes of organisms are not all the same, but all known codes are minor variations of a single canonical code, distributed in a fashion (variations associated with clades deduced from other evidence; variations occurring in clades with small geneomes, especially those with codon usage biases) predicted by the theory of evolution.

Between these two points lies the redundancy of the genetic code. More than one codon (base triplet) maps to most amino-acids. The more closely related (as inferred from other evidence) the more likely organisms are to use the same triplet for the same amino acid residue at the same place in the same protein. A designer could use the same triplet in all organisms, or randomly distribute them, or anything else.4
--
alias Ernest Major


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