Any biologists hereabouts?

[davidm]

It would be nice to have an evolutionary biologist weigh in and combat nonsense, in the latter stages of this thread, (http://www.markcarey.com/mars/discuss-19933--2001-space-odyssey.html) at the Mars blog. :fuming: Any biologists about?

[Roland98]

But again, no new function is created. Such mutations could not drive the evolutionary progress we observe. " and other "no new information" garbage

Just tell him about this little critter. (http://nmsr.org/nylon.htm)

[davidm]

But again, no new function is created. Such mutations could not drive the evolutionary progress we observe. " and other "no new information" garbage

Just tell him about this little critter. (http://nmsr.org/nylon.htm)

Thanks, Roland, that's a great link. I've already given the main anti-evolution prattler, Martin Gradwell, a bunch of links refuting his "no new information" argument, but he has simply ignored them. What a surprise. :glare:

Let's see what he does with this one. :D

[livius drusus]

I'm still on page 3, but I have to say I find mario's "He is the absolute Alien" a rather charming phrase to describe God. :cthulhu2:

[davidm]

I'm still on page 3, but I have to say I find mario's "He is the absolute Alien" a rather charming phrase to describe God. :cthulhu2:

Mario is good fun because he's so deadly earnest and at the same time English is his second langauge, so he comes up with some oddly skewed terminology. :D

The thread gets hot later when Martin Gradwell steps in to "refute" evolution. I'm "They're Rocks," showing the craggy side of my personality. :biting:

Oh, and Marsman has just stepped in with a penetrating rebuttal of the Nylon Bug ... :yawn:

[Roland98]

Oh, and Marsman has just stepped in with a penetrating rebuttal of the Nylon Bug ... :yawn:

Hee hee... "TOUGH!"...oooo, scathing. :)

All right, had to jump in.

[davidm]

Oh, and Marsman has just stepped in with a penetrating rebuttal of the Nylon Bug ... :yawn:

Hee hee... "TOUGH!"...oooo, scathing. :)

All right, had to jump in.

Thanks for jumping in, Roland. I acknowledged you over at the blog. :wave: Hope that didnt blow any cover you were trying to keep.

Maybe now the *Rocks* can watch the fun unfold. :popcorn:

[livius drusus]

Mario is good fun because he's so deadly earnest and at the same time English is his second langauge, so he comes up with some oddly skewed terminology. :D

I love how he writes. His posts are so replete with Italianisms and direct translation errors it reminds me of my youth. I'm tempted to post in Italian just to give him a big ol' slap on the back for being such a nice befuddled fellow. (Even though he did kinda call you deaf cause you don't want to hear, but that was before the whole YEC thing got sorted out.)

The thread gets hot later when Martin Gradwell steps in to "refute" evolution. I'm "They're Rocks," showing the craggy side of my personality. :biting:

I haven't got there quite yet (I'd shake my fist at my job, but my bills might not appreciate the jinx. :shakefist: bills!), but I will say there's a fine line between craggy and hot.

[davidm]

Mario is good fun because he's so deadly earnest and at the same time English is his second langauge, so he comes up with some oddly skewed terminology. :D

I love how he writes. His posts are so replete with Italianisms and direct translation errors it reminds me of my youth. I'm tempted to post in Italian just to give him a big ol' slap on the back for being such a nice befuddled fellow. (Even though he did kinda call you deaf cause you don't want to hear, but that was before the whole YEC thing got sorted out.)

You should make at least one post in Italian, just for Mario! :cheer:

I suspect he thinks people are disparaging him because of his fractured English.

[viscousmemories]

You're hot in the cheerleader outfit, Degenerate. :lecher:

I'm on page three of that thread, but I don't think I'll make it through. :yawn:

[dave_a]

Read a few pages, but that got me thinking about something. Is there a biological explanation for sentience?

[LianaLi]

Ewww. Off the top of my head, sentinence can be viewed as an evolutionary advantage, because an organism can process events along a chronological sequence, and therefore relate the pertience of past experiences to the present, instead of just automatically reacting to the moment. It's the difference between fleeing for the hills because you heard a loud exploding noise, and recognizing a thunderclap. With sentinence and memory, you can tell the difference in noise of an explosion to flee from, and the exploding noise of a thunderstorm. Of course, that raises the question of what is sentinence and memory exactly, and the neurology textbooks get all touchy-feely on that one.

The damn textbooks always get really fuzzy at this point because you can't quantify a memory like you can a neuron firing. And the firing patterns in the brain that we associate with memory and sentinence isn't well understood yet. I remember in a neuro class, I was annoyed with my professor because he said we couldn't say why this pattern of neuron firing from the optical nerve to the back of the brain into the primary visual cortex, to the association cortex, and into the prefrontal cortex results in our recognition and association of the visual with our grandmother, because there's no chemical, no well understood pattern established with it, no specific neuron that fires ONLY when we see a tree, or our parents, At which point, I wanted to raise my hand and say something mildly moronic like "We associate that visual with our grandmother and identify it as our grandmother, because sometime in our childhood someone pointed at that person and said grandma. From there on out, we learned to do the association on our own." Ok, sorry. Enough ranting from my love/hate relationship with neurology.

-Liana

[LadyShea]

Roland or DH, I think Rolands fancy career title and degree needs to be posted. Those guys are yammering about "new information" like there ain't a frickin microbiologist in the thread now. Take em down a notch.

BTW, where did they learn to debate, the Big Sister School of "So??"

[viscousmemories]

Daddy, why did God create a bug that eats Mommies nylons? :ferret2:

[The Lone Ranger]

Gah! I read through that, and now my head hurts!

Alas, I don't have the time to get into it, but since I wrote one of the articles that's referenced in the thread, I suppose I should make some sort of comment somewhere.

When I wrote that evolution is an inevitable result of natural selection, it seemed so perfectly obvious to me that if the population is well-suited to its environment that the selectively-advantageous thing may very well be not to change that I didn't bother to explain that in detail. Apparently, I was mistaken.

This is what's known as "stabilizing selection." If any deviation from the "norm" makes the individual in question less fit, then selection will favor those who don't deviate from the norm. In fact, this is quite common, and both the fossil record and mathematical models show that this is the expected thing in any large population in a stable environment (once the population has become well-adapted to the environment, that is) -- that selection will largely work to prevent the population from changing too much.

This, too, is evolution -- because genotypes that are poorly-suited to the environment in question are being weeded out by natural selection. Just because the population's phenotype isn't changing in any obvious way doesn't mean that it isn't evolving as a result of natural selection.

Cheers,

Michael

[davidm]

Gah! I read through that, and now my head hurts!

Alas, I don't have the time to get into it..

I wish you would, praticularly since you wrote one of the articles cited. Martin Gradwell is making my head explode.

:explode2:

[viscousmemories]

I looked everywhere for a Nylon Bug for dumb dummies, but came up empty.

Here's what I have concluded from all the reading I've done this morning, starting from absolutely no knowledge or understanding of biology beyond how to evacuate my own waste:

Flavobacterium is one of two bacteria that contains enzymes (nylonase - 4 in this case) which enable it to digest nylon waste. Nylon waste is manmade and didn't exist before the 1930's. Scientists believe that some other organism experienced a frame shift genetic mutation that created new mutated enzymes that would ordinarily kill the organism, but as it happens this particular case resulted in a new organism capable of digesting and surviving off of nylon waste.

AiG on the other hand says that the organism could've survived the mutation because of something particular to the plastid substrate the enzyme sits on, but nsmr.org comes back with fine but that still doesn't explain where this organism came from if it requires nylon waste (which didn't exist before 1930) for survival.

Do I understand any of this at all?

[Roland98]

I looked everywhere for a Nylon Bug for dumb dummies, but came up empty.

Here's what I have concluded from all the reading I've done this morning, starting from absolutely no knowledge or understanding of biology beyond how to evacuate my own waste:

Flavobacterium is one of two bacteria that contains enzymes (nylonase - 4 in this case) which enable it to digest nylon waste. Nylon waste is manmade and didn't exist before the 1930's. Scientists believe that some other organism experienced a frame shift genetic mutation that created new mutated enzymes that would ordinarily kill the organism, but as it happens this particular case resulted in a new organism capable of digesting and surviving off of nylon waste.

AiG on the other hand says that the organism could've survived the mutation because of something particular to the plastid substrate the enzyme sits on, but nsmr.org comes back with fine but that still doesn't explain where this organism came from if it requires nylon waste (which didn't exist before 1930) for survival.

Do I understand any of this at all?


You're pretty close. Except I think you mean to mention the plasmid instead of the plastid. :) And it's not exactly what the enzyme sits on; it's where the DNA that encodes the enzyme is carried. In bacteria, most of the DNA is packaged into a single, circular chromosome. However, sometimes you can get bits on plasmids--these are tiny bits of circular DNA, which can be fairly easily transferred between bacteria. So what AiG is claiming is that this isn't a new mutation, but rather was just transferred to the nylon-eating bacteria on a plasmid from another bacterium. Then comes in nsmr's point that even if that was the case, where did it first come from? In order to be maintained in the population, it should have some survival benefit for the organism that carries it, or it will be lost.

What AiG also mentions is that it took 9 days for this activity to evolve in the lab. They say this as "evidence" that it somehow was "intelligently designed" or "not random" in some way. What they apparently don't realize is that 1) bacteria can double every 30 mins or so (not 100% sure what the doubling time of Pseudomonas is off the top of my head), and 2) when they're stressed (such as, from a lack of nutrients), many of them have mechanisms that increase their overall mutation rate, so that more copying errors will occur; some of them will be lethal, some may be beneficial. So if you start out with a large population of them, even if they have relatively low mutation rates, you'll still have at least 1-2 mutations per bacterium per generation. So if you have a population of, say, 10^6 bacteria, and each of them only doubles once, you can see that there's a lot of raw material for natural selection to then work on.

[pzmyers]

I've encountered that site before, and actually, that is not the most insane thread I've read there. Care for some Martian birds (http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/martian_birds/)?

Seriously, it's on my list of places that are so seriously screwed up and infested with dumbth that I should never enter them, to preserve the integrity of an overstressed circulatory system.

[davidm]

Thanks for entering that thread, Roland.

I must admit I remain a bit confubblegummed about Spetner's attempted rebuttal, which Gradwell quoted: "Enzyme 1, whose DNA sequence I have not seen, is probably the product of only point mutations. ...Second, enzyme 2 is not just the product of a frame shift, it is also the product of 140 point mutations. Many of these mutations are silent, but many are not. 47 amino acids out of 392 of the enzyme have been changed."

You later asked for a source for that, to which Gradwell has not yet responded. Yet he did say in his previous post that if Spetner got this wrong, he would have expected the nmsr site to come out and say so in no uncertain terms, which -- so far as I can tell -- it didn't actually do. (The quoted Spetner claim was from nmsr.) So are Spetner's quoted claims completely wrong, partly wrong, or irrelevant, or what?

I've encountered that site before, and actually, that is not the most insane thread I've read there. Care for some Martian birds?

Seriously, it's on my list of places that are so seriously screwed up and infested with dumbth that I should never enter them, to preserve the integrity of an overstressed circulatory system.

I battled the bird people for a couple of weeks, to the point where they wanted to kick me and a couple of other skeptics off the forum for spoiling their fun. :D

[Roland98]

You later asked for a source for that, to which Gradwell has not yet responded. Yet he did say in his previous post that if Spetner got this wrong, he would have expected the nmsr site to come out and say so in no uncertain terms, which -- so far as I can tell -- it didn't actually do. (The quoted Spetner claim was from nmsr.) So are Spetner's quoted claims completely wrong, partly wrong, or irrelevant, or what?

I dunno. That's why I'd like a reference. It's tough to figure out the veracity of a claim when someone just pulls it out of their ass and doesn't cite their source. I'm going to do a brief scan of the primary lit tomorrow at work to see if I can find where that came from.

ETA: unless he thinks that each AA affected due to the frameshift is a "point mutation?" 47 AA affected would roughly fit with the "140 point mutation" claim. I really am not sure how Spetner arrived at that number.

[viscousmemories]

Here's the letter (http://members.tripod.com/aslodge/id89.htm) (with sources at the bottom) that claim seems to have come from.

[viscousmemories]

Okay so this part is nonsense, right?

That is, the capability is built into the bacterium and the environment triggers the mutations.
I mean... isn't that roughly equivelant to saying that a computer has the capability of word processing built in, and installing Word just triggers it?

[beyelzu]

having read the spetner letter.

I can only say that the old evolution is random canard is really fucking irritating, particularly when it is espoused by someone who actually has some fucking education.


Thus, if only 6 of these 47 mutations were essential for the evolution, the probability of achieving it in 30 years is about 3 x 1035. So, if the evolution could not be random, then it would have to be nonrandom, and as I have suggested in my book, they would be triggered by the environment.

triggered by the environment equals natural fucking selection.

[Roland98]

Here's the letter (http://members.tripod.com/aslodge/id89.htm) (with sources at the bottom) that claim seems to have come from.

Right, but he doesn't say which paper (if any of those) it's from. And since they're all from the 80s, I'd have to physically go over to the library and drag the references out. Which I might do, if he actually said which one it was in.

[Roland98]

Okay so this part is nonsense, right?

That is, the capability is built into the bacterium and the environment triggers the mutations.
I mean... isn't that roughly equivelant to saying that a computer has the capability of word processing built in, and installing Word just triggers it?

Yeah, I think that's a decent analogy. And as beyelzu said and I mentioned in the other thread, they're tossing around the word "random" a bit too loosely. No one thinks "evolution is random" or anything like that. We know it's far from that in almost all cases; that natural selection is a very non-random process.

[davidm]

And the battle goes on... :beathead:

Gradwell, in his most recent posts, seems to show a clear misunderstanding of the issue, which I have tried (hopefully clearly) to point out. His basic stance seems to be that the changing environment somehow brings to the fore latent tendencies within the organisms to "mutate" in response to the change. This seems to be Spetner's stance as well. I don't know if he really "gets" the idea of random mutation PLUS natural selection.

[viscousmemories]

Here's the letter (http://members.tripod.com/aslodge/id89.htm) (with sources at the bottom) that claim seems to have come from.

Right, but he doesn't say which paper (if any of those) it's from. And since they're all from the 80s, I'd have to physically go over to the library and drag the references out. Which I might do, if he actually said which one it was in.
Ohhh... I see. Strange, why isn't all available knowledge on the Internet? :)

[viscousmemories]

Man I have been addicted to this topic since yesterday. I read a five page thread on the subject at CF (no new info there) a couple tangentially related threads at II, I'm trying to keep up with the Mars thread and I'm reading extensively at every link I've followed from each of these other places. I've even been taking notes and shit. Now I know how Bush feels. This job is haaaaard.

By the way somebody somewhere said DNA has 4 nucleotides: A, G, C, and T, but meanwhile someone at II said DNA is comprised of 5 nucleic acids. :?

[davidm]

Man I have been addicted to this topic since yesterday. I read a five page thread on the subject at CF (no new info there) a couple tangentially related threads at II, I'm trying to keep up with the Mars thread and I'm reading extensively at every link I've followed from each of these other places. I've even been taking notes and shit. Now I know how Bush feels. This job is haaaaard.

By the way somebody somewhere said DNA has 4 nucleotides: A, G, C, and T, but meanwhile someone at II said DNA is comprised of 5 nucleic acids. :?

This page (http://exobio.ucsd.edu/Space_Sciences/genetic_code.htm) should clarify matters. :professor:

[viscousmemories]

This page (http://exobio.ucsd.edu/Space_Sciences/genetic_code.htm) should clarify matters. :professor:
That was very helpful, thanks DH. :yup: