EVOLUTION is a figment of Chef Mike's imagination.

[trish]

Will Christians ever prove a god, or several of them, constructed the first proteins? Of course not. When and if we deduce the chemical pathways that lead to the first proteins we will only know they were the end result of natural processes that were initiated under a given set of presumed primordial conditions. Then we can always speculate whether or not a committee of gods was responsible for those initial conditions. And so the question of creation and design arises again. Answering the question for proteins will be of interest to those of us interested in the physical world and how it works, but it has no bearing, absolutely none on the religious question of whether or not the gods exist. It WILL, however, answer the question, was there a god who did it literally within a six day limit, and I think we already know the answer to that one.

[LG]

I can't believe I missed this whole discussion.

I can't believe there are still people who deny that evolution, as a theory, makes more sense than any creationist bullshit.

I can't believe that they think that only finding the missing link can ever prove evolutionists right when they are unable to explain dinosaurs, Noah's ark, the geological age aof the earth and the common links between different species.

I can't believe they don't know that we share 97% of our DNA with the two species of chimpanzees, including the bonobo, the only animal with a higher sex drive than human.

I can't believe that they don't manage, if they are so religious, to reconcile their religion with neo-Darwinism and accept evolution as a mechanism by which God might act, but would rather accept that there is no mechanism at all.

I can't believe they don't know anything about pepper moths, which prove natural selection in action, about the new strains of microbes and experiments on drosophila flies that show exactly how natural section can produce new trait and- in the case of bacteria- whole new species.

I can't believe we're even having this discussion.

Maybe God provided the initial spark and set the ball rolling, or maybe some electrical impulse or effect of a heat change altered those first proteins (the point is not how the first proteins arose- after all, proteins are no more than clumps of amino acids composed of three relatively plentiful elements- but when and how the first clump of proteins and other molecules began to qualify as living) but even that's not the question here. Do we accept that populations can adapt, survive or die based on how suitable they are for their environment (or 'fit') and that this can lead to the creation of news species, especially when mutations can create new genotypes that are phenotypically similar, perhaps, but more adept at survival? Or do we just say God threw all these creatures down on earth and that was it? And that he did it all in a week and with a day off at the end to unwind and play a round of golf as well?

And here's an interesting piece for you from the SciAm and something from the NCSE:


New Creation Museum Mostly Illustrates that Creationists Have Lots of Cash

The guy who developed the Jaws and King Kong rides at Universal Studios is behind the new Creation Museum, which is set to open May 28 just south of Cincinnati. (The Times has a great review.)

Pro: Now Cincinnati will be known for something other than race riots.

Con: Now Young Earth Creationism, which one would hope would be recognized as both bad theology and bad science, has its Mecca. (Can a Hajj be far behind?)

(For those of you unfamiliar with Young Earth Creationism, it's worth noting that one of its central tenets is that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, and that dinosaurs are in fact Dragons. Really!)



And now a word about the creation "museum"

The young-earth creationist ministry Answers in Genesis opened the doors of its lavish creation museum in northern Kentucky during the Memorial Day weekend. Here is a sampling of memorable quotes from the press coverage:

"Taking the Bible seriously doesn't mean you have to take it literally or reject evolution." -- Mendle Adams, pastor of St. Peter's United Church of Christ in Cincinnati, quoted in the Chicago Daily Southtown (May 27, 2007)

"It is important to remind our teachers, our education leaders, our public officials, our legislators, concerned parents and ourselves that a commitment to science education is essential for bolstering America's faltering leadership in science and technology globally. Supporting the creationist museum instead of supporting rigorous science education will not help us achieve this leadership goal." -- Thomas Gregg, Jnanendra K. Bhattacharjee, and Gary Janssen, all professors of science at Miami University, writing in the Cincinnati Enquirer (May 26, 2007)

"Twenty-seven million is a lot of money. I wonder what that would do for real education. This is shameful." -- Edwin Kagin, organizer of the Rally for Reason, quoted in the Cincinnati Post (May 29, 2007)

"This may be fascinating, but this is nonsense ... It's fine for people to believe whatever they want. What's inappropriate is to then essentially lie and say science supports these notions." -- Lawrence M. Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University and a board member of the Campaign to Defend the Constitution (DefCon), quoted in the Washington Post (May 27, 2007)

Asked to rate the museum on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being best: "I'd give it a 4 for technology, 5 for propaganda. As for content, I'd give it a negative 5." -- Lawrence M. Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University and a board member of the Campaign to Defend the Constitution (DefCon), quoted by the Associated Press (May 29, 2007)

"No qualified spokesperson or group for the scientific community recognizes any part of this as a museum." -- Steve Rissing, a professor of biology at the Ohio State University and a board member of Ohio Citizens for Science, quoted in the Dayton Daily News (May 26, 2007)

They will get kids coming into classrooms saying, 'My mom took me to this great, fancy museum this summer, and they say you're lying to me' ... This is not a good way to start the science class." -- NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott, quoted in the Cincinnati Post (May 25, 2007)

Also worth a visit are Martha Heil's discussion of the media coverage at The Panda's Thumb blog, P. Z. Myers's extensive collection of blog reactions to the museum's opening on his Pharyngula blog, and Lawrence M. Krauss's creation museum guide "Top 10 Reasons Why the Universe, the Sun, the Earth, and Life are not 6000 years old" (PDF).

[muhmuh]

Do we accept that populations can adapt, survive or die based on how suitable they are for their environment (or 'fit')

btw while we have this discussion
is anybody good enough in etymology to find out when fit turned from meaning suitable to meaning physically strong?

[LG]

Do we accept that populations can adapt, survive or die based on how suitable they are for their environment (or 'fit')

btw while we have this discussion
is anybody good enough in etymology to find out when fit turned from meaning suitable to meaning physically strong?

From etymonline:
fit (adj.) Look up fit at Dictionary.com
"suited to the circumstances, proper," c.1440, of unknown origin, perhaps from M.E. noun fit "an adversary of equal power" (c.1250), which is perhaps connected to fit (n.1). The verb meaning "to be the right shape" is first attested 1581. First record of fitness is from 1580. Survival of the fittest (1867) coined by H. Spencer.

Incidentally, in the UK, the terms 'fit' and 'well fit' can refer to physcial attractiveness, as in:
"Gor blimey, Kiff, look at that bird! She's well fit, in'she?"
"I wouldn't call 'er fit, Nige; I'd say she looks like a slag, but I s'pose I wouldn't kick her out of me bed".

[muhmuh]

Survival of the fittest (1867) coined by H. Spencer.

hm this would support my hunch that fit as strong is largely interconnected with social darwinism and the misinterpretation of darwins ideas

[guyone]

Hey LG. Nice avatar but still miss the Maoist.

[LG]

Hey LG. Nice avatar but still miss the Maoist.

Thanks guyone. The sexy Asian girl might make a comeback, but I'm in the mood for a little Lou Reed right now...

[trish]

The recent issue of Nature (447 28 June 2007 pg1055-6) has a review of Michael Behe’s recent effort The Edge of Evolution. The review is by Brown University biologist Professor Kenneth Miller.

I should like to quote a few paragraphs:

“Behe cites the malaria literature to note that two amino-acid changes in the digestive-vacuole membrane protein PfCRT (at positions 76 and 220) of Plasmodium are required to confer chloroquine resistance. From a report that spontaneous resistance to the drug can be found in roughly 1 parasite in 1020, he asserts that these are the odds of both mutations arising in a single organism, and uses them to make this sweeping assertion:


"On average, for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would need to wait a hundred million times ten million years. Since that is many times the age of the universe, it's reasonable to conclude the following: No mutation that is of the same complexity as chloroquine resistance in malaria arose by Darwinian evolution in the line leading to humans in the past ten million years."


Behe, incredibly, thinks he has determined the odds of a mutation "of the same complexity" occurring in the human line. He hasn't. What he has actually done is to determine the odds of these two exact mutations occurring simultaneously at precisely the same position in exactly the same gene in a single individual. He then leads his unsuspecting readers to believe that this spurious calculation is a hard and fast statistical barrier to the accumulation of enough variation to drive darwinian evolution.
It would be difficult to imagine a more breathtaking abuse of statistical genetics.
Behe obtains his probabilities by considering each mutation as an independent event, ruling out any role for cumulative selection, and requiring evolution to achieve an exact, predetermined result. Not only are each of these conditions unrealistic, but they do not apply even in the case of his chosen example. First, he overlooks the existence of chloroquine-resistant strains of malaria lacking one of the mutations he claims to be essential (at position 220). This matters, because it shows that there are several mutational routes to effective drug resistance. Second, and more importantly, Behe waves away evidence suggesting that chloroquine resistance may be the result of sequential, not simultaneous, mutations (Science 298, 74–75; 2002), boosted by the so-called ARMD (accelerated resistance to multiple drugs) phenotype, which is itself drug induced.
A mistake of this magnitude anywhere in a book on science is bad enough, but Behe has built his entire thesis on this error.”

So a word of warning: don’t waste your money on Behe’s newest blunder. Subscribe to Nature, or Science or Scientific American or any of a number of other real science journals or magazines instead.

[muhmuh]

its moot point anyway... both bacteria and viruses have a huge evolutionary advantage over multi cell organisms and despite all that neither have we died out from infections nor are all strains as harmless as herpes or warts by now
obviously our immune systems red queen is running every bit as fast as theirs

[trish]

The Sisyphus allusion seems really appropo to your last post.