lucaspa

Luminal, the October issue of Scientific American has an article dealing with theories on the physical basis of consciousness. Since both are based in patterns of neuronal firing, they both deal with your "problem". Indvididual molecules can be replaced, even individual neurons. So, it isn't the individual molecules (which are actually cycled and broken down to carbon dioxide, water, and urea) that is important, but the pattern of cells and how they fire.

It was already known that earth was moving. If the aether was a medium thru which light traveled, then earth is moving through the aether by moving in its orbit. Even if the aether is moving, that still means that earth's velocity relative to the aether would be different at if you looked in different directions. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/mmhist.html I said it was a premise. Premise and deduction are two different things. You start with a premise and make a deduction. Your "guess" is the decution from a syllogism: Premise 1: 2 papers published in the same year mean they were inspired by a common source. Premise 2: Einstein published 2 papers in the same year. Deduction: Einstein's papers were inspired by a common source. Syllogisms can be wrong for a number of reasons. For instance, the deduction can be a non sequitor from the premises. However, another way a syllogism can be wrong is for one of the premises to be wrong. This was what I was doing: calling into question one of the premises. OK, SR is about the structure of spacetime. My comment still applies because spacetime is continuous and not quantized. Loop quantum gravity is a new theory that is trying to quantize spacetime and thus unite quantum mechanics with GR. IF SR was related to QM, Einstein could have done this a long time ago. This is a non-sequitor. Planck's equation is E = hv where v is the frequency of light. Frequency is "the number of complete oscillations per second of energy (as sound or electromagnetic radiation) in the form of waves" So, Planck's work still had light traveling in waves. Planck did not displace wave theory, but implied the dual nature of light: waves and particles. Now, according to your logic, wouldn't you still need an aether for the waves to travel thru?

This is the premise: because 2 papers were published in the same year, they were inspired by a common source. Is this mandatory? Einstein was working on several different problems in his head at the same time. Most scientists do. This doesn't mean that they were related. Look, you can try to guess what Einstein was thinking all you want. IMO, it's a pretty pointless exercise unless and until you can find Einstein telling you what he was thinking. Do you have that? Do you have any writing BY Einstein telling you his thought processes when he wrote those 3 seminal papers? As it turns out, there isn't an obvious link between gravity -- the subject of Special Relativity -- and quantum mechanics. And QM is an outgrowth of Planck's quantization. IF there were a connection, then why did Einstein futilely spend the last 50 years of his life trying to unify SR and QM?

Uh, if they "know" this, why don't they publish it in the scientific journals? Showing SR to be wrong -- and the data involved -- would guarantee both publication in an physics journal AND grant funding for the rest of the scientist's career. But they don't. PLEASE! Do some critical thinking on your own! You haven't provided ANY data that SR is wrong and there are mountains of data supporting it: starting with that 1919 solar eclipse where bending of light was first observed. What EXACTLY do "90% or more of engineers and experimental physics" think the data is that shows special relativity to be dead? All the people working on M Theory or Loop Quantum Gravity accept SR as valid: their theories have to correspond to SR but add quantum gravity.

I think you are confusing the contingency of evolution with "type of survival". Within a particular environment, "survival" means having particular designs. Not all designs work in all environments. In all the examples of genetic algorithms I have seen, humans pick the environment. For instance, Thompson picked an environment where the computer circuit discriminated types of speech. Exactly HOW natural selection did that was up to natural selection and, in fact, natural selection found a way that Thompson doesn't understand. Now, Thompson can change the environment such that he can add variables such as fault tolerance, etc. and natural selection will figure a balance between that and speech recognition. IOW, Thompson will still ONLY select for survival, but the environment he sets will be more complicated. In nature, the environment is VERY complex, since environment is EVERYTHING that interacts with the individual. In the hominid lineage populations faced different environments and ecological niches. And yes, natural selection designed for them all. The entire genus Paranthropus was designed to be herbivorous. H. neandertals were evolved for a cold climate. So yes, many species of hominids did evolve differently. H. sapiens is the one that replaced the others. However, with an ecological niche where big brains and intelligence does well, natural selection would have evolved SOME species to fill it. That species may not even have been from primates. If the KT extinction hadn't occurred, the species could possibly have been from raptors. However, Thompson's circuit could also have evolved very differently depending on the contingencies of the variations available. He would still have had a circuit that discriminated speech, but it would have been different. "Technological evolution" is very different from biological evolution. Machines do not have inheritance. Instead, the Darwinian selection of designing machines is taking place in human minds. In essence, humans make the mental variations. Only when humans use genetic algorithms are they using natural selection. The variations are NOT coming from human minds, but are generated by the system. "Evolution" has come to mean "change" and often is applied to individuals. However, biological evolution applies only to POPULATIONS. Populations evolve, not individuals and not "technology". Technology changes. So, what humans are doing technologically is NOT evolution. Sometimes humans use natural selection in design: genetic algorithms.

No, the experiments proved the aether didn't exist because a consequence of the existence of the aether that should have been there wasn't. IOW, the aether was falsified. What Lorentz did was try to save the aether from falsification by making an ad hoc hypothesis: the earth (and everything on it) contracted in the direction of motion thru the aether to counter the difference in the speed of light that should have been detected. You can make an ad hoc hypothesis to save any and every theory from falsification. The key to a valid ad hoc hypothesis is that it is testable independent of the hypothesis it is trying to save. The Lorentz contraction has no other way to be tested because it's SOLE effect is to save aether. And Special Relativity, by itself, perhaps doesn't deny aether. It was the Michelson-Morely experiments that did so. Special Relativity doesn't need the aether, either, since light waves are propagated independent of a medium. Feeling the rocks only allows you to detect the radiation (and increased motion of the molecules and atoms of the rock). That most of the heat is radiated into space is irrelevant. It still has less capacity to do work (greater entropy) than the radiation that was absorbed by the rock. Meanwhile, in plants some of the radiation absorbed made sugar, which is a decrease in entropy. You said "eventually" and "far more quickly". You can't have both. The sugar can remain AS SUGAR for years! Meanwhile, the rock radiates its infrared within a few seconds or hours. Also consider what happens when the sugar is burned. Some of that energy is used to make high energy phosphate bonds which are then used to synthesize proteins and nucleic acids -- reducing entropy. It is not until those compounds are broken down that entropy is finally equal to what the rock did within a few seconds or hours! So no, life is a way of locally decreasing entropy. Life does NOT = evolution. Or evolution does NOT = life. Evolution happens to populations of living organisms. Therefore you cannot say that evolution = chemical reactions. Evolution also happens to other populations. 1. Storing some of the sugar. 2. Using some of the sugar in oxidative phosphorylation to make ATP and release heat. 3. Using the ATP to synthesize proteins and nucleic acids, which themselves represent a decrease in entropy. Eventually all the decrease in entropy represented by the synthesis of the sugar will be used to do work + release heat and the compounds make will themselves be converted to heat. As I said, since entropy is the ability to do work eventually maximum entropy will be reached -- a state where the energy is in a form that can do no more work. However, life is very inefficient at increasing entropy because, at each stage, life couples the release of energy to work and even decreasing entropy in another subsystem. The rock, OTOH, is very efficient at increasing entropy because it doesn't use the energy to do ANY work. There are indeed other mechanisms: 1. Genetic drift. 2. Development. Genetic drift will cause a trait to be "fixed" (every member of the species has it) but this happens by pure chance. Because the same genes are used to develop different parts of the body, genes selected by natural selection for one trait will also make traits in other parts of the body -- but without being selected. Examples: 1. Male nipples in humans. Nipples are selected for in females but the genes are expressed during development in human males also. 2. Elongated ankle bones in pandas. Natural selection "fashioned" an elongated wrist bone as a "thumb". However, the same genes are expressed in hindlimb development as well, so all pandas have the corresponding bone in the ankle elongated. There is no problem. Mutations themselves are not necessarily either higher or lower entropy. Mutations are simply changes in the sequence of nucleotides within DNA. That in itself does not represent either an increase or decrease in the ability to do work. What really matters is the protein that is made from the translated DNA. That protein may have a different function. Mutations that increase the amount of DNA -- single nucleotide insertions, insertions, gene duplications, inversions, or chromosome duplication -- make more nucleotide sequences that may mean more proteins. In the case of a single nucleotide insertion of deletion, it is going to result in a radically different protein as the amino acid sequence of the protein is randomly changed. Usually this will produce a protein with a different biological function than the original protein. But that in itself has nothing to do with entropy.

LOL! Nicely done. There's a better source: http://darwin-online.org.uk/ I just found out something interesting! Between the 1st and 2nd edition, Darwin added this to the Fontispiece: "The only distinct meaning of the word 'natural' is stated, fixed, or settled; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e. to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once." BUTLER: Analogy of Revealed Religion.

Citations? OK, what you are saying is that the "junk" DNA adds more nucleotides and thus more phosphate groups. However, NONE of the effects of this negative charge that you describe actually happen. Besides, you are forgetting the extra energy needed to 1) synthesize and 2) maintain this extra DNA. It would be more efficient just to have the active genes. After all, BACTERIA do! That's not why there is difference in charge. Yes, there is a concentration gradient of Na and K ions, but the net charge is established by proteins that cannot pass the cell membrane. http://www.cvphysiology.com/Arrhythmias/A007.htm Remember, in eukaryotic cells the DNA is in the nucleus and the HCO3 is generated in the mitochondria, which is in the cytoplasm. Thus, DNA can't "repel" it. Also, DNA in eukaryotic cells is surrounded by chromatin -- which neutralizes the negative charges due to the phosphate groups. PLEASE, do some better reading in biochemistry. Citations? Please point to papers comparing metabolism in cells with larger genomes with more "junk" and those without. If you don't have those papers, please stop trying to pass off your speculation as "fact". You are missing the function of the phosphate groups: it is to provide hydrogen bonding with the water molecules to make DNA soluble in water! It also, because it puts the hydrophilic phosphate groups on the outside, puts the hydrophobic bases together on the inside, where the hydrogen bonds between bases 1) make the double helix stable and 2) provide information on which base is complementary to ensure faithful replication of the nucleotide sequence. ] But that happens in bacterial DNA WITHOUT the large amounts of non-coding DNA found in eukaryotic cells. Pioneer, when thinking about your hypotheses, always remember what happens in bacteria where we have the same type of DNA but without the "junk". One of the reasons for the packaging of DNA via chromatin in multicellular organisms is to keep some genes permanently turned off: you don't want your heart cells making the proteins that cause your bone to calcify! http://scienceweek.com/2004/sa041231-3.htm Citation? The recent paper on this I found has nothing to do with charge, but PORES. That is, the pores in the nuclear membrane so that the mRNA can move to the cytoplasm to be translated in ribosomes! http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v8/n7/abs/nrg2122.html "Cells have evolved sophisticated multi-protein complexes that can regulate gene activity at various steps of the transcription process. Recent advances highlight the role of nuclear positioning in the control of gene expression and have put nuclear envelope components at centre stage. On the inner face of the nuclear envelope, active genes localize to nuclear-pore structures whereas silent chromatin localizes to non-pore sites. Nuclear-pore components seem to not only recruit the RNA-processing and RNA-export machinery, but contribute a level of regulation that might enhance gene expression in a heritable manner." Citation? The only time I can find when the nuclear membrane disappears is during cell division. Otherwise, there is nuclear membrane around those areas of the DNA that are packed. Citation? Remember, ATP is being made in the mitochondria and there is no effect on the cell membrane. And where did you get the idea that there is an "internal limit of negative charge"? Sorry, Pioneer, but your biochemistry is just off. It's interesting to try to make a unified "simple" theory, but it is unnecessary. If you read the literature, there are lots of functions for the non-coding regions -- none of them are what you propose and what you propose is contradicted by the data. Sorry. Citation, please? That isn't the data I've seen. True, hydrogen bonding is only about 3-7 kcal/mole (compared with 70-100 kcal/mole for a covalent bond) but there are a LOT of hydrogen bonds in a DNA molecule. Hydrophobic interactions (exclusion of water) is only about 1-2 kcal/mole. For some reason, physicists and engineers think they can be instant experts in biology and biochemistry. The history of medical science is full of such engineers who seriously botched the job. Linus Pauling is the most famous, but there are many others. Somehow, engineers don't seem to learn from the repeated failures.

That is not the same as saying there is common descent! Giving a general statement about change is NOT saying ""The ability to comprehend that we, in our current form, must have come from some series of previous forms. And conclude that our form will continue to branch off into other forms, forms that either become extinct, or continue. Depending on environmental variables." After all, the "change" could just be changes within a present form. And "change" does not mean "branching". It can be limited to "change from ONE form to ONE other form." Also, Darwin did not have life shaped by "stress". Unless you warp the word "stress" out of all normal meaning. Gautama was thinking about individuals; Darwin was thinking about populations. Darwinism is not Buddhism nor did Buddha anticipate Darwin. 1. You don't "know" that ants and bees are "unconsciously intelligent". You are asserting it. You are taking the post I made that forager ants do the equivalent of spherical trigonometry and this ability is hardwired into their genes and calling the ability "unconscious intelligence". But that doesn't make them "unconsciously intelligent". Instead, ALL the data shows is that natural selection can make brain modules that perform tasks that, in humans, requires a lot of learning and above average conscious intelligence. It's not "intelligence", just as running fast for horses is not "intelligence". It's an ability designed by natural selection. 2. And what do the ants and bees "consciously create"? Again, they are hardwired to build nests and tunnels, but do you see any variation in them? Any individual expression like you see in human art? Human savants are conscious beings, aren't they? They don't perform the calculations consciously, but overall the humans are conscious in ways that the ants and bees never are. 1. The quote you attributed to me was made by YOU! If you had noticed, there was an incomplete signature. Again, unless you can remember what you said, or if you continue to deny what you said, this discussion can't go anywhere. 2. Your answer is another assertion. It's even more blatant when it was YOU who asked the original question. YOU didn't know the answer -- because you asked the question -- and then proceeded to make an unfounded assertion. No. The fun is in inventing something NEW, not warping and garbling something we already know. That is simply irritating and wastes time. Also, if you haven't read the work and realized all the mistakes that were made in originally inventing the wheel, what you end up doing is wasting your time on all the original mistakes -- without ever knowing that they were mistakes and why. You see, you then have to rediscover why they were mistakes. Wasting time again. Only, of course, you are wasting other people's time because you won't read why the ideas were mistakes the first time around. Yes, I'm serious. Using the correct language to describe ideas is important. The biggest trouble comes when the strength of the claim doesn't match the strength of the data. If you state a weak claim (speculation, hypothesis) and have weak data, then you are OK. If you state a strong claim and have strong data, you are OK. If you state a weak claim but have strong data, that is a problem. The worst problem, of course, arises when you make a strong claim but have weak or no data. In this particular case, claiming "assumption" when it is hypothesis, you try to make it weaker than it is. In this context, "assumption" means "claim without any evidence". IOW, a wild guess. However, the people working in the field do have some evidence in the form of living related species and their abilities. Therefore, they are not working on "assumption", but rather testing hypotheses. If this is your intent, then you aren't asking questions or speculating. Instead, you are making assertions: statements that are supposedly "fact" but without having done any of the work of proving/disproving the statements. That is discourteous, because as we try to point out the flaws with the assertions, you resist and stick to them as "fact". Also, I don't think you comprehend the fact of not knowing. As I have pointed out several times with your "unconscious intelligence" in this an other posts, you aren't saying "I don't know". You are insisting that this "unconscious intelligence" exists. So, before you try to look at the "discourteous" dust mote in others, you might want to look at the discourteous log in yourself. Start with these. A PubMed search will give you hundreds more looking at the link between genetics and behavior in invertebrates. Bottom line: change the gene and you completely change the behavior. Humans have more "choice" in their behavior: 1: Basualdo M, Rodriguez EM, Bedascarrasbure E, De Jong D. Selection and estimation of the heritability of sunflower (Helianthus annuus) pollen collection behavior in Apis mellifera colonies. Genet Mol Res. 2007 Jun 20;6(2):274-81. PMID: 17624860 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] 2: Zhang K, Guo JZ, Peng Y, Xi W, Guo A. Dopamine-mushroom body circuit regulates saliency-based decision-making in Drosophila. Science. 2007 Jun 29;316(5833):1901-4. PMID: 17600217 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] 3: Sandrelli F, Tauber E, Pegoraro M, Mazzotta G, Cisotto P, Landskron J, Stanewsky R, Piccin A, Rosato E, Zordan M, Costa R, Kyriacou CP. A molecular basis for natural selection at the timeless locus in Drosophila melanogaster. Science. 2007 Jun 29;316(5833):1898-900. PMID: 17600216 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] 4: Pankiw T. Brood pheromone regulates foraging activity of honey bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae). J Econ Entomol. 2004 Jun;97(3):748-51. PMID: 15279247 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] 5: Toth AL, Robinson GE. Evo-devo and the evolution of social behavior. Trends Genet. 2007 Jul;23(7):334-41. Epub 2007 May 16. Review. PMID: 17509723 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] 6: Shirangi TR, McKeown M. Sex in flies: what 'body--mind' dichotomy? Dev Biol. 2007 Jun 1;306(1):10-9. Epub 2007 Mar 23. Review. PMID: 17475234 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] 7: Ingram KK, Oefner P, Gordon DM. Task-specific expression of the foraging gene in harvester ants. Mol Ecol. 2005 Mar;14(3):813-8. Where did you get this definition? Please give us a citation to a scientific work that uses this definition. It appears that you made it up. What's worse, you then use it as premise for your further arguments. But before you can do that, you have to establish the premise as true. Everyone, the October Scientific American has an article discussing 2 theories of how consciousness is produced in the brain. Reading it might make the discussion better, since discussion would take place within a framework of data instead of assertions. From the article "We share many common views, including the important acknowledgment that there is not a single problem of consciousness. Rather, numerous phenomena must be explained—in particular, self-consciousness (the ability to examine one’s own desires and thoughts), the content of con-sciousness (what you are actually conscious of at any moment), and how brain processes relate to consciousness and to nonconsciousness." The data in the article contradicts this. Neither theory postulates "centers" of conciousness. "■ HIS THEORY: For each conscious experience, a unique set of neurons in particular brain regions fires in a specific manner." "HER THEORY: For each conscious experience, neurons across the brain synchronize into coordinated assemblies, then disband." Pioneer, your assertions simply don't stand the test of data. PLEASE read the article before you spend any more time promoting a theory that can't be defended.

The point IDers make is that, say, the flagellum, is a complex structure of many different proteins and thus many different genes. They don't see how this multitude of different genes for one structure could have come about thru a step-by-step process that is their strawman of natural selection. (They can, because natural selection is not their strawman of it.) However, here what we have is the importation of hundreds/thousands of genes at one fell swoop! So, you could have 30 of these bacterial genes, say, and just ONE of the host genes and suddenly you have the 31 genes you need for a flagellum. Now do you see why I say this is really bad for ID? Your pronoun "this" is vague. I can see 2 "assumptions" 1. That of the Human Genome Project that any bacterial DNA sequences were contamination from stray bacteria in the test tubes, reagents, etc. 2. An "assumption" by the authors of this paper that the bacterial sequences found in the Human Genome Project were part of the human genome. So which are you referring to? Which "library". The Drosophila or the Human? In the human library, you won't find any data because no one kept track of it and didn't publish it. You'd have had to be involved and look at the original data. Not necessarily. This is coming from a parasite. Humans may not have had similar parasites or those parasites may not have inserted their genome into the human genome. I'm not sure what the insertion mechanism is, but it looks to be contingent -- the bacteria/host have to have the correct enzymes to do the inserting. That isn't the claim. You haven't read the paper, have you? You really should before you impute claims to them. "Whole eukaryote genome sequencing projects routinely exclude bacterial sequences on the assumption that these represent contamination. For example, the publicly available assembly of D. ananassae does not include any of the Wolbachia sequences described here. Therefore, the argument that the lack of bacterial genes in these assembled genomes indicates that bacterial LGT does not occur is circular and invalid. Recent bacterial LGT to eukaryotic genomes will continue to be difficult to detect if bacterial sequences are routinely excluded from assemblies without experimental verification. And these LGT events will remain understudied despite their potential to provide novel gene functions and impact arthropod and nematode genome evolution. Because W. pipientis is among the most abundant intracellular bacteria (17, 18), and its hosts are among the most abundant animal phyla, the view that prokaryote to eukaryote transfers are uncommon and unimportant needs to be reevaluated." Finding these Wolbachia sequences in ALL wild captures makes it very unlikely that the time of infection was recent. Since the genes are not expressed, you don't have natural selection fixing the capture in the population. Instead, it must have occurred by genetic drift, and that takes a LOT of time in a large population like this. So, if it were unstable, then sometime during the time it took genetic drift to fix the captured genome, it would have been discarded. Not "normalized" but "compared": "Analysis of the transcript levels of inserted Wolbachia genes with qRT-PCR (11) revealed that they are 10-4fold to10-7 fold less abundant than the fly’s highly transcribed Actin gene (act5C; table S3)" And yes, RT-PCR does correct for differences in PCR efficiency, as I understand the procedure. They chose the actin gene because actin is expressed in nearly all cells and is expressed at a fairly high level. I have seen actin used as the comparison in RT-PCR in many animal and human studies.

DNA is not a person to be either a "slob" or not a slob. Stop trying to impose human personality on it. A problem is the very nature of natural selection. By it's very nature, natural selection can only addinformation, not subtract it. What's more, accident will "turn off" a gene and remove its start codon. Then all the following sequence is unexpressed. These are called "pseudogenes". Much DNA is also the results of insertions of repetitive sequences -- many inserted by viruses in the past. Fully 10% of the human genome is ALU repeats. "Junk" DNA simply means that it is not expressed as proteins. Much of "junk" DNA is actually control sequences to tell the genes to be turned on or turned off. That is, it is binding domains of transcription factors. Other parts of "junk" DNA is there to get efficient packaging of the DNA into the chromosome and binding with chromatins. Pioneer, the next time one of these ideas hits you, do us all a favor and start reading on the subject before you post. Instead of relying on us to teach you, please try a little self-learning first. Then, if you hit a problem or find concepts that you don't understand, then come to the board. There is a lot of literature on "junk" DNA and the function of non-coding sequences. It would not have taken you long to find some good .edu sites to start reading about it.

That's the fallacy: placing a judgement call and "value" on a genome. In evolution, there is no such thing as "improvement" or "more advanced". Instead, the terms "primitive" and "derived" are used to describe traits. This eliminates the value judgement about which species is "advanced". Actually, mammals had evolved at the beginning of the Triassic. Both dinos and mammals evolved at roughly the same time. So, for 130 million years mammals lived in the "shadow" of the dinos with dinos occupying the ecological niches of larger animals. No, what it means was that neither mammalian nor dino genes are more "evolved". You place a higher value on mammals because you are one. That's the mistake. A very poor "just-so" story. Think about it. There are snakes NOW, but that doesn't mean mammals have to be "dumb", does it? In that particular environment, dinos did better at being larger animals than mammals. Part of it was the mobility. The first dinos were on two legs and could move faster than the mammal-like reptiles of the time. The second is physiology. In a warmer climate, being partly warm-blooded takes less energy than being completely warm-blooded. Thus dinos had less metabolic cost than early mammals. Remember, EVERY trait comes with a cost as well as a benefit. In some environments the cost outweighs the benefit. In others, it is the other way around. No, it's not. Again, a basesless value judgement. EVERY other species on the planet has just as long an evolutionary history as humans. EACH of them is just as "evolved". If you were an elephant, you'd think a trunk was the "most evolved" feature. If a dolphin, it would be sonar. Just forget the "progressive" and "regressive" genes idea. Think instead of "advantageous" or "disadvantageous" traits and recognize that a trait is "advantageous" only in relation to the environment. Change the environment and what was "advantageous" becomes "disadvantageous". That is what all the studies on natural selection have shown.

You do realize that "artificial selection" and "natural selection" are simply Darwinian selection, don't you? Darwin looked at the type of selection human breeders were doing and simply said that such selection was occurring in "nature" -- thus "natural selection". There is a huge difference between understanding the genome and being able to genetically engineer to what you want. Humans are already genetically engineering animals. I have a strain in the lab called ROSA mouse. It has had the bacterial beta-galactosidase gene inserted into its genome (randomly by a viral vector) so that every cell in the body expresses beta-galactosidase. It allows those cells to be identified and tracked when placed into another non-ROSA mouse. There are also mice genetically engineered with green fluorescent protein. Many of these are tied to specific promoters -- such as troponin I in heart muscle -- that are expressed in specific tissues. Thus that tissue, and only that tissue, express the GFP. The problem with gene engineering humans is that we are presuming that certain traits are inarguably "good". This means that we are saying that we are smarter than natural selection. Remember, EVERY trait comes with a cost as well as a benefit. Natural selection constantly does a balancing act between cost and benefit. Humans would not do such an analysis or balancing. We are NOT smarter than natural selection. I think we should recognize our limitations and do technology instead. We can make visors that see in UV; we don't need to genetically engineer that.

1. Why isn't this in "Evolution". 2. The best answer I have found is an essay by Hiram Berry in the book Is God a Creationist? edited by Roland Frye. Basically, some people have tied untestable statements of ultimate meaning -- God exists and God created -- to very testable statements about HOW God created. When those testable statements -- creationism -- are falsified, then those people are faced with a crisis of faith. They can either reject their statements of ultimate meaning or reject evolution. They choose to reject evolution. 3. BTW, I am a "godwad" and an evolutionist. Like Darwin, Asa Gray, Dobzhansky, Wolcott, Ayala, Kenneth Miller, and at least 50% of evolutionary biologists. So I would appreciate that you did not engage in ad hominem. Oh, for crying out loud! Here you "believe" in evolution but don't know what it IS! Talk about blind faith! Oh, the irony. Look, do NOT get your view of evolution from movies for God's sake. You need to read some books on evolution by evolutionary biologists. In particular, start with Origin of Species (it's online in several places) and then do Ernst Mayr's What Evolution IS. Here is a definition of evolution for you: "Thus, evolution, in a broad sense is descent with modification, and often with diversification. Many kinds of systems are evolutionary ... In all such systems there are populations, or groups, of entities; there is variation in one or more characteristics among the members of the population; there is HEREDITARY SIMILARITY between parent and offspring entities; and over the course of generations there may be changes in the proportions of individuals with different characteristics within populations. This process consitutes descent with modification. Populations may become subdivided so that several populations are derived from a COMMON ANCESTRAL POPULATION. If different changes in the proportions of variant individuals transpire in te several populations,the populations DIVERGE, OR DIVERSIFY. ... All these properties of an evolutionary process pertain to populations of organisms, in which there is hereditary transmission of characteristics (based on genes, composed of DNA or, in a few cases, RNA), variation owing to mutation, and sorting of variation by several kinds of processes. Chief among these sorting processes are CHANCE (random variation in the survival or reproduction of different variants), and natural selection (consistent, nonrandom differences among variants in their rates of survival or reproduction). It is natural selection that causes adaptation -- improvement in function. Thus biological (or organic) evolution is change in the properties of populations of organisms , or groups of such populations, over the course of generations. ... Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportions of different forms of a gene within a population, such as the alleles that determine the different human blood types, to the alterations that led from the earliest organisms to dinosaurs, bees, snapdragons, and humans." Douglas Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, (1999) pg 4. NO! You are talking about natural selection. The environment selects those variations (changes) that work well in that particular environment. Guys, seriously, how can you be so absymally ignorant about evolution and natural selection? NO! Antibiotics kill ANY bacteria -- harmful or otherwise. So yes, antibiotics represent a change in environment for the bacteria. Only those bacteria lucky enough to have a variation that makes them resistant to the antibiotic will survive. Being resistant to the antibiotic -- so it doesn't kill you -- is a selective advantage, not "gain selective advantage". Since only the resistant individuals survive, that means the next generation will be descended from those bacteria -- and will inherit the resistance. Thus, resistant bacteria are selected by the environment (antibiotics). If you go to the PBS website for their series on evolution, you will find that this is being done with HIV treatment. The key is whether the resistant individuals can reproduce as fast as the non-resistant ones. Since resistance requires more proteins (the ones that confer resistance), the answer is usually (but not always) "no". In HIV treatment the anti-virals are used to knock down the non-resistant HIV and lower the HIV count. Then the anti-virals are discontinued and competition between the resistant and few remaining non-resistant HIV happens, which reduces the non-resistant ones and, again, lowers the total HIV count. Then, when the count goes up and consists of the resistant individuals, then the anti-virals are started again. Since they are in the digestive tract, they are isolated from the immune system! The immune system only "sees" bacteria that are inside the tissues. This is why the most common post-op infection is strep aureus. S. aureus is a common bacteria on the skin, but it doesn't invade the skin to get inside the tissues. However, when S. aureus is accidentally introduced to an open wound during surgery, then it's off to the races and causes a severe infection.

Abortion is "new" to humans, but infanticide is not. Many/most cultures have had a tradition of exposing or outright killing deformed infants. Instead of doing abortion, they just waited until the baby was born. Not in every species. Even in species that have male domination, the females sneak off to have sex with the beta males. This is well-documented in chimps, for instance. That's not it. Abortion is a last ditch method of birth control. Every species has a geometric increase in population but an arithmetic increase in resources. Thus, population always outstrips resources. This is the basis of the "struggle for existence" so necessary to natural selection. Humans can, however, consciously control their population, thus keeping it from outstripping resources. This is necessary for technological civilization. If population outstrips resources, you can't maintain civilization. Now, since humans are already at a fitness peak and are well-adapted to their environment, further competition isn't going to result in "improvement", but simply restrict the gene pool. It's called "purifiying selection". Very recently. There are mutations that make individuals immune to HIV, for instance. There are others that increase bone mass (preventing osteoporosis later in life) and some lowering cholesterol and thus preventing cardiac diseases. Mutations for living at high altitude have been documented in 2 populations: Andean and Himalayan highlanders. Different adaptations in both. Since the Andean highlanders have been there less than 10,000 years, those mutations must have come about within that time frame. 2. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/information/apolipoprotein.html New apo-lipoprotein mutation that adds antioxidant activity. 4. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/346/20/1513 Mutation giving extra dense bones 6. Pardis C. Sabeti, David E. Reich et. al. Detecting recent positive selection in the human genome from haplotype structure. Nature 419 24 OCTOBER 2002.

It should be because 1) in both cases the radiation will be in the infrared, 2) eventually both processes will end up with energy that cannot do any further work (maximum entropy). Not necessarily. Remember, we are talking about photons that have been absorbed by the chemicals of the rock, pushing the electrons to a higher energy state. When the electrons fall back, they re-emit photons in the infrared. All you need do is feel that rocks sitting in the sun are warm. Now, if you are talking "reflected", that simply means the photons bounce off the material. Wavelength is unchanged. The chlorophyll of plants is such that it is very good at absorbing at particular wavelengths BUT some photons are reflected -- the ones in the green of the spectrum. Which is why, of course, plants are green. That's the fallacy. Plants capture photons in the red frequencies and converts them to SUGAR, not heat. A rock either reflects them or absorbs them and re-emits them as heat. Thus the rock goes to increasing entropy more quickly. Actually, remember that science was able to DISprove the aether. Look up Michelson-Morely experiments. And I would think that this theory of matter as "eddies" in the flow of spacetime could be detected by looking in the past. After all, spacetime is flowing faster now than in the past, so by your theory there should be more matter now than in the past. Yet as I recall, the amount of matter seen by Hubble in the past is the same as we see now. Gibb's free energy measures whether a reaction is spontaneous. And yes, you can get a spontaneous reaction that lowers entropy if the enthalpy has a larger negative value than the positive value of the decreasing entropy. The formula is: deltaG = deltaH -TxdeltaS, where deltaH is the change in heat given off (-) or heat required (+) for the reaction, T is temperature in degrees Kelvin, and deltaS is the change in entropy. Increasing entropy is positive and decreasing entropy is negative. You can see that if entropy decreases the -deltaS times -T yields a positive number and would tend to indicate that the reaction is not spontaneous. However, if deltaH is negative (gives off heat), it can compensate for a positive TxdeltaS to yield a negative deltaG and the reaction will still be spontaneous. One example of this is the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen to form water. The hydrogen and oxygen gases have greater entropy than water, but the heat given off by the reaction overcomes the decrease in entropy and the reaction is spontaneous (as the passengers aboard the Hindenburg witnessed). Interestingly, helical DNA has less entropy than single strand DNA. Double strand, helical DNA is much more organized than single strand, random DNA. Yet DNA does NOT spontaneously unwind. It must be heated (energy added) to unwind and go to a state of greater entropy. In the case of DNA, the hydrogen bonds between the nucleotide pairs of the 2 DNA strands have enough negative deltaH to overwhelm the positive TxdeltaS. The free energy equation operates only in a closed system, where no outside energy is available. If outside energy is available, then it can be applied to overcome a positive deltaH or decrease in entropy. This would drive the reaction to occur even if it is not spontaneous. Since evolution applies to populations of organisms and Gibb's Free Energy applies to chemical reactions, it would be a mistake to say that evolution lowers GFE.

Genetic algorithms are natural or Darwinian selection. And yes, the implications for every field of science are enormous. The reason is that natural selection is much smarter than we are. Therefore people are using it for design problems that are too tough for us. Some examples where this is routinely being used -- and where it impacts your life: 1. MJ Plunkett and JA Ellman, Combinatorial chemistry and new drugs. Scientific American, 276: 68-73, April 1997. Summary of article: "By harnessing the creative power of Darwinian selection inside a test tube, chemists can now discover compounds they would not have known how to make. The key is combinatorial chemistry, a process that allows them to produce and screen millions of candidate molecules quickly and systematically." 2. GF Joyce, Directed molecular evolution. Scientific American 267: 90-97,July 1994. 4. G Taubes, Evolving a conscious machine. Discover 19: 72-79. June1998. Uses a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip that can reprogram its architecture. Adrian Thompson of Univ. of Suxxex used Darwinianselection to have chip write its own architecture to solve problems. First problem was to distiguish between 1 kiloHz and 10 kHz sound. Allocated only 100 logic elements out of 4,096. Chip did the job withonly 32. Thompson can't figure out how. A chip designed by a human would require 10 to 100 times as many logic elements -- or at least access to aclock -- to perform the same task. "There are properties that humans have great trouble designing into a system, like being very efficient, using small amounts of power, or being fault tolerant. Evolution can cope withthem all."-- Thompson. 6. CW Petit, Touched by nature: putting evolution to work on the assembly line. US News and World Report, 125: 43-45, July 27, 1998. Use "genetic algorithms" (cumulative selection) to get design in industry. Boeing engineers had cumulative selection design a wing forthem for a jet to carry 600 passengers but have a wing the same size as a 747. 9. FS Santiago, HC Lowe, MM Kavurma, CN Chesterman, A Baker, DG Atkins,LM Khachigian, New DNA enzyme targeting Egr-1 mRNA inhibits vascular smooth muscle proliferation and regrowth after injury. Nature Medicine 5:1264-1269, 1999. Used Darwinian selection to design a DNA enzyme (not found in nature) that degrades mRNA for use in treating hyperplasia after balloon arthroplasty. Humans have no idea what the nucleotide sequence of the DNA enzyme because they didn't make it --Darwinian selection did. 10. Breaker RR, Joyce GF.A DNA enzyme that cleaves RNA. Chem Biol 1994 Dec;1(4):223-9 14. Jr Koza, MA Keane, MJ Streeter, Evolving inventions. Scientific American, 52-59, Feb 2003 check out http://www.genetic-programming.com Well, DUH! Since genetic algorithms are natural selection, yes we are a product of natural selection! "Survival" is the same reinforcer in GA. In this case, the human sets the environment and only those variations which "survive" in that environment reproduce. So don't discount survival. No, you only reinforce survival -- survival in the environment you set up.

Where did this blanket statement come from? How do you "conceal data/information" if in science? After all, where does the data come from? The physical universe! And anyone and everyone can look at the physical universe! How can you possibly hide the physical universe? Where do you think scientists have concealed data? I stated that in my post: "whenever a person comes along and tries to make evolution = abiogenesis, they are not really talking about evolution. Instead, they are arguing atheism vs theism and using god-of-the-gaps theology. " This is too simplistic. Strictly speaking, neither induction nor deduction can "prove". However, deduction can disprove. Absolutely. Therefore, the negative statements in science are "proved". The earth is NOT flat. Each individual species was NOT created separately. What happens is that the data "for" is sufficient that we provisionally accept it as true unless and until Biogenesis and evolution do exclude creationism. Precisely because creationism IS a "mechanism" of creation. A literal read of the two creation stories in Genesis do provide mechanisms: in Genesis 1 God "speaks" things into existence and in Genesis 2 God "forms from dust". So, yes, creationism is a falsified scientific theory. Creation by deity is NOT excluded, because creation is a theological statement -- "Deity created" -- that does not specify a mechanism. Christianity accepted evoluton and abiogenesis as the mechanism that God used to create. Fundamentalism has not. Actually, according the Hawking, such would be the case. In looking at radiation from black holes, Hawking said that radiation is emitted in all possible forms. Your right sneaker is one possible form. Of course, abiogenesis and evolution are NOT about "chance". That is a strawman put out by creationists. Chemistry is determined by the nature of the atoms involved. The selection part of natural selection is the opposite of chance -- it is determinism.

Not "better". There is a maximum to entropy and you simply can't do "better" than maximum entropy. As it happens, light hitting a rock is re-radiated at more entropy than life hitting a leaf. Why? Because part of the light hitting the leaf is converted to sugar -- lower entropy. Now, later the sugar will be "burned" by the plant or an animal. At that point the heat radiated will be equal to that the rock did initially. With you but disagree. This doesn't make life a "very effective way of increasing entropy" but rather a very INeffective way of increasing entropy. Life has to go thru extra steps to get the same increase of entropy. And what in the world does "eddies in spacetime" have to do with this subject? What are "eddies in spacetime" anyway? In Einsteinian gravity, those would be stars and planets and other matter. Well, this is what I have agreed to.

It's more than breeding. As I pointed out, the cute dog in Little Rascals was a pit bull. Pit bulls are not necessarily agressive. They are taught to be that way by humans. So "the answer" is also to make such training illegal and then fighting illegal. Which we have. However, note that we do NOT consider it immoral to breed and train guard dogs! That is, to train them to act violently in particular situations -- usually violently to specific classes of humans (such as thieves or muggers).

What's the difference between "conditioned" and "learning"? Mice are routinely used in studies on learning, which means they "figure it out". In each case, how do you know? Humans you can determine by language. Some chimps have been taught sign-language and we have language in common. We don't with dolphins. What behavior specifically tells you that the animal is "self-aware". Couldn't you correlate that behavior with PET scans of the brain and thus correlate the behavior to specific physical functioning of the brain? Then wouldn't you be able to use the functioning of the brain to tell you if the animal was self-aware? What behavior do you? You stated above that you "knew" of 3 animal species that were self-aware. Then you stated that you could can know that a species in self-aware by looking at behavior. Therefore, you must have some behavior in mind that you "know" is unique to self-aware beings. On a biochemical level, how does a venus flytrap react? How about a mouse? Let me propose a criteria for you: change the stimulus and see if the entity can learn a new behavior. For example, a venus flytrap closes on an insect. It does so for food, but doing so involves energy expenditure. So, construct a "fly" from metal and see if the venus flytrap always closes. If it does, then it is just reaction to stimulus without being able to discriminate. OTOH, if you take a mouse it will learn in new situations. For instance, it can learn that pushing one lever gives food while pushing the lever next to it gives food and an electric shock. It can discriminate between stimuli (food) and decide which stimulus it will react to. You end up with a lot of dead babies that way! When babies are taught to swim, an adult is there to initially support them until they figure it out. Otherwise, the baby won't figure it out until after it has sunk to the bottom of the pool and drowned! Not since you were a baby. Human babies need a lot of parenting. But from the age of 7 or 8, the child would figure out quite a bit. Including some things that Einstein didn't know how to do: such as knap flint or make rope. Remember, our skill set is necessarily what our ancestors knew. As technology changes skills are lost. When the first stone tools were discovered, it took anthropologists a couple of decades to recover stone working skills. No, we aren't. It appears that we have 2 adaptations: 1. The ability to make tools to make tools. 2. The ability to manipulate abstract ideas and to make fine sounds. Both are small adaptations (the last involves a small change in just one gene) but have huge technological implications. See above. Many species seem to have "the capacity to know". That isn't enough for technology. For instance, you think dolphins are self-aware and perhaps intelligent. However, can they produce our technology? Nope. Why not? No hands. You gave a short list, but are those ALL of our emotions? How about compassion? Love? Sex drive is necessary for us to survive, but love? Do we have to "love" in order to mate? And what about altruism? The type of altruism that drives us to sacrifice for the benefit of people who are not related to us? How does that set of feelings help us survive?

This makes the behavior of the professional creationists even more immoral. I can understand that fakeman123 would be unaware of some of the data, but professional creationists go thru ALL the scientific literature for 2 reasons: 1. Looking for quote mining. 2. Finding evidence supporting evolution that they then have to try to explain away. So the professional creationists don't have the excuse of "not knowing" what the data is. A major irony here is that the professional creationists are telling people like Fakeman123 that they are Christians and believe in God and the Bible. Yet here they are consistently and repeatedly violating the 9th Commandment. Guys, it looks like we have a drive-by posting from Fakeman.

You stated as a criteria: "The ability to comprehend that we, in our current form, must have come from some series of previous forms. And conclude that our form will continue to branch off into other forms, forms that either become extinct, or continue. Depending on environmental variables." That is Darwin, not Gautama. Please try to remember what you post. Then the ants and bees are not "conscious" because they don't have artistic creativity. You have confused what we consider "intelligent engineering techniques and structures" and intelligence itself. As you pointed out with hominid stone tools, your criteria is that the individual be aware of the usefulness of the tools. Invertebrates are not aware. Everything they do is hardwired by the genes and does not require conscious thought. That won't work because 1) adaptation by natural selection happens to POPULATIONS but "consciousness" is a characteristic of an individual and 2) adaptation occurs thru an unconscious, unintelligent process -- natural selection. Populations have nothing to say about whether and how they adapt. You noted 1) yourself when you are postulating that human infants and elderly (individuals, not the species) have lower "consciousness" or no "consciousness": "A toddler will walk straight across a busy road to pick-up a ball without thinking about the consequences. This to me is undeveloped consciousness of a situation. When I talk to an adult whose head is in the clouds. Or, someone who is high on marijuana, I get the feeling of having an obviously higher consciousness then they do, at that moment in time. And, when I have too much beer to drink, I can gauge my regular consciousness dropping away. I'd guess as we reach a certain old age, our consciousness will begin to diminish again." Yes, but to what level? Do they see a world that has finite resources for example? You have 2 separate definitions here: 1. Consciousness = self-awareness. (first sentence) 2. Consciousness is capability of acting against what its emotions promote. Which is it? And then, of course, you have injected "intelligence" into "consciousness" by saying intelligence is necessary (but not sufficient) for consciousness. Everyone might find this site useful as a starting point for the discussion: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ At least it will give you the work put into the subject by others and you can avoid trying to reinvent the wheel. To say this AGAIN, this cannot be known precisely because 1) we don't have an adequate definition of "consciousness" and 2) it doesn't leave a fossil record. And please don't use the word "assume"; it's not an accurate description. This isn't an "assumption". What you want is "hypothesize" or "speculate". Cognition and problem solving have evolved in several lineages and are present in a number of species. Is that "consciousness"? 1. N Williams, Evolutionary psychologists look for roots of cognition. Science 275 (3 Jan): 29-30, 1997. 2. R Plomin and JC DeFries, The genetics of cognitive abilities and disabilities. Scientific American, 278: 62-69, May 1998. Several living species of primates have impressive cognitive and problem solving skills. Were they present in the common ancestor or did each lineage evolve the skills separately? Dichotomy, there are some questions we simply don't have the data to answer. If you are going to be in science, then you have to learn to live with unanswered questions and wait in a state of suspended judgement until you do have enough data. That state of suspended judgement -- "I don't know" -- can last years, decades, or sometimes centuries.

It's not that it is not considered. Indeed, several early evolutionists such as Asa Gray, DID consider it. It's just that consciousness is 1) not needed and 2) is actually refuted. I'll go into this in more detail below. Do you really mean this? Or are you going to continue to postulate ad hoc hypotheses to avoid falsification of CUF. Below is an example of one of your ad hoc hypotheses: By the statements you are making, we shouldn't find all the dead ends in extinct species! Instead, we should find a very few chronospecies as the species used the CUF to change with changing environments. For instance, in the elephant lineage, why should the mammoths have gone extinct? With the changing climate, a consequence of the CUF would have been to reduce the amount of hair and other adaptations to a cold environment and adjust them to live in the warmer climate. Multiply that over the enormous number of species that have gone extinct by backing themselves into an ecological corner. Why did the CUF permit that? Remember, you are positing that the CUF is "intelligent" enough to look ahead and think how good it would be for the Venus flytrap to be able to trap insects. Then why isn't the CUF "intelligent" enough to look ahead and see that shorter fur is going to be advantageous for mammoths and adapt the species accordingly? You can't have it both ways. You can't simultaneously give the CUF the ability to see into the future and "drive" a population toward ultimately beneficial adaptations but then say that the CUF did not do so for 99.99% of the species on the planet. (BTW, the estimate is made mainly by looking at the fossil record for invertebrates -- which is much fuller than for vertebrates -- and comparing the number of species that existed vs the number that are here. But it also works well for larger vertebrates. For instance, there is ONE living elephant species in the genus of the Indian elephant. However, over the last 4 million years there have been TEN. Thus, 90% of the species in the genus Elephas have become extinct. Instead, by CUF theory, Elephas ekorensis should still be around or, at most there should be 1 or 2 intermediate species between E. ekorensis and modern Indian elephants. Not all those extinct side branches.) You keep saying that CUF improves probability and the CUF is a driving force for adaptation. But a 0.01% probability of a species continuing is very low. This is "improvement"? How did you come to this conclusion? Nice assertions, but no data to back them up. Please provide some data and/or arguments. The chances of life from non-life are very high. So high that you can "create" life in your kitchen or backyard with simple chemicals! Call Sigma Chemical Co. at 800-325-3010 and order 1 bottle of catalog number M 7145 and one bottle of R 7131 amino acids solutions (you need both to get all the amino acids http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/sigma/formulation/M5550for.pdf ). They will cost you about $40 plus shipping for both. Empty the bottles into a fying pan, turn the heat on low and heat until all the water is evaporated. Then heat for 15 more minutes. Add water. You will have protocells in the solution. They are alive. If this is too "artificial" for you, then put the solution out on a hot rock for the afternoon and let it evaporate. Then add water (rain). So, once you get life, then diversity comes from that thru the processes Darwin and others have outlined -- particularly allopatric and sympatric speciation. Cumulative (natural or Darwinian) selection actually reduces odds. Let's try a simple example: Let me give you an example of the power of cumulative selection to cut down odds. You have a 1 in 1024 chance of correctly winning 10 coin tosses in a row. But I can guarantee you I can find someone who can do so. How? Simple, use cumulative selection in the form of a single elimination tournament. I start with 1024 people and pair them up. Then each pair tosses a coin. The 512 winners are selected to go to the next round. Again they are paired and do a coin toss; the 256 winners are selected to go to the next round. Repeat this 7 more times. Now you have 2 people who have won 9 coin tosses in a row. The winner of this round has won 10 coin tosses in a row. And it is a certainty that such a person will be found with this method. We have taken odds of 1 in 1024 and converted that into virtual certainty. Now, I don't know which individual will win the tosses, but it is certain that one of them will, given the algorithm of the competition. Evolution by natural selection is a competition algorithm, more complex but analogous to the single elimination tournament algorithm. We don't have enough knowledge of the total environment to know which individual will have the necessary design elements to compete better, nor in competition between species do we have enough knowledge in most cases to predict which species has the better design. But it is certain that such a competitive edge does exist, and it will be selected for. No it doesn't. The physical processes are sufficient -- as material causes -- of getting everything we see in the universe. There is no other material "cause" needed. On the one hand you ascribe some form of "intelligence" to the CUF -- such as to get the Venus flytrap. But when you look at all the bad designs in nature, then you have to wonder at the CUF. Let's look at the Panda and it's "thumb". You might say that the CUF drove the panda to evolve an elongated wristbone to enable it to grasp bamboo. But you are overlooking that the panda ALREADY has a thumb. It is fused to the other fingers. So why didn't the CUF take the simpler path and simply unfuse the thumb? Or take the beaks of birds. Yes, it was "smart" of the CUF to evolve ancestors of birds not to have teeth because that reduced weight and let them fly better. BUT, when you look at embryonic development in birds, you see that the teeth do form, but are then resorbed. Wouldn't the CUF simply drive evolution so that the teeth never formed and saved the energy involved? Or look at humans. Humans have a repair mechanism in bones to keep microfractures from accumulating and destroying the bones. When humans started being bipedal, they also needed a repair mechanism for the intervertebral discs because the increased weight on them (as opposed to quadrupeds) cause them to microfracture and eventually disintegrate. Virtually every human gets a herniated disc sometime in their life. Was the CUF taking a nap and didn't put in that adaptation? Again, you can't have it both ways. You can't invoke a CUF as necessary for the "intelligence" of designs in organisms but then say that the CUF is NOT "intelligent"! If you say that the CUF is not intelligent, then you don't need it at all! After all, natural selection is already an unintelligent process that gives design. So natural selection can already give you the "good" designs and the "stupid" ones as well as account for extinctions: unlike the CUF, natural selection can't look ahead to see what would be useful in the far future, but only what is useful in the NOW. As I said, please read Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. You are not the first to insist that natural selection has to have "help" and propose some type of guiding agent for evolution. The reason we don't have one now is partly because of the information provided here, but there is considerable additional information that refutes the notion. Dennett (with a lot more space) provides a lot more of the evidence. Do you REALLY think so? Do you think that we need to periodically challenge the concept that the earth is round? Or that the planets orbit the sun? I submit such challenges are merely a waste of time and represent ignorance on the part of the challenger. The challenge you are posing falls into that category.

Don't tell that to anyone working in transcription control, intracellular signalling, or evolution. You really think the panda's thumb is a "simplest solution"? Parsimony was never meant by Ockham to be a method of theory evaluation. Sorry, but that is not true. The emotion of cats is not to be on their backs, especially if held. They are too vulnerable. Yet I have seen several cats who will willingly be held in that position and actually enjoy it. Look at any animal act where animals are taught to act against their emotion of fear of fire. This looks like the True Scotsman fallacy. Strawman. There is a difference between "never" go against emotion and "can readily disobey their emotions". Just because an animal can doesn't mean it is "readily". Humans can go against their emotion of fear of death, but it takes a struggle to do so. Wasn't Helen Keller born without many of her senses? Yet she was self aware. None of this is to say that animals are "self-aware" or "conscious" as are humans. It is simply looking at some specific arguments you are using.