Arete

Thinking hard about being able to fly won't cause mutations in your genes towards that phenotype any more than thinking really hard about having long hair will make your hair grow faster, or thinking really hard about how I wish I could telepathically make coffee with my mind so it's ready when I get out of bed is going to actually give me that ability - something I'd probably appreciate more than flying. Technological solutions for personal flight already exist: For a measly $100,000 you can have all the advantages of functional wings whilst still being able to fit inside of a building and walking upright, albiet only over water, with a vertical range of 30 feet and a horizontal range of 80 miles. http://jetlev.com Or this thing - It'll set you back $1.25 million but allows a range of 184 miles over any surface. http://www.gizmag.com/the-springtail-exoskeleton-flying-vehicle-ideal-for-the-quick-getaway/11593/

How does "finding the last corner left for God" differ from the "God of the Gaps" logical fallacy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps Why does freedom derive from belief? I would have thought freedom derives from a lack of restrictions - independent of belief of lack thereof.

The simple answer is that there are no free lunches in evolution - phenotypic specialization comes at the expense of general function To illustrate this point, the largest extant flying animal is the Kori bustard which stands ~150cm tall, has a wingspan of ~2.75m, but only weighs in at ~16kg. So, to get a human sized organism off the ground, you'll need impractically large wings, or to lose a considerable amount of weight, thus compromising the strength and functionality of the musculoskeletal strucutre of the body. Next, you'll need a heart and lungs capable of the metabolic output required for flight. So a lot of your other internal organs will need to shrink to accommodate your bigger heart and lungs. Finally, if you "look at genomes" you'll probably find that a lot of the phenotypic differences between birds and mammals are associated with regulatory and expression differences during development.

Also, you have an example from one country (i.e. China) which is a substantial outlier in regards to its recent political stance on religion. What leads you to extrapolate results from an outlier to both East Asia and the entire world?

No worries - clinal variation, at least in evolutionary sense, is cases where you get a gradient of genotypes or phenotypes between one state and another - for example: if you sampled a person in Calabria in Italy, you might find they have a "100% southern Italian" genotype; and you sampled a person in Finland you might find they have a "100% Scandinavian genotype" and subsequently infer that the Scandinavians and Italians are separate genetic races. But then you sample a person every 5km between the two and find a gradient of every combination between your two distinct genotypes. So rather than two distinct entities, what you actually observe is two ends of a clinally distributed gradient. An example seen in other organisms are ring species: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species where individuals sampled at the extreme ends of the distribution appear to be separate entities, but when you sample the entire distribution you find a gradient of intermediate phenotypes from one to the other. Here's an example in salamaders: http://rosarubicondior.blogspot.com/2012/01/ring-species-evolution-in-progress.html Of course, you'll find exceptions of either geographically or culturally isolated human populations - like the Amish which have a distinct genetic background compared to adjacent populations, but studies have shown that as you move broadly across human distributions, differences are clinal in nature and a lot of admixture happens - such that comparing distributional extremes is non-representative of the true genetic makeup of the species as a whole.

Quite the contrary. It's a "scientific fact" that the concept of "race" has no biological basis, and the genetic differentiation between "races" is clinal: http://www.sciencedi...002929709001578 Races are a cultural, rather than biological construct - therefore any phenotypic correlations with discrete races are likely to be also clinal or coincidental. An alternative explanation is that environment has a large role to play in intelligence and that allopatric human populations are subjected to different environments: environment plays a larger role in the development of intellect than heritable components: "The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero" http://pss.sagepub.c.../14/6/623.short "IQ, is perhaps 48%; narrow-sense heritability, the relevant quantity for evolutionary arguments because it measures the additive effects of genes, is about 34%." http://www.nature.co...l/388468a0.html "large environmentally induced IQ gains between generations suggest an important role for environment in shaping IQ" http://psycnet.apa.o.../rev/108/2/346/ etc.

Your political subdivision of the religious as being "far right" and evolution being a "far left" concept at least appears uninformed: a) The Pope accepts evolution http://www.nbcnews.com/id/19956961/#.URFLrWfpp8s b) applied biology you use every day is fundamentally reliant on evolution, e.g. the flu vaccine: http://bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/02/03/why-our-flu-vaccines-can-keep/SAZCYJcc3tiaKifJcJrSgI/story.html c) there are plenty of left wing Christians: http://www.thechristianleft.org/ d) and conservatives who accept evolution e.g. Jon McCainhttp://conservapedia.com/John_McCain#Evolution Despite unrepresentative coverage, it's only a small proportion of religious people who do not accept evolutionary theory. Given evolution as defined by the accumulation of mutations resulting in reciprocal reproductive isolation of populations has been directly observed and documented - I'd be interested to hear what counts as factual - http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v230/n5292/abs/230289a0.html http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11048719

I merged the two duplicate threads. The assumption is false, and thus the entire following argument starts from a false premise. A single nucleotide would be insufficient for any DNA based life form (for a start you need three nucleotides to code for one amino acid) and life is not necessary for the existence of a chain of nucleic acids to exist. See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis Just reiterating charonY here - the gain and loss of genetic elements in a genome does not occur in a nucleotide by nucleotide stepwise manner. Entire genomic regions can be lost, gained, moved around, turned on, turned off, etc. Assuming that nucleotides are gained one by one in an orderly manner is a false assumption which shows an exceptional lack of understanding of very basic genetics. No. As explained above, it is simply not how genetics works. As an example a person who acquires an unbalanced Robertsonian fusion event (a trisomy) will gain an entire chromosome and thus millions of nucleotides in comparison to their parents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisomy Aside from environmentally induced, epigenetic changes, an organism generally doesn't acquire mutations or addtional genetic information during its lifetime. Most gross recombination happens as a result of replication/reproduction. Another fundamentally false assumption. Changes in the human phenotype are observed over a period of less than 100 years. http://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2009/10/26/evolution_continues_framingham_heart_study_says/ As explained above - No, it doesn't. The premise is fundamentally flawed. Many experiments regarding the gain and loss of genetic material exist: here's a few: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534703000338 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/256/1346/119.short http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7082/abs/nature04562.html http://www.genetics.org/content/160/4/1651.short You're not going to find an article supporting the author's assertions about evolutionary theory, as the deviate fundamentally from any accepted model of it - effectively forming a strawman argument and then "proving" that there's no evidence to support this mythical argument. It's the same as me saying that I can't find any observations of pink unicorns therefore the Christian god is non-existent. Christians never claimed that unicorns exist, nor is it in any way relevant to whether or not God exists, so such an argument would be irrelevant - much like this one. It is. see the above cited article on the Framingham heart study for an example of it being observed, in humans, in the last 100 years. This is a fundamental misuse of the term mutation - again displaying the author's lack of understanding of very basic genetics. Mutations are simply changes to genetic material over time. They include point mutations (e.g. a change from an A to a C at a given nucleotide) in addition to insertions, deletions, duplications, gene expression changes, gene duplications, etc. No, as explained above the whole argument is based on false assumptions. See answers above. It is. See citation above. It didn't, see citations above.

Not all chromosomal rearrangements lead to the disruption of meiosis - and in many cases where a metacentric fusion does lead to meiotic disruption, reproductive potential of the offspring is reduced but not eliminated. For example, Robersonian fusions result in different nummbers of chromosomes, but not necessarily reproductive isolation. Approximately 1 in 1000 humans have a Robertsonian fusion (thus only 45 chromosomes) most without any detrimental effects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertsonian_translocation As such, the particular karyotypic rearrangement needs to be determined before you can infer an isolating barrier, and many closely related organsims with different numbers of chromosomes can sucessfully interbreed to produce viable offspring - Mus musculus being a textbook example, with over 40 described chromosomal types across the species, ranging from 22 to 40 pairs of chromosomes. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2410154

Err citation please... First: most cancers do not cause mortaility in humans until after their reproductive potential has been met (e.g. average first-time mother age in the US is 25 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db21.pdf). As a result, evolutionary pressures will not select for "immunity". Only cancers which cause significant mortality BEFORE reproductive potential has been met have the possibility to be exposed to selection pressure. Second, tumor supression (the most commonly cited form of cancer "immunity") comes with several, significant trade offs, such as early aging, lower fecundity and reduced tissue repair capacity: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534705002284 as such, cancers with a low rate of pre-reproductive mortality in a population will not be selected against heavily enough to cause allele frequency changes, if their negative consequences are an equal or greater limit to fecundity as that mortaility rate. Third, a cursory literature search doesn't support your claim.

At least according to long term results from the Framingham heart study: Humans are evolving to be shorter Humans are evolving to be stouter Humans are evolving to have lower systolic blood pressure Humans are evolving to have lower HDL cholestorol Humans are evolving to have their first child younger Humans are evolving to start menopause later. http://www.pnas.org/...pl.1/1787.short

Actually, this is incorrect. The logical fallacy of appeal to authority is as such: Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S. Person A makes claim C about subject S. Therefore, C is true. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html The above article explicity goes into detail in relation to how citing a degree as evidence of the validity of an argument is an appeal to authority fallacy. The statement you made below: is a textbook example. You're claiming that the fact that Williams and Cassanova are assumedly MD's, and that John Cuthber is assumedly, not - means we should give less weight to John criticisms. The supposed degrees of the argument's sources have no bearing on the validity of the arguments posed within - which logically need to be addressed on their merits and not on the supposed authority of their sources. It's an unequivocal appeal to authority fallacy. John's argument was as follows (to paraphrase): " A testable prediction of the hypothesis presented is that there would have been a significant increase in birth defects/prenatal mortality at the time ultrasound became widely implemented. Is that predicition supported?" Levelling an appeal to authority at that argument does not do anything to address the valid question posed within and therefore doesn't add to or facilitate further discussion. To logically address the criticism, you'd need to provide the data to test the prediction. Additionally, John's proposal that the article is motivated to scare readers is substantiated in the article itself: Finally, I would personally criticise the use of that image in the first place. A damaged water pump does nothing to substantiate ultrasound causing significant cavitation which in turn damages cellular structures. It proves that hydraulic cavitation shock at macro scales wears out propellors over time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavitation If that's the best evidence available, you have a fairly wild speculation at best. Significant experimental validation, and the correlative data John requested is needed to substantiate it. I would add an addtional motivation - generating hype for an upcoming publication, and potentially as an avenue to express some of the controversial interpretations of their data which didn't make it through peer review in the article:

It would probably aid discussion if you don't use logically fallacious devices like argument from authority.

It really is strange - My research at the moment is directly in neglected tropical diseases. We get funding from the National Institutes of Heatlh and USAID to work on disease control, treatment and delivey of treatments to poor communities. I've never had the fact that this is a good use of money questioned before - the implicit assumption being that basic health treatment is a fundamental human right everyone should have access to. It's sort of mind boggling that it's seemingly fine to spend tax dollars developing the best way to get trypanosomiasis treatments to rural communities in the DRC, but "socialist" to suggest that universal health care for Americans should also be funded. On topic - how about having a "bill of responsibilities" to go alongside the bill of rights?

HTCondor might be a good platform, however whatever program you run needs to be MPI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condor_high-throughput_computing_system Are all the computers configured the same (i.e. processors, RAM, etc) or a hotch potch? I imagine that constantly trying to find the latest compatibility issue or hardware failure in a cluster of 30, 10+ year old orphan machines wold be a continuous nightmare, especially if you're spinning them hard with big MPI jobs.

Ultimately the OP didn't want to do basic PCR and vector cloning, but actually wanted to produce mutant plants and vertebrates, so we're comparing apples and oranges, and actually, what I specifically said was: "setting up Sanger sequencing will set you back a decent six figure sum". You outsource your Sanger sequencing to a core facility. I can see that as a major self sufficency hurdle for a hobbyist. We just had the capillaries replaced in our aging 3730xL and it cost around $7k, so both the purchase and the upkeep will be expensive. Even if you buy an old ABI 377 slab gel sequencer, you'll have the issue of trying to safely use large amounts of acrylamide at home. I'm glad you managed to get a home setup running as cheaply as you could - you could go even cheaper: instead of using a thermocycler you could go competely old school and set up three water baths, transferring your pcr reactions to each in sequence One issue I can see is that some of your equipment would fall outside of our facilities' health and safety parameters (e.g. home made laminar flow hood), and some would fall outside of the standard operating procedures required to publish results by our funding body (e.g. cloning vectors stored above -80C). Our lab recently bought an Ion Torrent next gen platform which - for a sequencer capable of high throughput genomic sequencing was pretty cheap ~ $80,000USD. That's not that far out of reach for a hobbyist I imagine. Again, the service protocol would be prohibitively expensive, however and you need to have a pretty high throughput of samples to keep the machine in service. http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11929

No. just like the fact that 3' and 5' don't indicate "short" and "long" DNA ends, and it doesn't indicate that the deoxyribose rings have 3 or 5 segments, the 3' and 5' labels do not indicate that the rings have lengths of different sides either. 5' and 3' simply tell you which way around a nucleotide is. That's all. Here's a tutorial which explains in detail, the reasons DNA forms a helical structure. It has to do with the way the hydrophobic bases stack together and the interaction between the two strands. http://www.liv.ac.uk/sbs/DNA_Topology/HelixL.htm

That is incorrect. Deoxyribose rings are 5' at both ends of a nucleotide. The 3' and 5' convention just describes where the nucleic acid binds to the ring, describing the directionality of the DNA strand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directionality_%28molecular_biology%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deoxyribose

Err, that's precisely how scientific advances work. Building a speculation based on previous unsupported speculations bad science. So is ad hoc-ery (i.e. starting with a conclusion, and attempting to find evidence to support that conclusion, as opposed to starting with evidence, and then generating a conclusion which is supported by that evidence). The entire premise of trying to interpet the bible as somehow being a description of physics is by its very nature, ad hoc. e.g. This is a series of illusory correlations and false associations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_correlation e.g. 3' and 5' prime ends of a DNA strand are simply naming conventions. Deoxyribose sugars are arranged in a ring. http://protist.biology.washington.edu/fingerprint/elementa.html

Well not in the God of the bible: “I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.” Albert Einstein, upon being asked if he believed in God by Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue, New York, April 24, 1921, published in the New York Times, April 25, 1929 “I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.”Albert Einstein, letter to a Baptist pastor in 1953; “It is quite possible that we can do greater things than Jesus, for what is written in the Bible about him is poetically embellished.”Albert Einstein; quoted in W. I. Hermanns, "A Talk with Einstein," October 1943, “I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.”Albert Einstein, quoted in The New York Times obituary, April 19, 1955; “Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being.”Albert Einstein in response to a child who had written him in 1936 and asked if scientists pray; “The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.”Albert Einstein, letter to Hoffman and Dukas, 1946; “For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts.”Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1970, p. 25. http://www.stephenja...s_einstein.html Again, if you choose to intepret words competely differently to how they are written in order to support a pre-existing hypothesis, you wind up with an arbitrary, ad hoc set of cherry picked explanations which don't actually fit the model at all when viewed objectively.

This is incorrect. Gesis describes a series of events in an incoherent chronological order: In Genesis 1:1, the earth and "heaven" are created together "in the beginning," whereas according to current estimates, the earth and universe are about 4.6 and 13.7 billion years old, respectively. In Genesis, the earth is created (1:1) before light (1:3), sun and stars (1:16); birds and whales (1:21) before reptiles and insects (1:24); and flowering plants (1:11) before any animals (1:20). The order of events known from science is in each case just the opposite. God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn't make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). "The greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night." But the moon is not a light; it only reflects light from the sun. etc. and the second chapter of Genesis contradicts the first: In chapter 1 plants are created on the third day before humans are created on the sixth. But in chapter 2 the order is reversed. In the first creation story, God makes humans (male and female) after the other animals; in the second, God makes a man first, then the other animals, and then a woman. http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/

Do you mean the time from mating to egg laying (8 weeks) or from laying to hatching? (60-90 days) Iguanas are not vivparous. Also, http://lmgtfy.com/?q=+green+iguana+breeding

Sure, and the label on the antifreeze that says "poison" really means "mix with vodka to make a delicious cocktail". You can't interpret an explicit statement to mean something competely different to what it actually says and subsequently fit your model, and not wind up with a completely arbitrary, "just so" model with zero value. The point was not to make light of the time period, but to demonstrate that event A had to happen before event B, contrary to the sequence presented in the bible.

Also - it appears from your bible quotes the bible suggests that plants not only evolved, but diverged into gymnosperms and angiosperms a day before the sun did. A) Given the oldest known flowering plant is from a generous ~250 million years ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowering_plant, and our best estimate of the age of the sun is approximately 4.6 billion years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun; B) Autotrophic organisms such as pants require sunlight to live; There appears to be a glaring deficiency in the bible as a literal description of reality in general.

I totally didn't mean to imply that because a gene of viral/prokaryote origin finds its way into a human genome, it immediately generates a functional difference. I have first hand experience with the Wolbachia/Glossina quagmire and trying to figure out which organism all these damn non-functional/fragmented paralogs came from and how the hell they got there... All having a virus gene in a human genome does is provide recombining processes/mutation/evolution some novel raw material to work with. The vast majority of horizontally transferred genes in eukaryotic genomes do nothing. However it does look like some of these genes of novel origin have played an important role in eukaryotic evolution. The whole shrinking endosymbiont genome phenomenon, with the transfer of the symbiont's genes to the host genome and subsequent taking over of essential functions for the symbiont by the host is really interesting - it kind of pushes the boundaries of the definitions we use for "life" and provides pretty good evidence for the posed mechanism for the origins of mitochondria and chloroplasts. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/9063.short http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5845/1753.short