Arete

The issue is that all combinations of the four nucleotides into codons actually encode amino acids, so the addition of point mutations to an expressed gene never result in the gene being un-translateable and in fact, non-synonymous mutations will result in a novel amino acid sequence. So you never lose "lvl2" information, simply change it. Randomly changing letters of words in sentence results in them becoming un-translateable. This does not happen with codons and as such, your analogy of random rearrangements of letters in words making them unintelligible is not reflective of point mutations of nucleotides in a gene which cannot result in unintelligible codons - as there's no such thing. Take a short 5 codon hypothetical gene sequence: att gct ttg gat cca (IALDP) Even if we randomly add a point mutation to every codon we still have a gene encoding 5 amino acids: gtt gca atg gct ccc (VAMAP) In addition, gene duplication events and insertions are documented - as such, the addition of genetic information to a genome is a known fact: an interesting example is that a gene duplication event is responsible for shape variation in tomato varieties: http://www.sciencema...5869/1527.short So if the above example represented a situation in which we had a gene duplication event followed by different point mutations in each gene we would have the addition of novel genetic information to a genome. I actually work on kinteoplast parasites which avoid the acquired immune system of their hosts through antigenic variation of their surface protein coats. They have 7 expressed genes encoding this protein coat, but archives of over a thousand partial and pseudogenic non-expressed versions of the genes encoding this protein coat. Gene switching in these parasites can occur as fast as every hundred generations, never allowing the host's immune system to accurately detect and eliminate the current generation of parasites. The mechanism by which these parasites switch to a new protein coat is through ecotopic recombination of the expressed protein coat gene with one of the neutrally evolving non-expressed genes to create a novel (i.e. new) surface coating the immune system of the host hasn't seen before. As such, the parasites I directly work on are reliant upon the creation of new genes in order to exist. http://users.path.ox...05_berriman.pdf http://www.nature.co...ature07982.html

Copperhead - you started out arguing that birds evolved before the rest of the terrestrial vertebrates, as far as I can see, when this position became untenable you said: "I feel I ought to apologize, as I've been having you on the whole time." And swapped to arguing that Genesis actually states that terrestrial vertebrates evolved before birds. This contradicts these sources: http://christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-ordercreation.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_creation_narrative http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_bibl.htm http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_did_god_create_on_the_1st_day_2nd_day_3rd_day_4th_day_5th_day_6th_day_and_7th http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/sevncrea.htm http://creationwiki.org/Days_of_creation

This happens on the fifth day Genesis 1:20-21 English Standard Version (ESV) 20 And God said, "Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds[a] fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens." 21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. This happens on the sixth day Genesis 1:24-25 English Standard Version (ESV) 24 And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds." And it was so. 25 And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. www.biblegateway.com/ Seems fairly straightforward that Genesis is stating that the "beasts of the earth" came after the birds and it seems to require a fair bit of logical and linguistic gymnastics to twist it the other way around.

The common ancestral archosaur was not a bird via the use of any system of classification in current use. The clade contains many non-ornithian lineages such as all extant crocodiles, the Sauropods in addition to Therapods. The fact that some theraods shared some traits with extant birds does not indicate that either a) all archosars did, b) the ancestral archosaur did or c) that those therapods which had some common traits with birds were "proto-birds". The point is moot given that the archosaurs were preceded by a vast diversity of other tetrapods and were thus not the first terrestrial vertebrates. You simply cannot assert that birds evolutionarily preceded terrestrial vertebrates and thus Genesis contradicts evolutionary theory. There is simply no manner, consistent with modern evolutionary synthesis to uphold a conclusion by which aves can in any way be described as ancestral to the terrestrial vertebrates.

1) Birds evolved from an ancestral Archosaur - http://tolweb.org/Archosauria/14900 Archosauria gave rise to the Squamates, the Crocodilians, the sauropods and the birds. Describing the ancestral Archosaur as a "bird" would be a considerable stretch of the word "bird". 2) Synapisdae is unequivocally ancestral to the Dynapsidae and thus predates it. http://tolweb.org/Amniota/14990 You can't get around the fact that birds are a derived lineage within the Amniota and thus the Genesis version of events contradicts evolutionary theory.

Great Apes Think Ahead: Conclusive Evidence Of Advanced Planning Capacities ScienceDaily (June 18, 2008) — Apes can plan for their future needs just as we humans can – by using self-control and imagining future events. Mathias and Helena Osvath’s research, from Lunds University Cognitive Science in Sweden, is the first to provide conclusive evidence of advanced planning capacities in non-human species. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080618114602.htm http://www.springerlink.com/content/n3t11524177737p0/?MUD=MP

In order for one to assume this, the genetic line must be the one that all tetrapod life is descended from. I.e.

Sure, but the light was created on the first day, before any celestial bodies which came along with the sun on day three. Sure if you want to interpret "birds" to mean "the common amphibian ancestor to all terrestrial tetrapods" you might be correct, but it would be a pretty long stretch of the word "birds" - as every animal with four appendages would now be describable as a bird.

Except for when the light is created before the sun and the birds before the terrestrial vertebrates.

If all you're interested in is what comes out the back end and you can directly measure that [as they can for extant ruminants like cows], why do you need to know what goes in the front?

Plants don't release methane. The conversion of plant matter to methane requires anaerobic decomposition - and if the major contributor to anaerobic decomposition of organic materials is an animal, it is the abundance and contribution of the animals that is important. E.g. If we wanted to work out the contribution of methane to the atmosphere of a dairy farm it would not be sensible to go out and determine the biomass of grass on the farm. It wouldn't tell us anything about the contribution of methane from the farm at all as the grass itself is not contributing methane to the atmosphere. If we work out that the fermentation of the grass by the cattle is the major contributor, how much methane per cow per day is released and how many cows, we will. It is only by analyzing the cow data you'd determine the methane contribution of the farm.

I'm not sure anyone was implying that sauropod methane caused an extinction event...?

1) Biomass and therefore methane budgets are not constant over time - biomass is not uniformly distributed over land mass, so there's no reason to expect it to be uniformly distributed over time and if fact it most likely hasn't been. http://www.sciencema...5741/1714.short 2) Ruminants produce significantly more methane than non-ruminants due to the fermentation process by which they digest their food. The paper makes the rather speculative leap that saurpods also digest their food via a fermentation method - but if they did, then they might have a point. http://www.google.co...SRwF8fA&cad=rja

Off the back of the wind farm thread comes the dino farts warming hypothesis! At least this one might be amusing. The argument is that as livestock produced methane is a major contributor to greenhouse gases today, so one can speculate that sauropods would have contributed significantly to atmospheric methane back in the Mesozoic - which was known to have been warmer than today. A recent Current Biology paper gives some back of the envelope calculations and finds out that if sauropod farts may well have been a significant greenhouse gas source: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2812%2900329-6 "Mesozoic sauropods, like many modern herbivores, are likely to have hosted microbial methanogenic symbionts for the fermentative digestion of their plant food [1]. Today methane from livestock is a significant component of the global methane budget [2]. Sauropod methane emission would probably also have been considerable. Here, we use a simple quantitative approach to estimate the magnitude of such methane production and show that the production of the ‘greenhouse’ gas methane by sauropods could have been an important factor in warm Mesozoic climates... As an illustrative example, we consider the sauropod biomass density of 200,000 kg/km2 to consist of ten 20,000 kg sauropods; this is a conservative estimate of the adult mass of the medium sized sauropod Apatosaurus louise, colloquially known as ‘Brontosaurus’. For this, the allometric relation gives methane emission of 2675 litres per day for one animal, equivalent to about 1.9 kg per day under the standard temperature and pressure conditions assumed in [7]. For a density of ten adults per km2, assuming, for comparability, modern day and year lengths (the Mesozoic day was slightly shorter), we get 6.9 tonnes/km2 of methane per year methane emissions. Scaling up, assuming a global vegetated area of 75 x 106 km2 (equivalent to half the total land area), gives global methane production from sauropods of 520 Tg (520 million tonnes). This is comparable to the total modern-day methane emission (Figure 1) [2]." "Estimated sauropod methane production compared to total modern (both natural and anthropogenic), global pre-industrial and estimated modern methane production from ruminants. Even reducing our estimate by half still predicts a major role for sauropod methane in the Mesozoic."

1) Teaching a student cloning PCR products. We were plating out or colonies in the laminar flow hood. You dip the spreader in ethanol, flame it off spread media, repeat. If you get the order mixed up, you'll dip the lit spreader in your ethanol container and set it on fire. No big deal, cover the beaker, no more fire. Except the student, rather than covering the vessel, threw the contents of her water bottle into the beaker. Different outcome than anticipated, sideburns on fire. 2) Different student, learning how to make acrylamide gels. I just looked in to see how they were doing, lent over to make sure the gel was well up against the comb. They lent down too, putting a hand on the top plate as they did. Unset acrylamide shoots out of the plates and up my nose. To the emergency shower. "Is it really that bad?" they ask. Yes, yes it is... 3) Same student, learning electrophoresis. Puts Schott bottle of agarose in microwave. Screws lid down tight. BOOOOM. Blew the door of the microwave across the room. Fire alarm goes off. Lucky no one was in front of it.

How can you possibly ascertain this without reading the report? If you could direct us to the measurements which show appreciable declines in wind speed attributable to wind turbines, that would be great. N.B. "It's obvious" is not a viable substitute. I see. If we broaden the use of the term "local" to encompass the planet, you're spot on.

I think there's multiple reasons why esbo is coming under criticism: 1) The title of the thread stems directly from a misinterpretation of a scientific article by the media. 2) Esbo is rejecting the scientific article without reading it. "I have read a brief summary of the paper and it is obvious it is a mainly worthless report, one which not right minded person would pay to see". Rejecting the merits of evidence without actually reading it is not a logical basis to begin with. 3) Esbo is, however retaining the results of the article as valid, but stating the results support his/her pet hypothesis and not that posed by the authors of the paper. 4) Esbo's pet hypothesis makes predictions he/she is unable to support e.g. if wind turbines cause significant warming by slowing the wind, there should be a measurable reduction in wind speed in the vicinity of the wind farms. We have not had this demonstrated so the conclusion that heating is caused by an appreciable slowing of the wind is unsupported. In addition, placing an obstacle in the path of a moving body of air does not necessarily slow down the movement of the air and in cases, can speed it up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_gradient 5) Claims like "The effects of CO2 are local" indicate a lack of understanding of basic principles, like the four gas laws. Most people with a basic science education would understand that a gas released from a point source dissipates into the atmosphere to approach a uniform concentration, and thus the statement made is fundamentally flawed.

which is fundamentally different to atmospheric convection how, exactly?

In addition, A significant proportion of fine scale genetic structure in humans is clinal http://www.sciencedi...002929709001578 " Table 2 summarizes the results of this test and demonstrates that significant evidence of clinal variation is observed for all continents" Genetic studies also indicate significant inter-population migration since at least the Pleistocene. http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/8/1823.full "We find evidence for this ancient admixture in European, East Asian, and West African samples, suggesting that admixture between diverged hominin groups may be a general feature of recent human evolution." There is no genetic evidence to suggest long term isolation of human races, and significant evidence to suggest that gene flow between races is characteristically high throughout human evolutionary timescales.

might want to double check that one... (convection happens in liquids too...) http://www.redmap.or...nd-downwelling/ http://www.tpub.com/weather3/1-24.htm

Placebos work even if the patient knows the treatment is a placebo. http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/27/placebos-work-even-if-you-know-theyre-fake-but-how/

remove the extra bracket at the end.

This simply goes to highlight the fact that having not read the article means you have an incomplete understanding of it. [taken from http://www.atmos.albany.edu/facstaff/zhou/tmp/nclimate1505-aop.pdf] "In contrast, the daytime LST shows strong interannual variations and no significant trends...Furthermore, continuous conduction and convection help to create a well-mixed thick ABL in late afternoon, which exhibits a statically neutral profile where the vertical temperature gradients are approximately adiabatic." There is no daytime effect because the atmosphere is homogenizing itself more during the day than at night. "We aggregate globally validated 1-km MODIS eight-day LST (ref. 18) and 16-day albedo19 into anoma- lies at pixels of 0:01 (1.1 km) resolution from 2003 to 2011 in winter (DecemberJanuaryFebruary, DJF) and summer (JuneJulyAugust , JJA). " N.B. LST= land surface temperature. "The stronger wind speeds in JJA than DJF and at night-time than daytime (Supplementary Table S1) probably drive wind turbines to generate more electricity and turbulence and consequently result in the strongest warming effect at night-time in JJA. The nocturnal ABL is typically stable and much thinner than the daytime ABL and hence the turbine-enhanced vertical mixing produces a stronger night-time effect." And you do realize that there is more to anthropogenic climate change than LST, right?

It's irrelevent. The research poses a scenario by which the action of the wind turbines creates a downdraft in the atmosphere, homogenizing upper layers with lower layers. In this particular scenario, the upper layers are expected to be warmer than the underlying layers, creating a localized high pressure system which results in a localized warming effect. "Slowing the wind down" has never been proposed as the mechanism by which this temperature differential was observed, except by you, and you have no data, and now it seems everything you've read on the subject comes from a tabloid newspaper article. Now a) when you move a body of air, another body of air replaces it. Thus the cool air displaced by the descending hot air went somewhere else and presumably, if the place it went was warmer it had a localized cooling effect. The net effect of the air movement on global temperatures is zero and the idea that it has a any effect on global temperatures is a blatant misconception. There is no mechanism by which a net heating effect is taking place. b) The assumption that hotter air resides above colder air does not hold true in other places - http://en.wikipedia....8meteorology%29 meaning that the effect described here does not extrapolate to all conceivable locations in which wind farms are. In fact, in general air higher up in the atmosphere is colder than that near the surface of the earth so in many other places opposite effect could well be observed.