Who’s to say it’s wrong? There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .
(Stop that laughing, dammit. I can tell what you’re thinking!)
Seriously, though, I’m all in favor of fringe science and kooky ideas unless they directly contradict or are contradicted by the available evidence. Science as a self-correcting mechanism pretty much eliminates the really bizarre stuff over time (Fleischman and Pons, anyone?), while still allowing the ideas that seem kooky but hold a grain of truth to be realized. Mainstream physicists thought QM was nuts for a long time. And mainstream biologists thought prions were pretty silly too. Sometimes the silly ones are right, and the scientific process brings them to the mainstream. When they’re just silly, they’re discarded. That is so cool.
(I’m not preaching to you, David–I know your thoughts on science. I just had to rant.)
I just stumbled onto a little book called “Refuting Evolution”, by John Sarfati. Interestingly, the cover has a picture of a sledgehammer smashing a window- vandalism is indeed a good metaphor for creation science.
Sarfati talks a little bit about protein homology! His points are:
Homology means that similar animals have similar proteins.
This is precisely what both evolution and special creation predict.
There are exceptions to the rule that similar animals have similar proteins. Since evolution predicts that similar animals should have similar proteins, these exceptions disprove evolution. However, they do not disprove creationism, which predicts the same thing.
One exception is the DNA of alligators, which is more similar to the DNA of birds than to the DNA of snakes. Sarfati, of course, claims that evolution has no explanation for why birds should look, genetically, like they descended from reptiles, so obviously this proves evolution wrong and creationism right.
-Ben
I just wanted to respond to the “poison ivy” section here. Izzy seemed to be saying that an adaptation that has no obvious benefit to an animal other than its own comfort might possibly be used as evidence that something were wrong with evolutionary theory. But we must understand that we do not have all the information when you see something like this come up. Dogs are apparently not affected by poison ivy, but it does not follow that poison ivy was in any way a selection pressure on the dog. Although any skin rash might possibly lead to open sores, which may then be infection sites, this may not be enough of an advantage for dogs that had it for it to become a common characteristic.
Finding an example like this is meaningless unless we understand the relationship between the organisms. Cacao plants may be poisonous to dogs, but we can be certain that this is just a happenstance. Dogs and cacao plants have no relationship to one another, and asking, “How did the cacao plant become evolve the ability to poison dogs?” is a meaningless question. So your dog can’t safely eat a Hershey bar, and can’t get poison ivy. That can hardly be taken as evidence against evolution.
Lib, I don’t agree with some of your views on occasion, but I have to say that was a masterful post. Is he still on that skewer, or mounted above the fireplace?
Lib, please don’t worry. That is and will remains one of my all-time favorite posts by anyone on any subject. You’re as immortal as you’re gonna get in cyberspace.
Arrgh! What’s with everybody posting links to Ph****** parodies today? Geez, I’m having traumatic flashbacks. (That was a pretty good one, though, Lib. )
xenophon, Lib had a sterling example to follow. He Who Is Not To Be Named has been gone for only a few months, and some foolish ones seem to have forgotten the horror that he was.
In fact, I believe there are manny folks here who are tempting fate. If you keep invoking the Nameless One, he will appear.
xeno, that was a spot-on parody of a former poster who led many of us on a long and very frustrating wild goose chase after promising irrefutable evidence disproving evolution. He never delivered.
Fortunately, I think the whole nasty thread is lost in message board limbo. (That right, David?)
I’m a molecular geneticist here, so I’m playing devil’s advocate.
I just read a news and views article from Nature. Here is the story, and it may be password protected. If you’d rather dig it up at the local science library, it is
Gura, T. “Bones, molecular, or both?” Nature 406, 230 - 233 (2000).
This story basically states that molecular phylogeny, reached by taking variable segments of the DNA and doing cross-species analysis, often does not agree with the most careful morphologic analysis. For instance, whales and hippos fit into different places in phylogeny based on genetic and morphologic evidence.
So, what if the two can’t be resolved? What if all the paleontology we do doesn’t agree with our best theories of molecular evolution? That would kind of suck.
Probably, the scientific answer would be to take apart the data collection mechanisms, fully analyze everything, and construct new theories of morphologic and genetic change to fit the data. Of course, this may just be another thing that we are going to be arguing for the next 50 years with the “creation scientists.” I mean, an omniscient creator doesn’t necessarily have to mould the genes to fit the body, or the body to fit the genes…
Hello all, just dropped in to see how everything’s going. Looks like the debate is pretty much over now. But I thought I’d drop by the old neighborhood anyway. Ben, you’re looking well, you to IzzyR, and of course the rest of you seem to be doing fine too. Well, guess I might mosey on over to some other neighborhoods, or maybe one of the other near-by cities. Perhaps I’ll go to the city of G.Q. to ask the good folks there a question about feet. Well, take it easy all, so long.
Yes, it would seem logical. Chimpanzees and Gorillas seem very similar to each other, don’t they? But, molecularly, chimpanzees are more like humans than they are like gorillas. Chimps and humans are two twigs on one branch, gorillas are on another branch. Also, DNA doesn’t really work like a blueprint…it doesn’t contain a model of a complete organism. A closer analogy is that DNA is like a recipe…you start with flour, eggs, adenosine triphosphate, etc, and end up with a critter…but the recipe doesn’t look anything like the critter.
Talking about “junk DNA”
Here’s why we think some DNA is “junk”…it doesn’t code for any proteins. If you tried to build a protein out of it you’d get a useless protein. This occurs in genes. Ever heard of introns? Well, when a DNA sequence is transcibed into RNA to make a protein, parts of it are snipped out and never sent to the ribosomes for translation into a protein. That’s why we think the DNA is junk…it never becomes protein.
Now, we may find some other use for the junk DNA…we have lots and lots of it after all…but that use is almost certainly not for making proteins. A current hypothesis is that most of it comes from viruses that have inserted themselves into our genome.
But here’s why “junk” DNA is useful for phylogeny. It doesn’t get translated into protein, so it is not under selective pressure. If a mutation occured in hemoglobin we have a big problem, that organism might die if the mutation is at a functional site. Selection conserves functional DNA. But non-functional DNA changes pretty much at random…there’s no reason for it to be similar, except for common descent.
I am not a biologist, but I think that the latest question Izzy asked is pretty interesting. My impression is though, that genetic variation among a population rarely results in so large and identifiable a feature as an altered hoof. While we can point out the smaller things like resistance to disease or toxins as becoming more and more prevalent because we systematically study such phenomena, I can’t think of any examples that are liek the one you asked about other than a vague memory of some tropical bird whose beaks changed shape over a few generations. (Someone else remember hearing something of this?) I would be interested in reading any links that addressed your question, Izzy.
Yes, I know what you’re talking about. Unfortunately I can’t remember many details & I don’t have time to search it up. Off the top of my head:
There is a couple who have been following the finch population on one of the Galapagos islands for around a quarter-century now. They visit (IIRC) twice a year and capture, tag & measure birds. I think they visit during nesting and track the babies to the parents, as well. They also survey the island for food-plant populations, and they have some sort of ongoing weather tracking.
In their records, they show clear changes in the body size and beak shape/size of the finch population. These changes are the result of ‘natural selection’ in response to the climate. They’ve tracked these changes back & forth several times; I believe the population ratio changes drastically within a generation or two. (In other words, the ‘small’ population is almost entirely replaced by the ‘large’ version, and then vice-versa.) The differences between the two ‘versions’ are large enough to have caused confusion as to whether these were separate species of finch or not; this couple has clarified that it is change occurring within the same species.
Cyclical natural climate variation (wet to dry) changes the ratio of available food sources (different types of plants with different styles of seeds do better depending on the weather). The bird population (ratio of small bird/small beak to large bird/large beak) changes to match the available food supply. (The small birds out-compete the large when certain types of plants are prevalent, then the tide reverses when the weather changes and other types of plants prevail.)
Can’t remember their names, though. Nor which island, which species of finch, etc. Makes it a bit difficult to search up, eh?
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