Darwin's Discovery: Design without a Designer

[Graybeard]

.................

"We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our sympathies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished.

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses."

Robert Ardrey (b. 1908-10-16 in Chicago, Illinois; d. 1980-01-14 in South Africa) was an anthropologist, playwright and screenwriter.



greg.....

Trivia: This is my 3000 post since Aug-2005 ..... hardly a memorable one, but then milestones are illusionary .... lmao

[austintorn@aol.com]

We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.


Into the Lands of the Gods

Part 1a

A survey of the dead and forgotten gods





Part 1b

The Intelligent Designer vs. Natural Selection
(first half)





Part 1c

The Intelligent Designer vs. Natural Selection
(last half)

[Lloyd Gillespie]

Biological Evolution's True Rock...

Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992), the 1983 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, was an American scientist and one of the world's most distinguished cytogeneticists. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927, where she was a leader in the development of maize cytogenetics. The field remained the focus of her research for the rest of her career. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. Her work was groundbreaking: she developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas, including genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome with physical traits, and demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized amongst the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.

During the 1940s and 1950s, McClintock discovered transposition and used it to show how genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on or off. She developed theories to explain the repression or expression of genetic information from one generation of maize plants to the next. Encountering skepticism of her research and its implications, she stopped publishing her data in 1953. Later, she made an extensive study of the cytogenetics and ethnobotany of maize races from South America. McClintock's research became well understood in the 1960s and 1970s, as researchers demonstrated the mechanisms of genetic change and genetic regulation that she had demonstrated in her maize research in the 1940s and 1950s. Awards and recognition for her contributions to the field followed, including the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition; she is the only woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category

Discovery of Controlling Elements...
In the summer of 1944 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, McClintock began systematic studies on the mechanisms of the mosaic color patterns of maize seed and the unstable inheritance of this mosaicism. She identified two new dominant and interacting genetic loci that she named Dissociator (Ds) and Activator (Ac). She found that the Dissociator did not just dissociate or cause the chromosome to break, it also had a variety of effects on neighboring genes when the Activator was also present. In early 1948, she made the surprising discovery that both Dissociator and Activator could transpose, or change position, on the chromosome.

She observed the effects of the transposition of Ac and Ds by the changing patterns of coloration in maize kernels over generations of controlled crosses, and described the relationship between the two loci through intricate microscopic analysis. She concluded that Ac controls the transposition of the Ds from chromosome 9, and that the movement of Ds is accompanied by the breakage of the chromosome. When Ds moves, the aleurone-color gene is released from the suppressing effect of the Ds and transformed into the active form, which initiates the pigment synthesis in cells. The transposition of Ds in different cells is random, it may move in some but not others, which causes color mosaicism. The size of the colored spot on the seed is determined by stage of the seed development during dissociation. McClintock also found that the transposition of Ds and the is determined by the number of Ac copies in the cell.

Between 1948 and 1950, she developed a theory by which these mobile elements regulated the genes by inhibiting or modulating their action. She referred to Dissociator and Activator as "controlling units"—later, as "controlling elements"—to distinguish them from genes. She hypothesized that gene regulation could explain how complex multicellular organisms made of cells with identical genomes have cells of different function. McClintock's discovery challenged the concept of the genome as a static set of instructions passed between generations. In 1950, she reported her work on Ac/Ds and her ideas about gene regulation in a paper entitled "The origin and behavior of mutable loci in maize" published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In summer 1951, when she reported on her work on gene mutability in maize at the annual symposium at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the paper she presented was called "The origin and behavior of mutable loci in maize".

Her work on controlling elements and gene regulation was conceptually difficult and was not immediately understood or accepted by her contemporaries; she described the reception of her research as "puzzlement, even hostility". Nevertheless, McClintock continued to develop her ideas on controlling elements. She published a paper in Genetics in 1953 where she presented all her statistical data, and undertook lecture tours to universities throughout the 1950s to speak about her work. She continued to investigate the problem and identified a new element that she called Suppressor-mutator (Spm), which, although similar to Ac/Ds, displays more complex behavior. Based on the reactions of other scientists to her work, McClintock felt she risked alienating the scientific mainstream, and from 1953 stopped publishing accounts of her research on controlling elements.

Free Controlled Will Biology__The irony of molecular biology: informatics replaces mechanics, James A. Shapiro
Lots of pics and diagrams...

[r.p.bibra]

I do believe you do ...... (and he will .... lol)


"Overall there is just Evolution".

And by the way .... It's here to stay ..... lmao


cool bananas ... greg

Very rightly said Greg. Stay-put to your convictions (fruits of your practical research), as LG does too.
love&regards.ls

[Graybeard]

"And so ends, perhaps, this claim of mammalian uniqueness,"

Our Brains Are More Like Birds' Than We Thought


CLICK ...

cool bananas ... greg

[SteveA]

"And so ends, perhaps, this claim of mammalian uniqueness,"

Our Brains Are More Like Birds' Than We Thought


CLICK ...

cool bananas ... greg

Thanks, Greg.

Yes, awareness and consciousness etc. don't reside specifically anywhere "out there". Everything is a component of experience.

Here's a article regarding something similar though in this case, probably at least 3/4ths of the normal volume brain was just fluid, and though his I.Q. was lower than average, he wasn't technically even considered mentally retarded http://www.newscientist.com/article/...s-doctors.html

[Graybeard]

Quite a good read ...... and quite amazing !!!!

Tanx ... greg

[labelwench]

Mammoths used to make their home in the Yukon and a miner in Dawson City unearthed an intact skull and tusks recently. The skull is estimated to be 30,000 years old.

Scientists have made breakthroughs recently in understanding mammoth DNA, he said. A recent study demystified how mammoths handled cold weather by looking at genetic information on the animal’s hemoglobin.

http://www.yukon-news.com/news/18469/

[labelwench]

White deer, co-existing among the usual population. White offspring from brown deer and brown offspring from white parents. In a region where winter lasts for five months, the white species has an advantage, although during the remaining seven months, they are as obvious 'as a sore thumb' as the biologist being interviewed alludes.

These deer have been surviving and thriving for a significantly long period, and they were documented by the early European settlers and respected by the indigenous population before then.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...nwi10s22a3q81f

[austintorn@aol.com]

Marine Isotope Stage 6

(The near extinction of H. Sapiens)

Life was good 195,000 years ago;
The climate was mild; food plentiful.
The planet then entered a long glacial stage.

It became cool and arid,
The deserts expanding,
Making most of the earth uninhabitable.

The number of people plummeted
To just hundreds of breeding individuals.

We humans today are all from them;
We exhibit very low genetic diversity
Relative to many other species.

The southern coast of Africa,
Rich in shellfish and edible plants,
Year round, seems to have been their refuge.

The evidence is presented
In this month’s ‘Scientific American’.
A cave has been found, along with tools—
A coastal cornucopia.

We almost never were.