Evolution vs Whatever

[D1B]

If AIDS is intelligently designed, then that designer is a F****ing pr***. I don't care if it was a deity or Bon Jovi.

Do you have AIDS? Then what is your issue? Don't want AIDS, don't have unprotected sex.

Not trying to harsh, but those are the cold hard facts. You don't want AIDS, wear protection. Problem solved.

You're a freaking idiot.

[SeattleGriz]

Do you have AIDS? Then what is your issue? Don't want AIDS, don't have unprotected sex.

Not trying to harsh, but those are the cold hard facts. You don't want AIDS, wear protection. Problem solved.

You're a freaking idiot.

And you keep playing the role of everyone being unaccountable for actions. Stated I wasn't trying to be harsh. It's the same for pregnancy. Don't want to get pregnant, then use protection.

[alvin kayak]

Two questions:

#1 : Are you aware that people also acquire AIDS from blood transfusion and childbirth in Africa?

#2 : If I intelligently designed a killer virus and infected the globe with it, killing millions people. Am I an a$$h*le?

[SeattleGriz]

Two questions:

#1 : Are you aware that people also acquire AIDS from blood transfusion and childbirth in Africa?

#2 : If I intelligently designed a killer virus and infected the globe with it, killing millions people. Am I an a$$h*le?

#1) Yes, and I do feel sorry for those that had no say in how they got HIV.

#2) It depends. Is this killer virus as easily preventable as HIV is if you wear a condom and/or don't share needles? If no, and you really did create it, sure you're a turd.

Are you familiar with Intelligent Design? You seem to equate Intelligent Design as equaling GOD. That would be called Creationism, not Intelligent Design. Although I have admitted some might use ID as a way to bring God in the backdoor (no pun intended) of the Evolution argument. A good amount of Intelligent Design believers feel that Evolution happened, it just didn't happen by blind luck as Neo Darwinists believe.

So, that would mean that yes something intelligent had to help DNA (RNA in the case of HIV) along, but I really don't think any one of them would go so far as to say, HIV was created on purpose. It was due to the spooky properties viruses have. The ability to pretty much put a new gene right into their genome anytime they feel like it. Yes, a nasty effect of ID if you want to look at it that way.

On a side note, you don't need to worry about profanity on this board. If you don't want to see profanity, you can have your settings filter it out.

[CID1990]

The Evolution engine really put Harley Davidson back on the map.

[SeattleGriz]

The Evolution engine really put Harley Davidson back on the map.

Was that before or after their bailout?

[JohnStOnge]

You don't want AIDS, wear protection. Problem solved.

I don't know how this conversation turned into a discussion on the transmissability of AIDS but the "Problem solved" part of that quote is not true. Rather, it is "probability of a problem reduced."

It's old and I don't remember the name of it but I read a risk assessment on AIDS that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I think it was 1989. The authors concluded that in the United State wearing a condom cut the risk of transmission, in actual practice, by about 90%. They also concluded that whether or not your sex partner is in one of the well defined high risk groups is a more important factor in reducing the risk than whether or not you wear a condom is. If I recallc orrectly the high risk groups they listed are homosexual males, IV drug abusers, and prostitutes.

So the idea was that if you are a guy and you decide you're going to have vaginal sex with a female who is not an IV drug user or a prostitute without a condom you are taking less of a risk of AIDS than you would if you decide you're going to have anal sex with another male.

Plus they didn't include such factors as the fact that the "receiving" partner is more at risk. A researcher names Nancy Padian long ago did a study of disconcordant pairs and estimated that the risk of transmission on a single contact in heterosexual vaginal sex when one partner is known to be infected is about 1000 to 1. But NONE of the transmissions observed during her study were female to male. They were all male to female. I later heard a report of a study concluding that the risk of female to male transmission is about 1/20,000th the risk of male to female transmission.

Sure, female to male transmission in the United States is possible and it happens just like people winning the lottery happens. When you have a low risk event occur billions of times there are going to be times when the risk is realized. But the bottom line is that wearing a condom does not eliminate the risk and there are other factors that are more important.

[JohnStOnge]

Writing again just coming in at the end and not having read all the posts. What I always look for is whether or not there is experimental evidence to support key premises of the overall theory of evolution. In particular, since the overall theory of evolution includes the idea that populations of multicellular organisms arose from populations of single celled organisms, I try to find out if there have been any experiments in which exposing populations of single celled organisms to condutions hypothezized as "causing" such an event have been conducted and yielded the desired result.

And so far I haven't been able to find that. It might be out there. But I can't find it. If it's not out there there's no way one can legitimately say the theory of Evolution is at the highest level of certainty in science. To me that's a critical premise of the overall theory that somebody should be able to experimentally validate. They should be able to create the conditions in which such an event would take place, apply that treatment in an experimental setting, and have the event take place.

And until that's done the premise is just conjecture. It may be very educated conjecture that makes sense but it's still conjecture. It may be supported to some extent by observational data. Don't know the extent to which that's the case. But finding evidence of single celled organisms in old rocks then finding evidence of multicellular organisms in other old rocks that are newer doesn't do it. It's not experimental validation. It's just observation that's not inconsistent with the theory.

[JohnStOnge]

Are you familiar with Intelligent Design? You seem to equate Intelligent Design as equaling GOD. That would be called Creationism, not Intelligent Design. Although I have admitted some might use ID as a way to bring God in the backdoor (no pun intended) of the Evolution argument. A good amount of Intelligent Design believers feel that Evolution happened, it just didn't happen by blind luck as Neo Darwinists believe.

I"ll attempt to pre-empt an argument you might get on intelligent design by pointing out that "falsifiability" is not a rule of science. It is a philosophy proposed by Karl Popper that provides a convienent way to create the impression that intelligent design can't be science. But it's not part of the scientific method and it's frequently not the way science proceeds.

Statistical hyopothesis testing is a good example. In statistical hypothesis testing one does not attempt to "falsify" the affirmative (the theory). One attempts to falsify the contrary and thereby affirm the theory.

Besides it's obviously nonsense. If you say that your theory is that there are bigfoot in the Northwest those who use the "falsifiabilty" argument claim it can't be science because if there are no bigfoot you can never say so. But does that mean that if you positively show that there ARE bigfoot by actually finding them that's not valid? Think about how ridiculous that is.

If "falsifiability" were a valid philosophy then "science" could never identify new species since if there were no new species we couldn't prove that that's true. We couldn't "falsify" the idea that there are species we don't know about since, just because we don't find new species, that doesn't prove there aren't any.

[SeattleGriz]

Read my add on to your original post above please. It sheds light on the attitude of the science community and lack of proof. Many "leaps of faith".

Those "leaps of faith" you describe only deal with fossil records. Are you saying the genetic findings are also leaps of faith?

I know this is very late in the game, but did you just say the empirical proof of evolution is a leap of faith?

This has been my whole point. Even if you come up with some great genetic ideas, which I find very interesting, aren't they based upon a leap of faith?

You know I don't question you, in fact, I really appreciate all you bring to the discussion. Have always stated we needed the "big guns" of science to make sure I am not veering too far off truth.

[∞∞∞]

I thought human evolution was pretty much proven when we conclusively showed that chromosome #2 in humans is just a fused version of one the extra chromosomes great apes have on us, thus why we have twenty-three pairs and apes have twenty-four. Otherwise, we share almost every trait together.

[SeattleGriz]

I thought human evolution was pretty much proven when we conclusively showed that chromosome #2 in humans is just a fused version of one the extra chromosomes great apes have on us, thus why we have twenty-three pairs and apes have twenty-four. Otherwise, we share almost every trait together.

As stated previously, this is a compelling argument for evolution, but it is still an assumption. There is a good amount of dissent about this proposal amongst some PhD level scientists. Some have even called it "cherry picking" of data and excluding information that flies in the face of this argument.

It requires some very unlikely assumptions to happen. The real kicker is that it would have had to have happened at the level of the gamete (sperm or egg) and this almost always results in a nonviable organism, one that is diseased, or one that is non fertile. Good luck passing on the reduction of genes to your progeny. Still possible, but highly unlikely.

Essentially, it is still a guess, although a decent one.

Let me put it this way. If scientists actually adhered to the fact the fossil record is crap and didn't have a preconceived notion, would they still say this? By the way, for many many years, these same scientists said our DNA contained tons of junk information, only to know realize they didn't know what they were talking about.

[CID1990]

By the way, for many many years, these same scientists said our DNA contained tons of junk information, only to know realize they didn't know what they were talking about.

That's a pretty accurate description of this entire thread.

[SeattleGriz]

By the way, for many many years, these same scientists said our DNA contained tons of junk information, only to know realize they didn't know what they were talking about.

That's a pretty accurate description of this entire thread.

Agreed. I have always conceded any sort of worthwhile discussion happens at the PhD level. I know I don't have a PhD and many on here don't either, so it is limited to a football board discussion with many inaccuracies. That is why I also made the disclaimer I couldn't prove anything, just try to poke holes in Evolution.

It's a thread I start every year.

[JMU DJ]

Those "leaps of faith" you describe only deal with fossil records. Are you saying the genetic findings are also leaps of faith?

I know this is very late in the game, but did you just say the empirical proof of evolution is a leap of faith?

This has been my whole point. Even if you come up with some great genetic ideas, which I find very interesting, aren't they based upon a leap of faith?

You know I don't question you, in fact, I really appreciate all you bring to the discussion. Have always stated we needed the "big guns" of science to make sure I am not veering too far off truth.

Nope, just seeing if your "leaps of faith" statement was a blanket statement. I'm not up on the fossil evolution side of things, so I try to stick to what I know, which is the biology.


You really have not addressed any of the issues or "poked holes," besides calling them "leaps of faith."


Explain to me how these are "leaps of faith":


- The exact site, down to the nucleotide, for Chromosome 2 fusion has been mapped. Also contained in the fusion site are telomeric sequences. Telomeres are always found at the end of chromosomes, why would these be found in the middle?

Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution, having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that remained separate in other primates. The precise fusion site has been located in 2q13–2q14.1 (ref. 2; hg16:114455823–114455838), where our analysis confirmed the presence of multiple subtelomeric duplications to chromosomes 1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 21 and 22 (Fig. 3; Supplementary Fig. 3a, region A). During the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two centromeres became inactivated (2q21, which corresponds to the centromere from chimp chromosome 13) and the centromeric structure quickly deterioriated.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 03466.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Fusions have occurred in other organisms, it's not just Humans. Also, in regards to gene loss affecting viability, in the Human fusion event, no genes were lost. So how is this an unlikely event? Especially if it's seen in other related organisms?


- Why Chimps and Humans have the exact same ERV's in the exact same genomic localization. Knowing that ERV's insert randomly as well as the probability of this event.

- Why gene duplication provides data that corroborates previous evolutionary models.

- Why Chimps and Humans have the exact same genetic mutations/deletions, in the exact same locations for pseudogenes like beat-globin and steroid-21-hydroxylase.


Taken together as a whole, this data strongly supports evolution. Yet, you only focus on one aspect at a time and say it's a "leap of faith." However, by examining the broad spectrum of data on different subjects, it's not.



As for the "Junk DNA," as science and technology progresses, researchers are able to conduct experiments that may not have been possible 1, 5,10,100, etc. years ago. Your point actually supports that scientist don't adhere to the "dogma." In fact, when presented with good evidence to the contrary, they don't ignore it. If we ignored the evidence, the earth would still be flat and the sun would revolve around the earth.

[SeattleGriz]

I know this is very late in the game, but did you just say the empirical proof of evolution is a leap of faith?

This has been my whole point. Even if you come up with some great genetic ideas, which I find very interesting, aren't they based upon a leap of faith?

You know I don't question you, in fact, I really appreciate all you bring to the discussion. Have always stated we needed the "big guns" of science to make sure I am not veering too far off truth.

Nope, just seeing if your "leaps of faith" statement was a blanket statement. I'm not up on the fossil evolution side of things, so I try to stick to what I know, which is the biology.


You really have not addressed any of the issues or "poked holes," besides calling them "leaps of faith."


Explain to me how these are "leaps of faith":


- The exact site, down to the nucleotide, for Chromosome 2 fusion has been mapped. Also contained in the fusion site are telomeric sequences. Telomeres are always found at the end of chromosomes, why would these be found in the middle?

Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution, having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that remained separate in other primates. The precise fusion site has been located in 2q13–2q14.1 (ref. 2; hg16:114455823–114455838), where our analysis confirmed the presence of multiple subtelomeric duplications to chromosomes 1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 21 and 22 (Fig. 3; Supplementary Fig. 3a, region A). During the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two centromeres became inactivated (2q21, which corresponds to the centromere from chimp chromosome 13) and the centromeric structure quickly deterioriated.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 03466.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Fusions have occurred in other organisms, it's not just Humans. Also, in regards to gene loss affecting viability, in the Human fusion event, no genes were lost. So how is this an unlikely event? Especially if it's seen in other related organisms?


- Why Chimps and Humans have the exact same ERV's in the exact same genomic localization. Knowing that ERV's insert randomly as well as the probability of this event.

- Why gene duplication provides data that corroborates previous evolutionary models.

- Why Chimps and Humans have the exact same genetic mutations/deletions, in the exact same locations for pseudogenes like beat-globin and steroid-21-hydroxylase.


Taken together as a whole, this data strongly supports evolution. Yet, you only focus on one aspect at a time and say it's a "leap of faith." However, by examining the broad spectrum of data on different subjects, it's not.



As for the "Junk DNA," as science and technology progresses, researchers are able to conduct experiments that may not have been possible 1, 5,10,100, etc. years ago. Your point actually supports that scientist don't adhere to the "dogma." In fact, when presented with good evidence to the contrary, they don't ignore it. If we ignored the evidence, the earth would still be flat and the sun would revolve around the earth.

I bring up the junk DNA because there are plenty of Evolution experts who insist DNA is full of useless genes. Richard Dawkins, who wrote "The God Delusion" in 2006, insists there is no God, for if there was a God, there wouldn't be so much junk in the DNA.

Obviously Dr Dawkins isn't going to acknowledge the incredible advances in elucidating the use of junk DNA. He still insists anything that doesn't code for a protein is junk. He is not the only expert to say such.

As for chromosome 2. What other organisms have done the swap before? Are we talking animal or bacterial/viral? This will shed light on the viability statement.

How frequently does a telomere to telomere fusion happen? Why have we not seen more of this?

How about a selective sweep? Does this happen all the time and what does it mean? All this needs to be done for 24 pairs to get down to 23. What are the odds? Why don't we see it more often?

Onto ERV's. How is it that of the 30,000 ERV's out there, only around 7 have inserted themselves at the same site as humans and chimps? Pseudogenes sounds much like a new way to call a gene junk as well. You are talking junk DNA before it has been found useful. How about the other 23,993 psuedogenes? Why don't we share those?

Honestly, I am fine with Evolution being the premier theory, for as someone else in this thread stated, "it is the best we have", but it needs to be judged like all theories are supposed to be judged. Embrace challenge as strengthening the theory if proven false. Don't attack it - which happens all the times. Not implying you have in any way attacked opposition, in fact you are very level headed. Might be because you are not in the Evolution field and your grant money doesn't depend on supporting it.

By the way, how close is humanity to creating life from scratch? Should be very simple as we just stumbled upon life and all that we are. Science surely should be able to create single celled organism by now...right?

Edited multiple times to clean up jibberish.

[JohnStOnge]

have always conceded any sort of worthwhile discussion happens at the PhD level.

I hope that is a joke and/or sarcasim.

[JohnStOnge]

Explain to me how these are "leaps of faith":


- The exact site, down to the nucleotide, for Chromosome 2 fusion has been mapped. Also contained in the fusion site are telomeric sequences. Telomeres are always found at the end of chromosomes, why would these be found in the middle?

I just clipped that out of a much larger body of argument to respond to the general line of argument. All of what you're describing is observation consistent with the theory. But it's observational. It's not experimental vaidation.

I wouldn't say it's a "leap of faith" to believe in the general overall theory of evolution. But it is not established with the highest level of certainty with respect to the scientific method

Evolution as a concept is a process. It is a statement about something causing something. And to show cause and effect you have to do experiments where you say "I have set up the conditions that will cause the effect" then document the effect to occur. Again: Show me an experiment in which conditions are established then the expected evolution of a population of multicellular organisms from a population of of single celled organisms occurs. Then you have validated at least kind of the first step in the overall theory that the diversity of life on this planet is explained by the process.

I hate to break this to you, but all the stuff you're describing about genetics is also consistent with belief in creationism. Nothing about it rules that belief out.

[JohnStOnge]

Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution, having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that remained separate in other primates.

That is a cause and effect statement. Are there controlled experiments to validate that? Are there direct observations of the event itself to validate that? By that I mean, did someone watch the "emergence" itself? Or are they looking at what exists now and deciding from how they understand it that it emerged as a result of what they think caused it?

[JohnStOnge]

I thought human evolution was pretty much proven when we conclusively showed that chromosome #2 in humans is just a fused version of one the extra chromosomes great apes have on us, thus why we have twenty-three pairs and apes have twenty-four. Otherwise, we share almost every trait together.

Suppose you were a creationist. How would that refute your viewpoint?

It doesn't. It just says two animals that obviously are similar in many ways have very similar genetic codes. It's consistent with the theory of evolution. But it doesn't prove it.

And that's the way observational data are. You can go on and on saying what you observe is consistent with a certain theory. But that's not the same as validation through controlled experiments.

I mean, there is a point at which you don't need a controlled experiment. Like if you watch a battle where people are shooting each other you can pretty much tell that getting shot can cause death. Or like if you watch a lion kill a wilderbeast you know the lion caused the wilderbeat to die. Very direct observation of events as they occur..

But nobody watched the development and proliferation of life on earth as it occured. People are looking at observational evidence consistent with the belief that it happened in a certain general way.

[SeattleGriz]

Pussies.