This whole arguement could have been avoided had Aquila Praefortis paid attention in class.
This whole arguement could have been avoided had Aquila Praefortis paid attention in class.
The theory of evolution is just like a religion. A religion starts with a logical hypothesis. When problems start to pile up with that hypothesis, we invent miracles and events. You end up with a document similar to the apocalypse of John. If someone studies the apocalypse of john today he wont understand anything. But when this document was written, the people who studied it knew what was the meaning of the Alpha and the Omega, what the seven churches were, what the seven trumpets meant etc
Well sorry to disappoint you but something similar happens with evolution. First you make a point. Humanoid fossils prove, in your opinion, that no creator exist but we are a natural phenomenon. Then problems start to surface. Human cells are too complex to emerge with a random procedure. You invent events (Abiogenesis), miracles(two eyes formed through random mutations) etc. Just like the book of revelation, you create a whole new world although different, that is studied in detail. In 1000 years people will see this theory in a similar manner we see today the book of revelation. Some interesting points but overall the logic and the language of the evolution documents will be dismissed as nonsense. Just another failed theory for mankind
I....wow. That's funny. I'm not sure Papay's ever taken a science class.
One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.
-Neil deGrasse Tyson
Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
A hypothesis has constructive and predictive validity as well as soundness of argument. A hypothesis confirmed many times becomes theory. There's a big difference between a hypothesis and a religious ideology.
No it doesn't. Evolution is the uniting theory of biology, literally every theory in biology depends on it. If it were falsified everything we know about animals, humans, organisms in general, including medicine, biochemistry, taxonomy, dna, and etc would also need to be falsified. You literally cannot understand biology without understanding evolution.
DNA evidence proves it, fossil evidence strongly suggests it. Let's go through it slowly so we can see what a hypothesis is:
Background:
There is a fossil record of animals available to us by excavation.
Because of the theory of plate tectonics and radioactive crystal dating methods (uranium, carbon, etc) we can tell the rough age of various layers as they appear in archaeology.
Animal fossils which appear in these layers most likely died around the same time layers were deposited.
Hypothesis:
Animals could either have arose independently of each other or in a common lineage, if they arose in a common lineage we would expect transitional fossils to be located in the layers between their ancestors and their modern descendants.
Null Hypothesis:
If no transitional fossils are found then the hypothesis is not supported.
Are transitional fossils found?
Yes.
Hypothesis = Confirmed, not just in one way either, in tens of thousands of different ways this hypothesis has been repeatedly confirmed.
Background:
Transitional fossils seem to show that animals descended from a few or even one single lineage.
DNA evidence can be recovered from every species on the planet, no life form yet found does not have DNA
DNA evidence presents a huge number of data points, the smallest genome known contains 160,000 base pairs. The largest have more than 149,000,000,000 base pairs.
Phylogeny is a mathematical function of constructing relation between two potential functions based on variance between them. The smaller the variance the more likely that the organisms are related recently. The larger the variance the more likely that the organisms aren't related or are related distantly.
Hypothesis:
Using DNA phylogeny to compare character states (specific sequences of DNA) a tree of life can be created revealing the lineage of all creatures
Null Hypothesis:
DNA evidence will show no relation between species with character states not resembling one another or will result in a phylogeny of a few centralized lineages rather than a single one.
Does phylogeny comparisons of DNA evidence result in a single ancestor being implicated? Yes. Not only does all life seem to relate backwards to a single organism but DNA in fossils strongly supports this finding as well.
Hypothesis=Confirmed. Furthermore it's not just confirmed in one way, it's confirmed in countless MILLIONS of ways. We share the same basic genes with bacteria and single celled eukaryotes.
Oh really? I don't think you understand science enough to identify what the theory actually says much less what problems exist.
This is not true. This is your assumption. DNA evidence denies this however.
Not part of the theory of evolution. Try again.
Not a miracle if a testable sound hypothesis which has predictive and constructive validity can be constructed for it. It can and has been validated. I explain hox genes and their origins in this very thread, obviously you don't understand much more than a single sentence. I must wonder if this is because you haven't bothered to actually read the thread or the information therein, or if you simply can't synthesize a coherent position.
Let's create a hypothesis for the story of creation.
Background:
There's a massive variety of species on the planet, estimated at 6.5 million land species alone (oceanic species are not well understood) up to 20 million overall just including organisms bigger than bacteria. Potentially hundreds of millions or billions including microscopic organisms.
It is written in a book authored by bronze age men that a perfect being called god created all of the organisms.
Hypothesis:
If this is the case we should expect distinct organisms uniquely designed to suit their environment to perfection, furthermore when evaluating the organisms no species should be greater related to any other i.e. phylogenetic calculations should show humans are just as distant from lizards as they are from other mammals.
Null hypothesis:
Phylogenetic comparisons show distinct variance in the degree of relation between DNA sequences, furthermore most if not all organisms have imperfections that even humans would not mistakenly create.
Hypothesis = Dismissed.
Perhaps I'm biased, please try and construct a valid hypothesis for this god character.
Unlikely.
Obviously you don't know what logic is.
Or you'e utterly failed to understand it. Let's create a hypothesis for that.
Background:
The theory of evolution is a uniting theory of biology from which all biological understanding extends.
Hypothesis:
If one were to understand the theory of evolution they would be able to synthesize a coherent position for or against evolution describing specific problems in a rigorous manner.
Null Hypothesis:
The hypothesis is not supported if they cannot describe evolution rigorously and specifically.
It does not seem you can describe evolution much less identify problems with it. In this case the null hypothesis that you don't understand crap about what you're talking about is supported.
Always nice to see you post Papay.
You have faith. Good for you
One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.
-Neil deGrasse Tyson
Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
Yeap and i pray every day, and i fast, and i whip myself when i sin. Actually i post from a monastery. You have revealed me
You might want to pick up a book on Mendelian genetics while you're there.
Added in information about Transitional Fossils and some examples of those things.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Want.allowing some animals to do things like see x-rays and ultraviolet light.
The only self-discipline you need is to finish your sandwiches
Hmm, that might be relevant to this. It's a paper I typed a few years ago for an argumentation class.
How to genetically engineer your own Frankenstein plants!
There’s a lot of controversy in the last decade about GM organisms being essentially akin to the devil and the concept has always struck me as a bit odd especially considering how genetics work in plants. As entertaining as the controversy is perhaps its better just to explain how to do it yourself? I mean people used to be horribly afraid of electricity until every house in the country was lit up by it so perhaps that’s the solution? This is my attempt to make genetic engineering commonplace and not so mysterious.
The trend is called ‘synbio’ and has been highly popularized since the year 2000 when an artist created a glowing bunny with his friend after learning a bit about genetics. Named Eduardo Kac the science artist shook the world by revealing just how easy genetic engineering was. Another infamous individual named Meredith Patterson makes glowing yogurt in her spare time just because she can.
What is genetic engineering in the first place? First it’s key to understand a bit of basic chemistry. In your cells there’s this substance called Deoxyribonucleic acid. So-called because it lacks the characteristic hydroxyl group which is present in ribonucleic acid. The specific chemistry is irrelevant however. Basically speaking DNA contains within it the set of instructions for making every bit of you. For a human that’s about 2 million separate proteins.
The way it does this is not unlike how your computer is making this image on your screen right now. Instead of 1’s and 0’s however DNA uses A’s, G’s, T’s and C’s which are shorthand for their respective chemicals. In a way it’s the biological equivalent to machine code.
This is a powerful realization because it introduces a rather simple and exciting concept: If you change the code, you change the program. In the case of biology life itself is the program. The potential implications of this are extraordinarily vast.
Unfortunately a lot like modern computer programs today DNA is packed with a ton of non-coding instructions. To give a quick analog, to produce a modern game it takes about two to four gigabytes of information. A byte is composed of eight bits. A bit is either a 0 or a 1. This means that a gigabyte contains a billion bytes or eight billion bits.
However that’s only in machine code. In reality the very same game could be produced if you were to be an expert in writing in binary with only a few thousand bits. So then what’s the rest of the game? Well a large portion of the game code is devoted not to the game itself but rather to building up a series of commands that can be more easily used by programmers in a meaningful way. For example most digital artists don’t understand the first thing about binary so they use programs like photoshop or 3dmark to build their digital art. These programs have their own internal programming which in turn is based on languages itself which in turn is composed of binary. It’s highly inefficient but it’s much easier to use.
The same is true for our genes. That’s not to say that a good portion of our DNA is ‘junk’ in all likeliness none of it is really junk. If you’ve ever encountered a floating point error (the dreaded blue screen of death) on your computer you know the potential hazards of missing just one datapoint in billions. So while DNA could be massively compacted if redesigned from scratch, as it is, it’s written into complex languages which in turn means we need to learn the sentence structure before we can willy-nilly alter it.
To put that issue into perspective, imagine getting the machine code of a game like skyrim, or mass effect, or even something much simpler like tetris and trying to figure out what it was from the thousands or billions of 1’s and 0’s. It would be nearly impossible right? Well that’s what we’ve been doing with DNA for 50 years and now we understand with some pretty stunning fidelity what that language is.
This concludes our DNA 101 session.
Ok. So now we’ve figured out the language of DNA we can start adding our own commands into it. Let’s keep it really simple. First off what did Eduardo Kac do to his bunny? Did he shoot it full of gamma radiation like a bad super hero plot?
No. Eduardo Kac, to use our previous metaphor, added the sentence. ‘Produce this glowing protein.’ He did this by using a very well-known method called fluorescent tagging. Basically when scientists want to know what a specific gene does they take the GFP gene and insert it downstream (after) the promoter of a specific gene. To put this simply, just like our normal language there exists spaces and period, in genes there are analogs to these that tell genes where to start reading and where to stop.
A promoter is somewhat similar to the space that follows a period immediately before a capital letter. So when the geneticist working with Eduardo Kac inserted the gene he essentially copy-and-pasted a whole sentence of meaning.
The GFP protein is a protein that was first isolated in jelly fish decades ago. It was most important for the fact that under ultraviolet light it glows brightly. This allowed geneticists to insert it downstream of promoters in any gene they wanted. When and where the gene was used would then glow when they shined a UV light upon it. For example, they may have wanted to know where the CesA01 gene was being expressed in Rockcress. Rockcress is a simple plant that scientists love to use because it’s so easy to work with.
The scientists knowing that the GFP protein would produce a telltale sign could then insert the GFP gene between the promoter and the CesA01 gene itself to determine where the CesA01 gene was produced. When they did so they discovered the CesA01 was one of many genes that produced proteins which in turn produced cellulose in the cell walls of plants.
Now how did they insert the gene? There’s one accessible technique used for this. It is called restriction digestion. Restriction digestion is a rather inexact method of cutting apart DNA mostly because it cuts any place in the DNA which is palindromic. Remember when I said that DNA was composed of A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s? Well sometimes these produce palindromes which are read the same way forward or backwards i.e GATATC you might think that that’s not a palindrome but for DNA it is because DNA is two sided. Thus G’s always partner with C’s and A’s always with T’s. This means GATATC on one strand is read as CTATAG on the other.
Restriction digestion uses thousands of different enzymes that we’ve shamelessly stolen from bacteria to cut these sequences allowing us to attach whatever we want almost where-ever we want. All we need is the sequence of what we’re attaching and the sequence of where we’re attaching it. Now this is the part you can’t figure out in your kitchen. Genetic analysis would take eon’s in your kitchen. However fortunately there’s an online genetic library!
That’s right, every gene ever discovered has been published as a sort of genetic dictionary. Using this genetic dictionary you can figure out which gene you want (for example the gene in the hair of rabbits). Now that you know what gene you want you simply need to cut the DNA and implant it back into the cell and hope that it takes. Now there’s no guarantee that it will. Especially without more advanced genetic testing, but when it does we jump for joy. The same technique has been used to create glow in the dark fish. A real laboratory has no need however of performing this on a trial basis, more advanced techniques allow geneticists to know with relative certainty where and how to insert a gene and whether or not that gene has successfully done so. The requirement of doing this is something that regulation demands of anyone attempting to produce this in a commercial format just in case.
Now that all seems fine and dandy. How do you do this stuff in your kitchen?
Well first off you need some basic lab equipment. This can be purchased at your local hardware store, model shop or electronics dealer. My favorite way to obtain this stuff is fry’s electronics. They have awesome science kits that give all of the basic tools you need. Unfortunately the day in age where we produce the DNA and proteins and enzymes ourselves isn’t here yet. On the other hand there already exists companies which will do that for us!
Once you have some basic lab equipment like test tubes, slides, microscopes and capillary tubes (somewhere between $20 and $200 depending on the quality you want) you can take a hapless animal embryo and stuff it full of altered DNA. There’s several ways to make sure this sticks, you can use ligase enzymes (which repair natural breaks in DNA and are fooled into ‘repairing’ the synthetic DNA) you can use heat treatment, you can use electricity or a variety of other methodologies. Personally I use a model train transformer hooked to some wires.
However at the end of the day the biggest difficulty is trying to get that animal to actually grow up into a semi normal healthy adult. This is probably out of the reach of most people. Don't give up hope yet, animals are not the only thing we can experiment on. Besides it's probably unethical to do so anyways.
What’s our next option? Well the simplest organisms to alter are bacteria. This is because bacteria use a form of DNA called a plasmid. A plasmid is essentially a very long circular loop of DNA. Bacteria don’t necessarily care where the plasmid comes from, put it in it and if it doesn’t have restriction enzymes to cut it apart it will start to produce whatever that plasmid tells it to. Additionally it will replicate the plasmid when it replicates and it can even pass the plasmid on to unrelated bacteria. Much easier!
Step 1, get some bacteria, I personally would suggest Lactobacillius Acidophillus. You’re most familiar with this bacteria as the creature responsible for making the yogurt most of us know and love. Be sure the yogurt is of the live kind and not the already dead bacteria. Better yet, purchase the bacteria directly which are often sold for do-it-yourselfers to make their own homemade yogurt.
Step 2, buy GFP protein plasmid (not to be confused with linear GFP genes) online. You can purchase thousands of plasmid copies for a few bucks online. The more copies, the easier it is to get inside a bacteria. To put this in context, 12 grams of carbon (coal) has 6 with 22 or so zeroes after it molecules of carbon. 1000 molecules really is almost nothing but it only takes 1 to get into a bacteria.
Step 3, trigger uptake of the plasmids by the bacteria. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Heat treatment stretches the cell walls causing gaps in them to open where material from outside will flow inside due to osmosis. Electrical treatment does essentially the same thing as heat treatment. Adding a tiny bit of soap to the mixture can work. Heck there’s even a chance that the bacteria will take in the plasmid on their own with no help needed.
Step 4, grow your bacteria. This shouldn’t be too hard. If nothing grows you might have been a bit too extreme with your attempts to force the plasmids into the bacteria.
Step 5, check to see if the bacteria glow. You’ll need a lot for this which is why you need to let them grow before you can verify if the experiment worked. If it didn’t rinse, wash and repeat. If it did then hooray you’re a geneticist!
Plants are quite simple as well. Much like bacteria plants aren’t very choosy about where their DNA comes from. For example, you and I each have two copies of every gene in our body. One from our mom and one from our dad. The common strawberry has as many as sixteen. This means you can mess with the DNA a ton before you end up killing the plant itself because odds are it has other copies of the DNA to back up the original. On the other hand this means that it’s significantly easier to genetically engineer a plant compared to an animal.
Luckily instead of trying to figure out how to do this ourselves we can recruit bacteria that’ve already figured it out. The agrobacterium is a bacteria which infects a host plant and triggers that plant to create a sugary protected tumor for the bacteria to grow in. If you’ve ever seen an oak tree you’ve probably seen examples of this natural genetic engineering. More to the point it can affect just about any plant. Yes, this means whether the plant is genetically modified by people or not a great deal is genetically modified by bacteria. Bacteria are far less exact than we are about genetic engineering but who cares I want to make a glowing vegetable!
Make sure to purchase agrobacteria with no plasmids already present otherwise they’ll make their normal sugary tumors instead of glowing plants. Next we’ve got agrobacteria with GFP plasmids in them. Then all we need to do is expose them to a desired plant. Once the plant has been exposed give it some time to grow and test it. If it works duplicate it by taking cuttings.
One thing to caution however is that much like bacteria plants are capable of transferring genetics across species and to non-altered plants via their spores. What this means is that were some enterprising scientist to create glow in the dark grass, they could presumably create an entire ecosystem of glow in the dark plants entirely by ‘accident’.
Now I’m not encouraging any of you to do this but I do think it would be really, really awesome and you would be really cool if you did do it. Seriously, don’t do it. If you happen to accidentally cause this do take pictures though!
The whole point of this was to reveal how easy it was to genetically engineer. Now geneticists who work commercially today use much more varied and specific tools. For example they might create specific markers which in turn allow homologous genetic recombination to take place only at a specific genetic sequence. Thus they are allowed to then sell these plants to us because they can prove that there’s only one place this gene was inserted and it hasn’t invariably created a random poisonous mutant or otherwise produced something dangerous. There really isn’t any point in fearing genetic manipulation. For better or for worse it’s here to stay and it’s already cheap enough for most people to do at home. In another decade making designer genes at home will be entirely possible.
Accept it. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about genetically modified. The only danger is rejecting something because you don’t know enough about it.
Last edited by Elfdude; January 10, 2015 at 06:05 PM.
I would like to add that there are cases where genetically modified organisms have an important role in everyday lives. The example I am going to use and try to quickly explain involves human insulin, but similar methods are also used to make rice with beta-carotene - a precursor to vitamin A, insect-resistant crops, and control Hepatitis B infections, just as a few examples used for very practical purposes.
Type 1 diabetes is basically when the human body cannot make enough insulin. That’s bad because insulin is an important protein that regulates the metabolism of carbohydrates and fats. Proteins are made in a cell by splitting DNA, copying the important section, reconnecting the DNA, sending the non-essential copy of the DNA (the mRNA) to the ribosome, which translates the mRNA to a series of matching amino acids, and the amino acids fold into a 3D shape. (I’m sure elfdude has written a less condensed summary somewhere, maybe even in this thread.) For insulin, two chains of amino acids combine.
Historically, people with type 1 diabetes are supplied with the insulin boost from animals, cadavers, or both. Now we can use bacteria with human DNA coding for insulin in its plasmids, which are circular loops of DNA in bacteria that can replicate without involving chromosomal DNA. Anyone who knows better, feel free to correct me, but here’s how it works to my knowledge:
1. Scientists synthesize the strings of amino acids which fold into insulin by chemically linking the DNA sequences.
2. Plasmids of the bacteria E. coli are split with sticky ends – this refers to leaving one side of the DNA intact so new DNA can attach to it – with restriction enzymes. (This is the beginning of the Gibson assembly, which is completed in the next step.)
3. Introduce the new DNA to the split in the plasmid, which the cell then attaches with hydrogen bonds because the sticky end. The cell DNA would then connect the nucleotides.
4. The E. coli now has a strand of DNA for human insulin that it uses to make the peptide hormone. The bacterium can eventually be harvested, and the insulin administered to diabetics.
Other methods can be used, as well as different host organisms. But the general idea is used widespread. Genetically modified organisms are helping millions of people with type 1 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes can cause fatal diabetic ketoacidosis (when the body burns fatty acids due to a shortage of insulin) or even have their own immune system attack a human enzyme.
Golden rice can help even more people, since vitamin A deficiency causes the death or permanent blindness to several million people every year. It has faced opposition with certain environmental and anti-globalization circles as well as people against the use of genetically modified organisms. Additionally, all of the three most common uses to diagnose HIV use genetically modified organisms, and we control Hepatitis B infections, which cause the deaths of three-quarters of a million people a year, with them as well.
Consider all these lives we can save using this scientific procedure. The number is so big we cannot really imagine it as anything but a statistic instead of each one as a human being. There need to be very strong arguments I am totally ignorant of in order for anti-genetically modified organism proponents to significantly sway my opinion. Organisms naturally modify themselves through evolution anyway, so it’s just a matter of human “tampering”.
Also, wow, is this an old thread. I’m not too proud of me-from-the-past here; if I met him I probably wouldn’t have liked him very much.
Last edited by pacifism; January 11, 2015 at 05:42 PM. Reason: grammar
Just some minor errors IIRC, looks good on you though, nice to see someone else figuring out the value of science.
Sticky ends means the two stranded DNA has one end which is longer than the other, this (using restriction digestion) produces a palindromic sequence which new DNA can be inserted into. The DNA is then sealed with DNA Polymerase which then links the new pieces together.
Hydrogen bonds help orient the pieces, for the piece to actually become a part of the plasmid you need to establish a phosodiester bond along the phosphate backbone of the DNA.
Yup. Some trial and error is required to place it in the right spot and not ruin the bacteria's own genome.
Last edited by Elfdude; January 11, 2015 at 01:45 PM.
I've had a friend say to me "if we evolved from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?". I was genuinely gobsmacked, he's a man with two science degrees and a fantastic working knowledge of the human body.
Now I've seen the meme with the redneck dog saying "If I'm evolved from wolves, how come there are still wolves?" so I'll know what to say next time.
The lovely thing about the theory of evolution is its subject to rigorous testing. Every time someone comes up with a new example or challenge they get to have a crack at the theory and if they satisfy the scientific method they get a prize paid for with dynamite. So cool.
Jatte lambastes Calico Rat
One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.
-Neil deGrasse Tyson
Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.