Texas comes into the 21 century

No. It didn't contain information that I think that it should have, and wasted an hour of my time while I tacked on a through-hole compensation capacitor to a tricky surface mount circuit that I had designed straight onto a printed circuit board.

The board worked first time in every other respect, which was a definite tour de force, of which I'm inordinately proud, so the tacked- on compensation capacitor was particularly irritating.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

If you'd stopped to read the rest of the paragraph, you'd have realised that the distribution of Alu elements has to look random to peole who know a lot more about the human genenome than I do (and pretty close to infinitely more than you do.

Since you don't edit your posts to correct the indenting around your insertions, this is less than obvious in what you have posted.

Not true - you've just proved that you can't be bothered to follow a reasoned argument.

So you can't imagine any kind of propellor-like intermediate structure. Bacteria have propellor-like flagela because the chunks of protein that rotate within the socket that drive them don't need access to the bacterium's circulatory system (and it does have one). Fish would have had to evolve a bony or at least cartilaginous propellor, perhaps with an elliptical central hole, that was persuaded to rotate around some kind of muscular/cartilagenous shaft which could distort itself into a a succession of elliptical shapes to cause the propellor to rotate.

So. I've managed to imagine a propellor for a fish. It would wear out after a while, so the fish would have be growing a new ones to replace it all the time, in the same way that sharks grow new teeth.

See if you can imagine a series of intermediate structure that would be useful for some other job or jobs - maybe a rotating ring of teeth that worked like a circular saw - and work out a plausible evolutionary sequence.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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It does sound as if he did discover epigentic inheritance, and that his toads were tampered with.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Sure. But you are talking about using introspection to control for goodness, and it is an exceedingly flawed tool. As you should have been able to work out form the not-all-that-infrequent examples of uncharitable and intolerant behaviour by card-carrying Christians and Muslims.

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That argument is vitiated by the way apes can detect - and complain about - unfair patterns of reward and distribution.

The socio-biological explanation of "goodness" involves the necessity to detect and punish free-loaders in a cooperating group of individuals. Most of the anthropoid apes live in tribes of more or less closely related individuals - humans seem to have evolved rather more refined mechanisms for doing this than the other anthropoid apes and the group that gave rise to us as a species seems to have been optimised for a rather large tribe of 150-odd individuals.

Once we had language and learnable culture, we were able to refine these mechanisms a lot faster, and have now got them to the point where the cooperating groups number in the hundreds of millions.

We still have free-loaders - the US military-industrial complex is a particularly flagrant example - and the mechanisms that we use to detect free-loaders aren't as good as they might be, so that some posters here think that anybody who gets unemployment benefit is a free-loading welfare queen.

Using the existence of feelings about goodness to justify theism is applying William Paley's "divine watchmaker" argument to yet another evolved faculty, and really isn't persuasive.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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It's not such a big step to go from killing your neighbours so you can grow good crops on their land to burning babies so that you'll have good crops on your land, or sending American troops to die in Irak in order to secure Iraki oil for your cars.

Dead is dead, and the people killed are just as dead if they've been killed in a "just war" or turned into some more obvious form of human sacrifice.

In the eye of the believer. Non-believers tend to see self-justify intellectual contortions.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Scrapie in sheep has been known almost forever. It was the fact that it seemed to cause no visible harm to humans that led to the cavalier attitude to dealing with BSE and caused so much trouble in the UK.

CJD was certainly noted in the west, it is unclear whether this particular bovine infection was sporadically occurring.

What is certain was that once they stopped properly rendering the animal carcasses for feed supplements to save money the feedback loop allowed the novel infectious agent to multiply uncontrollably.

Regards, Martin Brown

Quite a lot of them are though. And they provide a means to check for genetic drift with time where genetic material is available to be sequenced. Some of the cut & paste sequences may not be quite as blameless as Bill implies but the ones we see in populations are mostly at worst neutral and do not prevent further reproduction. The ones that are better than average reproduce more successfully.

It is only very recently that we have developed targeted gene therapy to insert genetic sequences with known function into the right place.

Actually that is a very double edged sword. The cells of the human body still contain enough primaeval survive at all costs mechanisms to make cancer a real problem. When genetic damage arises that switches off some of the more complex cooperative differentiated organs mechanisms the cells revert to their backup survive at all costs programming. This is of course extremely deleterious to the host organism.

What we do have in genetic diversity is different susceptibilities to various diseases and environmental chemical hazards.

There are a whole family of repair mechanisms keeping our DNA correct in what is quite a challenging environment cells need oxygen to survive, but oxidation damage to DNA is potentially harmful. You might find this page on DNA repair interesting:

You seem to have the idea that the DNA can plan. It doesn't. It merely widens the range of patterns in each successive generation and once full sexual reproduction came along it could cut and paste selective traits from two organisms to generate far more diverse offspring.

Aphids have the ability to switch on and off their sexual mode according to the amount of stress they are under. Virgin birth of clones when times are good and sexual reproduction for maximum diversity when times are bad and to survive the winter.

You seem to think that anything you imagine is necessarily correct.

Regards, Martin Brown

Thanks for the links, Bill.

I was thinking about this last night. (Rather than calculating the thermal time constant of a new probe idea.) Once you have some form of information flow from the environment to the DNA it seems like life would use it! To ignore the information while your neighbor is using it will consign you to the waste bin of history.

I thought this was exactly what John L was talking about. Some environmental clue causes the organism to 'reactivate' some older =91pathway=92 from its genetic history. (Mind you I only have a =91popular science=92 knowledge of what=92s current in biology these days.)

George H.

youth.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kammerer

Right. Genetics has always been plagued by dogma, much of it declared before DNA was even discovered.

I agree with you: if an organism can use a machanism to get advantage over competitors, and that mechanism isn't flat physically-impossible, it will probably evolve and use it. And researchers equipped with a sufficient load of establishment dogma will refuse to see it.

It's obvious that nobody knows much about genetics or cellular machinery. If we did, we'd have cures for cancer, AIDS, the common cold, autism, fatheadedness, unemployment, all sorts of terrible things.

So, keep an open mind about what's possible, and keep believing in evolution.

John

Since survival of populations trumps survival of individuals, we are probably optimized to balance cancer against adaptability.

You can't know that; that's dogma. A cell is an astoundingly complex computing machine. It could easily have switched-off genetic sequences ready to handle attack, sense threats, and selectively (for all practical purposes intelligently) enable the right stored defense, without waiting 2000 generations for random selection and mutation to save its ass. Any creature that did this would have a huge evolutionary advantage.

I think that actually happens.

It merely

You seem to think that anything you disapprove of is impossible.

I think that anything that's not impossible, and confers advantages on its host, is likely to evolve. And that dogma won't prevent it.

John

Did you see the final HP movie? I haven't yet, but I did read the book, so I know about what happens.

John

I didn't say I can't imagine it. I said that fish don't have it.

John

I'd probably be a really bad harp player.

John

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ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kammerer

Hmm, I think the biologist have come a long way in the past several decades. They've got lots more tools now. But it's just a super- complicated problem.

I'm not too worried about the 'old' dogma. Science has been dealing with that problem for 100's of years. (You wait a generation and all the old dogs die.) And the old dogma is never without some merit. It's like the first approximation to solving a problem....

I sort of wish I'd kept up with advances in biology. In high school and for the first few years of college I thought I'd be a biology major.

George H.

youth.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kammerer

We're making progress, but sort of like a shade-tree mechanic: replace things and see if it fixes things. A lot of drugs are developed by shotgun techniques, namely test thousands of likely and unlikely candidates to see what works.

Some day we'll really understand this stuff, and people will live a thousand years.

John

My biggest disappointment was in #1 on that 1500-year old giant magical medieval chess set, where they climb onto the pieces, and start calling out moves in 1980 CP/M terminology.

Cheers! Rich

As usual, you have snipped the preceding text that demonstrates that you are ducking the question.

You claim that I lack imagination because I can't see a way that evolution might have created the kind of product documentation and change control system that your version of intelligent design requires.

I point out that evolution has failed to deliver at least one conceivable - comparably useful - structure, and ask you to think about about the constraints imposed by the evolutionary requirement that each intermediate stage between what you've got and what you want has to be functional and competitive with it's immediate predecessors.

You fail to rise to the challenge, claiming that you "suppose fish don't (have propellors) because they have better ways to get around" without even finding some suppport for the - implausible - proposition that a wagging vertical tail fin is a better way of converting energy into water movement that a propellor.

You need to demonstrate that you can imagine a sequence of intermediate states that might get us from the genetic machinery we know we have got to the genetic machinery that you think (based on no supporting evidence) we might have, and you've just made it perfectly obvious that you don't know enough to know where to start.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kammerer

The point about epigenetic inheritance is that it doesn't change the message in the DNA, only the way the next generation reacts to that message. Methylation is reversible.

You could obviously cook up a scheme for using it to send mesages to subsequent generations, but you would have to throw in a lot of error detection and correction to keep it working in the genetic environment where every base pair can be subject to a single nuclear polymorphism, and 300 base-pair chunks keep on getting copied out of the genome and the copy pasted back in at some random point somewhere else in the genome.

The fact is that our genetic engineering does seem to be the way that evolution has come up with to do that particular job - a rather convoluted way, but evolution doesn't seem to value elegance in design.

ular

And John doesn't even have that. One of the - many - problems with this idea is that any unused information in the genome gets degraded over time. If you don't use it - which is to say if you don't rely on the genetically encoded data to stay alive and reproduce - the data gets degraded (bit rot).

The classic example are the olfactory genes in primates. We've got much the same set of genes as the mouse, but while these genes are highly conserved in the mouse and similar animals that rely heavily on their noses, they aren't conserved in primates, and about half of the versions of the genes that we share with the other primates have degraded to the point where they clearly don't work.

This makes John's scheme - with its implicit version control and documentation of successive modification - hilariously implausible.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I have to snip your long-winded, off-topic, pompous posts. I'm certainly not going to read all of them.

You lack imagination because you post second-hand off-topic dogma, and no original circuits. This is an electronic ***design*** group.

Bacteria already have rotary motor propulsion systems. If they can do it, fish can do it. If fish don't, it's probably because it doesn't work very well for them.

I can't imagine the intermediate states the bacteria went through to evolve spinning flagellum. Can you?

All that useful-intermediate stuff is, again, classic dogma.

John