Global Warming: Junk Mathematics

I fear the concept of natural selection is a bit too complicated for some.

Did you ever wonder, gunga why certain families or sub-families of homo sapiens disappeared and other (evolved) families are found with similarities to the earlier extinct family, but with signficant differences?

What could have contributed to the demise of the earlier family?

I fear the concept of natural selection is a bit too complicated for some.

Did you ever wonder, gunga why certain families or sub-families of homo sapiens disappeared and other (evolved) families are found with similarities to the earlier extinct family, but with signficant differences?

What could have contributed to the demise of the earlier family?

That amounts to the fallicy of interpreting all evidence for change as evidence of EVOLUTIONARY change. As I've mentioned, there are other ways in which change can occur, such as genetic engineering and re-engineering and, in fact, there is evidence strongly suggesting such a history of change in our own genome as I've noted (the thing about Henry Gee's article on about page 21 of this thread).

I've mentioned the terms genetic engineering and re-engineering. What evidence for that sort of thing might there be, you ask?? Turns out, there actually is some:


Henry Gee
Monday February 12, 2001
The Guardian

The potentially-poisonous Japanese fugu fish has achieved notoriety, at least among scientists who haven't eaten any, because it has a genome that can be best described as "concise". There is no "junk" DNA, no waste, no nonsense. You get exactly what it says on the tin. This makes its genome very easy to deal with in the laboratory: it is close
to being the perfect genetic instruction set. Take all the genes you need to make an animal and no more, stir, and you'd get fugu. Now, most people would hardly rate the fugu fish as the acme of creation. If it were, it would be eating us, and not the other way round. But here is
a paradox. The human genome probably does not contain significantly more genes than the fugu fish. What sets it apart is - and there is no more succinct way to put this - rubbish.

The human genome is more than 95% rubbish. Fewer than 5% of the 3.2bn As, Cs, Gs and Ts that make up the human genome are actually found in genes. It is more litter-strewn than any genome completely sequenced so far. It is believed to contain just under 31,780 genes, only about half as many again as found in the simple roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (19,099 genes): yet in terms of bulk DNA content, the human genome is almost 30 times the size.A lot is just rubbish, plain and simple. But at least half the genome is
rubbish of a special kind - transposable elements. These are small segments of DNA that show signs of having once been the genomes of independent entities. Although rather small, they often contain sequences that signal cellular machinery to transcribe them (that is, to switch them on). They may also contain genetic instructions for enzymes whose function is to make copies and insert the copies elsewhere in the genome. These transposable elements litter the human genome in their hundreds of thousands. Many contain genes for an enzyme called reverse transcriptase - essential for a transposable element to integrate itself into the host DNA.

The chilling part is that reverse transcriptase is a key feature of retroviruses such as HIV-1, the human immunodeficiency virus. Much of the genome itself - at least half its bulk - may have consisted of DNA that started out, perhaps millions of years ago, as independent viruses or
virus-like entities. To make matters worse, hundreds of genes, containing instructions for at least 223 proteins, seem to have been imported directly from bacteria. Some are responsible for features of human metabolism otherwise hard to explain away as quirks of evolution - such as our ability to metabolise psychotropic drugs. Thus, monoamine oxidase is involved in metabolising alcohol.

If the import of bacterial genes for novel purposes (such as drug resistance) sounds disturbing and familiar, it should - this is precisely the thrust of much research into the genetic modification of organisms in agriculture or biotechnology.

So natural-born human beings are, indeed, genetically modified. Self-respecting eco-warriors should never let their children marry a human being, in case the population at large gets contaminated with exotic genes!One of the most common transposable elements in the human genome is called
Alu - the genome is riddled with it. What the draft genome now shows quite clearly is that copies of Alu tend to cluster where there are genes. The density of genes in the genome varies, and where there are more genes, there are more copies of Alu. Nobody knows why, yet it is consistent with the idea that Alu has a positive benefit for genomes.
To be extremely speculative, it could be that a host of very similar looking Alu sequences in gene-rich regions could facilitate the kind of gene-shuffling that peps up natural genetic variation, and with that, evolution. This ties in with the fact that human genes are, more than most,
fragmented into a series of many exons, separated by small sections of rubbish called introns - rather like segments of a TV programme being punctuated by commercials.

The gene for the protein titin, for example, is divided into a record-breaking 178 exons, all of which must be patched together by the gene-reading machinery before the finished protein can be assembled. This fragmentation allows for alternative versions of proteins to be built from
the same information, by shuffling exons around. Genomes with less fragmented genes may have a similar number of overall genes - but a smaller palette of ways to use this information. Transposable elements might have
helped unlock the potential in the human genome, and could even have contributed to the fragmentation of genes in the first place (some introns are transposable elements by another name). This, at root, may explain why human beings are far more complex than roundworms or fruit flies. If it were not for trashy transposable elements
such as Alu, it might have been more difficult to shuffle genes and parts of genes, creating alternative ways of reading the "same" genes. It is true that the human genome is mostly rubbish, but it explains what we are, and
why we are who we are, and not lying on the slab in a sushi bar.

• Deep Time by Henry Gee will be published shortly in paperback by Fourth Estate. He is a senior editor of Nature.

Again, natural selection is an agency of stasis not change, and a destructive process rather than a constructive one. You could no more build a new species with natural selection than you could build a skyscraper with a wrecking ball.

The theory of evolution amounts to a claim that new species arise via mutations, and that natural selection then weeds out the "unfit" from the new species which arise, leaving only the superior ones.

As to human and hominid prehistory, with the neanderthal having been positively ruled out as a human ancestor by recent DNA studies Recent? This is nothing new, Neandertals were simply a dead end branch of the same evolutionary tree as humans.and with all other hominids significantly further removed from modern man than the neanderthal, there is now arguably nothing which modern man could be descended from. Sure there is, do a google search and see what you come up with. Oh, and make sure to look for publishments by scientists who get aproved for funding, "real" scientists have no clue what they are talking about. In other words what we have is a chain which is cleanly broken. In fact DNA tests have even been done on the one or two neanderthal skeletons which some had thought to be possible intermediates and they turned out to be just more neanderthals.

It not known whether modern humans fully replaced the Neanderthals or simply swamped them genetically, with greater numbers.
I don't know, if this ever will be known - we can't asked them

do you have a source for that gunga?

And again I wonder where you draw the line between "microevolution" and "macroevolution". Would you consider something like a cat evolving innto something like a tiger micro or macro? how about something like a rat evolving innto something like a vombat? Something like a sheep evolving into something like a cow?

Can you come up with any mechanisms that would prevent "macroevolution" other than an opinion that natural selection would not favor intermediary species?

Edited to remove flawed link

You never replied to this snake

Einherjar wrote:

And again I wonder where you draw the line between "microevolution" and "macroevolution". Would you consider something like a cat evolving innto something like a tiger micro or macro? how about something like a rat evolving innto something like a vombat? Something like a sheep evolving into something like a cow?

Can you come up with any mechanisms that would prevent "macroevolution" other than an opinion that natural selection would not favor intermediary species?

Edited to remove flawed link

It is clear from the article that the wiew held by the scientific comunity in general is that humans and neanderthal probably did not interbreed, and that if they did this was incredibly rare. What i remember reading is that it is likely that any interbreeding between the two species would most likely result in sterile offspring.

You might want to go back and read a few of those quotes I provided a while back. What several of those scholars are saying is that, basically, enough fossils have been found by now that if there were any intermediate fossils, we'd have found them and not just a few of them.

Darwin's theory as I understand it demands that the vast bulk of all fossils should be intermediates and there just aren't any.

How did you define intermediates again?

"...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when
they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line,
there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight
argument."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London
As quoted by: L. D. Sunderland
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 89

Human evolution

Lots of links

yet another link

That should answer your question. (the first link pretty much covers it unless you want to go innto detail)