Evolution? How?

Doktor S wrote:

That whole reply was one big strawman, so I'll not address it point by point.
I've never asserted 'my beliefs' are the correct ones, or even that there are correct beliefs.
It is you that believes in an immutable manual for human existence not I.

Yes I am smarter than most, what of it? Yes, it is plain to me that many have poor reasoning skills and are very gullible. Do you dispute this?
Since you answered no to both questions, surely you don't.
What we have is reason and logic. we can either work with them or against them, but only one way leads to true conclusions.

The difference is that your use of 'reason' and 'logic' has led you to the conclusion that you are god.

I think most would agree that conclusion is not reasonable or logical, so any other use of the terms by you is extremely suspect.

real life wrote:

Doktor S wrote:

That whole reply was one big strawman, so I'll not address it point by point.
I've never asserted 'my beliefs' are the correct ones, or even that there are correct beliefs.
It is you that believes in an immutable manual for human existence not I.

Yes I am smarter than most, what of it? Yes, it is plain to me that many have poor reasoning skills and are very gullible. Do you dispute this?
Since you answered no to both questions, surely you don't.
What we have is reason and logic. we can either work with them or against them, but only one way leads to true conclusions.

The difference is that your use of 'reason' and 'logic' has led you to the conclusion that you are god.

I think most would agree that conclusion is not reasonable or logical, so any other use of the terms by you is extremely suspect.

That you are incapable of understanding/enjoy purposefully misrepresenting my stance on autotheism is neither here nor there.This is an extremely weak dodge, as it has absolutely nothing to do with the argument presented.
Weak sauce, real life, as usual.

Doktor S wrote:

real life wrote:

Doktor S wrote:

That whole reply was one big strawman, so I'll not address it point by point.
I've never asserted 'my beliefs' are the correct ones, or even that there are correct beliefs.
It is you that believes in an immutable manual for human existence not I.

Yes I am smarter than most, what of it? Yes, it is plain to me that many have poor reasoning skills and are very gullible. Do you dispute this?
Since you answered no to both questions, surely you don't.
What we have is reason and logic. we can either work with them or against them, but only one way leads to true conclusions.

The difference is that your use of 'reason' and 'logic' has led you to the conclusion that you are god.

I think most would agree that conclusion is not reasonable or logical, so any other use of the terms by you is extremely suspect.

That you are incapable of understanding/enjoy purposefully misrepresenting my stance on autotheism is neither here nor there.This is an extremely weak dodge, as it has absolutely nothing to do with the argument presented.
Weak sauce, real life, as usual.

I misrepresent? Let's see.....

Do you, or do you not, refer to yourself as god?

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1732651&highlight=autotheism#1732651

Do you, or do you not, make up your own definition for god (yourself) as distinct from any standard definition? Yes, you do.

Communication is usually best when standards of language, including definitions, are observed.

If you tell me that you would like to sell me a 'hammer' and when you finally show the hammer it turns out to be a kumquat, then something vital is distorted in communication.

When you use the word 'god' in a novel way to describe yourself, then your purposeful twisting of language likewise does violence to communication.

You fit no definition of 'god' except the definition that you made up!

Yet you consider yourself 'logical' and skilled in 'reason'.

It's like a child who insists on being called 'little Prince'. It's laughable. You refer to yourself as 'god' , yet supposedly it is I who 'misrepresent' !!

For the same reason, any other communication from you must be considered equally suspect, because who knows what novel definition you may have assigned to other words that are otherwise commonly understood?

farmerman wrote:

My days home ended today . You boys have been busy stoning each other. Cant we just get along and agree to disagree?

RL, if youd go back, I dont think that an issue of "interbreeding " was an issue . The genetic variation in the foundation species of polar bears was in the Brown bear, a big grizzly. Having end members of a species exist doesnt negate evolution, it actually supports it. Here was a bear , a single bear whose genetic makeup and some of its features were both polar and grizzly. Was there a population of similar hybrids around? or was it, as was suspected a genetic remnant?

Fossils of polar bears do exist, enough , so that the development of the Roman features of the polar bears snout, its paws, its ears, its dentition are all catalogues in he fossil record(just not a lot of them)
Now that the ice is melting, Ive posited that there may be an impending extinction for polar bears unless we can keep the "rootstock" viable in grizzlies or brownies.

I think the discovery of this fella was neat, a "living intermediate"

I didn't see in the article any reference to a 'genetic remnant'. Did I read it too quickly?

Are you saying you do not think the bear was a result of interbreeding of species, but a 'throwback' of sorts?

And we had also had this previously from Pauligirl

Quote:

And it's an on-going process...

http://www.search.com/reference/bear
Occasionally, barren-ground grizzlies are found hunting seals on the sea ice north of the Canadian mainland. The barren-ground grizzlies appear to be brown bear/ polar bear crosses, and could represent an intergrade form...........

Photo in the News: Polar Bear-Grizzly Hybrid Discovered

DNA analysis has confirmed that a bear shot in the Canadian Arctic last month is a half-polar bear, half-grizzly hybrid. While the two bear species have interbred in zoos, this is the first evidence of a wild polar bear-grizzly offspring.

Jim Martell ........, a 65-year-old hunter from Idaho, shot the bear April 16 on the southern tip of Banks Island .........., the CanWest News Service reports.

Wildlife officials seized the bear after noticing its white fur was interspersed with brown patches. It also had long claws, a concave facial profile, and a humped back, which are characteristic of a grizzly.

Now the genetic tests have confirmed that the hybrid's father was a grizzly and its mother was a polar bear.

"I don't think anyone expected it to actually happen in the wild," said Ian Stirling, a polar bear expert with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Edmonton.

Polar bears and grizzlies require an extended mating ritual to reproduce, Stirling said. Both live by themselves in large, open habitats.

To prevent wasting their eggs, females ovulate only after spending several days with a male, Stirling explained. "Then they mate several times over several days."

In other words, the mating between the polar bear and grizzly was more than a chance encounter. "That's what makes it quite interesting," he added.

Stirling says the hybrid has no official name, though locals have taken to calling it a "pizzly" and a "grolar bear."

The reason I ask is that it relates to our earlier discussion that many so-called 'transitional' or 'intermediate' fossils could simply be examples of interbreeding between two existing species and not necessarily any evidence of an evolutionary transition at all.

DNA Study Maps Human-Chimp Split By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer
2 hours, 57 minutes ago

Humans and chimps diverged from a single ancestral population through a complex process that took 4 million years, according to a new study comparing DNA from the two species.

By analyzing about 800 times more DNA than previous studies of the human-chimp split, researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard were able to learn not just when, but a little bit about how the sister species arose.

"For the first time we're able to see the details written out in the DNA," said Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute. "What they tell us at the least is that the human-chimp speciation was very unusual."

The researchers hypothesize that an ancestral ape species split into two isolated populations about 10 million years ago, then got back together after a few thousand millennia. At that time the two groups, though somewhat genetically different, would have mated to form a third, hybrid population. That population could have interbred with one or both of its parent populations. Then, at some point after 6.3 million years ago, two distinct lines arose.

Some experts in human evolution are skeptical of that precise scenario, but nevertheless impressed with the study.

"It's a totally cool and extremely clever analysis," said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard. "My problem is imagining what it would be like to have a bipedal hominid and a chimpanzee viewing each other as appropriate mates, not to put it too crudely."

Past studies that compared human and chimp DNA could only offer a point estimate of how long ago the two species split by averaging the amount of divergence in their genes. Generally, those studies come up with a figure of about 7 million years ago.

But since the completion of the chimpanzee genome project in September it is possible to look at how specific sections of the genetic code have evolved. The Broad Institute study, which will be published in a future issue of the journal Nature, is one of the first to do that.

"There are a lot of big surprises here," Lander said.

For one thing, the new data suggest the human-chimp split was much closer to the present than the 7 million year date that fossils and previous studies indicate ?- certainly no earlier than 6.3 million years ago, and more likely in the neighborhood of 5.4 million.

The data also show that the human-chimp split probably took millions of years. That's because in some parts of the DNA sequence the genetic difference between humans and chimps is so large that those genes must have been isolated from each other nearly 10 million years ago. But in other places the human and chimp lines are so close that they appear to have still been swapping genetic material at least until 6.3 million years ago.

One of those areas is the X-chromosome, which is intriguing.

"The genes that are a barrier to speciation tend to be on the X-chromosome," said David Reich, the main author of the study.

May 17, 2006
Grandma Manimal
Posted by Carl Zimmer

Nothing gets the blood boiling like a manimal. For many people, the idea of breaching the human species barrier--to mingle our biology with that of an animal--seems like a supreme affront to the moral order. In his January state of the union address, President Bush called for a ban on "creating human-animal hybrids."

These so-called chimeras, according to their opponents, devalue humanity by breaching our species barrier. "Human life is a gift from our creator, and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale," Bush declared. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas expanded on this sentiment in his Human Chimera Prohibition Bill of 2005. Chimeras, according to the bill, "blur the lines between human and animal." They must be banned because "respect for human dignity and the integrity of the human species may be threatened by chimeras."

Some opponents cite the Bible as proof that chimeras are wrong--in particular, I Corinthians 15:39: "All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." Others rely on their own sense of disgust as a reliable guide to the wrongness of chimeras. "When we start to blend the edges of things, we're uneasy," explains Grant Hurlburt, a psychiatrist and member of the President's Council on Bioethics. "That's why chimeric creatures are monsters in mythology in the first place."

So let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that a nefarious plot to create human-ape hybrids was discovered in some distant country. Genetic studies revealed at some point in the past, the DNA of that nation's citizens had been mixed with the DNA from a separate species of ape. The species barrier had been breached, and the contamination had been carried down from generation to generation. Even today a significant amount of DNA in people of that nation could be traced to that hybridization. Horror and condemnation would arise at the discovery that chimeras had been created.

But of course, this is all hypothetical, right?

Perhaps not.

Scientists know a fair amount about how species split apart--including the genetic changes that occur during the split. An old species splits into new ones when one of its populations becomes isolated. The individuals in a population begin to interbreed more with one another than with the rest of the species. When mutations emerge in that population, they don't spread to the rest of the species.

Over time, the population becomes more and more genetically distinct from other members of the species. They may begin to look different, and they may begin to specialize in different ways of getting food. They may still be able to interbreed with other members of their species, at least in theory. But barriers may emerge. A population of plants may begin to flower at a different time of year, for example. Fish may prefer to mate with fish that look more like themselves.

If the population has some contact with the rest of its species, a few hybrids may be produced in each generation. In some cases, they more form a healthy hybrid zone. In other cases, the hybrids may not thrive as well as their parents. Nevertheless, through this interbreeding, genes may flow back and forth over the barrier--even as the barrier is becoming stronger. It may take thousands or millions of years for a new species to bud off completely from an old one.

Most of these insights have emerged from studies on living species--observations on the mating habits of fruit flies, measurements of genetic divergence in wolves, and the like. (See the 2004 book Speciation if you crave the full story.) It's also possible to use these insights to learn about the origin of species in the distant past. What you need is a ton of data--such as genome sequences--from living species, and fossils to provide points of comparison. And thanks to the human genome project--as well as the chimpanzee genome project, and similar efforts to sequence DNA in gorillas, orangutans and other apes--the origin of our own species has become one of the best cases to study. In tomorrow's issue of Nature, a team of scientists from the Broad Institute in Massachusetts present the biggest such study by far.

Before this study, the rough consensus among scientists was that our ancestors diverged from the ancestors of our closest relatives--chimpanzees and bonobos--at some point between five to seven million years ago. That evidence came from studies on DNA, as well as from fossils, such as the oldest hominid fossil, Sahelanthropus, which is estimated to have lived 6.5 to 7.5 million years old. Most scientists argued that the hominids made a relatively clean break from other apes, without any significant hybridizing.

But that's not what has emerged from the new study. The Broad Institute scientists lined up millions of bases of DNA in humans and chimps and measured their differences. Humans and chimpanzees both inherited each segment of DNA from a common ancestor. Over time, the copies of that ancestral segment picked up mutations. The differences between them can offer clues to how long they've been evolving along separate paths. It turns out that the ancestors for some of those segments are much older than others. The only way to make sense of these results, according to the scientists, is to conclude that hominids and the ancestors of chimpanzees were interbreeding--to some extent at least--for four million years.

It's hard to get a fix from the new evidence on exactly when our lineage split from the chimp lineage, and when the interbreeding finally stopped. But the authors do question whether Sahelanthropus and other early hominid fossils represent the start of a distinct line of hominids that remained pure up to living humans. They suggest that the two lineages did split apart, and hominids began to evolve the distinct hominid body (walking upright, perhaps). But later the two populations interbred, mixing their genes. So our genes have a younger ancestry than the fossil record of hominids.

Some of the most intriguing signs of hybridizing comes from the X chromosome, one of the sex determining chromosomes (XX is female, XY is male). The X chromosome contains segments of DNA that have the most recent common ancestry of all the DNA shared by chimps and humans. The scientists suggest that when the ancestors of chimps and humans came back in contact a few million years ago, hybrid males turned out to be infertile--a common pattern in the origin of species among many animals. Only the females remained fertile, returning to their populations to mate and spread the genes from the other species among their own. If they had sons, those males would be fertile. As a result, many old copies of genes on the X chromosomes were lost, and the X chromosomes in today's chimps and humans share a recent ancestry.

Smaller previous studies have suggested hybridization, but they've been rejected by a lot of other experts. It will be interesting to see how this one fares with the critics. I suspect it will be much harder to contest, because the sample is so vast--800 times more DNA than in previous studies. If it holds up, it raises all sorts of fascinating scientific questions. What brought the two lineages back in contact? Were they fleeing some ecological disaster? How did the two populations interact? Why didn't the two lineages collapse back into one species? Did our ancestors evolve some mating preference that turned them away for good? And how did an infusion of chimpanzee-ancestor genes alter the workings of the bodies of our ancestors?

And then there is the matter of the manimals. I'm not trying to says hominids interbreeding with proto-chimpanzees are exactly the same thing as mice with human neurons growing in their heads. Obviously there's a biological difference here, because mice are separated from us by far more evolutionary time. I would just argue that any ethical stand on chimeras has to be in harmony with the scientific evidence. And it doesn't seem as if there's much careful thought behind the call for a total ban on chimeras. Integrity is not essential to a species. It emerges gradually over time, through evolutionary change. And when a new species starts to emerge, its integrity is not a foregone conclusion. Politicians may want to dismiss hybrids between animals or between plants as irrelevant to the issue of human-animal hybrids. Humans are different, the argument goes. It's certainly true that we are different from all other animals in our cognition and other faculties. And it's right to use those differences as a starting point for deciding what the ethics of new biotechnology. But when it comes to the integrity of the human species compared to other animals, there is no difference. That fact remains that our upright hominids apparently intebred with the ancestors of chimpanzees. We are all the children of chimeras.

Here's something you guys can chew over.

Quote:

DNA Study Maps Human-Chimp Split By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer
2 hours, 57 minutes ago

The researchers hypothesize that an ancestral ape species split into two isolated populations about 10 million years ago, then got back together after a few thousand millennia. At that time the two groups, though somewhat genetically different, would have mated to form a third, hybrid population. That population could have interbred with one or both of its parent populations. Then, at some point after 6.3 million years ago, two distinct lines arose.

For one thing, the new data suggest the human-chimp split was much closer to the present than the 7 million year date that fossils and previous studies indicate ?- certainly no earlier than 6.3 million years ago, and more likely in the neighborhood of 5.4 million.

The data also show that the human-chimp split probably took millions of years. That's because in some parts of the DNA sequence the genetic difference between humans and chimps is so large that those genes must have been isolated from each other nearly 10 million years ago. But in other places the human and chimp lines are so close that they appear to have still been swapping genetic material at least until 6.3 million years ago.

Very interesting stuff. Genetic analysis is going to provide a lot of good informaiton to work from.

Thanks,

Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors
CHRIS STEPHEN AND ALLAN HALL

THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

The Soviet authorities were struggling to rebuild the Red Army after bruising wars.

And there was intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialisation.

Mr Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the Tsar when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.

Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.

Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.

A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

Mr Ivanov was now in disgrace. His were not the only experiments going wrong: the plan to collectivise farms ended in the 1932 famine in which at least four million died.

For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years' jail, which was later commuted to five years' exile in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan in 1931. A year later he died, reportedly after falling sick while standing on a freezing railway platform.

If this is real and stands scrutiny, a number iof the paleoarcheological types will be searching the 5 to 6 my sediments at Laeotoli.

Isn't it interesting that the people that wrote the bible two thousand years ago