The IRA, after a hundred years of strife, has announced it’s laying down arms and wants to work toward its goals using non-violent means (as Kathleen has noted over on her website.)
So let’s say we flash forward ten years, and Al Qeada is still strong, in business, and a major terrorist force. Iraq is still a fragmented mess. And suddenly Al Qeada announces that it wants to lay down arms and work toward a peaceful unification of Iraq and the Muslim world.
Do we accept that? Do we start working with them?
PAD
• 
Thanks, Bill.
“What exactly do you think natural selection IS, Robbnn? How do you think it occurs without some sort of mutation?”
Well, I figured that natural selection would be a characteristic, such a beak, changing shape over generations to make it more successful. As in a bunch of short-beeked finches hatching out an odd-looking (to them) bird with a bit of a narrower, perhaps longer beek that in time of famine allows the critter to last a little longer than his siblings. Then it mates with another outcast beeky bird and has a still beekier bird, and so on until there isn’t a bug in a tree that’s safe. There is not mutation in the classic sense in this scenario. I don’t think any genes or base pairs change, it’s just that weird looking birds have weirder looking birds that might be helpful traits someday.
Isn’t mutation as Bill suggested, a new expression of genes? I don’t just mean the hopeful monster – which we don’t have any examples of… something caused the pre-cambrian explosion, didn’t it? If it wasn’t radioactive spider-bites, what was it?
Bill, I have to compliment you on your explanations for how evolution works. I find that one of the many of the misconceptions about it revolve around things like you’ve illustrated, such as expecting mutations to be dramatic (ie, a foot turning into a complete flipper in one generation) or that a species converts en masse into a new species.
I love teaching evolution and I’m starting to get itchy to get back to school (not that I won’t be keening for my lost free time. I will be.).
I think an awful lot of the controversy about evolution is due to misunderstanding. Some of it is due to deliberate misinformaion spread by creationists but, in all honesty, much of it is also due to the condescending treatment given to doubters by evolutionists. I’ve long argued in our political discussions that the left has lost power in large part because of its arrogance towrad those not on their bandwagon and I sure as hëll want to make sure that I don’t replicate that mistake in my teaching.
Robbnn,
The thing is, the reason that birds have different shaped beaks at all is because of DNA differences. Not all of this is due to mutation but some of it is. Ay amy rate, evolution is actually defined as a change in gene frequency of a population–if increasing cases of skin cancer favor darker skin and as a result the percentage of black people goes from 12% to 15% of the population, the population has evolved. That’s not “classical” as you say, but what if a white kid is born with a few more copies of the melanin gene than either of her parents, which gives her the same protection? That would be an example of a gene mutation contributing to natural selection.
something caused the pre-cambrian explosion, didn’t it?
great question. I don’t know. One aspect that might have been a factor was that we are talking about a world that was ripe for the plucking–I think that if we dropped a few sspecies on a virgin world that was rich in organic material and had the right temperature range we might very well get the same result–an explosion of new life exploring every available niche, followed by the inevitable implosion as the more successful phyla outlast the also-rans.
Hmm… Ok, I have to ask a question because my genetics knowledge on the detailed level is very rusty. When we’re talking about genetic speciation versus the genetic mutations that fuel natural selection, is it correct to say that while all members of a species share the same options in the number and functional assignments of genetic base pairs, their individual genetic expressions could be quite different, depending on which options are chosen in their base pairs? For example, say the Pontiac Grand Am is a species of car, with the same options available to each individual member, but the choice of options (mutations) the buyer picks presents them with a unique expression of that species. I’m reading Robbnn’s post and Bill’s post and am wondering if this is a point of confusion for others or just myself.
Off off topic but there’s an intriguing trailer for a new indie film called JUNE & JULY at http://www.juneandjuly.net/
Without giving much away, if you are a comics fan and/or an idie film buff, it looks like a winner. If 3 of us buy a copy it will instantly be more succesful than THE ISLAND or STEALTH.
Hmmm… ok, further thinking… in the car analogy, would the mutation come in when I win a spot on “Pimp My Ride” and West Coast Customs mutates the car with a host of new options? Back the genetics would that entail the addition of a base pair(s) of genes, making the new thing a one-off of the original species?
“is it correct to say that while all members of a species share the same options in the number and functional assignments of genetic base pairs, their individual genetic expressions could be quite different, depending on which options are chosen in their base pairs?”
As far as i can understand.
There can be some variation within the genes that make up a specie without making a seperate specie.
For instance, humans can have white, brown, black, reddish-brown, and ever shade inbetween skin. we can have many eye colors, and variations in height. we can even have variations in the number of appendages (I am thinking of the tendancy among the Amish to have six fingered kids.) all while remaining homo sapiens.
I do not know though, that they can be “Quite different.” one to two percent variation is probably about the norm. I am not sure how big the variation is. I know chimps are about 96% the same as us, but where that 4% lies could make all the difference.
To answer your question: you can have variation in the looks/size/behavior of a specie while not changing the fact that it is a specie. The “options” you speak of are called “traits” in bio-speak, and some nerd named Mendel did a lot of work with this in pea plants. He apparently had nothing better to do. Its like the man was a monk or something.
In more bio-speak: some alleles can be expressed, while others aren’t.
“Well, can a liger pull a heavy cart up a steep mountain road?”
I forget, is the liger the bigger one, or is that the tigon? Either way, judhing from their size, they could…the more important question is: Would you survive trying to hook a liger up to a cart, and would it then do the work of pulling the cart, or would it just lay down until you took the harness off?
At which point, if it didn’t kill and eat you before hand, it probably would now.
“Back the genetics would that entail the addition of a base pair(s) of genes, making the new thing a one-off of the original species?”
Well, if they pimped your car out to the extent that it was no longer recognizable as a Grand Am, then it would be a different specie of car. To determine EXACTLY when it became a new specie, you would have to see at what point it stopped being a grand am.
To apply this to genes: It might have gotten a new base pair, but that is unlikely, unless it changed from a car to a motorcycle. more than likely the genetic drift was so “large” that it was no longer within the factory specs of a grand am.
to drop the car analogy….if a million years ago two groups of the common ancestors of humans and Orangatangs had been stranded on opposite sides of a chasm, and their ancestors met today, it would be obvious that this was two totally different species, despite the fact that their genes were very similar.
Well, I figured that natural selection would be a characteristic, such a beak, changing shape over generations to make it more successful. As in a bunch of short-beeked finches hatching out an odd-looking (to them) bird with a bit of a narrower, perhaps longer beek that in time of famine allows the critter to last a little longer than his siblings.
True enough — but as Bill’s already said, the only way you get an “odd-looking” bird is via the expression of some mutation or other. Mutations don’t have to be huge.
TWL
Let’s also keep in mind that the definition of species is quite fluid. Even if Luions and Tigers could produce fertile offspring, the fact is that they do not do so normally in the wild, so the definition still holds.
There are probably many species of animals that COULD produce fertile hybrids but don’t, for a variety of reasons–different mating times, different mating dances, wrong smell, whatever. And then you have a situation where there are 6 closely related seagulls. #1 can mate with #2 and #3, which can mate with # 4 but #4 can’t mate with #1. So are #1 and # 4 different species while #1 and #3 and #3 and #4 are the same?
I just point this out to show that nature is way more complicated than we tend to make it out to be and our desire for tidy explanations will probably be thwarted more often than not.
“Back the genetics would that entail the addition of a base pair(s) of genes, making the new thing a one-off of the original species?”
Yeah, this should have read “Back to the genetics, would that…” I left out a “to” and a “,” initially – sorry about that…
And thanks for the clarifications. I was using the car example for fun; don’t think I’m all hung up on cars or anything.
I’m not arguing, Tim, just trying to understand. Is that mutation? It seems to me that it’s dealing in existing genes (resessive versus dominant). Mutation would be like blue hair, where there wasn’t a gene or allele and through cosmic drift there is now (okay, not through cosmic drift, but it sounds good).
Robbnn:
your missing the point. Unless you change it somehow, your genes determine how you look. pug nose? gene. Brown hair? gene. Freaky blue hair (undyed) Gene. Mutation is a change in a gene. For instance, cancer is caused when the part of a gene that slows a cells growth is removed by a mutation. The cells then grow out of control, causing cancer.
now, if you get a benificial mutation, and pass that on to your kid through your genes, the gene may be recessive. Say you have trait a. but your mate has trait A (the dominant one) your offspring will show trait A (say, brown hair) but will carry the trait a (red hair) now if your son gets together with someone else who carries the a gene, then their kid should have red hair.
now, you could, possibly, have a mutation through exposure to cosmic rays that would create blue hair, and you could pass that on to your kids, but it would still have to be a genetic change.
I don’t really see how having significantly flatter feet than has shown up in either “family tree” (for want of a better phrase) is going to be a simple dominant/recessive issue. At least some of the changes you’re talking about are going to have to be mutations.
This isn’t really directed at you, Robbnn (and certainly not solely towards you in any case) — it’s just that an awful lot of people out there seem to think that “mutation” has to mean something huge and vastly different. It’s really not. There could be some mutation that affects how efficiently an organism gets energy from its food, for example; you wouldn’t see any sign of it externally, but it would almost certainly provide a huge evolutionary advantage over others of the species.
In any case, I think Bill’s doing a better job on this than I am (which he’d better, being the biology teacher and all :-), so I’ll leave it to him.
TWL
That’s always been my difficulty with science: if there IS the supernatural, then science is limited and its answers may be wrong.
Science is built on the assumption that the universe operates in a consistant manner. If the universe does NOT operate in a consistant manner, because of some magic, undetectable force, then, well, we can’t have much predictive knowlege of ANYTHING. We can’t assume that just because gravity has kept our planet in orbit for billions of years, that it won’t suddenly send us shooting into space tomorrow. We can’t assume that the chemical bonds that hold our bodies together won’t dissolve, or that the light reaching our eyes has really bounced off of the objects around us.
Luckily, the laws of physics seem to be holding. The nice thing about science is that IT WORKS. Because it relies on OBSERVATION and REPETITION, it can provide very accurate predictions of future events even if the underlying mechanisms aren’t known, or are misunderstood. And it corrects itself when new data are discovered.
If you can find a better means than science of learning about the world, if you can come up with a way to measure the “supernatural” in such a way that you can produce a predicative model that is more accurate than the naturalistic ones, go for it. Until then, science is far and away the best tool we have. I call it the Wish-In-One-Hand-Shìŧ-In-The-Other-Principle. Even if the supernatural exists, naturalistic, scientific, empirically-based knowlege has produced a LOT more practical applications.
It’s a little bit like a cop saying “aha! A murder has been committed and it MUST be someone in this room!”
No, it’s like a cop saying “A murder has been committed and it must have been committed by SOMETHING.”
Showing my ignorance yet again, let me ask: is the taxonomy classification just an overlaid representation? That is, do we have evidence that one classification has turned into another classification? Or is “life” really a continuum with somewhat arbitrary demarcations of class?
All demarkations are by their nature arbitrary and artificial, but they are usefull. It used to be that animals were grouped by shared characteristics, but the trend now is what is called “cladistic” taxonomy. It attempts to categorize animals by their lines of common descent. Therefore, all mammals and birds are seen as a branch off of reptiles. The demarkations are ideally based on genetic evidence of the last common ancestor. This has lead to having to re-work the tree. The best-known example is that Chimpanzees are more closely-related to us than they are to Gorillas, but it also looks like Guinea Pigs’ ancestors branched off from the rest of the rodents much earlier than previously suspected.
At the point where their genes are so different they can no longer produce fertile offspring. For instance, a Mastiff and a Chihuahua could (in theory) have puppies who were perfectly fertile, thus, they are both still Canis lupus familiaris.
It’s not that cut-and-dried. Speciation can take place even if two populations are CAPABLE of producing fertile offspring, but simply do not do so in the wild, even given opportunity. This can happen because of differing fertility cycles (especially in plants), anatomical difficulties (as would be the case with theoretical wild mastiffs and wild Chihuahuas), or simple sexual selection.
Taxonomy isn’t an exact science. If it were, we’d have trouble justifying placing chimps in a separate genus from ourselves.
“Speciation can take place even if two populations are CAPABLE of producing fertile offspring, but simply do not do so in the wild, even given opportunity.”
I wasn’t aware of that definition, I was simply taught the fertile off-spring part. Thanks for the info. My point (whatever it was) still holds.
I’m a bit amazed when creationists talk about the second part of your comment–the idea that “kinds” could be a very broad based thing. So, as one explained to me, Noah took just two turtles on the ark and from these basic turtles came about ALL of the speices of turtles that exist today–from box turtles to sea turtles to giant Galapagos Tortoises, etc.
Someone observed that the size of a “kind” is inversely proportional to how familiar the creationist is with the animal in question. The 85,000-odd species of flies might be a “kind”, but humans and apes are seperate “kinds”.
I forget, is the liger the bigger one, or is that the tigon?
The liger is larger, larger in fact than either a lion or tiger. Lions get one of their growth-regulating genes from the mother, while tigers get it from the father. Ligers, having a lion father and a tiger mother, don’t get the gene at all. Tigons, conversely, get two copies, and are smaller than either parent.
Forgive me for not knowing how to post it as a link, but here’s some info on ligers. They’re FREAKIN’ HUGE. Enjoy.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/liger.asp
And, yeah, I don’t care if they could pull a cart or not; they kick a mule’s ášš… well, its posterior, not its parent…
Hey, we settled up with the Klingons, didn’t we?
In any case, I think Bill’s doing a better job on this than I am (which he’d better, being the biology teacher and all
Thank you. I only wish it were true (I’m mostly teaching Earth/Environmental now but obviously Bio is my first love and I sneak it in as much as possible).
Here’s another Liger photo showing off it’s massive size: http://www.scumpa.com/~art/king-richards-sep02/liger-med.jpg
I’m really doubting the “Can run at 50 mph” claim. I suspect that, in the wild, it would have trouble finding enough to eat (there’s a reason the Smilodon died out, more’s the pity). Awfully cool though, the nitwits at the Sci Fi Channel should have slapped a couple of fangs on these guys for their dopey SABRETOOTH movies.
Nice to know that even with me out of town for 5 days, this post has managed to stay off the original topic and still dealing with (at least in part) ID, evolution, and the reason why the earth really is flat after all (just kidding).
Unfortunately, I leave on another trip Wednesday, so I will just enjoy your posts. Keep at it! It is rather entertaining and even educational.
Iowa Jim
Bill, your pic of a liger is so big, by organization has chosen to screen it out while I’m at work. (Ok, they mean the file size in data bits, but it still works).
Safe Travels, Jim.
I’m also off on a trip for a week-and-a-half, so while I won’t be commenting, I’ll read with pleasure when I get back.
Fun stuff.
Oh, by-the-by, I didn’t think anyone had tried to define what a biblical Kind is. It would be a conceit if anyone does. The Bible gives no indication of what a kind is.
And, Jack, I agree with your assessment that science is a big deal. I’ve seen miracles, though, so I don’t believe it is the ONLY big deal.
I don’t know if anyone’s going to see this, since the link to it’s since gone off the main page, but I got this in the mail a day or two ago after Bush’s statement in favor of teaching “both sides” — it’s from the president of the American Astronomical Society and is an open letter from him to President Bush. Interesting reading.
TWL
——-
August 5, 2005
The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
As President of the American Astronomical Society, I was very disappointed by the comments attributed to you in an article in the August 2nd, 2005 Washington Post regarding intelligent design. While we agree that “part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” intelligent design has neither scientific evidence to support it nor an educational basis for teaching it as science. Your science adviser, John H Marburger III correctly commented that “intelligent design is not a scientific concept.”
Scientific theories are coherent, are based on careful experiments and observations of nature that are repeatedly tested and verified. They aren’t just opinions or guesses. Gravity, relativity, plate tectonics and evolution are all theories that explain the physical universe in which we live. What makes scientific theories so powerful is that they account for the facts we know and make new predictions that we can test. The most exciting thing for a scientist is to find new evidence that shows old ideas are wrong. That’s how science progresses. It is the opposite of a dogma that can’t be shown wrong. “Intelligent design” is not so bold as to make predictions or subject itself to a test. There’s no way to find out if it is right or wrong. It isn’t part of science.
We agree with you that “scientific critiques of any theory should be a normal part of the science curriculum,” but intelligent design has no place in science classes because it is not a “scientific critique.” It is a philosophical statement that some things about the physical world are beyond scientific understanding. Most scientists are quite optimistic that our understanding will grow, and things that seem mysterious today will still be wonderful when they are within our understanding tomorrow. Scientists see gaps in our present knowledge as opportunities for research, not as a cause to give up searching for an answer by invoking
the intervention of a God-like intelligent designer.
The schools of our nation have a tough job—and there is no part of their task that is more important than science education. It doesn’t help to mix in religious ideas like “intelligent design” with the job of understanding what the world is and how it works. It’s hard enough to keep straight how Newton’s Laws work in the Solar System or to understand the mechanisms of human heredity without adding in this confusing and non-scientific agenda. It would be a lot more helpful if you would advocate good science teaching and the importance of scientific understanding for a strong and thriving America. “Intelligent design” isn’t even part of science – it is a religious idea that doesn’t have a place in the science curriculum.
Sincerely,
Robert P. Kirshner
President, American Astronomical Society
Harvard College Professor and Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University
Like Tim, I doubt this will be seen, but what they heck.
I just read The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel. Outstanding book, and it opened my eyes to what Intelligent Design really is. I have my doubts that it should be taught side by side in science class, but it would make a dandy comprehensive introduction to science classes.
ID isn’t a one-to-one with evolution, it covers a lot more than that, although some of the irreducibly complex components within biology should be examined. (And that most of the evidence for evolution is also evidence for ID.) That a cell could evolve from nothing is silly. The only arguments I’ve seen about IR attack the mousetrap anology, but none confront Behe’s claims that cells, cilia and numerous other complex structures of the body are irreducibly complex.
Further, the Cambrian explosion, as admitted by Bill, is a problem for the evolutionist. 35 to possibly all 40 of the animal forms “suddenly” appear within 10 million years (I think that’s the right number). Nowhere near enough time for evolution to make those changes.
Much of ID is philosophical. When studying cosmology, astronomy, physics, and self-consciousness, just to name a few, the next logical inference from the facts is that this was designed, and in the manner it is designed, one must logically conclude that the designer is a single being with will, still active, and that the universe was designed and Earth particularly placed for Man to make discoveries.
Our schools teach science akin to showing a single line on the board in one class, another line in another class, etc. But the lines put together show a Da Vince drawing, and that we DON’T show the kids.
Tim, Bill, I’d love to hear your perspectives of the Case for a Creator.