oh and pophead -on the Greek- Flee. Flee now before you translate away three years of your life and then wake up one morning with a headful of etymological trivia that trust me, NO ONE outside of the antiquities department cares to hear and say to yourself- Greek? What posessed me to minor in Greek?
Dna
- Thread starter 125gJoe
- Start date
Largely I am w/happychem, but one point needs to be stressed a bit more strongly - science is a process, a technique for finding validity. Nothing is ever known totally and completely, parts and certain "natural" observable processes can be studied and ideas (theories) expressed about how they occur (the mechanism involved), but the process is open-ended, not finite. Those ideas can be tested, hopefully rigorously, but sometimes not with absolute rigor. Newtonian physics and Galilean cosmology involve such ideas, and those "theories" were shown to be valid and "true", with some egg on the face of certain human religious organizations. The fact that neither holds at all levels of operation or observation (testing) in no way distorts, weakens or lessens those theories underlying validity within the grossly observable world. Nothing in science is carved in stone, it is always subject to re-examination and evaluation by testing. Science is process, and on-going. If you want things carved in stone, that is not the arena of science. If you want to study any part of observable reality - macro or micro - present, past, or future - and if you do not and cannot or will not use science you are fooling only yourself. If you hold something to be "true" and want to convince me that it is true, show me the data. If there is no data - belief proves nothing - it is not and cannot be science.
Everything Slip. It's the evidence of intelligent design vs the appearance of accidental mutation.slipknottin said:
A human with a disease? Like how they originally thought that the neandertal was a disfigured man with rickets?
Rickets...that's a good one.
I wish we had a disease today that made us more powerful and extraordinarily athletic and muscular.
Are you calling this skull an ethnic skull? Which ethnic group?
AHHHH! The Europeans are coming!!!! I've been to most of the countries in Europe. Never seen anyone that looked like that.
And yes, everyone knows about several cases where either overly enthusiastic or downright criminal people created a new species of homo that never existed.
But to point to them as a case to defraud all researchers is the same as I debunking all leaders of religion because of what David Koresh did in Waco.
Glad to see yall are coming back from the edge of the abyss. I like to go up to the edge and look over every now and then, but it's such a slippery slope. OK..so maybe I do go down it some.......
I see nothing wrong with discussing Canada having Miss Universe here in the chit chat forum . Flame me if you willl :Angel:
I see nothing wrong with discussing Canada having Miss Universe here in the chit chat forum . Flame me if you willl :Angel:
Turns out this might not even be true. I haven't read the article, but a recent paper (like this week, I think--I'm usually several weeks behind on the literature) gave evidence for the idea that the transposons are part of how our nervous system develops. Also, most of the differences between us and other primates (and birds and fish and trees) lies in the "junk DNA". Just another reason why no self-respecting biologist thinks that junk DNA is junk.mogurnda said:
In agreement with RTR and happychem, to paraphrase Richard Feynman (since I don't feel like looking up his actual quote)--science is the process of assuming that what we know is probably wrong and progressing from there.RTR said:
mrakins said:
I remember the paper going by, and can't dig it up at the moment. If you can find the citation, please post it. The reason it made a splash, though, was that it was the exception rather than the rule. In the cases I know of, transposons, repetitive sequences and retroviral insertions tend to be associated with pathology more than with normal function. The best example I can think offhand of is the polyglutamine expansion associated with Huntington's disease.
I'm a little surprised that people really believe every base pair in their genome is there for a reason. If you look at gene structure, there is the part of a gene that encodes a protein (with exceptions like microRNAs, ribosomal RNAs and so on), the parts that regulate the expression of that protein, and then there is stuff in between. The part that encodes the protein is very strongly conserved between species, because you usually die if the protein is mutated. Certain regions of the regulatory sequence of the gene are also identical or very similar across species, because they are important for determining the place and time the protein is produced. But there has to be a certain amount of space between the various parts, so that DNA-binding proteins have room to bind and do their work. In that case, the intervening sequence doesn't make a fig of difference, it just has to be within a certain length range. Those sequences show no conservation across species, supporting the idea that the sequence doesn't make much of a difference.
There are also these bits of DNA called introns, within the parts that code for proteins. In some cases, there are sequences in the introns that are needed for regulation of expression. In others, the introns can be removed and everything is fine.
But what most "self-respecting biologists" refer to as "junk" are the dispersed repetitive sequences that are scattered throughout our genome. They were originally referred to as junk because there was no obvious role for them. At this point, their function is largely mysterious. It would be arrogant to say that they do nothing simply because we don't know their function, but it seems equally arrogant (and simply untrue) to believe that every base in our enormous genome serves a purpose.
