Re: Re Evolution (was Salt)

[Guest guest]

Hi Jane,

> Cracks me up! Stuck in the 60's? Punctuated equilibrium is the

> newest attempt to account for the lack of a fossil record and nobody

> buys it. Well, many buy it who are *progressive* in the sciences,

> but nobody without an agenda buys it.

I don't have an agenda, and I buy it. The reason I agree with

punctuated equilibrium has nothing whatsoever to do with gaps in the

fossil record. I think one could make interesting speculations about

certain obvious creative bursts or " explosions " of speciation in the

fossil record, but someone who relies on the fossil record either to

confirm or refute evolution is missing 90% of the evidence. The

reason that punctuated equilibrium is a sensible tempo for evolution

is that the entire unfolding of our knowledge of genetics and the way

genes change has supported it.

But really, it's not an either/or proposition. Gradual change also

occurs. The debate among scientists is not whether one or the other

occurs, but to what proportion either contributes to the totality of

evolution.

> How perfectly convenient that " the mechanism shuts off " so that it

> can never be studied.

If you didn't have such an interminable and profound bias and didn't

approach the issue with such sarcasm, I'd love to explain it. But you

do not even let down your guard long enough to ask me what I'm talking

about before you decide it's stupid.

The role of transposons (mobile genetic elements) in speciation is

highly circumstantial and therefore speculative. But the fact that

transposons are real and the fact that they have induced a massive

amount of hypermutation historically associated with certain

speciation events is not speculative and is based on hard evidence.

Transposons are active in many species. In humans they have been

almost entirely shut off, at least in those human genomes that have

been studied.

The historical activity of transposons in a genome can be studied in

great detail -- much better detail than the fossil record! -- in much

the same way that forensic scientists deduce what happened at a crime

scene based on a variety of different types of evidence.

> Trust me, I'm having a lot of fun here and am not particularly

> concerned that I can't take you on in your science lingo, but you

> can't take me on in common sense, so we're gonna have to call it

> even. Let's try to remain friendly and all.

Someone with common sense would take a couple hours to read and

understand the value of DNA and protein sequence analysis, and

consider that cytochrome c analysis indicates that humans and

chimpanzees have a 1 in

10,00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00\

0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

chance of not being descended from a common ancestor.

In case I miscounted, there should be 93 zeros there.

It's not really a difficult concept to grasp, I don't think. You

don't need to be a scientist. You need to be open-minded and willing

to respond to evidence.

Many people do not have that.

Chris

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