Evolution Starts with Lucy

[Cougarbear]

Save it. Millions of people see it every day. If you don't, it just means you need to get out more.

See what? No one sees a wolf change into an ape. Or, an ape into a human. Everyday? What are you talking about?

 

[Cougarbear]

YOU'VE not been to university ... did you even take high school biology? ...

You read this on some uneducated red-neck website ... maybe Fauxnews ... you cares ... Lucy, or more properly Australopithecus afarensis, is morphologically an ape ... not human ... see the generic name? ... it's not Homo ... so not human ...

I only made half way through a California high school ... and even I know this ... but that's California, high tax rates means well funded schools ... Texas has low taxes and this is the ignorant shit we have to deal with ...

Why do you hate God? ... why do you hate yourself ... and why are you blaming evolution? ...

 

[Cougarbear]

Excuse me I am Piltdown man and I take issue with your statement!

We found your bones. Just not your brains

 

[BackAgain]

Yes it was! LOL! In your college too. If you went to college. Probably not.

Wrong. As usual.

Why do you make shit up and then Stick with it despite having not a shred of evidence?

Rhetorical question. Obviously, you’re overtly hostile to truth.

 

[Cougarbear]

What a joke. "Th Cult of Those Who Would Fail 7th Grade Science."

If you can't follow this then you must be a baboon. Or a Chimp... Lucy was not an ancestor of today's human beings.

 

[Cougarbear]

Wrong. As usual.

Why do you make shit up and then Stick with it despite having not a shred of evidence?

Rhetorical question. Obviously, you’re overtly hostile to truth.

It's not me without evidence. It's you. You have no empirical evidence for believing in evolution. I don't need empirical evidence for the evidence of God is faith.

 

[BackAgain]

It's not me without evidence. It's you. You have no empirical evidence for believing in evolution. I don't need empirical evidence for the evidence of God is faith.

What a stupid ignorant comeback.

Personally, I don’t give a crap whether or not you believe in the evidence for evolution which not only does exist but exists in significant measure.

Try to smarten up. It’s possible to believe in God without accepting that every word in the Bible was written by the Almighty. It’s far more reasonable to accept the scientific proof of the age of our planet than it is to accept the Bible story that it’s only about 6,000 years old.

 

[scruffy]

I never mentioned god,,

and since or only retort is to insult and change he subject I can only assume youre desperate to get people to believe in your religion,,

You're the one that brought up religion, and made false comparisons to science. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Evolution has more evidence than any other science, with the possible exception of astronomy. You must be very desperate comparing it to a religion which has ZERO in the way of evidence.

Whenever you put science up against religion, science will win every time.

 

[scruffy]

See what? No one sees a wolf change into an ape. Or, an ape into a human. Everyday? What are you talking about?

Never mind. You won't get it because your mind is closed.

I have work to do, cancers to cure.

Right now I'm working on a brain computer interface that reads your EEG and makes your legs move.

That's science, it advances in little tiny increments. There's nothing hifalutin like the savior of mankind.

 

[Cougarbear]

What a stupid ignorant comeback.

Personally, I don’t give a crap whether or not you believe in the evidence for evolution which not only does exist but exists in significant measure.

Try to smarten up. It’s possible to believe in God without accepting that every word in the Bible was written by the Almighty. It’s far more reasonable to accept the scientific proof of the age of our planet than it is to accept the Bible story that it’s only about 6,000 years old.

Funny man trying to support his religion of evolution. Darwin his God. No evidence. We cannot create the parts that make up atoms let alone life of any kind.

 

[BackAgain]

Funny man trying to support his religion of evolution. Darwin his God. No evidence. We cannot create the parts that make up atoms let alone life of any kind.

No no; you ignorant and insecure dolt.

My God is God who created the universe.

I get that it escapes your negligible ability to grasp concepts, but I will tell you again:

There’s zero contradiction between believing that all of the universe was created by a supreme Being while also believing that He can use any tool He wishes to engage in the ongoing processes of creation. And as far as life is concerned, such tools may easily include evolution.

 

[scruffy]

Funny man trying to support his religion of evolution. Darwin his God. No evidence.

Talk about a funny man...

We cannot create the parts that make up atoms

Doofus, that's called conservation of energy. Don't you know ANYTHING?

Lemme guess, you didn't graduate from high school?

No GED? No physical science class?

let alone life of any kind.

You are thoroughly ignorant. You've never been inside a doctor's office either? Never seen a throat culture?

You people are entirely laughable. Funny man, indeed. Rehearsing for a career as a stand up comedian.

Here's a word of advice: don't get mad when the audience starts throwing tomatoes at you.

 

[Cougarbear]

Talk about a funny man...



Doofus, that's called conservation of energy. Don't you know ANYTHING?

Lemme guess, you didn't graduate from high school?

No GED? No physical science class?



You are thoroughly ignorant. You've never been inside a doctor's office either? Never seen a throat culture?

You people are entirely laughable. Funny man, indeed. Rehearsing for a career as a stand up comedian.

Here's a word of advice: don't get mad when the audience starts throwing tomatoes at you.

What does the fact the energy can’t be destroyed or created have to do with the many parts of an atom?

 

[alang1216]

If we are a social animal ... as biology suggests ... then religion is the set of rules we follow in order to live together in peace ... and rules everyone can understand ...

Evolution is complex ... few understand even the regulatory functions of the DNA molecule, fewer still how these change over time ... to base a set of social rules on evolution then excludes most people ... we're no better off than despotism ...

Academicians becomes the new aristocracy ... c.f. Foundation by Isaac Asimov ...

We are social and culture is its structure. We may evolve biologically but it is our cultures that aggressively compete. We desire peace within our society but war with all others.

 

[alang1216]

That's because nothing has contradicted it. In fact, as science continues and archology continues, more and more it's proving the scriptures true. You just don't want to accept this.

What I want is irrelevant, I don’t accept it because it is not true.

 

[scruffy]

What does the fact the energy can’t be destroyed or created have to do with the many parts of an atom?

Sorry, I can't help you.

You need more remedial than I can provide. Don't have the time to give you a physics education too.

 

[scruffy]

It's not me without evidence. It's you. You have no empirical evidence for believing in evolution. I don't need empirical evidence for the evidence of God is faith.

This is just silly. Faith is not evidence, that's why it's called faith. Science has strict standards of evidence, for starters it has to be reproducible and independently verifiable.

Here, let me show you what I do:

Pretty soon we'll be able to measure and quantify faith. We're already light years beyond Neuralink, the above imagery was acquired non-invasively with HD-EEG and the current sources reconstructed in real time, then matched to brain anatomy and the result is visualized with NME, an open source Python software package for neurological analysis. dSPM stands for "dynamic statistical parametric mapping", we're basically doing real time nonlinear curve fitting in 256 dimensions. This would have been completely impossible a few years ago, it requires insane amounts of computing horsepower. And because the results are so spectacular there are literally THOUSANDS of eyes on this world wide. Every government in the Western hemisphere is funding this research.

Genetics is the same way. Just five years ago we were having trouble reading flat files from DNA sequencing machines. Now we have AI that can read them, decode them, and match them against a database in seconds. The GenBank database is maintained by NCBI, you can find it here:

GenBank Overview

Here's a representative entry for a single gene, this one happens to be human:

HTR1A 5-hydroxytryptamine receptor 1A [Homo sapiens (human)] - Gene - NCBI

Look where it says "lineage", so you'll know what I'm talking about.

This database is now being updated DAILY, with input from the US, Europe, Japan, and even China. There are teams all over the world analyzing this data every single day.

Now you know why I say fossils schmossils. We already know which proteins are highly conserved among tens of thousands of organisms, and we can track where the representative DNA occurs in the chromosomes and how it changes position and structure from one organism to the next. We already have complete catalogs for dozens of organisms, and all that remains is to work out the kinetics for the transcription factors.

Faith? Yeah, we have plenty of it. Ten years from now we're going to be engineering synthetic life forms by the dozens, maybe even hundreds. In twenty years we'll be able to create the organism of your choice on demand. And structure their brains so they don't eat you the minute they get hungry.

 

[scruffy]

UC Santa Cruz maintains a publicly available MySQL genetic database you can query from your own browser.

Go to this page here:

UCSC Genome Browser Gateway

UCSC Genome Browser

genome.ucsc.edu

and look on the left hand side of the page, there's a convenient list of all the species that are catalogued. Just click on any of them to see what's available.

At the bottom of each page are download options, or you can use any MySql browser or get in from Python or R with username "genome", then you can list all the tables (there's like 53,000 of them) or query any table (obviously it's read only).

For example "Mouse" is a good one to look at, you can see under "Assembly Details" that it covers chromosomes 1-19 and the mitochondrial DNA. Whenever we prepare a new knockout strain that's missing a BBB membrane protein or something, we have to compare it against this database to make sure we've done the right thing. Verification takes about 15 min on a fast PC.

The blood brain barrier is very interesting, it's like a filter that keeps red and white blood cells and other things out of the cerebrospinal fluid. We can knock out specific proteins to make the filter porous and thereby change the brain's electrical behavior, calcium and magnesium pumps are examples. If there is an infarction we can tell where it happened using imagery like in the previous post. We want to do this BEFORE we slice up the mouse's brain because we're testing behavior.

So for example in my case, I can knock out one of the MAP proteins to make the blood brain barrier permeable to the JC virus, which causes PML (or the mouse equivalent). What happens is you get little bubbles on the walls of the capillaries, and when several nearby bubbles burst simultaneously you get an infarction, which allows small molecules and viruses to come rushing in. Similar work is being done on Mad Cow disease (CJV), which is actually a prion, it's even smaller than y'r average virus.

Normally the brain keeps viruses out, because it has internal virus-like behaviors that are vital for proper brain function. However some of these viruses have found ways to attack the cell membranes of the capillary wall. They can work from inside as well as outside - if an internal virus mutates and attacks its own capillaries we call it an autoimmune disorder, but the mechanisms are similar in many cases.

This kind of science requires comparisons across species because we're trying to get to the underlying mechanisms. If we know that calcium channel knockouts and microtubule associated protein knockouts both result in the same set of symptoms we start getting a pretty good idea of what's going on. Then we can find some other species that has a different sequence for one or the other and predict whether it's susceptible to a virus. Ultimately, once we understand all this stuff we can fabricate a protein that prevents the virus from entering while at the same time leaving normal function intact - because if the virus attacks a calcium pump we can't stop the pump just to inhibit the virus.

 

[ReinyDays]

UC Santa Cruz maintains a publicly available MySQL genetic database you can query from your own browser.

Go to this page here:

UCSC Genome Browser Gateway

UCSC Genome Browser

genome.ucsc.edu

and look on the left hand side of the page, there's a convenient list of all the species that are catalogued. Just click on any of them to see what's available.

At the bottom of each page are download options, or you can use any MySql browser or get in from Python or R with username "genome", then you can list all the tables (there's like 53,000 of them) or query any table (obviously it's read only).

For example "Mouse" is a good one to look at, you can see under "Assembly Details" that it covers chromosomes 1-19 and the mitochondrial DNA. Whenever we prepare a new knockout strain that's missing a BBB membrane protein or something, we have to compare it against this database to make sure we've done the right thing. Verification takes about 15 min on a fast PC.

The blood brain barrier is very interesting, it's like a filter that keeps red and white blood cells and other things out of the cerebrospinal fluid. We can knock out specific proteins to make the filter porous and thereby change the brain's electrical behavior, calcium and magnesium pumps are examples. If there is an infarction we can tell where it happened using imagery like in the previous post. We want to do this BEFORE we slice up the mouse's brain because we're testing behavior.

So for example in my case, I can knock out one of the MAP proteins to make the blood brain barrier permeable to the JC virus, which causes PML (or the mouse equivalent). What happens is you get little bubbles on the walls of the capillaries, and when several nearby bubbles burst simultaneously you get an infarction, which allows small molecules and viruses to come rushing in. Similar work is being done on Mad Cow disease (CJV), which is actually a prion, it's even smaller than y'r average virus.

Normally the brain keeps viruses out, because it has internal virus-like behaviors that are vital for proper brain function. However some of these viruses have found ways to attack the cell membranes of the capillary wall. They can work from inside as well as outside - if an internal virus mutates and attacks its own capillaries we call it an autoimmune disorder, but the mechanisms are similar in many cases.

This kind of science requires comparisons across species because we're trying to get to the underlying mechanisms. If we know that calcium channel knockouts and microtubule associated protein knockouts both result in the same set of symptoms we start getting a pretty good idea of what's going on. Then we can find some other species that has a different sequence for one or the other and predict whether it's susceptible to a virus. Ultimately, once we understand all this stuff we can fabricate a protein that prevents the virus from entering while at the same time leaving normal function intact - because if the virus attacks a calcium pump we can't stop the pump just to inhibit the virus.

Whoa ... big data ... you're welcome to my framing hammer if anything needs "adjusting" ... [giggle] ...

 

[scruffy]

Whoa ... big data ... you're welcome to my framing hammer if anything needs "adjusting" ... [giggle] ...

You can look at evolution in a better and more meaningful way, instead of digging up fossils.

The data scientists go through the database with machines, to figure out which proteins are conserved and which are volatile. For example the Krebs cycle genes have been highly conserved in all organisms for a billion years, even the tiniest mutation is fixed right away by the DNA repair mechanisms, or the organism dies.

On the other hand the transcription factors that control Hox and Sox are volatile, they change from one organism to the next. What's interesting about that is that several of them usually change at the same time. It's almost as if a mutation was being replicated through several regions of the genome.

This is why machine learning is involved, humans could never make these connections. Does DNA have a way of propagating errors? It's a new question brought to us by the machines.