Genome Sequencing

Unique to Science News is a good review article, "They're Sequencing a What? Genome scientists go out on a limb of the tree of life" by Susan Milius. It touches on a number of relevant points, such as "convergent" evolution, significant differences in lineages that are supposed to be related, amazing abilities, and other difficulties for evolutionists, along with the usual assumptions and speculations. I may just share some excerpts:

"Among the nine mammals added in August to the list of ...sequencing
targets, the least familiar is probably the lesser hedgehog tenrec...It looks
like a hedgehog and rolls into an impenetrable ball of prickles when threatened.
Yet...mammalogists have argued that the tenrec is more closely related to the
elephant... The tenrecs made the list as representatives of Afrotheria, which
mammalogists suspect was the earliest of the four major lineages of placental
mammals that are still around today.

This grouping is the result of a recent rethinking of mammal history. For
decades, the 30-some species of the tenrec family, found mostly in Madagascar,
were classified...with such animals as shrews, moles...and hedgehogs. In 1997,
though, geneticists argued that their work justified shuffling mammals in the
evolutionary tree to create a new superorder, Afrotheria.... [which] lumped
tenrecs and golden moles with such groups as elephant shrews, aardvarks,
hyraxes, elephants, and the slow, aquatic dugongs and manatees...the lesser
hedgehog tenrec is among the few mammals that fall into metabolic torpor during
the day but snap out of it in the evening...as if compressing a cycle of winter
hibernation and spring emergence into a single day...one of several
traits...making [it] an interesting contrast to the other Afrotherian about to
get sequenced, the elephant. These traits also include undescended testicles and
a cloaca, a multitasking opening shared by the reproductive and excretory
systems."

Sounds like the lesser hedgehog tenrec is a real puzzle. It will be interesting to see how the genome analysis turns out.


Until Next Time,

David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.

http://home.att.net/~david.bump

Dating Homo Sapiens

Reporting on an article in the online November Public Library of Science (PloS) Biology, "Evolution's Buggy Ride: Lice leap boldly into human-origins fray" (Science News v. 166, Oct. 9, 2004, p. 230) describes a study of human body/head lice that the researchers say indicates that "Physical contact occurred between H. erectus and H. sapiens, probably in eastern Asia between 50,000 and 25,000 years ago.

This is because their study of mitochondrial DNA has led them to believe that the two lineages of lice that infest our heads "diverged about 1.18 million years ago." They also believe their data "indicated that the louse lineage with the global distribution experienced a population decline around 100,000 years ago. That roughly coincided with a population decline of modern H. sapiens..."

The lesser lineage that had jumped ship from the extinct line "now lives only in the Americas, apparently after having been transported by Asian migrants during the late Stone Age." Interesting, but even other evolutionists question the validity of "dating" things by assuming random changes in mitochondrial DNA, and an earlier analysis didn't come up with the two separate lineages.

Until Next Time,

David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.

http://home.att.net/~david.bump

Breaking Up These Two Birds-Not Gonna Happen

Science News v. 166, Oct. 9, 2004, p. 228, "Separate Vacations: Birds winter apart but return in sync" -- based on a report in the October 7 Nature,

I mention it here only as an accessible reference to a case of another amazing ability in living things. In addition to migrating long distances as the seasons change (as many birds do), some mating pairs of birds (in this case, black-tailed godwits) split up over the winter and then meet up again at the nesting site in the spring. In this case, while researchers discovered that "birds arrived over a period of about a month" they also "found that mates in 7 of 10 pairs ...arrived within 3 days of each other, even though these mates typically wintered about 1,000 km from each other...How the birds manage this timing isn't clear."

Until Next Time,

David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.

http://home.att.net/~david.bump

Comments on a Book Review

It continues to surprise me that some of my best material comes from book reviews. "When giants walked the Earth: A. pedigree of Darwin's well bred English bulldogs" is a book review by Steve Jones of A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection in the British Imagination_ by Marek Kohn (Nature v. 431, 2 Sep 2004, p. 21) . "What's this cult of personality in evolutionary biology all abou? There's the great leader, Chairman Charles, of course... But why do we need so many? Experts on chloroplasts or chlorine manage, as far as I know, with living facts, and are not forced to attach them to dead heroes. But there's something in evolution that calls for immortals to whom we plebs must defer." Quite an admission, isn't it?

It's interesting to me that of the six British scientists chosen for the book, several are the most prominent in the global history of evolutionary thought. There's J. B. S. Haldane, John Maynard Smith, Richard Dawkins, and Alfred Russell Wallace. The reviewer notes that all but Wallace attended prestigious schools such as Cambridge and Oxford. Also, the reviewer notes a feeling that the author's "patience is tried by the miasma of self-congratulation that surrounded some of the actors in his drama. Fisher claimed that his fundamental theory of natural selection occupied the supreme position among the biological sciences, although others dismissed it as a verbal trick"

And how about this for an unscientific attitude: "Wallace's expeditions were followed by a lifetime of devotion to the Great Leader... He turned, alas, to spiritualism and, as so often when scientists use their knowledge of nature to interpret the world of man, abandoned common sense." And Wallace wasn't the only one to use "sweeping generalizations without the need for facts -- when discussing human affairs." Fisher, for example, had "rather a nasty social agenda" which I've learned elsewhere was a form of eugenics. Then there's Haldane, who "stuck with the Communist Party long after his colleagues had abandoned it..." and demonstrated a "readiness to support Comrade Lysenko even in the face of powerful evidence against his theories." So much for the objectivity of scientists. Note the reviewer's language here: Haldane's representative on Earth was, for nearly 40 years, John Maynard Smith..." representative on Earth? Good grief. Smith "... had himself honed a hammer and circle from his Eton window." And how about the reviewer's attitude revealed in his comments on Richard Dawkins' being "voted Britain's top intellectual": "(a welcome kick in the teeth for the new generation of Creationists in our privately funded schools)." Nasty.

The reviewer claims that "Darwin's ability to generalize came from his huge knowledge of plants and animals. Few of his intellectual descendents can tell a hawk from a handsaw, let alone from an eagle." He says that Bill Hamilton did have such encyclopedic knowledge, but also notes: "Hamilton, sad to say, was also a martyr to political vapourings and lobbied for a cracked eugenics Utopia with Margaret Thatcher as Life President and caesarean births banned."

The reviewer concludes with: "Every evolutionist should read it -- as a warning against personality cults, if nothing else. Kohn makes it clear that giants walked the Earth in those days. Those days are gone, but after perusing his chapter on the Oxford school of evolutionary biology in the 1950s and 1960s -- some geniuses, no doubt, but also a fair sprinkling of prima donnas and right-wing zealots -- one can only mutter, through gently clenched teeth, 'Thank God!'



Until Next Time,

David Bump
Philippians 3: 13 Brethren, I
count not myself to have
apprehended: but [this] one thing
[I do], forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are
before, 14 I press toward the
mark for the prize of the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.

http://home.att.net/~david.bump