The Pope, Evolution And The T-Rex

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Pope, being a leader of an anti-science cult, has to attack the science behind evolution. People don't want to believe that Lady Luck and Mother Nature, simply by using various mathematical probabilities coupled with some useful laws, can create all of creation. Meanwhile, scientist continue to probe nature and every week, there are new bits of information that confirms evolution's existence.

From Reuters:

Pope Benedict, elaborating his views on evolution for the first time as Pontiff, says science has narrowed the way life's origins are understood and Christians should take a broader approach to the question.

The Pope also says the Darwinist theory of evolution is not completely provable because mutations over hundreds of thousands of years cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.

I am constantly amazed at how blind 'educated' people can be. The proof of 'evolution' has been obvious ever since the first dogs were domesticated and bred for various purposes, sizes, colors and other attributes we wished to create.

And all this was done through simple breeding: killing off the ones with 'undesirable traits' and protecting the young of the ones with traits we wanted. Since then, humans have redirected evolution all over the place, first with pigs and sheep, then cows and horses. And then with various bird species, fishes, plants of all sorts. We call this 'the agrarian revolution.'

I tell people, it is easy to think of evolution if one views predators as breeders. Lions breed zebras and gnu to run very hard, in tight groups. They have bred them to turn suddenly and to move swiftly in the same direction. They bred in all sorts of things via culling the weaker or slower members of these herds.

Mere single-celled creatures can breed other creatures to do their own bidding. There are sexual diseases that encourage more sex, for example (by making one itchy down there), rabies is spread by exciting the brain so the victim seeks out someone to bite. It turns shy animals into bold hunters even if they are grazing animals.

What with the abundant fossil record showing decisively how nature evolves, it amazes me that anyone could question this at all. Perhaps they have a problem with the first virus or first bacterium? Or maybe the first proto-cell? All cells are complex thanks to evolution. They have many interior components and a complex atomic infrastructure. There is no such thing as a 'simple' cell, actually.

But they all came from a host of very simple molecular chains. The first steps of evolution took nearly a billion years. As living things evolved, they stumbled into asexual reproduction then came the sexual revolution and then variety in nature exploded thanks to sex.

I do wonder about religious people. They often have gods that are very obsessed with sex. I would suggest, many of these gods are sex fiends. In the olden times, our ancestors realized this and told many an amusing tale of these sex fiend gods and goddesses. But the new gods hate sex, hate evolution, are scared of death (thus, the need to pretend they will live forever and ever but the fear no one will believe them causes them to itch to punish us all, hahaha).

Death is evolution's sword and sex is evolution's---sex drive. Well, war and sex are together in bed and this is where change happens because the children of Mars and Venus never look or act like mom and dad but are different. Christians removed their Jesus god from all this by making him like an amoeba: namely, his dad split in two and implanted him like he was a parasite, inside a woman on earth. Gah. I always found this rather disgusting.

Anyway, this god evidently split again and had a Holy Ghost. Now, no one has ever explained this ghost to me. I would imagine, as a ghost, he was there to go 'boooo' and scare off any females who wanted sex with ordinary men rather than parasitical gods.

Indeed, at least Zeus had sex with them, namely, he gave them at least some pleasure. Then his wife would make them miserable. When Zeus cleaved like the Christian god, he had a big headache and out sprang Athena, a goddess who hated sex, hated Venus and had a very bad temper, turned a woman into a spider, for example.

Wow. Let's build temples to her! And so it goes: if one ignores science and instead, seeks to see God in Nature, what we end up with is a circus of sex gone bad. Let's stick to breeding, OK?

From Associated Press:

Researchers have decoded genetic material from a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, an unprecedented step once thought impossible.

"The door just opens up to a whole avenue of research that involves anything extinct," said Matthew T. Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

And, the new finding adds weight to the idea that today's birds are descendants of dinosaurs.
*snip*
What Asara's team found was collagen, a type of fibrous connective tissue that is a major component of bone. And the closest match in creatures alive today was collagen from chicken bones.

I have chickens. They are tiny Tyrannosauri Rex. They eat anything they can, the peck with sharp beaks, the roosters have spurs and they crow very, very loudly and strut around and I am not surprised to learn they are in the same family. Ever battle a chickadee?

Ferocious critters. They will 'Dee-dee-dee' until you are dee-feated. In their minds, they stomp across the planet and to this day, still are annoyed that mammals have overrun things.

Actually, I am very astonished any genetic material survived not only 60+million years but the dense weight of tons of earth that over-lay it all. But then, scientific techniques coupled with computers has opened many, many doors.

All birds are very graceful creatures, large or small. I believe that even the biggest of the dinosaurs moved with elegant grace.

From the Independent:

By Steve Connor
Published: 12 April 2007
There is barely an area of biomedical science that has not been touched by the revolutionary technique of RNA-interference (RNA-i), an area of research which won last year's Nobel Prize in medicine because of its importance in modern molecular biology.

RNA-i allows scientists to target a gene with exquisite accuracy by giving them a precise molecular tool for gradually turning down a gene's activity, much like a dimmer switch of an electric light bulb.

RNA-i seems to be one of nature's ways of controlling gene activity and it appears to be ubiquitous among all living cells. Scientists discovered RNA-i in petunia plants in the 1990s, but have since found that it occurs in almost every organism studied, from fungi to fruit flies, from mouse to man.

It is possible that the process of controlling gene activity using RNA-i evolved as a primitive form of defence against the lethal genes of invading viruses, before the evolution of sophisticated immune systems in higher animals.

Here is more proof of evolution: something scientists discovered in humans ends up being all over nature. this particular mutation, for all genetic change starts as a mutation, must have happened around 500 million years ago, at least! The ability to turn on and off parts of various DNA and RNA chains is as useful a mutation as the sex mutation! Since we carry lots of genes from previous incarnations, keeping them 'turned off' is important as well as 'turning on' genes that are connected with sex that must operate only when the organism is ready to reproduce.

Going back to that primal soupcon seas of ancient times, all organisms were trying to 'eat' or 'invade' all others. One group accidentally were able to tap the sun's energy directly. Others remained 'predators' who sought to colonize or in other ways, take over the genetic or the molecular materials of others. The battle over these things drove evolution.

When larger organisms evolved, they had to fight off those simpler ones called 'viruses' and these, in turn, evolved constantly, probing for some way of getting inside host organisms. So all sorts of elaborate defense/offense mechanisms were created out of the tissues of genetic change via being zapped by cosmic or solar rays or good old sex.

From the article above:

The gene makes a regulatory protein called eIF2a which normally keeps a check on memory. Mice genetically engineered to carry a defective version of the gene showed an improved talent for spatial learning.

In the water maze, the mice were trained to swim to a hidden platform. After several days, the mutant mice were able to find the platform significantly faster than normal mice. Researchers found they could alter the long-term memory of mice by tampering with the gene. Blocking its activity boosted the animals' performance in a water maze, where they had to memorise the route to a hidden platform.

This RNA mutation means we can 'open our minds', eh? Well, I think humans want to forget stuff because otherwise, we go insane. Ever live with someone like myself? People don't want to remember stuff! It is most annoying! And often, what we end up remembering isn't the stuff we need to know but stuff our brain wants to collect. Example: try doing the multiplication tables while remembering old ditties from TV commercials broadcast 50 years ago! Gah!

The commercials win.

This is why nature invented 'forgetting'. Creatures who remembered too much couldn't win out over ones that were a bit more blissful. This is why economists who can't see at the end of their own noses do so well versus people like me who remembers stuff from last week and can figure out what is happening tomorrow.

This is a paradox, of course. One that gods enjoy exploiting. This is why the Greeks had so many stories of people trying to learn from the past or exploit information from seers and priestesses only to fall in the pits of defeat or hell anyway.

Even the Tyrannosaurus Rex himself couldn't stop from becoming extinct. Ditto the gods. They depend too much on humans who have this RNA for forgetting stuff. Even when these gods whack them with lightning bolts, plagues of frogs or pillars of salt.

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Comments

[JSmith]

"...humans have redirected evolution all over the place..."

We do that with germs too - see "antibiotic-resistant infection".

"Zeus had sex with them, namely, he gave them at least some pleasure."

Zeus was a rapist.

"Let's stick to breeding, OK?"

OKAAAY!!

"I have chickens. They are tiny Tyrannosauri Rex."

How can anyone possibly look at a baby bird of any species and not say "That thing is a dinosaur!"

"Going back to that primal soupcon seas of ancient times, all organisms were trying to 'eat' or 'invade' all others."

Which led to the biggest "mutation" of them all - the mitochondria in eukaryotic cells. That happened when a single-celled bacterium was endocytosed (engulfed) by another bacterium, and stayed around, later becoming the primary energy source for eukaryotes (like you, me, and DeVaul.) Good quote: "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking." More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory

"Ever live with someone like myself?"

Oh, dear God, no.

An interesting post today, Elaine. Thank you.

[larry, dfh]

My wife works for an RNA-i outfit. The big problem for all these potential therapies right now is "delivery"; getting the synthetic RNA to the 'target site'. The same reasons that RNA is a transitory entitiy in the cell, and mechanisms exist to destroy foreign poly-nucleotides make the therapies tricky.
I had a former boss who used to describe viruses as: little pieces of life that wrap themselves in 'you' and escape. Often people anthropomorphize viruses, which aren't technically alive. They say they are 'smart' because of their infective abilities (sneezes, etc.). I think a better approach is one using mathematics and probabilities: what is the probability that we will see this thing again if such an event happens.
One of the most interesting benefits from the gene sequencing has been done on sea water. The classic methods involved culturing a pure organism before analyzing. Now all the genetic material in a sample can be analyzed, regardless of whether the organism whose material was sequenced can actually be grown. Turns out many, many interesting organisms cannot be cultured. Whole new chemical pathways and mechanisms have been opened up by this, including alternative photosynthetic pathways.
As an organic chemist, I have admired for years the chemical ability of fungi, and other micro-organisms. Under chemical challenge, say, an herbicide, or some other material present to inhibit them, they will muster their enzymic abilities so that the end result will be that an enzyme which originally carried on one function, will be changed slightly to perform a totally different role. But as you mentioned in your "rift" pieces, this in only under pressure.
Yeah, I'm sure you're a pain-in-the-ass to live with, but the best is seldom cheapest. Maybe you can explain: I seem to remember better than my wife, she calls me the "thinking machine', yet she's always right.

[larry, dfh]

And don't forget the chloroplast, which is the green-plant equivalent of the mitochondrion. They may be derived in similar ways.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Larry, women are always right because we have cute sex organs that even gods cannot resist. Heh. As Pegasus likes to say, 'Be nice to the Graces or they will become the Furies.'

And I am fascinated by what you say about the fungi's ability to change the functions of enzymes. All the 'primitive' creatures also have genetic material that is easily 'exchanged' and modified which is why they don't take long to mutate if under pressure of some sort.

And thanks for reading this blog, Larry. I appreciate the insights.

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As a result, not only will it cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars more to live in your home every month.