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Author Topic:   The Common Ancestor?
Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


(1)
Message 124 of 341 (585487)
10-08-2010 12:54 PM
Reply to: Message 123 by barbara
10-08-2010 12:13 PM


Re: Time Tree : : Timescale of Life
Could you clear things up for me Barbara, is the question you are asking here 'If we evolved from monkeys why are there still monkeys?' or is it 'How come there are dwarfs and pygmies!!!?'.
What it indicates is that at one point in the past there existed an interbreeding population of organisms which was ancestral to both of those various pairs of species in your list but which, in most cases except perhaps for the most recent primate splits, closely resembled neither of them.
How can you still not understand enough about evolution to see how ridiculous your question here is?
There are some things it is reasonable to ask 'Did we evolve from?', but they are much higher order groupings like reptiles or fish, not Cod or Snakes.
TTFN,
WK

This message is a reply to:
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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 140 of 341 (586772)
10-14-2010 5:39 PM
Reply to: Message 139 by barbara
10-14-2010 5:07 PM


Re: Time Tree : : Timescale of Life
rRNA means ribosomal RNA, ribosomes are what synthesise proteins based on sequences of messenger RNA (mRNA). Ribosomes are unusual in that they are a mixture of protein and RNA molecules.
Ribosomes are an essential part of protein synthesis and the RNA sequences which are incorporated in them are highly conserved. In prokaryotes they are well conserved across the Archaea and Bacterial kingdoms. This conservation makes them a good subject for deep time phylogenetic studies.
TTFN,
WK

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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 145 of 341 (586954)
10-15-2010 5:45 PM
Reply to: Message 143 by barbara
10-15-2010 4:29 PM


Re: Time Tree : : Timescale of Life
Some people here do not agree that genes actually carry information.
What people do you mean here? I'd ask what you mean by information as well, but that traditionally sends us off down a rabbit hole.
My understanding is you are only able to see what the protein makes in the form of bone, tissue etc.
Your understanding is wrong, we can analyze specific proteins to determine their amino acid sequence and other modifications, we can also directly examine their structure to find out what form they take in vivo and how they interact with other proteins. As well as this we can study the genes coding for these protein sequences.
Considering that most species do share the same proteins because we share the same parts, wouldn't this make the connection between them harder to determine?
I'm not following your logic here. If your point is that the proteins have to have certain form in order to form tissues and organs then A) There is no reason to believe this is true since there are multiple possible amino acid sequences which can create the same functional folds in proteins, and possibly many totally distinct folds which can perform equivalent functions, the fact of the matter is that we only have a very rudimentary understanding of the functional phase space of proteins. B) We know that even if a protein is 100% conserved in terms of amino acid sequence it can still diverge almost 40%, possibly more in some cases, at the DNA sequence level.
TTFN,
WK

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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


(1)
Message 163 of 341 (587191)
10-17-2010 3:07 PM
Reply to: Message 162 by barbara
10-17-2010 10:50 AM


Re: Information rides again
I have to say I'm with Barbara on this one. I understand what NWR is saying about the nature of information, in fact in many ways it is an approach consonant with many creationist ideas about infomation, except they always want to include genetic information in the abstracted information set and he puts in on the outside with other natural phenomena such as tree rings, etc ....
But whatever the pros and cons of a semantic debate on the nature of information theidea that there is some form of information inherent in specific sequences of DNA is certainly one that is well established in the scientific literature, in terms of Shannon entropy, Kolmogorov complexity, Fisher information, Kullback-Leibler information and probably many others.
Even if it is only an aplication of informatic techniques to something that doesn't strictly fit a certain semantic definition of information it is nevertheless a highly productive one.
The real problem when creationist's choose to discuss information in genomes is that they don't use any of the well defined easily measured metrics measured above. In fact they rarely propose any sort of metric that can be consistently measured at all. Most of the time creationist's talking about infromation are considered to be idiots because historically we have seen that as such discussions go on they prove themselves to be so.
When a creationist/Ider comes around talking about information and only wants to discuss it in terms of Gitt information or irreducible complexity or complex specified information, then it is pretty much a certainty that they will never be able to tell us how to measure such types of information, but they will declaim ad nauseam that they can never be increased by random mutation and natural selection. More often than not they don't even have any coherent concept of what they mean by information but claim, like hard-core pornography, they know it when they see it.
TTFN,
WK
Edited by Wounded King, : Removed greengrocer's apostrophes

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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 168 of 341 (587308)
10-18-2010 10:32 AM
Reply to: Message 167 by barbara
10-18-2010 9:53 AM


Re: Time Tree : : Timescale of Life
Partly this depends if you mean actual DNA or DNA sequences, either way the main methodology would be the same but you would need to sequence the actual DNA first.
Then put those sequences into the BLAST program at NCBI that would find matching DNA sequences if they were in the genbank database. You could also run it against sequenced proteins in case the genes weren't present in the database.
Even if an exact match for your sequence didn't come up the chances are it would identify homologues from several other species, and the similarity of those matches would start to give you some indication of what sort of animal you were looking for.
*ABE*One caveat is that this approach depends rather on what type of DNA you have, if it is protein coding your chances are better for making an ID than if it is some homogenous string of dinucleotide repeats.*/ABE*
TTFN,
WK
Edited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 167 by barbara, posted 10-18-2010 9:53 AM barbara has replied

Replies to this message:
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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


(1)
Message 175 of 341 (587506)
10-19-2010 8:02 AM
Reply to: Message 171 by barbara
10-18-2010 1:47 PM


Beginning to lose the point
If life does not equate to abstract then why does one think that humans are the exception?
I certainly wouldn't claim that humans were an exception. I don't think there is any compelling evidence that we display any exceptional unique trait that isn't present in some degree in our primate relatives, including intelligence, tool use, communication, theory of mind etc ....
I'm not sure what contradiction you saw in Nij and Strongbow's statements.
Either there is no intelligent factor involved or there is, you can't have it both ways.
There is compelling evidence for a role for intelligent agency in the design of human made constructs, we have extensive experience of human design approaches and people who can explain their design rationale. We have no such evidence for any such role for intelligent agency in the genomes of living organisms. The mechanisms we do know of which effect changes on such genomes are naturalistic and stochastic.
Why can't it be one of both ways in different situations?
TTFN,
WK

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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 186 of 341 (620476)
06-17-2011 4:39 AM
Reply to: Message 185 by Percy
06-17-2011 12:58 AM


MRCAs of all stripes
It should be noted that neither mitochondrial Eve nor Y-chromosome Adam are considered candidates for the actual MRCA of modern humans. They are the most recent common matrilineal and patrilineal ancestors respectively, the actual MRCA of modern living humans will be considerably more recent.
One problem with the actual MRCA of living humans is that it may well not be something that can be readily studied genetically. We can identify ranges of dates for the MRCA of a particular gene or set of genes. However it is a simple product of human reproduction and our knowledge of historical population sizes and structures that we can use to model common ancestry irrespective of genetics, and it is such models that are used to produce estimates of when the actual MRCA of living humans existed.
Whatever the date the MRCA would have simply been one member of a larger population. A biblical originator such as Adam and Eve or Noah's family after the flood would be too small to contain the MRCA and to reach the modern populations we have from such a small initial pool would mean that the MRCA was considerably more recent than that initial pool.
Many of these topics were discussed in the All Human Beings Are Descendants of Adam thread, including the identical ancestors point that Mazzy mentions.
TTFN,
WK

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Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 190 of 341 (620570)
06-17-2011 6:58 PM
Reply to: Message 188 by Percy
06-17-2011 2:55 PM


Re: Shoes Fit Both Feet
Or alternatively hominin as it is in the quote.
TTFN,
WK

This message is a reply to:
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