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We ALWAYS run the risk that some folks may not get to throw in their 2 cents when we close a thread. In the Tyson thread, the OP was over-emphasizing Tyson's stance from a debate where he was asked to pick a side to defend, and when this was pointed out it made no difference to his agenda. I'm sorry to be blunt, but when I'm moderating, I really could care less about any of you individuals posting to any individual thread. It doesn't even enter into my mind when I see the opening poster unveil a shit-stirring agenda, or post fallacious arguments over and over, or any one of a hundred things people do to get their threads closed. You getting a chance to comment isn't a factor. My job is to enforce the rules. Contact the Admins if you feel I should be replaced. As far as religion goes, It's against the rules to bring it up in mainstream sections. Should this be changed? Or should we be like other science forums and drop religious discussions altogether? I don't think discussing religion is analogous with unfalsifiable science subjects. When people start posting 30,000+ versions of the many worlds theory, each insisting they have the only true explanation, I may change my mind. What makes it interesting, MigL? It seems like an excuse to criticize and accuse others of being thin-skinned, while holding yourself up as scientifically virtuous. And since you also state that you'll never start a religious thread, it also seems like more shit-stirring. It's not even something you're interested in. Senseless?! I'm not paid enough to deal with your condemnations. Just because you didn't get to comment doesn't give you the right to bash my reasoning skills. It's great that you can judge us based on partial information. I'm probably too senseless to do that.

Wow. I can see this conversation is going to go nowhere.

Let me try, John... Once again, someone who doesn't understand that nobody wants to read a 'wall of text' on an internet forum, has posted one.

Once again, someone who doesn't understand genetics is saying it's wrong.

Um, no. The mines are the many obstacles that black-skinned humans face in the US that don't apply to white-skinned humans. The attitudes that actually resulted in triggering the worst of (white) human nature. And nobody but you is suggesting running in to anything. The exact opposite is true, so why make this conversation so hard? In this age of tweets and sound bytes, panties get bunched pretty quickly, and nobody wants to give these types of subjects the intellectual time they deserve. I think discussion on black reparations is too important to set it on fire so quickly. Forums like this should be places to dig deep, and leave the shallow positions to the cable pundits whore in it for the ratings and profit.

Nice try, I believe they went on to prosper. Edit/ and in the context of this thread, they had a choice. That seems like nothing more than sabre rattling, we can't know the future even when we draw a line in the sand; and it should never be an excuse to just stand by and do nothing.

Don't watch many. But of those I have watched, the PBS Digital Series stand out. They are 'professional' in production as well as content, and not as 'dry' as a lecture. They manage to keep my interest even on topics I'm sufficiently familiar with.

Psithurism

I've seen a number of good threads where God was part of the discussion. Of course I've also seen people lose their minds. It seems me that people lose their minds when those mentioning God do so with no regard for logic or rationality.

Snowflake, maybe?

It seems the cudgel got passed next to you. Let’s focus on the topic please. Current Plan: Study reparations more. Full stop. It’s too murky and turbocharged of a topic to do it without a foundation of facts. More facts are needed. Stop being a bunch of bed wetters and study it, and stop standing in the way of those trying.

You leave Tina alone, and there's nothing wrong with the way she dances either... thanx will do. Same to you. Please don't reply either, every time it loads my iPad nearly melts with all the pages

Which seems to include American interference with our NHS - He can fuck right off with his chlorinated chickens!

It’s safe to say that most people – not just the (wo)man in the street but also biologists – work on the assumption that genetics explains what we are, or at least our bodies. There is, of course, a nature-nurture debate concerning many of our mental functions. Clearly, genetics doesn’t explain which language we speak. And there’s a thing called epigenetics: the influence of our environment on how we develop. If you eat too much you get fat, work out in the gym and your muscles grow. But the fact that we’ve got two arms and two legs, a heart that beats, eyes that see – that’s all genetics, right? Wrong. To explain why, we’re going to have to go pretty deep, but I’ll do my best to keep it as simple as possible. So stick with me!The first thing we need to consider is how complicated things can exist at all. There’s this thing you might of heard of called the Second Law of Thermodynamics: order decays into chaos. To take a simple example, if you put your hot mug of tea down briskly then before long the tea will stop sloshing, and before much longer it will have cooled to room temperature. It’s not just your tea that the Second Law wants to ‘level out’. Physicists tell us that in the end the whole universe will settle into a cold, flat and featureless state. Fortunately, we’re nowhere near that point now. There’s still a lot of energy about that can create interesting structures in defiance of the Second Law. And (making things simple again) there are just two ways of doing this. The first is design and construction: what we people are great at. From farming to pharmaceuticals, we use our brains to think up what we want and how to get it and then use our hands to make it. The second is self-assembly. This is how everything else in the physical universe comes to exist, from round planets to delicate snowflakes and from craggy mountains to rippled sandy beaches. There’s no design behind these things, just the laws of physics acting on material substances. When faced with the challenge of explaining our existence, most religions quite reasonably concluded that we must be designed. After all, surely it’s ridiculous to suppose that such wonderfully complex things could exist without a design? A design required a designer, the designer was God: problem solved? Unfortunately not. As biology taught us ever more about just how complex the inner workings of animals and plants are, how these structures are built of invisibly tiny cells – and how complicated the inner workings of these cells are – the idea of ‘breathing life into clay’ became woefully insufficient. How an intelligent designer could cause each fertilized egg or seed to grow into a man or a oak tree became a bit of a thing.Then science came up with an alternative explanation. Biologists found a set of instructions encoded in DNA that is present in each fertilized egg cell: the genome. Conveniently, this turned out to be a mash-up of the genomes of the parents with a dash of random mutation, which neatly mirrors the inheritance visible between parents and children. If you add natural selection to this combination of inheritance and variation then evolution is inevitable. And given evolution we can explain the entire branching tree of life all the way back to the first simple cell that somehow formed in the primeval soup billions of years ago. Case closed? Not quite.Certainly, the genome is an instruction kit. Actually a remarkably simple one: a string of codes that is used to determine which amino acid building blocks to string together into the chains that form the basis for all of the cell’s proteins. Not something complicated like the autoCAD designs that you need a degree in engineering to interpret when building a car. It is this simplicity that allows us to clearly conclude just what the genome does – and what it doesn’t. Unfortunately, it tells us that the genome cannot act as a design for the organism.A claim that flies do rudely in the face of accepted wisdom clearly needs solid substantiation, so here are short descriptions of not one but ten lines of reasoning that support this conclusion: Reason 1: The genome does not contain enough information. Any design needs to contain all the information necessary to accurately specify the product. For a ball bearing, this is easy: make a steel sphere with diameter x. Now think about how much information is required to define your body: all its different kinds of cells, its tissues and organs, its shape and size. It may seem that the billions of base pairs in your genome contain a lot of information, but they are not used individually: instead long strings of them (genes) are used together to build a protein. The number of different proteins that can be built is a more modest tens of thousands. Variations in these proteins are the only information that the genome actually sends out into the world, and this information is not nearly enough to define and distinguish a man from a mantis and a cat from a caterpillar. Reason 2: The genome only says how to build some parts. The best analogy for the genome is the book of blueprints used in a vehicle factory to make the metal parts it needs. Whenever a particular part is needed, the engineer opens the book at the right page, makes the part, and passes it on to the production line. Building a vehicle also requires all sorts of plastic and rubber parts, which come from other sources and are not based on these blueprints. Similarly, the genome provides the information needed to make proteins, but no designs for the many other essential cellular components such as fats, carbohydrates and minerals. Some of these are built with the help of enzymes (a kind of protein) but this indirect genetic effect does not constitute an end-product design. Reason 3: The genome does not determine which of its genes are used and when. Depending on whether the factory is building bicycles or biplanes, some blueprints will be used while others are not, but the instruction book has no say in the matter. Similarly, your genome is a resource that can be used by each of the very different types of cells in your body to produce those proteins they need. Many are only used in specific types of cell. Your genome does not independently determine which of its genes will be called upon. So genetic information does not even determine which parts are available to build each cell. Reason 4: The genome cannot guide its products. Simply sending loose parts to the production line is not going to build a car. Similarly, a functioning cell isn’t just a jumbled bag of molecules: instead it contains a collection of structures that must be built out of proteins and other molecules. After a protein has been constructed on the basis of genetic information, it therefore needs to go to the right place in the cell and join up with other molecules in order to play its part. The genome has no information or mechanism to guide it. Reason 5: No way of reaching the next level. A country’s transport systems require the right vehicles to be in the right places. A ship at an airport or a car moored in a harbor are not going to be particularly effective. Factory blueprints for metal parts are clearly far detached from this higher level of organisation. Similarly, our bodies are strictly organised systems created by having the right cells in the right places, and there is no genetic information that says how to build morphological structures like a leg, a heart or an eye. Reason 6: The limited role of developmental proteins. Most of a cars parts are designed to help it work as a vehicle. On the other hand, honking horns, flashing headlights and indicators have an external function, allowing interaction with other vehicles to ensure effective and safe traffic flows. A particularly loud horn may be more effective, while a malfunctioning one may lead to an accident. However, this is not to say that the instructions for building the metal parts of cars horns can be considered as an explanation for the transport function of the road network. Like the parts of a car, most of the proteins built on the basis of genetic instructions have a job within the cell, but some have signalling functions between cells that help them to interact and work together to form and operate as an organism. Variations in these proteins will have an effect on the organism’s developmental processes. However, this is not to say that the genome contains information on how cells should be arranged to build organs, or organs should be arranged to build a body. Reason 7: Lack of construction endpoint. A design-and-construction process starts off with raw materials and works towards the endpoint described in the design. The result is therefore only functional at the end of construction: a car can only drive at the end of the production line; a protein can only do its thing when it is complete. This is a luxury that living organisms do not have. They need to be viable from the first moment, all the way through embryonic, foetal and infant stages to adulthood. For this reason organisms cannot be the product of endpoint design. Reason 8: Diversity from the same genome. It is not only the many different kinds of cell in an organism that share the same genetic instruction book. The same applies to entirely different organisms. Vertebrates are unusual in having the same body plan throughout their lives, and even here infants are not just scaled down versions of adults. More commonly, an organism goes through radically different stages in its life cycle. A butterfly, for instance, starts out life as a caterpillar before breaking down all its organs in the chrysalis to develop into something completely different. Each of these forms contains identical genetic information. Logically, then, this information cannot determine which form to build. Furthermore, if the genome were to contain a design for each of these creatures it would need to be twice the size as the genome of an animal without such different stages. This is not the case. Reason 9: Designed systems can’t repair themselves. Systems that are created by design and construction, both of which are external to the system, cannot repair themselves. Get a dent in your car and you need a garage to fix it; a damaged protein also can’t mend itself. Yet if you cut your finger it quickly restores itself to its initial state. This inherent, corrective stability is characteristic of all bodily components, and is firm evidence that they are not the products of design. Reason 10: Development is not construction. Design-based construction involves choosing the right parts and bringing them together in the right configuration. This is what happens on our factory production lines, and how proteins are built from amino acids on the basis of genetic instructions. It is not the way organisms come to exist. Instead they grow and develop, a process fundamentally different from construction that cannot use design-type information to reach its endpoint.This final reason brings us to one last loophole that the genome might creep through to still claim its omnipotent role. Alongside design-based construction there is a second way of creating things to order: the recipe. This is not a description of the end product, but of the steps to be taken to create it. Perhaps, in addition to coding for proteins, the genome also contains a recipe for building the organism. Unfortunately, this fails to avoid most of the above objections, and introduces an even bigger one: how and where are these steps coded in the genome, and how are the instructions read and followed? Loophole closed. With so much simple yet damning evidence against it, why are people still so attached to the idea of the genome as design for the body? One reason is that the genome is, of course, a design. It is also present in every cell and has a visible effect on the body. The most obvious examples are genes for pigment proteins, such as those that determine eye color. Your genes provide a design for your eye pigments, and in doing so determine what color your eyes are. However, this does not mean that the whole complex structure of your eye is determined by genes.There are, of course, genes that have an effect on development. Meddle with the genes of a fruit fly and you can make legs grow out of their head. Hey presto! But again, let’s not overstate what is happening here. This is not like introducing a new complex feature on the basis of a necessarily equally complex new design. It is simply a matter of causing one of the existing complex features to be in the wrong place. It tells us nothing about how legs are built. A second reason is undoubtedly wishful thinking. How nice it would be if there was a design that explained the complex structures of the body! How satisfying to replace some vague divine scheme with a neat scientific physical blueprint. How pleasingly recognizable it would be if organisms, like the artifacts we make, were based on design and construction. The alternative, after all, is mind-blowing. Going back to the start of this article, we saw that there are just two ways of making complex systems: design and self-assembly. If there is no design for living organisms, then they must self-assemble. In other words, starting from a single fertilized cell every cell division, the differentiation into different types, the layering of cells into tissues, the twisting and wrapping involved in creating organs, each in just the right place in the body and functioning like a well-oiled machine: all that must just be the result of inherent interactions between component parts, starting at the molecular level with proteins and other compounds harmoniously moving and working together; moving up to cells exchanging information, nudging and jostling into just the right places; the whole thing growing and blossoming, while at every stage being a viable, vibrant, living entity interacting with its environment to obtain the resources it needs to grow; and eventually finding a mate with which to join germ cells to start the whole cycle anew. All this without any kind of design or plan? Ok, we can see how a filigree snowflake can grow without a plan, but a living organism? Surely this is absurd?As Sherlock Holmes famously said: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. We have seen that it is impossible for the genome to constitute a design for the organism, and there is no other design available. Therefore the immense improbability of self-assembly must be the truth. And let’s not forget: this didn’t happen overnight. Our planet was a billion years old before the first self-replicating cells appeared. Even then, with the power of evolution unleashed, it took another two billion years before even the simplest of organisms arose, and another billion before it found ways of building structured bodies with demarcated organs. We may marvel at the functional complexity of modern animals and plants, but we can design and build pumps and cameras that work better than our hearts and eyes. The real miracle of life is not the way we work but the fact that our bodies develop and grow from a single cell without needing a design to tell them how to do so. No wonder it took evolution billions of years to learn this trick!Certainly, the genome has an essential role to play in this process. The cell and the organism depend on it to provide templates for the construction of specific templates where and when these are required. But the inconvenient truth is that this is the only role that the genome has to play. It does not mold living creatures out of the inanimate clay; just sits on the shelf of the metal parts factory, waiting for the next order to come in.