Dr_666

PIES and CAKES are the epidemic; obesity is a symptom of it.

Completely agree with you.

Seems like you're wrong pretty often' date=' including about this. Perhaps you should try actually thinking and reading posts for content. It helps.

[/quote']

 

Really? and how is it that the Owner Of The Truth wastes time with me?

It seems to me that I'm not the only one missing points

...the change in environment can lead to genes that previously did not produce obesity doing so. For instance' date=' if you have genes that lead to a low metabolism, that would be fine 100,000 years ago, but today, with the current food situation in the US, those genes *do* now cause obesity (in a way).

[/quote']

 

I thought that Edisonian had a misconception of the mechanism of heredity and tried to make the point clear.

 

What causes the obesity (in your example) is the interaction of the genes with a certain environment. No changes in the genes are involved. No obesity is being transmitted or "passed on". Only the unhealthy diet is "passed on".

 

You may think that what I said is ludicrous (let's laugh together), but you are talking about something different. I said "obesity due to ENVIRONMENTAL causes can never be passed on through generations..." Aren't you talking about GENETIC causes??

 

People should blame less their genes for their problems and start eating using the brain. I had never seen people as fat as in this country before I came here to do research on genetics.

 

Dr_666

Hey guys!

Obesity, as any other trait that you may think of, has a genetic and an environmental component. If you are interested in the genetic component, have a look at the OMIM (On-line Mendelian Inheritance in Man) database:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=OMIM&cmd=search&term=obesity

However, I don't know why it seems to me that you have a misunderstanding about the mechanisms of heredity of evolution. Let me clarify this. People may become fat because of an unhealthy diet but... this will never be transmitted to their children, because acquired characteristics are not heritable!!! So obesity due to environmental causes can never be "passed on through generations" or "affect the gene pool" in any way.

Dr_666

No, it will not.

But does the very machinary of Evolution have a purpose' date=' plan if you will?

 

Some Evolutioinists would argue that it doesn't.

 

Thoughts?[/quote']

 

Evolutionary biologists cannot accept that evolution has a purpose, plan or point. Said this:

 

Evolution is just the consequence of changes in our gene pools over time, due to random mutations, natural selection and other processes. The course of evolution is also unpredictable. Things that today are bad, tomorrow (in evolutionary time) may save your life.

 

Let me give you an example. Sickle cell anaemia is a disease with a genetic origin. The mutation that causes sickle cell anaemia is transmitted from parents to children. You would expect this disease to disappear after some time, because the individuals that carry the mutation are more likely to die before they have children. However, the mutation is very frequent, which indicates that the trend has been the opposite (as if those individuals that carry the mutation had more children over many generations). Why is this?

 

There is a simple explanation: because the sickle cell mutation also confers resistance to malaria, an infectious disease. Suffering from sickle cell anaemia must be less bad than suffering from malaria, and thus, the carriers of the mutation reproduced better. The explanation for this is known quite well. The malaria parasite that infects cells after anchoring to some molecule. The absence of this molecule due to sickle cell mutation results in malaria resistance as a side effect.

 

This is a good example that evolution is blind.

 

Dr_666

In my country' date=' fungi is classified into the fungi kingdom but not the prokaryote kingdom.

Prokaryote kingdom consists of organisms which has simple structure, most are singular-cell and some has simple muticellular structure.

Some examples: Algae, paramecium, Amoeba[/quote']

 

In planet Earth, as far as I know, prokaryotes are not a kingdom. The term prokaryotes refers to cells that lack a nucleus (karyon, nucleus in Greek), as opposed to eukaryotic cells (which have a nucleus).

 

Prokaryotes include bacteria and archaea. Have a look at this:

 

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/alllife/threedomains.html

 

Let me know if you need more information,

 

Dr_666

Ok this is going to sound like a really basic question, but what is an allele?

Hey,

You can think of the genome as a big dictionary made up of many words. Each of these words (the genes!) contains information required for performing a biological function. For instance, many genes are actually instructions on how to build proteins, which are molecules that play many different roles in the cells.

What you need to know is that the cells of some organisms (like humans, for example) are given TWO copies of the dictionary. These dictionaries are weird because they might not be exactly identical, and some of the words in each copy might have slightly different definitions. Each of these versions of a gene (or "word") is called an allele.

The advantage of having two copies of each gene (two "alleles") is obvious if you consider that the "dictionaries" that you inherit (one from your mother and the other one from your father) have some pages or words damaged or missing.

Let me know if you need more information,

Dr_666

 

who created God?"

 

Why just one god and not many? who told you that? If we admit the existence of gods, I cannot see why they cannot be more numerous. Romans and Greeks had many and were probably better informed than we are, because they are closer in time to the creation, if such an event happened.

This is just to make you think scientifically on your question

However, it does not seem to explain how a species can evolve new characteristics, as Lamarck's theory does.

The problem with Lamarck's theory is that it DOES NOT account for the facts. Acquired characteristics are not inherited. You may have pale skin and have tanning sessions everyday, but that will not influence the skin color of your kids.

As you perfectly notice, Darwin was not able to explain the origin of the variation that he appreciated in living beings. However, Darwin succesfully noticed that such variation had to be HERITABLE (so not like your tanning sessions). Unfortunately, the mechanisms of inheritance and mutation were still unknown when Darwin wrote his theory.

Today, Genetics provides several mechanisms to generate the above-mentioned heritable variation.Two of these mechanisms are mutation (chemical changes in the genes, for instance) and recombination (new combination of genes from the parents).

Hope this helps!

I just read

 

http://www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Issues/Darwin.html

 

I believe in evolution... but this has some good points... it is kind of bias... but the scientific stuff it puts in there makes sense... what do you guys think.

 

The part that talks about eyes forming... how did they... why did an autotrophic organism decide to eat another... how were those channges gradual. how did they evolve to do that.

 

I suggest you to read a book that will give you a different point of view. The book is "The blind watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins. You can find it at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393315703/qid=1119855728/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-8476539-5838209?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

If you are interested in this controversy, you will enjoy reading it. Also, it will give you a scientific point of view on the evolution of complexity from scratch.

Hope this helps.

I may agree with that but this man here[/url'] doesn't seem to... What do you guys think about that???

The writer neither is a scientist nor represent current scientific views when he says: "Findings from the last two decades in particular openly contradict the basic assumptions of this theory. Many branches of science, such as paleontology, biochemistry, population genetics, comparative anatomy and biophysics, indicate that natural processes and coincidental effects cannot explain life, as the theory of evolution proposes".

I recommend you to have a look at a reliable source of information, such as:

http://nationalacademies.org/evolution/

Hope this helps

Even Nobel prize winner Francis Crick believes that.

You can have a look at his book "Life itself" about the "directed panspermia" hypothesis, according to which life was sent to the Earth in a spacecraft by some advanced extraterrestrial civilization.

Amazon link for "Life itself"

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671255622/qid=1119854365/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/103-8476539-5838209?v=glance&s=books

Hope this helps

Dr_666

Let's assume that the frequency of each nucleotide is about 1/4 (0.25).

The probability of getting the GCTGGTGG sequence just by chance would be:

(1/4)^8 = 0.25 to the power of 8 = 0,000015

that means 1 every 65536 sequences of eight nucleotides.

You find that sequence every 5000, so they happen less often than they would be expected just by chance.

Hope this helps.

Although (unfortunately) some people use the term RT-PCR for real-time PCR, the most commonly accepted, old and widespread meaning for RT is reverse transcription (or reverse transcriptase).

If you are talking about gene expression, you need a reverse transcription step. This creates molecules of DNA (cDNA or complementary DNA) from mRNA molecules (messenger RNA). The cDNA is subsequently used in a PCR reaction (hence the name RT-PCR).

As regards to the other meaning (real-time PCR) is not necessary related to the study of gene expression. It's a technique that allows you to determine the amount of template DNA that is present at the beginning of the PCR. This template can be cDNA (after a reverse transcription step, to quantify expression levels), but can also be viral or bacterial DNA (to assess the progress of an infection), genomic DNA (to assess the number of transgenes in a transgenic plant), etc.

Hope this helps.