DctrZaius

I agree, someone needs to block that troll who keeps using the word 'evolutionist'. Evolution is a fact, end of story. We've provided heaps of links to evidence and examples yet he still keeps on trolling. It's an annoyance. Stalin (and Mao) derived 'morality' from communism, which they followed strictly. Just because they happened to not believe in any God doesn't implicate the rest of atheism as finding communism morally acceptable. Just as one Catholic priest being a pedophile doesn't mean that all Catholics think pedophilia is morally acceptable.

Hitler was steeped in Christianity from childhood. That's exactly how he justified killing so many people; because you can justify anything in the name of religion. That's why we get terrorism and hideous breaches of human rights in the name of God. No murdering of people can be justified in the NAME of evolution or atheism. Even if you accept natural selection and survival of the fittest as fact, one can never justify murder without religion to tell you that you will be forgiven and still go to heaven. It was Hitler's weird and misconstrued combination of survival of the fittest and thoughts of doing God's work that allowed him to do such disgusting things. How many scientists do you see out there saying that since evolution and survival of the fittest are facts, we should stop allowing all type 1 diabetics to reproduce? etc. The whole field of modern medicine and saving people wouldn't exist if survival of the fittest was the desired occurrence. And interestingly, the majority of people in this field (scientists, doctors etc) wanting to save the incredibly unfit, if you like, accept evolution as a fact.

The question was with regard to genetic modification, not cloning. And it has been answered in the Genetics thread.

Are you aware that the USA has one of the poorest education standards in the world when compared to other developed countries? And that there is a clear correlation between lack of education and belief in creationism? And that intelligent design has been rejected in the USA by the people who matter? How about the fact that it has been rejected by the courts as science education and has been described clearly as religious creationism in disguise through the use of pseudoscience? Acceptance of evolution is not dying out. Do you see all of the major universities all of a sudden not teaching it? You can go to any peer-reviewed science journal (do you even know what they are?) and see how discoveries in many fields are put in the context of evolution to make sense. No molecular genetics makes sense without evolution. The fact that there are so many proteins and gene sequences that are conserved across hundreds of species only makes sense in the context of them having a common ancestor. If you were a real scientist you would not say something as ignorant as evolution being an insult to science. How ridiculous! Without evolution nothing makes sense. In addition to that, some of the most elegant experiments have been accomplished through the investigation of evolution. I'm sorry but you need to become more educated on this topic instead of arrogantly refusing to accept the existence of something you clearly know very little about. I'm a molecular biologist so I don't arrogantly go and tell my plumber how to do his job, I know nothing about it. Just as you're a 19 year-old creationist, you shouldn't be telling scientists how to do their job because you clearly know nothing about it. Would you want medical advice from a baker? No, that's not their field of expertise. So why should you accept science from people who aren't scientists and reject science from people who are? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I think you have a lot of growing up to do This is the most ironic thing I've ever seen in my life. It would be great satire if it was a TV show. So you specifically came to this forum with the intention of never listening to anything we say regarding evolution? Please never come back. And get an education.

Your understanding of evolution is really inaccurate. This is the problem with you wishing to discuss this on a science forum. You seem to be completely oblivious to the actual science behind the evidence for evolution. You just keep disregarding every piece of evidence by saying you don't think it's evidence, when it clearly is. Of course if you take a plant away from a light source, it's source of energy, it will die. Just as if you take food away from a human it will eventually die. Natural selection comes into play when you have an entire population of plants or animals and there is some genetically variable trait within the population that makes some organisms more likely to survive in a particular environment. In a population of plants there might be one that survives slightly saline conditions better than all the other plants due to a variable peptide sequence. If the water table rises and the topsoil becomes saline all the other plants die and the one with salt tolerance will survive to reproduce and pass on that important trait. One human example of natural selection is the tendency for carriers of a particular allele of the sickle cell anaemia gene to survive malaria infections. This particular allele is selected for in the population where malaria is rife because people without it die and cannot pass on that trait. People with the allele survive and pass it onto offspring who can survive malaria better than non-carriers of that allele. This has occurred over many many years in African countries where malaria is common. Can you not see that this is clear evidence for natural selection? Are you just going to deny that this is true because you haven't personally sequenced a sickle cell anaemia gene and witnessed the survival of those who carry it? I strongly suggest you go and read some reliable books on evolution if not for the sole purpose of being able to form stronger arguments. At the moment you're embarrassing yourself because nothing you allude to is based on scientific evidence. You just keep saying that scientific evidence is wrong, which is completely ridiculous. Do you think the scientific evidence that says medicine works is wrong? Despite the fact that it works? Are you going to deny the scientific evidence that led to the invention of things like computers when computers clearly work as a result of the evidence and theory they are based on? Seriously, your arguments are completely logically inconsistent. What has evolutionary theory got to do with anybody's personal opinion of rapists? Your statements are just ridiculous. How can you not see how little sense you're making? If you're a botanist, which university did you go to? Certainly not a recognised one. No botanist could ever have such a poor understanding of evolution when plant biology, classification and distribution only ever makes sense in the context of evolution.

Look, cabinintheforest, if you're not going to accept any of the evidence for evolution as evidence then what is your purpose with regard to coming onto this forum? There is plenty of evidence to support what you're opposing and when people provide you with this evidence you just refuse to accept it and prefer to believe your most ridiculously bias and unscientific websites to support your own delusions about the religion you've been brainwashed into. How is it that reproducible scientific data is false in your eyes but the writings in a 2000 year old book that were produced when little science was known are true? It is utterly ridiculous. Are you next going to tell us that you think the geographically impossible event of Noah's flood is a fact?

There's no empirical scientific evidence for the existence of any of those things so of course we don't 'believe' in them. If there was any evidence for those things we wouldn't need to 'believe' in it anyway, it would be a fact. I sincerely pity you for being so indoctrinated into your way of thinking. Do you realise that if you happened to be born at a different geographical location then you would understand that evolution is a fact just like the rest of us? Unfortunately you were born into a situation where you've been brainwashed into opposing what the rest of the world accepts.

Antibiotic resistance is an example of macroevolution in bacteria. I don't think your God plonked populations of bacteria onto the planet that were each resistant to certain drugs that man would eventually invent. Your claim that evolution must be false because you can't see it happening is ridiculous. You've been alive for not even 100 years and evolution occurred/occurs over hundreds of millions of years. It's an incredibly slow process. You know, it's also 'just a theory' that explains how the Earth goes around the sun. Can you show me a video of the Earth moving around the sun? No. A theory in science is the system which explains a process and it is supported by facts and evidence. Evolution is the process, and it is a fact (just as the Earth moving around the sun is a fact), the theory of evolution is the ideas which explain how that fact occurred (namely natural selection etc). A theory, as you seem to think, isn't just an idea that is made up for no reason and isn't supported by facts. Saying it's 'just a theory' is the most pathetic argument ever. The theory of evolution came about because it was obvious that animals evolved. The theory is the explanation for the fact that animals evolved and there is an undeniable body of evidence to support that fact and the theory (natural selection can be observed anywhere). I suggest you go and read some books about it (Such as "The Greatest Show on Earth") instead of trolling on a science website where people are obviously in tune with the scientific consensus that evolution is a fact. We don't come to your creation websites or whatever and tell you that God is a load of bullocks. This forum is for science. If you want to attack science go to your creationist or ID forum. Cheers.

One of the most interesting things I learnt in biochemistry was with regard to anaerobic respiration in the context of tooth decay. If you have a build up of plaque on your tooth, made up of layers of bacterial cells, the bacteria closest to the tooth don't have access to oxygen. As a result of this they have to survive through anaerobic respiration, which produces lots of lactic acid and the acid gets excreted directly onto your tooth, dissolving the enamel and causing tooth decay/cavities.

Is this a homework question?

There isn't really such a thing as "genes which are not known or recognized by that organism". If you transfect an organism with any gene, the cellular machinery will express the gene. All DNA is made up of the same four nucleotides so the RNA polymerase of an organism doesn't 'know' if the sequences within the genome are 'natural' to that organism; it can't tell if there's something introduced and will therefore express any gene it can bind to. The only time the organism won't express the gene is if there is no promoter upstream and RNA Pol can't bind to that sequence. You can transfect an organism with DNA that doesn't code for any functional product, however (with regard to your interest in the DNA playing no role).

Which model organism are you using?

I completely disagree with this statement. It's so entrenched in religious dogma. It reeks of the old 'animals were put here for us, only humans are made in God's image' crap. Humans are just another member of the animal kingdom. Just because we're of the species Homo sapiens doesn't mean we're more valuable than other forms of life. Myself and many others think it is completely immoral to eat a cheeseburger because we do not claim this distinction you speak of. i.e. "human life". Many people would say that cows are persons; they have the capacity to grieve and feel pain just as we do. Why should such a being be of less value than say a foetus that is of the species Homo sapiens, only it is incapable of suffering, grieving and feeling pain? This attitude is exactly why the hypocrisy of being 'pro-life' exists. More like 'pro Homo sapiens life'. This is scientifically incorrect. Life can be created without sperm. Somatic cell nuclear transfer is one example of how to do that. Human cloning is almost definitely occurring somewhere in the world. Therapeutic cloning is legal in many countries and reproductive cloning was (and I think still is) legal in some states in the US. LOL! Haven't you seen the crazy Christian views of IVF babies?! They're not real people, they don't have souls etc. These people even came about as a result of egg and sperm and they still get viewed as sub-human! I don't know how they would view clones! It's not as if you can go out into a group of people and guess who is a result of IVF and who isn't anyway; they're still living members of our species. Seriously, these religious people are messed up in their views. The Vatican officially frowned upon the inventor of IVF getting a Nobel prize...because...it created 4 million humans? Completely logically inconsistent for people who claim to be 'pro-life'.

So you have a mutant of interest but you're not looking specifically at the gene product that makes it a mutant, you want to look at the impact on all proteins in the organism? It sounds like you would have to do a massive proteomics study to achieve that. What about fluorescently labelled amino acids? What will measuring this result actually tell you though? Is it a gene involved in translation or proteosome function or something?

I truly believe that the general masses would be stuffing their faces with whale meat if it could be factory farmed. There's nothing special about whales. As the Japanese said, how is them eating whales any more immoral than Westerners eating sentient beings like cows, or in my country's case, their national animal-kangaroos? If anything it's actually less cruel to allow a whale to behave in its natural way and then have it suddenly die than cramming cows into a feedlot for the last 9 months of their lives with only 4 square metres of space each and then lead them into a terrifying slaughter house. Is there actually anything more special about whales than cows? I think the criticism against hunting whales from Western cultures is completely hypocritical. I don't agree with killing endangered species but killing 200 minke whales every year doesn't raise any moral dilemmas for me.

I suppose people may argue that this is a really slippery slope kind of idea. Perhaps nobody wants to have a daughter who will develop breast cancer and so preimplantation genetic diagnosis is used to avoid implanting embryos with a BRC1 mutation. Only this allele merely attributes a particular risk of developing breast cancer, the daughter may not necessarily develop cancer. Should you avoid implanting the embryo anyway? Prevent the existence of a possibly healthy person? And then we can get into all of the discussions regarding what we classify as disease. At the moment in Australia PGD can be used to avoid 'serious disease' but there is no definition of serious. What about diseases that can be tolerated relatively easily, like Type 1 diabetes? The injection of insulin isn't really such a burden on quality of life that diabetics would rather be dead, is it? Using PGD to avoid a baby with diabetes is almost an enhancement. What about instances where disease is actually an advantage? The best example is sickle cell anemia helping to avoid malaria infections. By the way, I'm doing a biotech in context course at the moment which is really philosophical and I absolutely love these discussions as a change from hard science!

I recommend just watching Acland's over and over. Learning the meaning of common words like foramen and tuberosity is helpful. Understanding orientation early in the piece is essential. Good luck!

Unofficially, yes. It's excellent for getting started on a new subject, most of the time. I would never ever reference it though!

Hello everyone! I'm Claire and I'm new to the forum (which I found while procrastinating doing an essay assignment...which was due yesterday). I'm currently in my final year of Med Science at the Australian National University in Canberra and will be graduating in 2 months (I'm counting the days!). My specialty area is cell and molecular biology. I work in a pathology lab and I would ultimately love to become an anatomical pathologist. I didn't get into medicine for next year but I shall try again after work and travel for a couple years. I really need a rest to muster up the energy to sit GAMSAT again! I'm too lazy to be a researcher and I have nothing but respect and awe for researchers! I heart Dawkins and science.

A perfect example of this is the recent H1N1 flu! Many older people who caught the H1N1 Spanish flu last century were partially immune to Swine flu. It's pretty amazing that immunological memory lasted that long. Oppositely, I caught chicken pox twice within 5 years so my immune system memory was pathetic, or I just didn't generate any T cells with a high affinity for the antigen initially.

Yes red blood cells don't have a nucleus but the first type of cells that sprung to mind was B and T cells. They undergo irreversible DNA arrangements in order to produce diversity in their receptors.

My 10 year-old cousin enjoyed this one the other week at school: put porridge into a stocking as if it were food in an intestine and demonstrate peristalsis. This also demonstrates how nutrients get absorbed through the intestinal wall (some particles get squeezed out through the stocking) and how fibre continues through the intestine and colon and comes out as poo! Sounds like fun.

Yes I thought it made sense. It's poorly written but nonetheless it's trying to say that more cytoplasm is required in the oocyte to provide for daughter cells after the pronuclei fuse and division begins.

It depends if and where homologous recombination occurs. It's unlikely that genes close to the centromere will recombine. If we assume that all of the alleles can re-assort then the statistics would be something like 10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 = 3,628,800 different possible combinations of alleles in one gamete. Makes you feel unique, huh?! (Also, I was assuming that all 10 genes are on one chromosome. You would need to add even more statistics to accommodate for the number of chromosomes within an organism. If there are 10 chromosomes in an organism, with 10 genes on each, then the hypothetical possible number of gametes would be 3,628,800^2)

I'm pretty confident that all three genes are taken from daffodils.