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Monday, August 05, 2013

Carnival of Evolution #60: Party like it’s 1953

I was out of town when the last two Carnivals of Evolution were published so I'm doing a bit of catchup. The June issue of Carnival of Evolution was hosted by Zen Faulkes at NeuroDojo. He's a invertebrate neuroethologist, whatever that is. Read: Carnival of Evolution #60: Party like it’s 1953.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a special edition of the Carnival of Evolution. It’s the big six oh!

In honor of that achievement, we shall share this carnival’s space with other events celebrating their sixtieth anniversary.


If you want to host a Carnival of Evolution please contact Bjørn Østman. Bjørn is always looking for someone to host the Carnival of Evolution. He would prefer someone who has not hosted before but repeat hosts are more than welcome right now! Bjørn is threatening to name YOU as host even if you don't volunteer! Contact him at the Carnival of Evolution blog. You can send articles directly to him or you can submit your articles at Carnival of Evolution although you now have to register to post a submission. Please alert Bjørn or the upcoming host if you see an article that should be included in next month's. You don't have to be the author to nominate a post.

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9 comments :

John Harshman said...

This is the second C of E to feature a post from the Pterosaur Heresies, a junk science site. Is there any screening going on here? Could we see posts from Uncommon Descent in future editions?

Joachim Dagg said...

If you provide a cogent post-publication peer review showing that, indeed, The Pterosaur Heresies is schlecht, I will include your criticism (or a short hint at it) in the relevant passage of CoE#62 before Larry even noticed he's still a month late.

John Harshman said...

Well, if by "post-publication" you mean actual publication, nothing in Pterosaur Heresies has ever been published, as far as I know. Nor is anyone following Peters around critiquing each and every post as soon as it appears. But Darren Naish has a fine overall analysis of his methods and results. Try this.

Joachim Dagg said...

Thanks; I put an update on the CoE#62

Newbie said...

Next time on special edition of the Carnival of Evolution: New evolutionary views by Greg Venter:

VIDEO http://edge.org/conversation/craig-venter-life-what-a-concept

Craig Venter: LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT!

"We discovered that almost every microorganism in the upper parts of the ocean has a photoreceptor similar to the ones in our own eyes. We knew there were one or two bacterial rhodopsins, but people thought they were rare molecules; it turns out it's probably one of the largest gene families on the planet. It's the same gene family that we have in our own eyes — our own rhodopsins, our visual pigments. Only instead of just capturing light information, these organisms capture a light, and convert it into cellular energy — non-photosynthetic, totally separate mechanism. When we set out to go to the Sargasso Sea surrounding Bermuda, all the marine microbiologists told us nothing was there, it was a desert, and we’d find only a few organisms. Instead we found tens of thousands of organisms in just a barrel of seawater. And the reason they said we wouldn't find anything is that there are no nutrients there; they said there are no nutrients, therefore there'll be no life. It turns out they don't need the nutrients because their energy is derived directly from sunlight.

LLOYD: Do you think perhaps that first use of rhodopsin was to harvest?energy?

VENTER: Quite possibly. And then it was adapted for visual pigments because it was a light-recognition molecule. And the other aspect of it is there's a wide range of new ones — and we have thousands of these now — and so lining up the proteins of all these, there's a single amino acid residue that determines the wavelength of light that the receptors see.

There's a single base change in the genetic code that determines the amino acid responsible for the wave length of light seen by the receptor. Changing one base in the genetic code can switch the light seen from for example blue to green. We found when we went back looking at the distribution of where these different rhodopsin molecules are, they totally segregate based on the color of water. The photoreceptors in the organisms in the deep indigo blue of the Sargasso Sea see blue light. You get into coastal water where there's a lot of chlorophyll, they see primarily green light. To me this is classical Darwinian selection. A single base pair determines the switch between blue and green. And whatever wavelength of light, it clearly provides a survival advantage for that environment.

It turns out, just looking at the populations, that this switch between blue and green has happened at least four times, back and forth. And so in one hand it seems like a classical reformation of Darwinian thinking. On the other hand, under each type of 16 S RNA, we have in fact hundreds to thousands of different cells, different genomes. Are they different species?

These are the types of species and definitions of life that I've been lately been devoting much of my professional career to. And it turns out these diverse organism share most of the gene content with each other and most of the gene order is conserved. But the sequence variations are as high as 60% between cell types. And according to classical Darwinism, this should not be the case, and it's not what anybody expected — there should be that one or a few species that survived and all the others died out."

That's fine by me even though evolution looks like a pile of bulls..t lol

Anonymous said...

Boring, boring and once again boring!!! This video and subject were discussed on this very blog long time ago by a creationist who claimed not to be a creationist. That was the time when I was just observing this blog with awe. He got banned eventually for..... not fulfilling his promises. He was a moron, so to speak. Don't become one or you are on his way buddy.

Newbie said...

Link?????

I have searched the blog and found none:

"It turns out, just looking at the populations, that this switch between blue and green has happened at least four times, back and forth. And so in one hand it seems like a classical reformation of Darwinian thinking. On the other hand, under each type of 16 S RNA, we have in fact hundreds to thousands of different cells, different genomes. Are they different species?

These are the types of species and definitions of life that I've been lately been devoting much of my professional career to. And it turns out these diverse organism share most of the gene content with each other and most of the gene order is conserved. But the sequence variations are as high as 60% between cell types. And according to classical Darwinism, this should not be the case, and it's not what anybody expected — there should be that one or a few species that survived and all the others died out."

Can you provide a link? Then, and only then, I will remove my comment.

Anonymous said...

Oops! Sorry Luise. You are right. The subject was similar but not the same. I was not involved in the discussion, so I missed the point. I apologize.

D.P. said...

Dear John Harshman, let me know, either publicly or via email (info@reptileevolution.com) what your problem is with pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com. Darren Naish was answered in a seven-part series at pterosaurheresies.com several years ago. There's no reason to put your faith in his propaganda. Use your reason and provide your own critique of pterosaurheresie.wordpress.com. You might be pleasantly surprised by what you find there.