Read all about it at Battle of the Chambersburg billboards.
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Be that as it may I’m a results oriented guy. Instead of presuming that “poorer” science education leads to poorer scientific output I instead look at what America actually produces in the way of science and engineering. Without question America’s output in science and engineering leads the world. Not just a little but a lot. We don’t steal nuclear technology secrets from China, they steal ours. We don’t use European GPS satellites for navigation, they use ours. The list can go on and on. We put a man on the moon 40 years ago while to this day no one else has. America has almost 3 times the number of Nobel prize winners as the next closest nation. That doesn’t support the notion that disbelief in Darwin is causing any problems. In fact it supports just the opposite. Disbelief in evolution makes a country into a superpower - militarily, economically, and yes even scientifically.Well, there you have it. If only those successful scientists, engineers, and Nobel Laureates1 would stop believing in evolution there's no limit to what America could achieve. Just look at how far America has come when it's only the ignorant who disbelieve in evolution!
Education in America is working just fine, thank you, judging by the fruits of American science and engineering. Disbelief in Darwinian evolution, if anything, leads to greater technological achievements not lesser. If it isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it.
1. America is pretty much in the middle of the pack in terms of Nobel Laureates per capita [Nobel Prizes by Country]. It takes a bit of intelligence and simple math to recognize that point.
It’s no secret that many of us liberty and/or family-minded folks are great fans of The National Post which officially only competes with the Globe and Mail but realistically also occupies reality that the Toronto Star and Toronto Sun covet. I personally began subscribing to the Post after graduation not because it had a host of right-wing commentators (the Toronto Sun can also claim this), but because the paper took the mission of presenting all view points seriously by often welcoming guest columnists who would attack its editorials, or by presenting series like the one they did two weeks ago on abortion, where a dozen commentators would weigh in on the issue with intelligent, but different viewpoints.For more information about the Love & Sex issue go to the National Post website [Love & Sex Issue].
This led me to great sadness today when I went onto their website to read the digital version of the paper. The front cover was just a large cartoon title that said “The Love & Sex Issue” which is tastefully questionable in itself for a national newspaper, but if you look at the picture itself, it also contains the drawing of two nude people behind the “x” which those of us familiar with Japanese pop-culture would classify as hentai. Half of the main section contained articles which were more at home in a Penthouse issue and the Post’s website contains video content that I dare not look at but is clearly part of the above-mentioned theme.
I have since called the Post’s office and dealt with a nice young chap who will be passing along my complaints (the Post is good at responding to these), but in the mean time, I invite everyone else who is disturbed by this extremely poor lack in judgment to write or phone to the Post’s editorial staff:
[Hat Tip: Canadian Cynic]
The Conservative government will not extend Canada's combat mission in Afghanistan beyond February 2009 without a consensus in Parliament, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Friday.Canadian Cynic has the answer. [Hint: Harper doesn't mean what you think he means.]
"I will want to see some degree of consensus among Canadians on how we move forward on that," Harper told reporters Friday in Ottawa.
Larry, if the amount of necessary sequences within introns are as small as you suggest wouldn't this allow us to make a prediction. Couldn't we predict that due to drift there should be very little similarity in intron lengths between different species. If, by any chance, there is similarity then what would your explanation be?There have been quite a few studies of average intron size in various species. I selected a number for the average size of introns from Hong et al. (2006). The average intron size, according to them, is 3,479 bp in coding regions. This value is a little deceptive since there are a small number of huge introns that make the average quite large. The median value is 1334 bp or less than half the average value.
Hong X, Scofield DG, Lynch M (2006) Intron size, abundance, and distribution within untranslated regions of genes. Mol. Biol. Evol. 23:2392-404. [PubMed]
Hong X, Scofield DG, Lynch M (2006) Intron size, abundance, and distribution within untranslated regions of genes. Mol. Biol. Evol. 23:2392-404. [PubMed]
My contribution to JustScience 2008 will be a review on a protein with the potential to transform evolution theory as we know it today. The review will be divided into 5 separate blog posts:I don't agree with the main conclusion that Hsp90 has an important role in evolution but the case is well presented. Anyone who wants to know more about hopeful monsters should read these articles.
The figure shows the structures of Hsp90 from yeast, dog, human and E. coli [HSP90 Structure]
CANADA PENSION - A Must Read: only in Canada.As if to prove that people can be really stupid, the Canadian letter has morphed into an American one by merely substituting "America" for Canada. See the snopes.com site for an example of similar email letters [Refugee Whiz].
Do not apply for your old age pension.
Apply to be a refugee. It is interesting that the federal government provides a single refugee with a monthly allowance of $1,890.00 and each can get an additional $580.00 in social assistance for a total of $2,470.00.
This compares very well to a single pensioner who, after contributing to the growth and development of Canada for 40 or 50 years, can only receive a monthly maximum of $1,012.00 in old age pension and Guaranteed Income Supplement.
Maybe our pensioners should apply as refugees!
Let's send this thought to as many Canadians as we can and maybe we can get the refugees cut back to $1,012.00 and the pensioners up to $2,470.00, so they can enjoy the money they were forced to submit to the Canadian government for those 40 to 50 years.
Please forward this to every Canadian you know.
Refugees don't receive more financial assistance from the federal government than Canadian pensioners. In [a letter to the Toronto Star], a one-time,start-up payment provided to some refugees in Canada was mistaken for an ongoing, monthly payment. Unfortunately, although the newspaper published a clarification, the misleading information had already spread widely over
In truth, about three quarters of refugees receive financial assistance from the federal government, for a limited time, and at levels lower than Canadian pensioners. They are known as government-assisted refugees.
We have to remember that many of these people are fleeing from unimaginable hardship, and have lived in refugee camps for several years. Others are victims of trauma or torture in their home countries. Many arrive with little more than a few personal belongings, if that. Canada has a humanitarian role to accept refugees and help them start their new lives here.
For this reason, government-assisted refugees get a one-time payment of up to $1,095 from the federal government to cover essentials — basic,start-up needs like food, furniture and clothing. They also receive a temporary monthly allowance for food and shelter that is based on provincial social assistance rates. In Ontario, for example, a single refugee would receive $592 per month. This assistance is temporary— lasting only for one year or until they can find a job, whichever comes first.
This short-term support for refugees is a far cry from the lifetime benefits for Canada's seniors. The Old Age Security (OAS) program, for example, provides people who have lived in Canada for at least10 years with a pension at age 65. The Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) is an additional monthly benefit for low-income pensioners. The Canada Pension Plan (CPP), or Quebec Pension Plan (QPP) for people in Quebec, pays a monthly retirement pension to people who have worked and contributed to the plan over their career. In July 2006, Canadian seniors received an average of $463.20 in OAS benefits and $472.79 in CPP retirement benefits ($388.94 in QPP). Lower income OAS recipients also qualified for an average of an additional $361.94 in GIS benefits.
[The map depicts the important settlements of American refugees who came to Canada in the 1800's. Most of them traveled north via secret routes with the aid of American sympathizers. The route came to be known as [The Underground Railroad]
1. A small number of former pseudogenes have been reactivated. They are no longer pseudogenes so they don't count as junk. A small number of pseudogenes have acquired a separate function so they don't count as junk. There do not appear to be very many examples.
2. There are many scientists who have tried to make the case for pseudogenes having some sort of function. The most common speculation is that they serve as an important reservoir of sequence information that can be accessed by recombination and/or re-activation (e.g., Balakirev and Ayala 2003).
Balakirev, E.S. and Ayala, F.J. (2003) PSEUDOGENES: Are They “Junk” or Functional DNA? Ann. Rev. Genet. 37:123-151. [doi:10.1146/annurev.genet.37.040103.103949]
Drouin, G. (2006)Processed pseudogenes are more abundant in human and mouse X chromosomes than in autosomes. Mol. Biol. Evol. 23:1652-1655 [PubMed]
Gregory, T.R. (2005) "Genome Size Evolution in Animals" in The Evolution of the Genome. Elsevier Academic Press, New York (USA).
Solovyev, V., Kosarev, P., Seledsov, I. and Vorobyev, D. (2006) Automatic annotation of eukaryotic genes, pseudogenes and promoters. Genome Biol. 7 Suppl 1:S10.1-12 [ PubMed
Taylor, J.S. and Raes, J. (2005) "Small-Scale Gene Duplications" in The Evolution of the Genome. Elsevier Academic Press, New York (USA).
Dewannieux, M. and Heidmann, T. (2005) L1-mediated retrotransposition of murine B1 and B2 SINEs recapitulated in cultured cells. J. Mol. Biol. 349:241-7 [PubMed]
Garcia-Perez, J.L., Doucet, A.J., Bucheton, A., Moran, J.V. and Gilbert, N. (2007) Distinct mechanisms for trans-mediated mobilization of cellular RNAs by the LINE-1 reverse transcriptase. Genome Res. 17:602-11. [PubMed] [Genome Research]
Kidwell, M. (2005) "Transposable Elements" in The Evolution of the Genome T.R. Gregory ed. Elsevier Academic Press, New York (USA)