IIDB Archive

Intellectual honesty like conflating "desirable" with "beneficial" while creating an ad hoc analogy about remodeling a house? Most of us are aware of the general lack of intellectual honesty exhibited by the major creationist organisations. That doesn't mean we should respond in...

That point doesn't look too genuine to me -- and I can't see accepting their notions about what kinds of mutations are possible, etc., since they don't seem to very often have accurate notions about these little details. Oh, their ideas about what kinds of mutations are possible are clearly as back...

Evolution is observable fact. If you watch any population long enough, you'll see morphological and genetic changes. I don't know about that. Obviously, it's got to happen after some period of time, and so it's falsifiable in principle. I doubt this would qualify as a falsifiable prediction under p...

You can kind of see what they're talking about, though. It's true that most antibiotic resistance mutations are already present somewhere in the population (most antibiotic compounds were isolated from organisms that produce them as defence mechanisms). It's also true that most of the mutations that...

you mean some of the amino acids are changed post translation? Sometimes- in the sense that they sometimes get cut off or added on. I don't know if there's anything so specific as, say, a change of a single amino acid at a specific location, but the addition of a load of crap to the protein would b...

I knew my ignorance would catch me out sooner or later. Can you give me an example of the sort of post translation modifications that take place? Ho! I only have a cursory idea of exactly what takes place there myself. I know proteins get phosphorylated a lot, and that some polypeptides get cut up ...

What are these heavily acronymized things of which you englishers speak?

This is a pretty cool idea. By rights it ought to be possible, and molecular biologists would love a "reverse translatase" enzyme to bits. It's probably nothing but a fantasy, though, not just because we've never encountered such a beast. The biggest problem I can see isn't just working ou...

You're right about ERVs and their use as a phylogenetic tool.

This is the first I've heartd of an ERV gene being actually expressed and used for development! I wonder how ancient that particular gene is?

I wonder how much more intelligent we really are. I mean, homo sapiens in a pre-technological society (and I mean way back: pre agriculture nomadic sapiens) are of the same intelligence as us, but how much could they achieve that chimps couldn't? Obviously something, but I think the perception of ou...