Double Helix: 50 Years of DNA 33
Dr from the Source writes "Despite previous posts, tomorrow (April 25, 2003) is the real 50th anniversary of the publication of the famous paper by J. D. Watson and F. Crick in the Nature journal. Readers can download such paper, along with a few other classic ones from Nature's archive."
We *are* genetically engineered to be intelligent (Score:1, Offtopic)
Sit down for a few hours and figure out the odds against enough genetic material arising spontaneously (together with a framework to support and replicate it all), no matter how many or how few steps it's done in, to produce the most basic lifeform. It lends new depth and
Re:We *are* genetically engineered to be intellige (Score:1)
Mathematics 101 (Score:2)
I'm glad you had something objective to say, and didn't stoop to an ad hominem argument [creationsafaris.com].
In point of fact, given the existence of creationists - and even asserting that they're all literally insane - the odds against one of them thinking objectively are many thousands of orders of magnitude more likely than even the simplest
Re:Mathematics 101 (Score:2)
Mathematics 102 (Score:2)
And Avogadro's number has what to do with probability?
Well, you've made a start, I guess. Pick a lifeform of the order of 10^8 atoms and structure them in all chemically possible ways (ie, all combinations of 10^7 through 10^9 atoms). How many of those ways repres
Re:Mathematics 102 (Score:2)
Mathematics 103 (Score:2)
Not exactly, and the difference between "very many" and "virtually infinite" is a crucial one.
If in practically every example you can find or analogy you can invent, the probability is always negative, zero or infinitesimal, this is an indication (not a proof, but certainly an indication) that in reality the probability is effectively zero (-: "or less" :-)
As I mentioned, it's
Re:Mathematics 101 (Score:1)
You don't even see the logic in my statement
I'm sorry, but I don't have the time nor inclination to argue with you. Have a nice day.
Polemics 101 (Score:2)
Ya just did, ya drongo! (-:
If you were truly interested in not arguing you would simply have dropped it.
I saw the logic in your statement, it was broken, I pointed it out, and now you're having a hissy fit and leaving. Very reasonable... (-:
Intelligence & Creationism (Score:1)
This may be because evolutionists have spent millions of years evolving objective thought, while creationists have not.
I once published a monograph on this subject in the old Journal of Irreproducible Results. (I am most emphatically not making this up.) The phylogenetic tree was something like this:
primordial slime ---> creationist
primordial slime ---> fish ---> frog ---> lizard ---> lemur ---> ape --->
Re:We *are* genetically engineered to be intellige (Score:2)
If you add a grain or two of sand to your soup, you are unlikely to notice it.
Now add a handful of sand. You begin to notice the grittiness.
Now dump an entire beach of sand onto your dining room table.
Adding ingredients is relative, even if it is only one new one.
Now, I know you're a troll (even if you may not realize it), but go read this [seds.org], take a look at the image [nasa.gov] it talks about, then have a little sit down and realize that this planet we're on (and all of yo
The Mote in God's Eye (Score:2)
You cannot add enough time to make spontaneous generation work. The closest anyone has come is (in their head only) adding an infinitude of extra universes to reality in the (forlorn) hope that if you toss a coin often enough, you'll come up with 10^umptysquillion heads in a row. Not only are those extra universes strictly an article of faith, but the way odds work the universe we would find ourselves in under those circumstances is extremel
Offtopic? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Offtopic? (Score:2)
With billions upon billions of years and billions upon billions of joules of energy flying every which way, I would be very surprised if life didn't start.
DNA is actually a very simple molecule, and I am speaking as a student of molecular biology, here. It's just _very_ large, so it seems much more complex than it is.
It consists of four basic units, each of which is simpler than the simplest protein of which I know. In fact, they are about as complex ch
Energy != structure (Score:2)
I'm going to borrow a couple of basic analogies to illustrate the point. Don't get carried away nitpicking the details of each analogy, just consider the broad view. The porpose of the analogies is not to prove or disprove evolution, but to illustrate some things about statistics.
If you sent a torna
Re:Energy != structure (Score:2)
The two would be more comparable if the monkeys had 114 keys and they could only hit them in particular combinations. Last I heard that was how many we had, and tha
Re:Energy != structure (Score:2)
To cut a long story short, the experts in various fields who have actually done realistic calculations or experiments say no.
For (a classic) example, after the Urey/Miller experiments, Stanley Miller followed up. Google for it if you're interested, but for political re
Nova program on Rosalind Franklin (Score:2, Informative)
Rosalind Franklin (Score:4, Informative)
Rosalind Franklin [accessexcellence.org]
Rosalind Franklin was a brilliant [female] scientist specializing in x-ray crystalography. It was Rosalind Franklin that identified two forms of DNA, and correlated their diffraction images with the helix shape. Watson and Crick were secretly, and intentionally passed Franklin's in-depth research (some would say "stole"). If Franklin had not died of cancer (probably due to working so much with radiation) at such a young age she would have undoubtedly presented the discovery of the helix nature of DNA (she was far ahead of Watson and Crick, while they were still fscking around with broken models). Watson went on to write The Double Helix, which slandered Franklin, to which even Crick objected. Franklin's paper on DNA was published in the same journal as two other papers (one of which was Watson/Crick's), AFTER the other two, and EDITED without her knowledge to imply that her research merely confirmed rather than provided the foundation for Watson's and Crick's work. After being made so miserable working at the same lab with Watson and Crick, she went on to other things briefly virus research, in which her partner, surprise again, also won a Nobel prize.
Personally I think it is a damned shame. We should be celebrating Rosalind Franklin. Or at the VERY LEAST we should have (and should still) heard her name. Crick and Watson really come off as clueless chauvanistic assholes. Granted, a Nova episode is one data point, but usually their programs are really good, and I'd like to hear other opinions if other people know more about this issue.
Re:Rosalind Franklin (Score:2, Interesting)
Franklin died 4 or 5 years after the publication of the Nature article, so she had plenty of time to publish anything related to her DNA work.
Crick objected to
Re:Rosalind Franklin (Score:1)
i _do_ think that franklin was screwed, but by all accounts, she was a bit of a snob herself, and made it very difficult to work with her at an equal level. the program seemed to simply dismiss this as a woman struggling in a mans world, but that doesn't change the facts.
one thing struck me as very interesting. this photo 51 that they talked about, apparently, franklin had h
Hershey & Chase (then) forward engineering (no (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe Watson and Crick's solution to DNA structure was a fabulous achievement, but press should also be given to Hershey and Chase's 1952 experiment [mit.edu] proving DNA as the genetic material. Of course, they too rested on the shoulders of giants in chemistry and biology, but their work has equal claim to initiating an era of reverse engineering hereditary mechanisms [accessexcellence.org].
Now:
Biology has come a long way reverse engineering life, but still has a long way to go. Unlike systems composed of similar components interacting to create a complex and often unpredictable outcome, life is composed of a huge variety of components which can interact to create stable outcomes (homeostasis). As we identify the individual components and subsystems, a new field is emerging. This field, called systems biology [stanford.edu], is about modeling this complexity.
Now/Next:
Perhaps most exciting, there now exists enough information to begin forward engineering life. In living systems we have the ultimate collection of both components and subsumption architectures for making complex systems. Rodney Brooks [umich.edu] was brilliant for modeling his robots after living systems, but a living system can be the starting point for further engineering. This work has begun, but consists mostly as limited applied science with pharmaceutical, agricultural, or industrial enzyme goals. Is anyone (else) engineering life for the sake of engineering?
backwards and forwards (Score:2)
Rosalind Franklin (Score:2, Informative)
For the curious, googling for "Rosalind Franklin" is rather informative.
And no, this isn't offtopic.
Re:Rosalind Franklin (Score:2)
Not enough data (Score:4, Interesting)
At the time, crystallography was something geologists did in order to study the composition of rocks. The idea of using xrays to study the crystal patterns of biological molecules was really new at the time. Franklin deserves credit for being innovative in that regard. The real credit that Watson and Crick deserve was that once Crick saw that the structure was a double helix, they were able to put together a decent model for DNA replication. Something people had only guessed about before. Their model wasa still a guess, at best, but they turned out to be right!
The funny part about the whole thing is that the diffraction pattern that they analyzed was no bigger than your fingernail. The picture in the Nature article has actually been blown up from its original size, if you can believe that. Kind of scary how something so important could have been determined by studying something so blurry and small...