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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (184077)	3/25/2006 12:24:20 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

It will be very interesting to see if any vaguely similar, although much less obvious methods, might exist in germline reproduction in any species. If so, we would have the fingerprints of something which might account for the Cambrian explosion. Kind of the biological equivalent of the 3K cosmic background radiation. All it would take is some such mechanism as seen in the T-cell replication, but functioning on the body plan HOX genes, and suddenly you would have very strange offspring. If this happened during the pre-Cambrian soft-bodied stage of evolution, for which we have almost no fossil evidence, then it would fit very well with the observed record. It is possible that such a mechaism might be detected in defunct DNA sequences of modern life. Just a WAG. Just a wag - nah, it's a naturalistic answer so let's baptize it as scientific fact. You don't like atheists. Thats the only problem AFAIK. I defintely don't like atheists using science to establish and promote their religion. And other chimps have figured out how to split the atom and found out the universe had a beginning. Did you know that nature did that on its own in Niger a few million years ago. A self assemblying water moderated reactor no less. No. Did nature build a power plant or a bomb? Why are chimps doing science at all? There's no evolutionary answer to these kind of questions imo. I think we are pretty close to that answer, now that both human and chimp genomes have been sequence. We'ed be a lot closer if the question was between mice and rats, but we are a bit more limited in the research we can do on humans. I assume the approach will be to add or delete genes in chimp embryos and see what happens. Most likely will not occur in the USA for obvious reasons, but I doubt the Asian researchers will be as hindered. I've read some speculation that perhaps 50 genes might account for most of the difference. So that is not that big of a research project. I'm pretty sure it will be done, despite the handwringing it will cause. You figure the difference in intelligence, creativity, not to mention such things as spirituality, art, music, language, etc. are all going to be found on the genome. Suppose they are. Next question would be what evolutionary purpose did they serve - why did natural selection select for these things. We are clearly a hell of a lot smarter than chimps of any sort need to be for evolutionary purposes. Indeed, our species is about 150K years old, they say. But only in the last century have our intellectual abilities reached their potential. What was that potential doing sitting there 149,900 years uselessly doing nothing?