Hi Readers,
Ever since I joined this forum I have been amazed at how easily people on here reject proof "evidence" and accept testimony in it's place, most of the scientific rejection seems to come from North America and it appears they also reject the theory of evolution as well. More evidence exists for this theory than any other theory I have looked at, does this explain the American psyche?


Belief in evolution
Untouched by the hand of God

Feb 5th 2009
From Economist.com
How people in various countries view the theory of evolution

IT IS 150 years since the publication of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which suggested that all living things are related and that everything is ultimately descended from a single common ancestor. This has troubled many, including Darwin himself, as it subverted ideas of divine intervention. It is not surprising that the countries least accepting of evolution today tend to be the most devout. In the most recent international survey available, only Turkey is less accepting of the theory than America. Iceland and Denmark are Darwin's most ardent adherents. Indeed America has become only slightly more accepting of Darwin's theory in recent years. In 2008 14% of people polled by Gallup agreed that “man evolved over millions of years”, up from 9% in 1982.
When asked if the theory was true the countries responded like this.

Iceland 85% said yes
Denmark 83% " "
Sweden 83% " "
France 80% " "
Britain 74% " "
Norway 73% " "
Belgium 73% " "
Spain 72% " "
Germany 70% " "
Italy 69% " "
Neatherlands 68% " "
Hungary 67% " "
Luxenberg 67% " "
Ireland 67% " "
Switzerland 65% " "
Austria 63% " "
Greece 52% " "
United States 40% " "
Turkey 26% " "


40% of USA said no and the rest weren't sure
52% of Turkey said no and the rest weren't sure

http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgaller...e=features_box4


Wow! What a rejection of evidence!


Cheers

Hi Guys,

Evolution is an amazing thing traits that maximise chances of survival seem to randomly appear in species and from there it is passed on to each succeeding generation of offspring. In this case it was light coat because environmental camouflage in Nebraska, but how did it occur when the Deer mouse did not even have a gene for light coat in the first place??

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* For similar stories, visit the Genetics and Evolution Topic Guides

Deer mice have pulled off the opposite trick to the famous peppered moth, evolving a light coat to disguise themselves from predators. What's more, they did it even though their ancestors had no genes for light coats.

Most deer mice have dark fur, which would stand out vividly against the pale-coloured Sand Hills of Nebraska. The hills formed around 10,000 years ago, but genetic analysis performed by Catherine Linnen of Harvard University and colleagues found that back then the deer mouse genome didn't contain the genes for light fur. That means the trait arose from a new mutation which rapidly spread through the local deer mouse population.

The mutation is in a gene called Agouti, which helps control coat colour in many mammals.

"We found a very strong association between a single amino acid deletion, in a functionally important part of the gene, and the colour phenotype," Linnen says.

Ron Woodruff, an evolutionary biologist at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, says the results are striking. "Any cases where you can find positive selection for a mutation are interesting," he says.
Standing start

The amount of genetic variation in the new version of Agouti suggests the mutation occurred less than 10,000 years ago, Linnen says – after the formation of the Sand Hills.

"An older mutation would show lots of variation," she says.

Normally, to achieve such a rapid evolutionary shift a species needs to have an alternative version of a gene already in circulation. A change in conditions – such as trees becoming darker as they get covered in soot, in the case of the peppered moth – can then provide the selection pressure that causes the alternate gene to spread. But in deer mice the new version of Agouti spread rapidly from a standing start.

Woodruff says that these "de novo" mutations – which occur after a species has encountered the situation where they will be useful, rather than before – may be more important for evolution than biologists think.

If the Agouti mutation occurred in just one mouse, the chances of it spreading rapidly through the whole population would be slim, which is why newly arising mutations like this have been thought to be unimportant.

But Woodruff points out that mutations can occur while an animal is in the womb. If this occurs early enough, the mutation may be present in many of its sperm or egg cells. Then the animal could have several offspring with the mutation, making it easier for the mutation to spread.

He says, "Beneficial mutations occur by both mechanisms: pre-existing variations and de novo mutations. The debate is, what is the proportion of the two?"

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1175826


Cheers

Hi Guys,
I found this very interesting too. Genetics is such an interesting study, if only we had time to study all of the things that we become interested in.....


Are humans impossible to ape?


Not quite human ... Chimpanzees have nearly the same DNA as humans. Photo: Edwina Pickles
August 27, 2009

Chimpanzees share 98 per cent of our DNA. But that does not mean they are close to being human. Sanjida O'Connell reports.

About 50 years ago something happened that radically changed our ideas about what it means to be human. A young secretary who had ventured into the African jungle witnessed a chimpanzee fashioning a tool out of a blade of grass and using it to fish for termites. Jane Goodall had been sent to Tanzania by Dr Louis Leakey, who, on hearing her startling news, came up with an equally startling statement: ''Now we must redefine 'tool', redefine 'man', or accept chimps as humans.''

In the 1960s Goodall, later founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, discovered more similarities between ourselves and chimpanzees: they can use stone tools; their mothers teach their infants; they feel similar emotions to us, such as fear, sadness and happiness, and they grieve over lost loved ones.

Subsequently, genetic research started to shore up her theory that ''the line between humans and other non-human beings, once thought so sharp, has become blurred''. Movements sprang up such as the Great Ape Project, founded in 1993 by the bioethicist Peter Singer, which argued that apes should be awarded some basic rights. And as genome mapping was developed, the genetic difference observed between humans and chimpanzees, our closest living ancestors, continued to shrink: it turned out that only 1.6 per cent of our genes were different.

This activity led to two conclusions: that humans and apes were not that different, and that if 98.4 per cent of our genes were shared with chimps, the remaining 1.6 per cent should explain why our development has differed so greatly from that of our cousins.

Yet a new book criticises both assumptions. ''Because we are virtually genetically identical, primatologists argue that in a logical sense, chimpanzees are very close to us cognitively,'' says Jeremy Taylor, author of Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human. ''The way this idea has bled into popular culture enrages me.''

Taylor is scathing on the subject of primate rights. ''I don't understand why conservation of the great apes has become synonymous with human rights and their similarity to us, whereas conservation of wetlands or a million other species doesn't carry any such conflations.'' In this he echoes geneticist Professor Steve Jones, who has argued that it is a mistake to apply a human concept, such as rights, to an animal. ''Chimpanzees share about 98 per cent of our DNA, but bananas share about 50 per cent, and we are not 98 per cent chimp or 50 per cent banana. We are entirely human and unique.''

Goodall's work was followed by a spate of studies demonstrating how close chimps' mental capacities seem to be to ours. They can, it is thought, show self-awareness, as demonstrated by what has become a classic test. Researchers put a blob of paint on a chimp's face without the animal noticing or being able to see the spot, and then give it a mirror. Macaques and other monkeys will react aggressively to their image, as if they are seeing another creature, whereas chimps will calmly sit down and rub the paint off.

In 1978 the scientists David Premack and Guy Woodruff published a paper asking if chimps had what they termed ''theory of mind'', the ability to understand that another being has thoughts, beliefs, desires and feelings. Because we have this ability, we think about what others are thinking; we don't treat others as if they were objects or automatons following a set of rules.

Most scientists working in this field would argue that chimps do not have the same capacity as humans for thinking about how others think, but that, nevertheless, chimps still have some understanding of mental states. ''It is time for humans to quit thinking that their nearest primate relatives only react to behaviour,'' says Dr Josep Call, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who has been studying chimpanzees for many years. ''All the evidence suggests that chimpanzees understand both the goals and intentions of others as well as the perception and knowledge of others.''

Yet there are sceptics, chief among them Professor Daniel Povinelli of the University of Louisiana. In one of his experiments chimps were made to beg for food from two researchers. One wore a bucket on his head, which prevented him from seeing the chimps, and the other did not. The chimps begged indiscriminately from both researchers, indicating they could not understand what the researchers could see.

It was such problems that led Taylor to turn to genetics to understand the mental and genetic differences between ourselves and chimpanzees. For his new book, the television producer trawled through the latest research and discovered these differences could be far greater than previously thought.

Over the past five years, he says, our understanding of genetics has become much more sophisticated. While there may only be a 1.6 per cent difference in the genome itself, the way it shapes our minds and bodies is radically different. ''The key thing for me,'' Taylor says, ''is that when you compare chimps and great apes with humans you notice how much more gene expression there is in humans.''

Gene expression is when certain genes damp down or speed up chemical processes. A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology showed that in human brains there is a five-fold increase in the rate of gene expression. Other research has shown that more than 90 per cent of the genes in human brains have been ''up-regulated'' - that is, they have higher levels of gene expression. Most of these genes are associated with the speed of transmission of nerve impulses or energy production to fuel the brain. Taylor says: ''Bigger, faster, greedier, longer-living - that's the evolutionary story of the human brain.''

Another genetic difference between chimps and us is ''copy number variation''. This is where a gene becomes copied, inserted into another part of the genome and yet still works. For instance, GLUD2 is a gene that governs an enzyme involved in nerve signalling in the brain. It is common to all the great apes, including humans, but with us the gene has been copied, which makes the enzyme work faster. The resulting neurological intensity, Taylor says, ''is like swapping a Lee-Enfield rifle for a machine gun''.

Along with other genetic innovations, such as inversions, where whole chromosomes are flipped over, and gene splicing (in which one gene controls up to 50 proteins), the gulf between human and chimpanzee brains starts to widen dramatically. ''If you add all this up,'' Taylor says, ''the genetic similarity between humans and chimps drops to 87 per cent.''

The differences between humans and chimpanzees are concentrated in our brains, our immune systems and our metabolisms, suggesting a level of uniqueness that marks us out from other creatures.

But some disagree. Professor Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta, has written several books, such as Our Inner Ape, in which he argues for a continuum between us and chimpanzees.

''Evolutionary theory shows there is a continuity between all life forms, including humans and other animals,'' he says. ''Darwin was clear on this, and modern neuroscience has yet to find any area in the human brain that is not also present in a chimpanzee's. If there is a qualitative jump between ape and human mental capacities, the challenge for Taylor will be to explain how we got there without major changes in the brain, apart from size.

''The trend over the past few decades has been the opposite: those who have bet on similarities between humans and other animals have been proven right time after time. Claiming human uniqueness has been a losing battle.''

Taylor agrees chimpanzees ''show many fundamentally human skills - to a degree that they have the ability to do maths, think abstractly, demonstrate altruism, make tools and imitate each other. There is nothing humans can do that apes can't do, however simplistically.''

But, he says, ''we are talking about the difference between using a twig as a tool and using the internet. It's humans who have speech and language; humans have culture, art, music, science, technology; humans recall the past, plan for the future, fear death and pay taxes.

''Sometimes, amid the scientific talk of genetic and cognitive similarity, we can lose sight of the most important facts.''

Telegraph, London

Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human (OUP) is published in Australia next month.

Cheers