|
WHY DO SOME HUMANS TODAY STILL DOUBT THAT HUMANS WERE NOT EVOLVED OF MONKEYS AS CLAIMED BY DARWIN 150 YEARS AGO............ Posted by Vishva News Reporter on February 12, 2009 |
TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO....TODAY ON FEBRUARY 12, 1809....
TWO GREAT-TO-BE LIFE-TRAVELERS WERE BORN....
ONE IN THE THEN OLD WORLD IN WEALTH AND
ONE IN THE NEW WORLD REALLY POOR... |
Left photo shows Charles Robert Darwin
at the age of 51,
Charles Darwin had just published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Middle
photo shows Darwin in later years when he formulated the theory of
evolution after 22 years in study, experiment and cogitation, was born 200 years ago today on February 12, 1809 and
died on 19 April 1882 (aged 73)...
You CAN KNOW THE LIFE HISTORY OF
DARWIN BY CLICKING
HERE....
The right photo is of Abraham Lincoln,
a Republican and the 16th President of United
States of America (USA) from March 4, 1861 – April 15, 1865 and was
assassinated on April 15, 1865 (aged 56) in Washington, D.C, capital
of USA.....
You
CAN KNOW THE LIFE HISTORY OF LINCON BY CLICKING rg/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln">
HERE
DARWIN
AND LINCON WERE BORN ON THE SAME DAY FEB 13, 1809....
DARWIN IN UK & LINCON IN USA...BOTH WILL LIVE IN MEMORY...
DARWIN FOR GOING AGAINST CHURCH'S CREATION THEORY.....
AND LINCON'S ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN USA UPHELD
USA'S FOUNDING FATHERS' PROCLAIMATION OF
SELF-EVIDENT THRUTH THAT
ALL HUMANS ARE CREATED EQUAL AND
HAVE THE SAME OPPORTUNITY IN LIFE
FOR PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS....
|
WHY PVA IS
PUBLSIHING THIS NEWS STORY ABOUT DARWIN....
Because....
- All faiths systems current today says God
created all that exists including human beings...but Darwin disputed
this knowledge saying humans evolved from monkeys about 6 million years
ago...and with gene called MYH16 non-functioning in humans but still
functioning in monkeys.....Yet amazing Darwin survived even during this
own life time when scientists like Copernicus and Galileo were punished
after being found guilty of blasphemy by their faith institutions...HOW
DID THIS HAPPEN????....
- The leading scientists of current daily evolving
science of genetics with its base in Human Genome Project research and
the current humanity appears to be supporting and contradicting Darwin
who, by the way, had never heard about a gene or presumably the 25,000
genes that humans possess to make each human to be distinct and function
commonly and distinctly....every second of the human breath by the
direction, control and guidance of about 3 billion codes in the human
DNA which scientists started thinking as made of 95 percent junk codes
and are now continually revising the estimate and usefulness of this so
classified junk human DNA.....
|
DARWIN'S EVOLUTION THEORY:
MONKEYS TO HUMANS
- And because the article on Darwin and current
thinking about evolution you will read on the next page ends thus: "The truth is that even 200 years from today, on Darwin's 400th birthday,
when we're all dead, our descendants still won't have a clue as to what
the traits just now starting to evolve may be.".....meaning
probably according to Darwin how much of monkeys would humans
still be.....
And thus as usual......PVAF invites YOU to share with the current
humanity on this planet earth..... YOUR thoughts on the origin of Human
creation and evolution on this knowledge sharing PVAF web site.....
Just click on the POST A COMMENT
button in the header of this news item.... and write-share away as much
as you wish....and/or you can email your writing to be published on this
web site by clicking
HERE.... |
Please click on the next line....to read the story of Darwin in the
Washington Post titled
"Going Where Darwin Feared to Tread.....Scientists Begin to Decode the History of Human Evolution"......This
writ-up is an amazing thinking to awaken your brain, heart and soul as defined
in current humanity and also as explained in highly scientific
sNskRUt language
the
sciences
of life and creation
called
vED.....
|
Going Where Darwin Feared to Tread.....
Scientists Begin to Decode the History of Human Evolution......
Washington Post:
Thursday, February 12, 2009; By David Brown, Staff Writer
In biology's most famous book, "On the Origin of Species," Charles
Darwin steered clear of applying his revolutionary theory of evolution
to the species of greatest interest to his readers -- their own.
He couldn't avoid it forever, of course. He eventually wrote another
tome nearly as famous, "The Descent of Man." But he knew in 1859, when
"Species" was published, that to jump right into a description of how
human beings had tussled with the environment and one another over eons,
changing their appearance, capabilities and behavior in the process,
would be hard for people to accept. Better to stick with birds and
barnacles.
Darwin was born 200 years ago today. "On the Origin of Species" will be
150 years old in a few months. There's no such reluctance now.
The search for signs of natural selection in human beings has just
begun. It will ultimately be as revelatory as Newton's description of
the mathematics of motion 322 years ago, or the unlocking of the atom's
secrets that began in the late 1800s.
The inundation of data since the completion of the Human Genome Project
in 2003, and the capacity to analyze it at the finest level of detail --
the individual DNA nucleotides that make up the molecule of heredity --
are giving us a look at humanity's autobiography in a way that was once
unimaginable.
In small, discrete changes in our genes that have accumulated over time,
we are seeing evolution's tracery, as durable as it is delicate. It is
slowly revealing how climate, geography, disease, culture and chance
sculpted Homo sapiens into the unique and diverse species it is today.
Biologists are discovering that the size of our limbs and brains, the
enzymes in our spit and stomachs, the color of our skin, the contour of
our hair, and the armament of our immune systems are each to some degree
the products of evolutionary adaptation. They are the hard-earned, but
unintended, bequests of our ancestors' struggle to survive.
This, of course, is no surprise. Darwin knew it was so -- and he'd never
heard of a gene.
The surprise is our capacity to see the mechanical changes -- for genes
are nothing more than little machines operating in water -- that are
evolution's working material. Natural selection has moved beyond
metaphor. We can see the thing itself.
"Why are we the way we are?
That has always been a sort of fundamental
question, hasn't it? But it is only now that we can really begin to
address it," said Carlos D. Bustamante, a professor of computational
biology at Cornell University. "Over the ages we catalogued the
anatomical differences between people and eventually biochemical
differences, too. Now we can get down to the molecular differences. We
really mean it this time."
Understanding which of our 25,000 genes have changed since we climbed
out of the trees may have practical results as well. Many of mankind's
most common health problems -- hypertension, diabetes and obesity are
examples -- may partly be consequences of natural selection that
occurred long ago, in a world far different from today's. Identifying
which genes have undergone the most rapid evolution, and then figuring
out what they do, may shed important light on these ailments.
Out of this research may come one other tantalizing insight:
How, if at
all, are we still evolving?
At the moment, though, there are a lot more promising leads than
mysteries solved.
More than 300 human genes show strong evidence of recent mutations that
favored survival in the face of new threats or novel environments, and
consequently spread quickly through populations. For only a few,
however, have researchers nailed down the full story of what the
mutations did and how they helped our ancestors.
"We are really just beginning to see the landscape of human evolution.
We're working toward a coherent picture of how we evolved over time,"
said Pardis Christine Sabeti, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard
University.
Some of that landscape is visible on a map of the world. Many of the
differences in appearance and physiology between ethnic groups are
products of natural selection that occurred eons ago in the geographic
regions those groups still inhabit.
Natural selection, of course, didn't begin just when human ancestors and
chimpanzees diverged 6 million years ago and we became our own, distinct
lineage. Much of what makes us special (at least in our own eyes) was
already underway.
Take our brains.
The marvelous things they can do -- and the use of language is right at
the top of the list -- didn't leap fully formed from a profoundly
inferior predecessor. Instead, our brains are the result of small
structural changes, some more important than others, accumulating since
deep in evolutionary time. That appears to be the case of a gene called
FOXP2.
When a mutation occurs in that gene in people (a rare event), they lose
the ability to make sense of language and to produce coherent speech.
When the gene is knocked out in birds, their songs are incomplete and
inaccurate. In bats, it seems to be involved in echolocation.
Across many species, the gene appears to play a role in processing sound
and using the information to perform an action -- making an intelligible
grunt, singing the right song or avoiding a collision with a cave wall.
And it turns out that human beings have two mutations in the FOXP2 gene
that chimpanzees don't.
What do they mean for the functioning of our
brain cells?
Nobody knows, but the betting is: something that may be key
to humans' unique capacity for language.
Curiously, sometimes evolution lurches forward when a gene stops
working. Making room in our skulls for our outsize brains may have been
helped by such an occurrence.
Humans have completely lost the function of a gene called MYH16. It's
still there, but scientists can tell from the DNA sequence that it
underwent a "frameshift mutation" and no longer works.
MYH16 codes for a protein that is a component of some muscles. In
chimpanzees and other primates, it is active only in muscles of the
head, especially ones used for chewing. Some scientists speculate that
the mutation that disabled the gene freed our skulls of the physical
constraints required to anchor large, powerful jaw muscles. That, in
turn, may have helped make room for the brain's rapid enlargement.
Brain size itself appears to be controlled by at least four other genes;
mutations in them cause microcephaly, a birth defect characterized by a
small head and mental retardation. These genes have been changing more
rapidly in primates than in rodents, and the pace of that evolution has
been especially fast in humans and chimps. That's no surprise; they're
smart and we're smarter.
It takes time for a mutation that produces an advantageous genetic trait
to sweep through a population. How quickly that occurs depends, in part,
on how big an advantage the change provides.
With many traits -- big brains, upright posture, scant body hair, color
vision -- the advantage is so great that the DNA sequence for them
reaches what geneticists call fixation. Everyone has it.
|
But fixation isn't always the endpoint. A gene-altering mutation can
sweep through one population but remain virtually absent in another.
That's because all that's required for a mutation to spread is for it to
improve its carriers' chance of surviving and reproducing under their
current circumstances. And circumstances are not the same for all people
and can change over time.
That was certainly the case 2,000 generations ago, when groups of modern
humans began to leave Africa and settle nearly every corner of a
geographically, climatically and botanically diverse planet. Their genes
changed as a result of their journeys, and the genes of people who
stayed in Africa continued to evolve, too, as life there changed.
All of this occurred by chance, and the result is the world of human
diversity we see today.
"Evolution in a pure Darwinian world has no goal or purpose," biologist
Edward O. Wilson wrote in the introduction to a collection of Darwin's
writings a few years ago.
In other words, evolution is not like an arrow shot at a target, but
like a blind dog stumbling across an obstacle-strewn landscape.
This is
what caused Darwin to shy away from talking about evolution and mankind
in the same breath, at least at the beginning.
It is still the heresy
that quickens the creationist's pulse.
The current conservative estimate is that 10 percent of our genome has
undergone "positive selection" since modern humans emerged about 200,000
years ago. Not surprisingly, the changes that tell the clearest stories
involve basic needs -- food, protection from the elements, resistance to
disease.
The adaptation to malaria is the best and oldest example.
Children and pregnant women are at highest risk of dying from malaria
(and about 900,000 still do each year). Any mutation that protects
victims from early deaths and lets them reproduce will spread widely,
because the survivors are more likely to carry it -- and therefore pass
it on to their descendants.
Over the past 10,000 years, such protective mutations have arisen and
been "naturally selected" not once, but several times. They emerged in
places where malaria was endemic -- West Africa, Southern Africa, the
Middle East -- and took hold independently of one another.
So great was their value that they became widespread, even though they
can cause problems of their own -- sickle cell anemia, thalassemia and
G6PD deficiency, diseases most prevalent in places where malaria was a
scourge.
Non-living threats have also exerted heavy pressure on our genes over
the eons. Sunlight is the most obvious one.
Several mutations that lighten skin swept through the out-of-Africa
migrants, though different populations have different "suites" of
altered pigment genes. That probably explains why fairness in Europeans
often extends to hair color, while in Asians it almost never does.
Curiously, the reason sunlight is such a driving force isn't entirely
clear.
Too much sun can burn the skin and damage folate, a vitamin essential to
fertility and embryo growth. Too little blocks formation of Vitamin D,
which is crucial for absorbing the calcium necessary for bones and
muscle. Whatever the reason, having the right skin color for one's home
latitude has clearly been a huge evolutionary task.
Of course, it's possible it could have happened by chance.
The random death of individuals carrying some genes and the chance
survival of people bearing others -- called genetic drift -- has also
shaped our genomes, most biologists believe. But the fact that so many
mutations affecting skin color occurred in non-African populations and
went to fixation (or close) makes chance an unlikely explanation.
"A big thing that makes you think this is natural selection is when you
see 'convergent evolution' -- different mutations with the exact same
biological function," said Sabeti, the Harvard geneticist. "Lightning
strikes once, but it doesn't often strike twice."
Researchers are now showing that
culture -- what humans have created --
also can drive natural selection with as much force as disease and the
environment.
The ability to digest milk in adulthood, called lactase persistence,
exists in more than 90 percent of Scandinavians but only 1 percent of
Chinese. It is much more common in places where cattle, goat and camel
herding are common -- and milk is a big part of the diet -- than in
populations (such as hunter-gatherers) where herding is more rare.
Most Europeans have a mutation in the lactase gene that allows them to
digest milk as adults. But it is virtually absent in Africans, many of
whom can also drink milk.
In 2006, scientists found three previously unknown lactase mutations
that swept through East African herding cultures in the past 5,000
years, long after the European one emerged.
"The reason for the advantage is not entirely clear," said Sarah
Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania who made the
discovery. "It could be the protein in the milk; it could be the fat; it
could be that it's a source of water in an arid region -- or none of the
above."
Which brings us to the question: In a world of intensive-care units,
vitamin pills, sunscreen, down jackets and (for many) too much food, has
evolution ground to a halt?
Or will global warming, urban crowding, HIV
infection, the obesity and diabetes epidemics, and the galloping changes
in technology crank it up again?
The answer seems to be:
Nobody knows. But something is probably still
happening.
"I definitely think people will come under new pressures," said Eugene
E. Harris, a biological anthropologist at Queensborough Community
College in New York. "There are going to be micro-evolutionary
adjustments that occur over time. Culture is imperfect and is not going
to buffer all of us."
But Bustamante, the computational biologist from Cornell, cautions that
it takes 200 generations for natural selection to show its hand -- and
that's when it's working full tilt.
"What is going to happen in 200 generations? I don't think we have any
mathematical models to answer that," he said.
Darwin, like evolution, took his time. He is the patron saint of
dawdlers.
He got off the HMS Beagle, the ship that took him on the trip that
taught him almost everything, on Oct. 2, 1836. He then spent 22 years in
study, experiment and cogitation -- capped with the equivalent of an
all-nighter -- to come up with his theory. He crashed it into print in a
dead heat with Alfred Russel Wallace, a young man in a hurry, presenting
it on the night of July 1, 1858, before the Linnean Society of London.
The truth is that even 200 years from today, on Darwin's 400th birthday,
when we're all dead, our descendants still won't have a clue as to what
the traits just now starting to evolve may be.
Evolution moves slowly, and it grinds exceeding small. Darwin knew this,
and wouldn't be surprised.
|
|
There are 0 additional comments.
Send your news items
to be posted to news@prajapati-samaj.ca.
|