Skip navigation

 Login or Register | Member Centre

Even platypus's genome is extraordinary

ROHAN SULLIVAN

Associated Press

Latest comment posted at 10:49 AM EDT 16/07/08

Scientists say newly mapped platypus genome could help explain evolution ...Read the full article

This conversation is semi-moderated What is moderation? | How do I report a comment?

  1. Orest Zarowsky from Toronto, Canada writes: How do the I.D. / Creationists explain this?
  2. Doug Hakala from Sarnia, Canada writes: The creationists/ID'ers will handle this data like they do all data. They'll ignore it because it's contrary to their dogma.
  3. Bill H from London, Canada writes: According to the Nature article, 82% of the platypus genes have human orthologs. Every family has its wierd relatives!
  4. R J from Montreal, Canada writes: As per usual the experts proceed as if they know absolutely everything. To the 2 previous people who left comments. Have you seen the actual fossil record and examples of the progression of "lesser" animal that we evolved from?

    I doubt it but you sheepishly listen to the experts and take every word they say as the "gospel" according to Darwin.

    Three hundered years ago experts told us that the world was flat.
    How flat is your world?

    Still looking for evidence.
  5. Liberal Elitist from Windsor, Canada writes: R J from Montreal, Canada writes:
    I doubt it but you sheepishly listen to the experts and take every word they say as the "gospel" according to Darwin.

    Three hundered years ago experts told us that the world was flat.
    How flat is your world?
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    I am glad they listen to experts rather than some character in a story book. At least there are evidence supporting experts' statements. Three hundred years ago, the church persecuted experts for claiming the earth is flat. Funny how that story is being twisted in your mind to suit your belief.
  6. K McIntyre from Oshawa, Canada writes: RJ: Since you asked, here's a list with some select hominid fossils. It's not a complete list, but enough to demonstrate the path of our evolution over the last several million years. www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/specimen.html I have no illusions that you will accept a clear fossil record as evidence, because you have a religion-based bias against evolution theory. If you were the type of person who bases conclusions on actual evidence, rather than twisting evidence to fit pre-existing conclusions, you wouldn't be a creationist.
  7. K McIntyre from Oshawa, Canada writes: On the flat earth: Pretty much everybody 300 years ago knew the Earth was round. Even the ancient Greeks had that figured out. Columbus knew perfectly round it was round in 1492, it wasn't a revelation. The Church persecution thing was about heliocentrism: the question was whether the Earth was the center of the solar system (or indeed, the universe) with everything else orbiting it -- this is called geocentrism. Galileo was forced by the inquisition to recant his view that the Earth orbited the sun. By the year 1600 renaissance astronomers had pretty much discredited geocentrism, but the idea took much longer to dislodge from religious institutions who viewed it as conflicting with their faith. It's interesting to read all the flawed criticisms of heliocentrism that religious figures produced back then. Some of them were half-credible, such as pointing out that there was no observed parallax when viewing stars at different times of year. All criticisms were ultimately unfounded, though -- in that case, it was simply that the stars are too distant for telescopes of that period to detect the parallax. The resemblance between 17th century geocentrism and 20th/21st century creationism is striking. I am confident that creationism will eventually collapse under the weight of reality, just as geocentrism did.
  8. Doug Hakala from Sarnia, Canada writes: Australopithecus Afarensus - Clearly siminan skull, very apelike, but guess what, a human knee joint! One of many transistional fossils, this one linking us to our ape cousins. Many others exist, even a living one or two, like the Platypus here, a transition from lizard to mammal. He even shares a significant part of his DNA with us! The sad thing here is our creationist friend will not bother to learn about the 160 years of biology that has built on Darwins work. Rather the next time any article mentioning evolution is read, they'll throw out another of the tired creationists questions, like transitional fossils, or bacterial flagella or the evolution of the eye, ignoring the volumes of work published on all of these subjects.
  9. martha stewart from Canada writes: I don't get the headline: "Even platypus's genome is extraordinary"

    Even? What else would one expect?
  10. veruckt veruckt from Canada writes: I love some of the comments on here.... it shows exactly the kinds of education a secular public engineered program creates.

    I like this quote " Many people have a very outdated picture of what science tells us about the world. " from John Polkinghorne a world leading quantum physicist who has recently become a Christian priest.

    It is interesting that the uninformed on the deficiencies of the creation of life claim every little evidence everytime there is a new DNA study. They ignore the sheer complexity of the DNA and the creation of life that has Scientist like
    Chandra Wickramasinghe saying live starting on earth is statistically impossible and it must have come from space ships, comets, asteroids etc.

    In the mean time Alister McGrath with a background in molecular biophysics becomes a Christian... and is proudly proclaiming his faith and debating darwinistic atheists regularly.

    Than you have comments like "The probability for such an event as the origin of DNA molecules to have occurred by sheer chance is just too small to be seriously considered ... ."Ernst Boris Chain with his Nobel Prize in medicine.

    The makeup of the DNA is interesting but not surprising considering that all the species exist on the same planet and must survive in the same environment. The creator does know what he is doing even if many of the creations seem to be blind to that fact, he even sent his son as part of that plan.
  11. K McIntyre from Oshawa, Canada writes: "...it shows exactly the kinds of education a secular public engineered program creates." Indeed. It shows we have moved past the dark ages, when rational argument in opposition to religious orthodoxy was severely punished. The argument for design because of improbability is fundamentally flawed. Consider that when your parents met, there were trillions of possible distinct children they could have created, based on all the genetic combinations that could occur. But one sperm won the race to one egg, and you happened to be created -- despite the astronomical odds against it. Should we conclude instead that the chance of you being conceived is too small to be seriously considered, and therefore you don't exist? The creationist argument against randomness is the same. While the outcome of 3.2 billion years of evolution can be observed, and taken by itself is highly improbable, it isn't significant because one outcome *had* to arise, and we don't have any basis on which to claim that ours is any more special than the countless other possibilities. Some scientists may make claims based on flawed reasoning because of superstitious presuppositions, but it doesn't have any bearing on the fact of evolution. Reasonable people aren't bothered by a handful of fallacious arguments that stand against the mountain of evidence supporting evolution of species.
  12. K McIntyre from Oshawa, Canada writes: I wish the comment system would quit stripping out all the paragraph breaks in my posts.
  13. veruckt veruckt from Canada writes: K McIntyre from you should read a book called "Not enough faith to be an Atheist". If you have men like Chandra Wickramasinghe who specializes in the origins of life saying that life came from spaceships or comets then who requires more faith? There are some good information on the Reasons to Believe webpage you may want read about the ridiculousness of the odds of the creation.

    "The principle of [divine] purpose ... stares the biologist in the face wherever he looks ... . The probability for such an event as the origin of DNA molecules to have occurred by sheer chance is just too small to be seriously considered ... ."Ernst Boris Chain - Nobel Prize in medicine

    When you look at the evidence and still ignore the truth well the truth is still true.

    "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell

    "Truth is absolute and knowable and must be searched for diligently, but many will try to hide it, deny it or muddy it." - Bai Leung.
  14. K McIntyre from Oshawa, Canada writes: I wrote above why the improbability argument is flawed. It doesn't matter how improbable the occurrence is -- it doesn't make the claim any more logical. "When you look at the evidence and still ignore the truth well the truth is still true." The fundamental question is how we can tell what is true apart from what is false. Consider this: You can't ever know that you're right about something unless you can also know if you're wrong. It creates a great problem for all religions, because they are constructed such that their adherents can never know that they are wrong. Logically, then, they can never know that they are right either. The resolution most religious people use is to insist dogmatically that they are right, and therefore claim there is no need to contemplate the possibility of it being wrong. To that I point out that -all- religious people think -most- religious people are wrong about what they believe. No religion has anywhere near half of the religious adherents in the world. So even if we were to think that maybe -one- religion might be right, then it would still mean that a single person's religious views are probably wrong. Science provides a mechanism for determining the truth or falsity of a claim: analyze consequences of the claim, and test those consequences. It gets past the older, considerably less reliable method of determining the truth: take what your parents taught you and insist everything they said is true, no matter what.
  15. Angry West Coast Canuck from Canada writes: I've always seen it as science explaining the "how" of things - how we came to be, the processes involved in our evolution. Whereas religion is trying to explain the "why". Science cannot answer the "why", because "why" assumes that there is a reason, and for there to be a reason, there has to be a will. So religion assumes some sort of divine will right from the outset, whereas science has no such delusion.

    The two are only incompatible when the religious nutters decide that they have an explanation for the "how" then try to call their delusion "science", or when certain science freaks claim they can explain the "why" of the universe through observation. In science, there is no "why", there is only "how".

    Science is about observation and testing. Religion is about faith. The two are completely and utterly mutually incompatible, for science denies faith in favour of repeatable observation, and religion denies observation and testing in favour of blind faith and dogma.

    When we stop with the childish notion that we need to know the "why" of everything, we will finally, as a species, be able to grow up and away from the childish delusions induced by religion. When religion stops being the anchor around our necks, dragging us backwards to another dark age, only then will humans be able to move on socially as well as technologically.
  16. John Smith from Canada writes: Wow. One intelligent comment out of all of this. Of all the animals in the world, how could you think that the platypus's genome would be boring?
    The rest of you, please be quiet. You're not going to convince anyone, and it's really annoying.
  17. Jim **** from Canada writes:
    "Unlike other evolving mammals, the platypus retained characteristics of snakes and lizards"

    Mmmm. I'm thinking that the platypus retained some different reptilian qualities than we did. But to suggest that it retained reptilian characteristics and that we didn't, is absurd.
  18. Iain's Opinion from Canada writes: I am so amused by the creationists. They berate us for blindly following science while they blindly follow their church leaders. Why could God not have included evolution in his/her plan?
    Give me science anyday.

Join the Conversation, Leave a Comment

This conversation is semi-moderated What is moderation? | How do I report a comment?

You must be logged-in to submit a comment — login now!

Not registered with globeandmail.com? Register now. It is quick and free.

close

Alert us about this comment

Please let us know if this reader’s comment breaks the editor's rules and is obscene, abusive, threatening, unlawful, harassing, defamatory, profane or racially offensive by selecting the appropriate option to describe the problem.

Do not use this to complain about comments that don’t break the rules, for example those comments that you disagree with or contain spelling errors or multiple postings.

Back to top