Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Why is WikiPedia so slow?

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Sat, 7 Jan 2006, Vern Green wrote:

> I don't really have a problem accepting evolution. In fact, I feel 
> evolution and the bible co-exist rather well. There are passages in the 
> bible that discuss other people that lived on the earth at the time of 
> Adam and Eve. I don't claim to say that Adam and Eve were the first 
> "human beings" on earth, but instead I hold the view that Adam and Eve 
> are the first of God's children.
>
> This view of course bugs the heck out of Mike,

Actually, that doesn't bug me because I think it is way better than the 
other things you do, like propping up creationism with a bunch of crappy 
pseudoscience web site.


> he would say that it is just a way to prop up my religion with science 
> and that I should just throw my belief in religion away and stay with 
> science. Whatever.

I don't see how you'd be "propping up your religion with science" -- you 
are not using science above, you are using the Bible.  I do wonder where 
the other people came from if God made Adam and Eve and no others.  He 
must have made more than two people, but why isn't that covered in the 
Bible?  Strange book, the Bible.  My disagreement with you guys is that 
you put so much weight on the Bible as a source of inspiration and 
historical evidence.  It just isn't *that* good.


> The problem I have in this whole evolution thing is the discontinuity in 
> the science. I still hear that 96% of the chimp DNA matches humans, yet 
> there is very well documented and proven evidence that the number is 
> only around 87%. Why then would the scientific community continue to 
> tout a number that is not correct if they do not have an agenda?

You have to read what I write.  I think I addressed those numbers twice 
already.  Scientists are using new sequence data to figure out how similar 
human and chimp are.  This is fairly difficult to do.  The first numbers 
were at about 98.4% but they were not taking into account certain kinds of 
genomic rearrangements (insertions, deletions, etc.) and once those were 
taken into account the number dropped to something closer to 95%.  I sent 
you some reference material on this yesterday -- a paper in PNAS for 
example.  You could read that.  Finally, you keep referring to a paper 
that came up with a value of 87%, but as I pointed out, that value was not 
an estimate for the full genome, it was only for a region called MHC 
(major histocompatibility complex), which is a very special region.  It is 
a highly variable region (from person to person or from chimp to chimp) 
which deals with immunity.  So it is expected to differ more between chimp 
and human than would other regions.  It explains why human and chimp 
differ somewhat in vulnerability to infections.


> Once the scientific community takes on an agenda, as they have with 
> evolution and the environment, then their scientific data becomes 
> tainted. They spend so much time trying to prove their agenda, that they 
> either purposely or accidentally overlook valid data collected by people 
> who are trying to prove their opposite agenda. What happens to the 
> precious scientific model at that point?

You really don't know a lot about this and it is painfully obvious.

New ideas that differ greatly from the mainstream actually attract a *lot* 
of attention if they can't be explained away immediately using extant 
data.  If they can be explained easily using extant data, it is probably 
because they are useless new ideas and incorrect.

As they say, it's good to keep an open mind, but not so open that your 
brain falls out.  What do you want people to do, just believe whatever you 
or some creationist says?  Sorry, it's a difficult process and you have to 
work hard to get good papers in top journals.  This is true for everyone, 
even scientists whose ideas are completely "mainstream."

Mike

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