Posted on 12/10/2006 2:44:11 PM PST by Alter Kaker
A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.
The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome. It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently.
Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.
Such a mutation is known to have arisen among an early cattle-raising people, the Funnel Beaker culture, which flourished some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in north-central Europe. People with a persistently active lactase gene have no problem digesting milk and are said to be lactose tolerant.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Dammit man! I had to cover my mouth to keep from spewing luke warm coffee on my monitor and keyboard!
"However, certain human populations have undergone a mutation on chromosome 2 which results in a bypass of the common shutdown in lactase production, allowing members of these populations to continue consumption of fresh milk and other milk products throughout their lives."
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Lactose_intolerance
This is only true if reality is limited to 4 dimensions.
A creator existing in 4+ dimensions does not require a beginning since he is not bound by time.
Actually, it isn't. Evolution is just change in allele frequencies over time. That can be caused by selection, which can take a number of forms including natural, sexual and artificial.
This renders the term 'evolution' meaningless since it easily accomodates populations accumulating deleterious mutations.
This would allow evolutionists to claim that populations that are in catastrophic error-catastrophe are 'evolving' when they are actually in genetic meltdown.
Coincidental?
Huh? Populations don't go into "catastrophic error-catastrophe" (whatever that is). That violates the principle of natural selection -- more fit individuals will survive, which means that there is constant evolutionary pressure towards greater fitness, not less.
I think your first clause disproves yours second. We know how it happened: selection, mutation, gene flow and genetic drift, and we can readily and repeatedly observe those four forces in the fossil and genetic record.
We know that hydrogen didn't evolve, that it was somehow created.
I don't know what "evolve" means in that context. Evolution in the biological sense refers to a change in allele frequencies over time. Hydrogen has no alleles. It did not "evolve". Hydrogen did form approximately 300,000 years after the Big Bang, per cosmologists, when atomic nuclei and electrons cooled down enough to combine.
Tell me how the first bits of life came about. Then show me your proof.
My answer is: I don't know. Evolution has nothing to say on the matter -- as far as I know, God could have created the first life.
Because it's a mutation that we can observe in the genetic record. Looking at random mutations over time to that mutation, we can get an approximate date for it's first appearance. Which is exactly what the researchers did in this study.
IOW, this article is opinion.
Nonsense. Out of curiosity, what are your qualifications? Have you read the actual study?
No, but if you continue to consume large quantities of alcohol, your children will possibly evolve, although the resultant mutations are unlikely to be benign or beneficial.
By looking at the degree of variation between different copies of the mutated gene, microbiologists can estimate the age of its earliest appearance, as certain mutation rates are reasonably constant. At the present time, this kind of dating is still only approximate, as you'll notice with the date used in this article which has an accuracy of +/- 2000 years.
Maybe you could help us out then -- please describe to me a hypothetical experiment where one could "duplicate Darwinism (sic) in a lab."
Tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself to believe whatever it is you feel called on to believe.
No it doesn't. That's why the researchers mentioned in the article conducted the genetic experiment they did, in order to date the mutation.
I know many adults that should switch from genes altogether, and just wear sweat pants.
Animal husbandry is the opposite of natural selection. Sorry Mamzelle.
Like you aren't doing the same thing?
LOL True.
Sorry, Alter Kater. Ain't accepting this stuff on faith or even history.
Hmmm. . .makes sense, but I'll have to think about that. Assuming they had domesticated cattle, it would seem the first thing they would do is eat some of the cattle as well as some of the plants the cattle ate.
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