evolution

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Radiometric Dating is Flawed!! Really??

2010-03-06 in News, Video by XiXiDu | No comments

Scientists admit that radiometric dating, one of the fundamental techniques used to show the earth is billions of years old is flawed!!! The earth is not 4.55 billion years old. Watch and find out just how old it really is.

Of course, scientists are always refining their techniques, it’s part of of science works. Creationists have pointed to a number of “results” from radiometric dating that prove it doesn’t work. Here I go over all the reasons why. Why is there Carbon-14 in some coal. Why did Potassium-Argon dating of the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens give ages on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.

To download this video, copyright free, please go to:
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To download the scientific paper featured in this video please go to:
http://www.mediafire.com/?mhljmmzn3m2

If you wish to translate the subtitles please download them from here:
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More: youtube.com/user/cdk007

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Evolution for IDiots (remix)

2010-02-27 in Video by XiXiDu | No comments

Evolutionary algorithm are maybe the simplest way to demonstrate that evolution is an logical consequence of the intrinsic properties of life. If you have imperfect replication in an environment where there is attrition, evolution is inevitable.

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Stupid Design

2010-02-19 in Video by XiXiDu | No comments

This is an from a presentation by Neil deGrasse Tyson at the 2006 Beyond Belief conference. Neil is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in the Rose Center For Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. In this Powerpoint entitled “Stupid Design” Tyson points out some of the glaring evidence for a universe without a designer.

via sandwalk.blogspot.com/fine-tuning-and-design.html

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“Induced” Eyes Suggest a Path to Retinal Repair

2009-08-22 in News by XiXiDu | No comments

Anti-evolutionists have long cited the eye as evidence against evolution. The organ is so intricate and complex, they argue, that it could not exist but for the careful guidance of a grand designer. Indeed, even Darwin himself labored to explain how such complexity might be the product of natural selection. The presence of primitive eye-like structures in lower species and, ironically, the non-intelligent design of the vertebrate eye itself—it is essentially built backward, as light must first travel past blood vessels and nerve tissue before it hits the photoreceptors—closes the lid on that argument for evolutionary biologists, yet the factors regulating eye formation during development are only now beginning to become clear.

Turning on just seven genes in frog pluripotent stem cells, tadpoles that would otherwise be blind can develop functional eyes from the transplanted cells. If the same techniques translate to human cells, they may provide a strategy for restoring vision to patients with retinal damage or hereditary eye diseases.

This treatment produced functional eye tissue; these “induced” eye structures not only contained all seven cell types found in normal retinas but also generated optic nerves that connected to the brain.

Zuber and colleagues have not only managed to drive stem cells to develop into a particular cell type, they have also managed to generate a complete and functioning tissue.

Link: plosbiology.org

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Major insights into evolution of life reported

2009-08-20 in News by XiXiDu | No comments

Humans might not be walking the face of the Earth were it not for the ancient fusing of two prokaryotes — tiny life forms that do not have a cellular nucleus. UCLA molecular biologist James A. Lake reports important new insights about prokaryotes and the evolution of life in the Aug. 20 advance online edition of the journal Nature.

Lake has discovered the first exclusively prokaryote endosymbiosis. All other known endosymbioses have involved a eukaryote — a cell that contains a nucleus. Eukaryotes are found in all multicellular forms of life, including humans, animals and plants.

“We thought eukaryotes always needed to be present to do it, but we were wrong.”

In the Nature paper, Lake reports that two groups of prokaryotes — actinobacteria and clostridia — came together and produced “double-membrane” prokaryotes.

“Higher life would not have happened without this event,” Lake said.

“This work is a major advance in our understanding of how a group of organisms came to be that learned to harness the sun and then effected the greatest environmental change the Earth has ever seen, in this case with beneficial results,” said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

Link: physorg.com

More:
Microbes Within Microbes Within Microbes: blogs.sciencemag.org/origins/

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Robots evolve to deceive one another

2009-08-19 in News by XiXiDu | No comments

In a Swiss laboratory, a group of ten robots is competing for food. Prowling around a small arena, the machines are part of an innovative study looking at the evolution of communication.

The bots get points based on how much time they spend near food or poison, which indicates how successful they are at their artificial lives.

Each can produce a blue light that others can detect with cameras and that can give away the position of the food because of the flashing robots congregating nearby. The blue light carries information, and after a few generations, the robots quickly evolved the ability to conceal that information and deceive one another.

Their evolution was made possible because each one was powered by an artificial neural network controlled by a binary “genome”.

The result was a new generation of robots, whose behaviour was inherited from the most successful representatives of the previous cohort.

In their initial experiments, the robots produced blue light at random. Even so, as the robots became better at finding food, the light became more and more informative and the bots became increasingly drawn to it after just 9 generations.

After around 500 generations of evolution, around 60% of the robots never emitted light near food, but around 10% of them did so most of the time. Some robots were slightly attracted to the blue light, but a third were strongly drawn to it and another third were actually repulsed.

Link: scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/

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