Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department and divide the faculty with tenure that I couldn't get rid of into two new departments: those who know engineering and how it applies to biological systems would be assigned to the new "Department of Biological Engineering"; the rest, and that includes the evolutionists, would be consigned to the new "Department of Nature Appreciation" (didn't Darwin think of himself as a naturalist?).William Dembski
How many times have you heard something similar over at UD? How many times have you heard someone say that engineers should be put in charge of studying biology? Or someone in the computer sciences?
I would like to introduce you to some engineers and some folks in computer science. Meet:
...Duncan Odom, a former postdoctoral associate at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research now at Cancer Research UK, and Robin Dowell, a postdoctoral fellow in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.Other authors are Elizabeth Jacobsen and Caitlin Conboy, technical assistants at the Whitehead Institute; William Gordon, a technical assistant in the Department of Biological Engineering; Timothy Danford, Kenzie MacIsaac and Alexander Rolfe, graduate students in electrical engineering and computer science; and David Gifford, professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
The above group of engineers and computer scientists recently did a study on how gene regulation acts to create livers in mice and humans. Did they find a blueprint signed by God an intelligent agent a disembodied telic agent He Who Must Not Be Named? Nope.
But now, a team of MIT researchers has uncovered a surprising difference. In a study of gene regulation in mouse and human liver cells, they found that master regulatory proteins function in very different ways in mice and humans."Evolution has discovered several different ways to make a liver from the same building blocks," said Ernest Fraenkel, MIT assistant professor of biological engineering and leader of the research team.
They discovered evolution:
The researchers and their colleagues had previously worked out many aspects of gene regulation in the human liver, which is one reason the researchers chose to study the liver. In the current study they compared 4,000 human genes with nearly identical counterparts, known as homologous genes, from mouse liver cells.Given the similarity between the two species' DNA sequences, the researchers expected that transcription factors would bind to the same sites in most pairs of homologous genes. To their surprise, they found that most of the binding sites--between 41 percent and 89 percent, depending on the transcription factor--were in different locations in humans and mice.
"The number of genes with the identical regulation in both species was very, very small," Fraenkel said.
Before they began, the researchers expected to see some differences in gene regulation between mice and humans, because the human liver has evolved to process cooked food, said Fraenkel. However, the magnitude of change was much higher than they anticipated.
Just goes to show, you should be careful what you ask for...
Comments
Really. Speaking as a tenured professor with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, I'm one of the last people that Dumbski would want around his "university"!
Posted by: JimFiore | May 23, 2007 11:15 AM