Uh-oh! It's more scientific graphics for the creationists to steal!

eh.
The colors, man...the colors...

Gorgeous.

It looks, uh, designed. Which reminds me of why the IDiots like to rip off animations and computer simulations so much--they happen to look rather more designed than do the photomicrographs. Presumably this is because the simulations just happen to be designed, while living parts are not.

They typically prefer analogies to human creations, like the mousetrap--which in fact does not appear to be evolved at all. Much better than the disanalogies to design thrown up everywhere by real life.

Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

Gonna throw in some J.R.R.T. geekery here:

"The Shadow can only mock, it cannot make real new things of its own."

Their website is loading r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y. I think it has been pharyngulated!
Z

While you wait for that to load, check out the latest from Nature:

The eyes have it: Fossilized flatfish settle evolutionary conundrum.

I think it's another nice demonstration of the importance of the fossil record, even in light of rapidly accumulating genome sequence data - and I say this as a molecular biologist. Well done!

That was just spectacular. The music was a bit ordinary though. I played it again with Holst's Jupiter from the Planet Suite and it works much better. Kind of makes it more majestic.

'I have to disagree with glen. I think for the first time, this vid actually takes some time to make things look a little more random. (a little). That vid dembski stole had particles magically going into the right place to build structures. This one at least makes a little more effort to make thigs look like they are accidentally hitting things.

Of course there are still those bits that magically went into that fact blob, and those other things that extracted and retracted tentacles. so it isnt perfect.

Its hard themake things look random when someone has to design every frame, or at least define the paths for all the objects.

We talked about this before, but I look forward to the day when we can actually take real video of these processes.

Know what this makes me think? That there could be a killer updating of "Fantastic Voyage" now. Use hypothetical VR and nanotechnology instead of literally shrinking people down, maybe. And now that CGI can do so much cooler stuff than the old Harryhausen/muppet effects of yore, plus maybe make it 3D and IMAX...huh? Pretty cool, right? Two things: Racquel Welch has to be in it, and this time the atheist is the good guy and the god-babbler is the bad guy.

hmm...i was thinking something like that myself, would be a great thing for a science museum, a trip through the body at various scales.

this video uses ray tracing, currently there exists real time ray tracing which can get comparable graphics at interactive framerates. you could probably make a nice VR arcade machine (or go the cheap route and make it a ride...but then you lack the interactivity.) kinda like those motorcycle arcade machine but with vr glasses, travel through the body to various areas, the machine gives g-force feedback as you turn or such, travel through the blood stream or shrink down to the size of a virus and enter the cells.

and an interactive experience must have the ability to shoot cells with a laser or manipulate with an arm..(ok...so your part isnt quite...up to physics ^_^..but the rest of the body should follow physics..a new physics engine would need to be made since gravity doesnt have as much importance as electrical attraction.)

Soon to be seen in "EXPELLED! II-Can't Stop The Plagiarism!"

Gerg @ #8

Racquel Welch yeah. They'd have to dig up the same old wetsuit though. The only one on board that was faulty- at least it seemed to have a problem with the zip staying up in the chest region.

"faulty"?

OT, Obama just voted to let telecoms wiretap anyone without a warrant and grant immunity to Bush for his previous illegal wiretapping orders. Is this your candidate for change? You people are delusional if you think he will represent the peoples interests. He just like McCain wants to keep troops in Iraq and put them in Afghanistan. The democratic party is just watered down republicans.

http://www.votenader.org/index.html

Here you go boys. Couldn't get a wetsuit shot but this should at least satisfy the archaeology geeks out there.

http://members.fortunecity.com/ymir1/page_graphics/images/00000026.gif

these vids would have made some of physiology and molecular genetics soooooo much easier to learn. those 2-D drawings of holliday junctions were completely useless

Wow, it's beautiful! I know how hard it is to design in 3-D so I find it quite admirable that they can make such a thing (and so beautifully). I'm sure it will be a great teaching tool..

Someone mention Ben Stein?

Enough excuse for this (I've been expecting someone to come out with it for ages):

There once was a family called Stein,
There was Gert, there was Ben, there was Ein.
Gert's poems are bunk, Ben's movie was junk
And nobody understands Ein.

(Apologies to whoever wrote the original version)

That vid dembski stole had particles magically going into the right place to build structures. This one at least makes a little more effort to make thigs look like they are accidentally hitting things.

Of course there are still those bits that magically went into that fact blob, and those other things that extracted and retracted tentacles. so it isnt perfect.

Two things:

1. The issue of randomness wasn't what I was particularly addressing, though it matters. The whole effect is to demarcate (color code, for instance) and visually emphasize what "is important" to produce a graphical demonstration.

2. I don't fault them at all for simplifying, sharpening, and emphasizing what "is important", because these are teaching and visualization tools, not attempts to depict reality.

That these are fictionalizations, and deliberately so, is a fact that needs to be told to the viewer. The attempts to get across to people that it is fiction has, I am sure, varying levels of effort and success, but I expect that most professors at least attempt to tell people that this isn't "what really happens".

If you've ever heard an IDist, like Behe, give a talk, you'll recognize what I was getting at in my post. The nice pretty fictional graphics used to illustrate and simplify what happens are pretty much given as the reality of what happens--at least it did Behe's lecture that I heard. I don't recall a single photomicrograph of the flagellum, but he sure was keen to show the fictionalized graphics of a flagellum. Again, I don't in the least mind the fictionalizations, for they are better at illustrating what "is important" to learn than are the photomicrographs. It's just the fact that the graphics do not reveal the true nature of the flagellum at all that Behe neither gets across, nor even seems to attempt to do in any meaningful way.

The graphics give the impression of very deterministically-made machines. The photomicrographs do to some extent too, mainly because they're still snapshots of a point in time. Even these, however, make the flagellum look much less like our own machines, and movies (or "realistic graphics") of flagella would make them look far less like human machines, and more like rather more mutable structures.

And although the mutability of the flagellum's structure does not directly relate to evolvability, the fact is that the DNA is mutable like the structure of the flagellum is. Your average IDiot would far rather portray the flagellum as a rigid structure like our visible machines generally are, than as the soft, flexible, and mutable structures that it (and analogously, the DNA encoding it) actually are.

I agree that this video is somewhat better at showing flexibility and randomness than the ones previously stolen by the IDiots. That makes it somewhat better for the fight against ID. But I don't think that anyone even wants graphics that show the entirety of the complexity, randomness, flexibility, and mutability of biology in these depictions. For, they are teaching tools which are properly understood as cutting out a great deal that would make understanding a full portrayal difficult.

As I said, the video looks designed. It really looks very like something designed, and not much like reality. Of course biological adaptation does produce results that mimic design in some aspects, even in reality. However, much is quite disanalogous from design as well. The bigger problem is not, certainly, that Behe uses graphics without adequately explaining that they are illustrative, not realistic. It is that he doesn't even acknowledge how vastly different something like a mousetrap is from actual biological machines.

The latter are evolvable, and they show dramatic evidence of having evolved. However, Behe will do everything he can to obscure this huge difference between designed objects and biology, and this includes using graphics which are massively different from the "real thing", without acknowledging how misleading his disanalogous analogy of life with human-made designs really is.

IOW, the way that Behe and Dembski use graphics is only a small part of a large-scale deception, one that they even buy into partially (yet you know that there is much that they recognize is misleading in their presentations).

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

If I were a creo, I think I'd be less happy about stealing this video than the XVIVO one that Expelled tried to filch. These thieves don't care about the sophisticated science. They just want something with a visceral appeal, for an uneducated target audience, that "hey this looks like a city, or a machine" ie something humans designed. But when I looked at the video, the first impression that came to my mind were analogies to living systems, forests, wild animals, alien planets, etc. So the gut response I get from watching this is not "wow, kind of looks like a mechanism," but "it looks like some kind of alien version of nature." And that is not what Dumbski and Blehe and their ilk want for their assorted deceptions.

Awesome stuff.

Oh, and in case anyone's wondering... the music? It's by a Scottish band called Mogwai, and it's called "I know you are but what am I?"

"I don't think that anyone even wants graphics that show the entirety of the complexity, randomness, flexibility, and mutability of biology"

you hit the nail on the head here. most IDiots seem to have little to no grasp of the nanoscale chaos within a cell and the way in which feedback controls alter probability, allowing the simplest of regulatory processes to occur. They seem to have taken very literal rigid interpretation of cellular anatomy diagrams without regard for the chemical mechanics that allow their function. To someone without any chemistry knowledge, it would be default to interpret such videos as magically happening in 'space'. It is easy to see how ID persists in the uneducated. Makes you wonder whether some of their leaders are purposefully deceitful or just plain don't get it.

Beautiful. Even if the images are informed abstractions of what is really happening at the cellular / molecular level, it's still well done.

So many wonders and lovely questions still left in science. Then a tiny minority of religious extremists get upset because an increasing number of the answers aren't already in their holy books. The God of the Gaps is "The Incredible Shrinking Deity" these days...

"We talked about this before, but I look forward to the day when we can actually take real video of these processes."
- techskeptic

Fluorescent microscopy timelapse? =P

Dots and lines are cool, esp. in GFP, my favourite colour...

/live cell imaging geek

Real cells -are- incredibly complex though. Can't imagine modeling them too realistically. Computer animation is hard work...

Where was the discussion of real video of live cells of this? Don't want to hijack this discussion too much for something that's already been covered, but I really think about two thirds of that video is too small to ever be imaged properly (at least with light - and in vivo electron microscopy or x-ray diffraction is a little, uhh, unlikely). And while I can't quite identify everything in there, it sometimes looks like there might be a few scaling errors...

That said, I've seen at least one example of confocal endoscopy in a seminar (imaging human colon, iirc). Now that is pretty cool.

And GFP? Pish posh! You'll be telling me you use FITC next! Real men use Alexa488! ;)

Alexa dyes might be bright and pretty, but for in vivo imaging nothing beats the convenience of GFP - the animals (and, if you get it in the germline, all their progeny) synthesise the fluorophore for you!

"'I have to disagree with glen. I think for the first time, this vid actually takes some time to make things look a little more random. (a little)."

Exactly, it looks like things happening in the cell are directed or something. For the most part it's all chance encounters between the chemicals. They aren't actively attracted to each other the way the video shows. In fact if you could actually see the molecules you'd probably have no clue what was going on.

techskeptic @ 7 :"Its hard to make things look random when someone has to design every frame, or at least define the paths for all the objects."

Oh, yes, I'm an animator myself. This is some of the most amazing stuff I have ever seen.

On a related note, I don't know if this has been posted here, but you all might get a kick out of this video as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I1zQ9CDbgE

From the way he talks at the beginning, the guy is most likely using the XVIVO/Harvard animation (most likely without permission), but this video wisely does not preserve the evidence.

But the real star of the show is the hysterically mangled science. As a biologist, this HURT me to hear him describing microtubules, gap junctions, and later, mRNA. This guy is a prize loon, or grade-A bullsh*tter. His audience of credulous boobies eats it right up, though; listen for the worried murmurs when he declares that 'cell phone radiation destroys DNA'.

Much prefer David Goodsell's pictures since they provide a more realistic view of how the cellular interior really is.

http://mgl.scripps.edu/people/goodsell/

How long until they're sued by Blondie for rendering an animated Heart of Glass?