Natural Science Forum / Biology / Evolution / August 2007

I will just state right now that I am a Christian, but I don't believe
the Christianity and Evolution are mutually exclusive, or that a
belief in Christianity is necessarily anti-evolutionary, or that a
belief in Evolution is anti-Christian.

I was invited here, because I find too many "holes" in "clay", for it
to be a valid hypothesis!
So who's the "clay" expert's in here?

Hi ya'll:  I'm new to this group, so if I'm running over familiar
ground, please cut me some slack.
I found the discussion of opsin gene duplications and the origins of
color vision discussed in Sean Carroll's THE MAKING OF THE

Leads and links to work on primate evolution requested.

An article in Wikipedia claims that the sandshark has a rudimentary
swim bladder, unlike most sharks.
   Is this true? I would be really interested if it was. I would
particularly like to know if this swim bladder organ is homologous to

This is a response to the message list "Evolutionary origins of
Laughter" . I don't know why I can't post there.
The discussion there is about either is meaningful or not to explain
laugther as a way of group comunication with the meaning "this think

I have been interested for a long time in the impact that civilization
has on our genome. I have many questions on this and will start out with
this one:
When individuals from distant (genetic) population groups interbreed

for a long time I was looking around for a database of character
matrices for difficult organisms/taxons. But I didn´t find someone. Is
anybody here who knows where I could find such a data collection?
Where? Or are there any projects like a "character wiki" or something

Animation On Dna Helicase
http://bioisolutions.blogspot.com/2007/08/dna-helicase.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/2dr8e6

A few years ago, I read an article which advanced the theory that
base-4 is the optimal (minimum energy) radix fpr information storage
and transfer.  Unfortunately I did not save a copy and extensive
searching drew a blank too.

Shamed scientist's 'breakthrough'
A scientist who faked his research may have actually made a
groundbreaking advance - without even realising it.
South Korean Woo Suk Hwang became famous after claiming to have

By William Mullen | Tribune staff reporter
August 3, 2007
Chimpanzees may be the closest cousins there are to human beings, with the
two species sharing 98 percent of the same DNA, but a group of researchers

Why has DNA evolved to use base-4?
I think the better question is why has DNA evolved
to use two sets of bases?
And then ask what's the difference between the two.

Published this week in PNAS.
"The new mutation theory of phenotypic evolution" by Masatoshi Nei
PNAS | July 24, 2007 | vol. 104 | no. 30 | 12235-12242
Abstract

I have read articles about the electrical sense of sharks. They use
them at short distances to zero in on the position of prey. I have
heard the claim that they need the electrical sense to know where to
position their mouth. However, I thought that the electrical fields