/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6257629
There's a course on Coursera that's about to start soon.

Any high school textbook will do.

>>6257634
what about "the greatest show on earth"?

I would say Khan Academy, but I remember not liking the regular bio playlist.

There is a crash course bio playlist which covers biology on there though: https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/crash-course1/crash-course-biology

>evolution
>science

>>6257685
>/pol/

You don't need scientific background to do anything related to biology.

Also, I'll tell you everything you need to know right now:

In each of our cells their is a long string code called DNA (wiki DNA if you want to know more), this is made up of millions of lines of code, each one of these lines of code is made from 4 digits. If any of these digits or lines changes, so to does the organism - this is called mutation.

All evolution is based on random mutation, and preferable traits being naturally selected for survival. Most mutations will do nothing or even harm the organism, but sometimes there is a positive mutation, and those creatures will be bred with in preference until that new trait is brought into the population.

Evolving new features in an organism does not necessarily make the organism "better," evolution is simply a better acclimation to the environment in question. The environment dictates will traits will be naturally selected.

Bam that's it.

>>6257685
Only /pol/tards believe in evolution and "race". The truth is that race does not exist. All humans are naturally equal.

>>6257719

It's not about equality, retard. Do you not believe in different breeds of dogs? Is a Cocker spaniel the same as a Doberman?

We are all the same SPECIES but we come in different breeds or "races."

Is a Doberman better than a Cocker spaniel? You would have to define "better" first, but epistemologically, no.

>>6257719
/pol/tard detected.

>>6257734
There are no different dogs. Dogs are defined by having 4 legs and fur. All animals with 4 legs and fur are equal.

>>6257739

I didn't read your original post closely enough to realize you were just innocently trolling, I apologize.

>>6257738
>projection
>tu quoque
>ad hominem
>strawman
>red herring
>ignoratio elenchi
>argumentum ad populum
>argumentum verbosum
>appeal to emotion

>>6257743
>hurr durr I'm brain damaged

Yes, we got it. We don't need further evidence.

>>6257745
>nobody fucking cares, now shut the fuck up and leave

>>6257749
>muh reaction images

internet tough guy detected

>>6257767
I'm the tough guy? You're the one derailing the thread

>>6257775
>projection

>>6257629
Origin of Species- Charles Darwin (really important)
The selfish Gene- Richard Dawkins
the Blind Watchmaker- Richard Dawkins
Why is Evolution True- Jerry Coyne

>>6257898
>Origin of Species- Charles Darwin (really important)
That books is old and facts that it relies on are outdated

>>6257629
Bible.

>>6257629
The wikipedia introduction to evolution page is actually pretty good. Read that

>>6257715
> If any of these digits or lines changes, so to does the organism
Nope
>All evolution is based on random mutation,
Nope
> those creatures will be bred with in preference until that new trait is brought into the population.
Nope
>Bam that's it.
Nope

Someone clearly didn't pay attention in high school biology

>>6257629
here anon some links
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html

FAQ
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html

an actual book
http://www.katproxy.pw/the-structure-of-evolutionary-theory-stephen-gould-t5923978.html

honestly, wiki is fine too

>>6258019

If any of the genetic code change, the organism changes in some way. It may not even be noticeable but it can lead to phenotype changes.

How is it not based on random mutation? The genes know how to change?

If it is an adaptive evolution, it will be bred with for the species to "evolve." It might not be, but for evolution to take place this is what has to happen.

I mean "nope" was a pretty good counter-argument, but if you could provide just the tiniest bit more detail.

>>6257745

Before:

>muh logik b stronger dan y'all

After:

>reads about Godel/Hume
>goes back to /pol/

Origin of Species by Darwin

>>6257629
I recommend you seek the truth.

http://crl.i8.com/Evolution/Dna.html

http://www.earthage.org/intro/odds_of_evolution_by_chance.htm

http://creationdesign.org/english/chances.html


Life adapts. Variation has been proven.
Life does not arise from non life. This has never been observed.

I'd recommend the complete works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It has nothing to do with evolution, of course. I just like to recommend Sherlock Holmes stories.

Just read wikipedia, simple.wikipedia offers pretty simple explanations for complex phenomena

>>6261670
fuck off retard

>>6261670
You're this guy >>6261650, aren't you. Also, you're points over there have already been refuted.

>>6261722
*your

Evolution is just a marketing gimmick to sell monkeys to zoos.

>>6261764
maximum red pill

/sci/ I got a question.
are mutations totally random?
and are there things that affect it and it probability of happening?

>>6264195

Yes, they're random.
You don't really know what to expect when mixing genes together, just like chemicals.

>>6264376
>You don't really know what to expect when mixing genes together, just like chemicals.

I thought we knew what to expect when mixing chemicals. Would you have me believe chemistry is false?

>>6264195
>and are there things that affect it and it probability of happening?

Well gamma rays are one thing, but instead of superhero powers you generally just get cancer.

>>6261764
At last i truly see.jpg

>>6258299
If any of the genetic code change, the organism changes in some way.
>what is a silent mutation
How is it not based on random mutation?
>what is genetic shift
>what is recombination
>what is a population bottleneck
it will be bred with for the species to "evolve."
>implying there is proactive sexual selection for beneficial evolutionary traits

>>6264195
No.
And it depends on what you are talking about. A lot of viruses intentionally cause themselves to mutate (in order to evade the immune system, which does a very similar thing with VDJ recombination in plasma cells).

In any case mutation isn't as simple as just changing the base pair sequence. There are lots of ways of changing phenotype (copy number variation, regulatory element mutations, recombination, imprinting defects etc) that aren't straight base substitutions.

Also you have to remember that mutation isn't the end point of change. If something mutates, there are a couple of things that could happen. The cell/whatever could be unchanged (silent mutation), or it could change in some way. Abstract from that, if the change in DNA sequence is recognised by the cell it triggers complex pathways that can result in apoptosis (cell suicide), DNA repair (back to the original sequence, occasionally with other modifications depending on the repair pathway) or it could just be left. Cancer occurs most readily when there are defects in DNA damage recognition/repair genes. Because the recog/repair pathways aren't random, the mutations that survive are not random. p53 is mutated in something like ~50% of human cancers.

>>6265585
>A lot of viruses intentionally cause themselves to mutate
Oh yeah, how? Protip: they don't. Selection != intentional change from behalf of the organism

>>6265590
low fidelity replication machinery, which is deliberately selected for to make a clonally varied population in a host.

my sides when people think that mutations == strictly point mutations

>not acknowledging the fact that duplications are the main driving force of protein evolution

>>6265590
>I'm a physicist, this gives me a platform to talk about all other science as if I were an expert in it

>>6265597
>mfw a first year bio major thought he was smart near me
Though I do share your pain, /sci/ is painfully ignorant when it comes to biology, as typified by posts like >>6258299 and >>6265590 that think they know things but sound borderline retarded to anyone who has actually studied this in any depth.

>>6265601
claiming that viruses intentionally cause themselves to mutate sounds borderline retarded m8

p.s. I have a degree in molbio and work in the industry as a bioinformatician/molecular ecologist

>>6265585
>A lot of viruses intentionally cause themselves to mutate

In a similar way to how HIV/AIDS does?

>>6265612
No, the whole claim of viruses changing intentionally is pseudo biology. Low fidelity dna/rna pol creates variation from which nature selects. There's no intention from behalf of the virus involved..

>>6265619
I see, so when people who dont really know what they're talking about say "The HIV/AIDS virus changes rapidly so the body cant create antibodies against it in time".

What are they actually meant to say?

>>6265609
>>6265619
>semantics
>implying anything can ever "intend" to do anything and not just be determined to do so by their biology
You're one of those twats that gets annoyed when someone says "the kidney was designed to do..."

Many viruses have low fidelity replication machinery because it is beneficial to them to produce a clonally varied population. Everyone who isn't a fedoracore retard knew exactly what was meant by that.

>>6265641
No that is fine, he's just being a pedantic asshat.

>>6265641
They do change rapidly, it's just that the change is not an intentional action of the virus, but a consequence of low fidelity replication and selection..

Evolution is pseudoscience.

>>6257629
The Selfish Gene ofc

>>6265578

Same guy here.

Genetic shift - I think you mean genetic drift, and these are all things that involve the movement of genes that already exist. I'm talking about the creation of the involved alleles to begin with. It all comes back to random genetic mutation. Lots of recombinations and drifting of said traits afterwards can happen, but the change you see in everything comes from the ultimate cause of random genetic mutation.

- Silent mutations are still mutations. I even said in my original post "you may not even notice these." You are agreeing with what I said but didn't pay attention to what I said.

- Of course there is proactive sexual selection...there is environmental and sexual selection, there are the only two types.

> IstillthinkI'mbeingTrolled.jpeg.avi

>>6265770
>Genetic shift - I think you mean genetic drift, and these are all things that involve the movement of genes that already exist. I'm talking about the creation of the involved alleles to begin with. It all comes back to random genetic mutation. Lots of recombinations and drifting of said traits afterwards can happen, but the change you see in everything comes from the ultimate cause of random genetic mutation.

I think he was referring to transposable elements which are not mutation, but pieces of DNA which break off and attach elsewhere on the genome.

And you are forgetting processes like polyploidization which are not mutation and can have a large impact on the evolution of an organism. Bread wheat is a good example, a hexaploid plant which evolved via hybridization of diploid plants.

>Silent mutations are still mutations. I even said in my original post "you may not even notice these." You are agreeing with what I said but didn't pay attention to what I said.

You said it would change the organism, which implies a phenotype change. Silent mutations don't change anything about the expression, just the code itself.

>Of course there is proactive sexual selection...there is environmental and sexual selection, there are the only two types.

More a case of you wording it badly, you made it sound as if the organisms are selecting better mates consciously in order to make themselves fitter.

>>6265738
>dawkins
>science
nope

>>6265770
No, I meant genetic shift (which is different from genetic drift in a massively important way)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ubp-Dz5uGUk

>>6265936
And whoever >>6265929 is provides adequate responses to >>6265770 for everything else. What you said was idiotic, but it could be a case of you explaining yourself poorly (see silent mutations/sexual selection) rather than just being thick. In any case, clarity is a valued skill in science. I linked that khan academy video because it was the first thing I saw when I googled genetic shift vs drift and from the first minute seems ok as an explanation.

>>6265936

Same guy here.

"Antigenic shift" is still just another medium for recombination and mixing of alleles which came to arise out of mutation.

You can recombine these alleles in the many different ways you specified, but for a NEW allele, or combination of nucleotides to come about, that takes random mutation.

It's bio101 that mutations are random man.

>>6265936

It's bio101 that mutations are random.

There are many ways to mix the alleles and such, but brand new nucleotide sequences arise from random mutation.

>>6265946
What you said was all evolution is based on random mutation, which is patently not true, especially in the context originally supplied which indicated you were largely talking about base pair insertion/deletion/substitution.

The point is that all evolution is not driven by this, and antigenic shift is a good example of this. I could write to the post limit on various things that drive evolutionary change that aren't base pair mutations.

Are you really so autistic you can't accept that what you said was wrong?

>"Antigenic shift" is still just another medium for recombination and mixing of alleles which came to arise out of mutation.

So... what you are saying is that evolution is driven by processes other than random mutation?

>You can recombine these alleles in the many different ways you specified, but for a NEW allele, or combination of nucleotides to come about, that takes random mutation.

Well yes, but that isn't how all evolution works. We have a group of alleles, and the arrangement and function of them is a) non-random and b) not necessarily due to point mutations.

It is a woefully simplistic view of a complex process, which is most definitely non-random.

>>6265950
Can I take you deleting your post as an admission that is was bullshit and you don't know what you are on about?

>>6265962

I just rephrased it.

My original post, way back, was that ULTIMATELY all evolution is based on random mutation, and selection on that mutation.

I stand by that. Selection on the mutation was in there.

Evolution implies a beneficial adaptation to the environment, evolution does not just mean a change of any sort. All of the arguments you have provided are different means of mixing genes - that is not necessarily implicit to EVOLUTION.

>>6257629
You could start with the origin of species.

>>6265958

I never said evolution was random, I said mutation of genes is random.

>>6265969
>I just rephrased it.
Because it was wrong...

That wasn't what you were saying, and even if it was what you were saying then it's still kind of wrong.

1) Mutation isn't random
2) Selection isn't random

>All of the arguments you have provided are different means of mixing genes - that is not necessarily implicit to EVOLUTION.
Umm... what? Mixing genes underpins evolution in like 90%+ of species. Animals use sexual reproduction. Bacteria use plasmids. Viruses use coinfective recombination. If everything was restricted to evolving merely by random mutation and selection on that evolution would be slowed down by a factor in the tens of millions. Accumulation of stochastic mutations is one among many evolutionary processes.

(Not all evolution is restricted to the genome anyway, that would only be true of organisms that can survive as naked DNA/RNA.)q

>>6265993

I think there's a lot of confusion here which may or may not have been largely caused by poor writing.

I'll just state my positions on your #1 and #2 and we'll leave it at that.

1) I am still of the opinion that mutation is random, I think the confusion may be that I am talking about MUTATION and you are talking about recombinations, which can ultimately lead to new traits. If we have 10 alleles for example, along with all the possible combinations of said alleles, in order for any additional combinations to arise, there has to be a mutation of nucleotides in an allele, giving us a new allele. I realize we could get a brand new trait by mixing existing alleles/genes, which may give us a new trait, but it is not mutation.

2) I agree that selection isn't random, I didn't realize there was an argument here.

When I say mutation, I mean the sequence of nucleotides in an allele, or alleles in a gene. All of the recombination mediums available are means of reorganizing existing lines of code. The line of code being the bare minimum unit, the allele. In order for a new ALLELE to rise (not gene) that takes mutation, and that mutation is random. New GENES can come about without mutation, but not new alleles.

I'm getting the idea that you are referring to mutation as ANY change in a gene (which is a mixture of alleles), when I say mutation I am referring specifically to a brand new allele coming into existence.

There's confusion here obviously, but I have been taught in several courses, and everything that I can find online, that in biology, mutation is random.

And as I stated, we agree on the selection not being random.

>>6265993

To add to this.

Answer a question, what is cancer?

Cancer comes about by a mutation in a previously healthy gene, changing its function for the worse, and the result could be a mass of malignant cells growing in your pancreas.

So, how did the gene change? How did this once properly functioning line(s) of code in a gene come to be this? They mutated.

Now what you are telling me is that this change was not random.

We're doing this exercise for the sake of clarity. Tell me now how you else you believe that this mutation could have come about?

>>6266008
Drake, J. W., et al. Rates of spontaneous mutation. Genetics 148, 1667–1686 (1998)

>>6266026
Why is p53 mutated in 50% of human cancers?

>>6265993
>1) Mutation isn't random
could you expand on this?

>>6266059
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12888108
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23041320
etc etc
It has long been known that mutation follows a non-random pattern wrt location on the genome.

This is quite peripheral to the argument at hand though. The question is whether, as the other anon stated, ALL evolution is down to random mutation (i.e random changes in base-pair sequence).