News you won't see in controlled mainstream media.

Hi Russ T

HOX complexities are not what we're concerned about. We're looking at the ability for HOX to produce symmetry.

If you are unaware of HOX genes and how they work what makes you feel qualified to suggest that evolution can’t produce symmetry. HOX gene complexes produce symmetry, symmetry that we can modify to test our understanding by altering these HOX genes. We can reprogram organisms to grow limbs or eyes or other parts in different places, places we specify by rewriting their HOX genes. We know that mirroring is involved because a change to a leg gene, for example, produces mirrored changes in all legs while a change in HOX genes produces variations in the placement of legs or whatever organ was specified by the HOX that we modified. One of the fields still under investigation is how asymmetry is produced, that is less well understood but symmetry is no challenge.

I'm happy to read the articles you provided, but I suspect that I will find more of what I have been finding in much scientific literature supportive of evolution for many years:

Please read them, there are plenty more if these don’t give you enough understanding of HOX genes.

A hypothesis based on huge assumptions and numerous "ifs", "mays", and "perhaps'"; Someone's ideas that are clearly designed to make evolution more emotionally acceptable through endless suggestive language and emotional appeals.

Yes I think we are all well aware that you see conspirators behind every tree Russ T. You are sounding rather paranoid IMHO.

I don't believe HOX had anything to do with symmetry in mammals, and its features that suggest an explanation for segmentation in insects are not related because, again, they don't deal with real symmetry.

Then you’d better start reading Russ. Get back to me when you’ve read up on how HOX works. And yes the same genes exist in mammals and do the same things in mammals as they do in fruit flies. This is one of the amazing features of HOX and one of the really strong pieces of evidence that we have for common descent. I’ve already cited an article that discusses the eyeless gene in fruit flies. If you disable this gene the results have no eyes. This has been experimentally verified. Eyeless(1) is a gene controlled by a HOX complex and again we can modify the HOX complex to express Eyeless in a different location and the fly produced will have eye’s on it’s legs or wherever the code was placed in the HOX. Mice and Humans carry a gene called Small Eye’s which, when inactivated, produces mice with small eye’s. Obviously we can’t do such tests in humans. The DNA sequence of Small Eye’s is virtually identical to Eyeless and in fact if Small Eye’s is inserted into a fruit fly in places of Eyeless the fly’s develop normal eyes. The gene’s are interchangeable in other words.

People get rather touchy about making people with arms growing out of their heads so this sort of research is only done in fruit flys and mice etc but genetic analysis of many naturally deformed organisms shows how HOX works in vertebrates just as it does in fruit flys.

Furthermore, the HOX discovery unveils yet another layer of complexity to the design of life which furthermore adds to the credibility of intelligent design.

Just do the math.

Yes we all understand by now that you don’t understand ToE or the maths behind it. If you see a problem with the maths try to express it in detail without all of the misunderstandings of well understood science such as how the HOX gene’s produce symmetry and how Natural selection works at every single step of Evolution or any of the numerous other misunderstandings you have shown of what science tells us about life on this planet. If you can do that I for one would be most interested to read what you have to say. Can you do it Russ T? Do you actually have any idea of how the maths behind this works or is this all just propaganda Russ T?

Ironically, you wrote some Visual Basic psudocode to demonstrate your idea about this, but it is, again, a vast oversimplification of the actual expression of symmetry in the real world.

But it is a realistic impression of how HOX actually works. The gene’s in HOX are laid out in the order the features will appear in the organism just as the function calls in that pseudocode. They work as subroutines called multiple times in some cases just as functions do in that pseudocode example. Swapping the order of the HOX gene’s has the same effect on the organism that swapping the subroutine calls does in the operation of the resultant in that pseudocode. In VB the program will do the specified steps in the new order in the body the genes will build a body with its features in the new order. So tell me Russ, what is ironic about that? Is it maybe that you don’t understand just how apt that example was?

Of course, your first demonstration of this is found in your attempts to redefine evolution as "natural selection". A good debate tactic, but not very honest.

Please Russ, if you are going to complain about what I have written at least read it first!! Evolution has a number of parts and Natural selection is a crucial one of them but evolution does not equal natural selection and I have never suggested that it does. Please try to keep up here Russ.

Nevertheless, I searched for about 20 minutes and was not able to get my hands on one of the articles you suggested. If you can provide me with text, I will read it.

Sorry the text is copyright so I can’t just cut and paste it but most decent libraries carry or can get Science (the first article Cited) and most of the others too. You can also access Science online with a free subscription that will let you view any articles older than I think it’s one year. I copied the citation for that first article into Google and it only came up with one hit, the article in question at the original source. Here’s the link to it.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/304/5675/1335

If you have problems with the article I suggest you try to frame them as evidence based complaints, I for one don’t buy your paranoid sounding mega conspiracy theories. Besides if you really do understand as much as you claim about this stuff and the articles are just propaganda then you should be able to point out where they are factually wrong fairly easily and that sort of a rebuttal will always carry weight with science minded people.

Symmetry is hard; Very hard. It clearly requires intelligence.

LOL or HOX gene’s but do a little reading and get back to me on it once you know a little more of what science has taught us about this field.

Furthermore, the assembly of the HOX building blocks is mathematically absurd to begin with, so even here, we are starting off with huge, far-reaching assumptions—bad science, not to mention the process of applying sea anemone processes to mammalian symmetry. Huge jump there.

Like I said, please do your homework before you make such foolish statements. The relationships between HOX gene’s from various organisms are discussed in a number of those articles, as I pointed out above even the interchangeablity of the same HOX gene’s between mammals and fruit fly’s has been experimentally tested and the relationships between all of them can be mathematically tested to produce a tree of life and guess what, it looks very familiar!

Please Russ T, you claim you know that all off this stuff is foolish because you’ve “Done your homework”, if that’s the case it should be no problem for you to point out, with evidence and maths, where the flaws are. If you can’t do that then it appears your statements here are just propaganda. I wonder if that includes your statements about herbal supplements, chemtrails, mercury amalgam etc. Is your “homework” and “expertise” in these fields as shaky as it is in the field of evolutionary biology and genetics?

Are you whiffing Russ?

In reason

Russell

Note 1: So as not to confuse everyone I think I need to explain why the gene is called “eyeless”. In this sort of research genes are named after the effect you get when you inactivate them. Eyeless is one of the complex of gene’s that create eye’s in fruit flies and a virtually identical gene is part of the complex that creates eyes in humans. Inactivating this gene cause’s fly’s to be born without eye’s and mice to be born with small eyes. Working normally Eyeless produces normal eyes and if activated in a different part of the body it produces eye’s in the specified place.