The Ebola Virus

Ebola and a similar viruses the Marburg virus.

There is a lot of news lately regarding the Ebola virus. How it is spreading and how dangerous it is. However, this virus is similar to another virus, the Marburg that can affect the body in similar ways. For example, signs and symptoms usually begin within 5 to 10 days after the infection with Ebola or Marburg virus has occurred.

The Filoviridae virus family.

There are three virus members in the Filoviridae family. The Genus EbolaVirus, is one, and the genus Marburgvirus and genus Cuevavirus are the other two.

Genus Ebolavirus is made up of 5 distinct species:

Bundibugyo ebolavirus

Zaire ebolavirus

Reston ebolavirus 

Sudan ebolavirus

Taï Forest ebolavirus 

The Genus Marburgvirus is made up of 2 distinct species:

Marburg virus and Ravn virus

The most recent genus is the Cuevavirus addes in 2010.

In general, what are these viruses?

The Ebola and Marburg virus are related because they cause severe fevers. These are illnesses marked by severe bleeding called a hemorrhage. There is also the possibility of organ failure and, which can cause death. Both viruses occur in Africa where these outbreaks have occurred for decades. Marburg virus and Ravn virus (2), which are approximately 20% divergent from one another

What are some of the effects of these viruses?

The effects include fever, joint and muscle aches, severe headache, chills, and body weakness.

However, after a time, the symptoms become more severe and additional body impacts occur such as nausea and vomiting, chest pain and cough, diarrhea, rash, stomach pain, severe weight loss, and red eyes. In addition, other bleedings may occur. Some will come from the eyes, and also bruising can occur where people near death may bleed from other areas like ears, nose, and rectum.  

Causes of the viruses spread

Both Ebola and Marburg virus originate from animals. Both have been found inside African monkeys, and chimps in addition to non-human primates. There also has been some evidence linking the Marburg virus to fruit bats in Africa.

How does the transmission from animals to humans occur?

At this time, the science evidence points to infections that occur from both viruses, which have infected transmissions to humans through the animal's bodily fluids. Examples include:

Blood products. When people butcher or eat infected animals this can spread the viruses. While carefulness is important, and as part of their research, even scientists who have operated on infected animals have also contracted the virus.

Animal waste products also form a basis of transmission. Tourists who have entered African caves and mine workers working underground have been infected with the Marburg virus, in part because they have had contact with infected bats and their spillover like the feces or urine.

At this time, there's no evidence that either the Ebola virus or the Marburg virus can be spread from insect bites.

How does the transmission from person to person occur?

Infected people ordinarily do not become contagious until after they develop symptoms. Family members, however, can become infected as they care for sick relatives or prepare a burial for the dead.

The Death Rate

Why are these viruses are so deadly? It involves the immune system. These viruses interfere with the system's ability to protect the body. Both Ebola and Marburg can lead to a high percentage of death for infected victims. The current death rate is 90%. So what happens to people that are infected? The virus can cause multiple organ failure, severe bleeding, coma, shock, jaundice, seizures, and delirium.

One of the current science and medical mysteries is that it is not clear why some people recover from Ebola or Marburg virus but others do not.

The Evolution of the Ebola and Marburg Virus

While media attention has been focused on the deadly aspects of these viruses, another science and evolutionary aspect is present.

These viruses are relatively new.

Ebola first appeared in 1976 in simultaneous outbreaks located in Nzara, Sudan, and in Yambuku, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Because Yambuku is a village situated near the Ebola River, the disease takes its name from there.

As these diseases originated with similar DNA sequences, what became important is how they continue to spread. It turns out that RNA is the prevailing sequence. In studying the DNA for Filoviruses, it became understood that they reproduce as RNA. The instance then showed that even though they reproduced over 20 years when they were first studied from 1976 to 1996, the original RNA format was stable.

One of the operating standards regarding these viruses is that the evolution originated with animals, but the virus found a steady and consistent approach to spreading inside the body of the animals. It didn’t change over time.

However, at the DNA level, how often is there a substitution? The following table give a general description:

The changes shown by the molecular evolutionary rate identify the rate.

Looking at the molecular evolutionary rates for viruses belonging to different species range from 0.46 × 10(-4) nucleotide substitutions/site/year for Sudan ebolavirus to 8.21 × 10(-4) nucleotide substitutions/site/year for Reston ebolavirus.

What this means is that the changes, which are the nucleotide substitutions, occur very rarely. A nucleotide mutation alters the amino acid sequence of a protein. 

So the most recent common ancestry can be traced back only within the last 50 years for two viruses the Reston ebolavirus and the Zaire ebolavirus species. What this suggests is that viruses within these species may have undergone recent genetic bottlenecks preventing them from acting. On the other hand, viruses within Marburg and Sudan ebolavirus species can be traced back further and share most recent common ancestors approximately 700 and 850 years before the present, respectively. However, scientists looking at the whole family of virus have presented suggestions that members of the Filoviridae virus share a recent common DNA ancestor originating approximately 10,000 years ago.

Summary

Both Ebola and Marburg viruses originate with animals in Africa. Contact with the animals will spread the virus to humans. Humans can spread the virus to other humans if either one encounters another person and then gets exposed to human fluids. The overall consequences can be deadly. At this time, there is no cure.

The evolution of the viruses can go back to 10,000 years for the Filorivide, and 700 to 850 years for versions of the Ebola and Marburg virus and most recently 50 years for the other versions of the Ebola virus.

The Neanderthal

Neanderthal

Who were the Neanderthals? The Neanderthals were archaic people who colonized Europe and some parts of the Middle East as long ago as 400,000 years. They co-existed with the first modern humans from about 80,000 to 30,000 years ago when they became extinct.

What were they like?

Neanderthals were hunter-gatherers. They made and used flint and stone tools for day to day operations. But they also built shelters and were active in fire control operations. They were highly carnivorous  yet there is limited evidence of plant foods that they operated with and which survives in the archaeological record. Their locations puts them in Mediterranean regions such that they went after marine resources such as shellfish and seals. However, their use of aquatic foods was more limited than that of modern humans.

Quick Facts

Scientific name: Homo Neanderthalensis

Genus: Homo

Height: (Male, Adult) 164 – 168 cm [5.3 – 5.5 ft.] (Female, Adult) 152 – 156 cm [4.9 -5.1 ft.]

Mass: (Adult, Male) 77.6 kg [171 lb.] on average; (Adult, Female) 66.4 kg [146 lb.] on average

The Humanoid Subspecies

The Neanderthals are an extinct species of the genus Homo, possibly a subspecies of Homo sapiens. They are closely related to modern humans. That means that between 1% and 4% of the Eurasian human genome seems to come from Neanderthals. Furthermore, they differ in DNA by only 0.3% with that of Homo sapiens genome structure.

Their Appearance

Neanderthals looked much like modern humans only shorter, more heavily built and much stronger, particularly in the arms and hands. Their facial feature which included large nose and strong double-arched brow ridge distinguished them from modern humans. Their skulls show that they had no chin and their foreheads sloped backwards. The brain case was lower but longer housing a slightly larger brain than that of modern humans. Because they were largely carnivorous, both male and female Neanderthals hunted prey. The evidence of a huge number of injuries, like those sometimes seen with today's rodeo riders, suggests that hunting involved dangerously close contact with large prey animals.

Are the Neanderthals a different species?

No, the fact that they interbred with modern humans shows they were not a separate species. Modern humans are classified as Homo sapiens. Most scientists today view Neanderthals as a sub-species or hominid sister group of all present-day humans. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals are believed to have a common ancestor who lived about 500,000 years ago in Africa. The common ancestor? Homo heidelbergensis.

Eye Size and its impact on Human social connections

One study of Neanderthal skulls suggests that they became extinct because they had larger eyes than our Home sapiens species.  In fact, one research team explored the idea that the ancestor of Neanderthals that left Africa and had to adapt to the longer, darker nights and murkier days of Europe. The result was that Neanderthals evolved larger eyes and a much larger visual processing area at the backs of their brains.

To prove this a scientific researcher, Eiluned Pearce of Oxford University, checked this theory. She compared the skulls of 32 Homo sapiens and 13 Neanderthals. She found that Neanderthals had significantly larger eye sockets, usually by as much as an average of 6mm from top to bottom.

So what was the impact of the larger eyes? How did affect them? One of the results of this was that their social connection to other Neanderthals was not as significant as the connection that Homo sapiens use with other humans. This is in contrast to the humans that stayed in Africa who  continued to live with bright days and so had no need to make weather adaption. As a result our Homo sapien ancestors, evolved their frontal lobes, associated with higher-level thinking, before they spread across the globe.  Because the Neanderthals were not the socially connected species, as Homo sapiens were, they were not able to advance as a species, not because of their preferences, but because their brain biology had a preference for visual operations, not thinking operations.

One thing to point out is that research on primates has shown that eye size is proportional to the amount of brain space devoted to visual processing. Given that prognosis scientist researchers have made the assumption that this would also be true of Neanderthals.

Thus it is hypothesized that Neanderthals had a smaller cognitive part of the brain and this would have limited them, including their ability to form larger groups. The idea is that if you live in a larger group, you need a larger brain in order to process all those extra relationships. This may also have had another consequence resulting from their more visually-focused brain structure which was that this focus affected their ability to adapt and innovate to the ice age that was thought to have contributed to their demise.

On their extinction

Although they had survived for hundreds of thousands of years and mastered the cold climates of the last Ice Age, Neanderthals had a tendency to be over-specialized meaning that they weren’t the dynamic race that would easily or necessarily change to meet environmental features. Moreover, they were never very populous to begin with. They were eventually edged out by Homo sapiens, but not before hybridization had occurred. Hybrid vigor due to Neanderthal admixture may have played a role in what human populations best succeeded at during the changing climate of Europe. But in a sense, Neanderthals never became totally extinct. Their genes live today on in hybrid populations.

Bees Extinction...at the Time of Dinosaurs

Did Bees Die and Reach extinction at the same time that Dinosaurs did?

We know that Dinosaurs reached the end of their life cycle 65 million years ago. The havoc on Earth was monumental. And there was a lot of physical evidence to support that claim and scientific observation.
But was that the only species that went extinct at that time?

Perhaps not because some scientists like Sandra Rehan, an assistant professor of biological sciences at University of New Hampshire, and Michael Schwarz at Australia's Flinders University and Remko Leys at the South Australia Museum worked to model a mass extinction in the  bee group Xylocopinae, or carpenter bees.  The extinction occurred at the end of the Cretaceous and beginning of the Paleogene eras, otherwise known as the K-T boundary.

Molecular phylogenetics

Rehan and colleagues overcame the lack of fossil evidence for bees with a technique called molecular phylogenetics. What is that study? For starters, It is the study of organisms on a molecular level to gather information about the phylogenetic relationships between different organisms.

What this accomplishes is that this program maps out the evolutionary history of an organism or group of organisms. The end result is that scientists can be precise about their estimates  involving when various events in evolutionary history occurred.

How it works

This science branch relies on the fact that genetic change is a constant. In effect in each generation, they note that organisms change slightly, but the rate of change tends to be constant and reliable. So now scientists can compare genetic information between different species and determine when they diverged from each other by examining their degree of similarity and dissimilarity. This is important because now researchers can also use this information to construct an evolutionary timeline.

The Bees

How many species of carpenter bees were they looking through? Answer:230.  So the scientists began to analyze DNA sequences of four "tribes" of species of carpenter bees from every continent with the exception of Antarctica. They were looking for evolutionary relationships and connections. The result was that they observed patterns consistent with a mass extinction. Then by combining the fossil records with the DNA analysis, they managed to introduce time into the equation, and it yielded information not only how the bees are related but also how old they were.

So what did they learn?

With the four groups of bees in the fold the data showed the research scientists that something major was happening to these different groups of bees at the same time. Moreover, it happened to be the same time as the dinosaurs went extinct.

The end result is that if Bees went down in that time frame, what other species might have reached an extinction point? ...In process....

Source:

1. Sandra M. Rehan, Remko Leys, Michael P. Schwarz. First Evidence for a Massive Extinction Event Affecting Bees Close to the K-T Boundary. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (10): e76683 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0076683

The Successful Failure of Creationism

Creationism and its new enhanced version, Intelligent design, have succeeded in failing. They have done so by showing that their structure of understanding how things are created can only come about by science, which they deny occurs or exists.

Science is the study of nature. Creationism is the study of nothing, saying that the world as we know it comes about because God puts it there and before God put the universe here, there was nothing. So they endorse modifiers to make science irrelevant or not necessary.

But Creationism has managed to format itself into three parts. One which accepts science as being part of creation and the other with denies science having anything to do with creation. The third part accepts some science as relevant to creation, but not all.

No Science Creationism

The Flat Earthers. They believe that the world is flat and covered by a firmament or dome. They take the literal interpretation of the bible. Furthermore they can explain occurrences in the bible. For example, the water above the firmament was the source of Noah's flood.

The  Geocentric. According to this group, the world is spherical, but deny that the sun is the center of the solar system, or that the earth moves. To them, the earth is the center of the solar system.

Some Science Creationism

Young Earth Creationists 
At the foundation of their belief is the supposition that the earth is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old. Their interpretation of the bible: the bible is literally true. No errors, no problems. The creation of life occured in six days. And blame Adam and Eve for the human condition, for our problems because it was their fall from grace that forced humans to become what we are now.

Not only that, but why does the Earth look the way that it does? The Earth geology must be interpreted in terms of Noah's Flood. Floods are disastrous. A world flood is a disaster to the world.

However, they accept a spherical earth and heliocentric solar system, that is that the sun is the center of the solar system. Young-Earth Creationists popularized the modern movement of scientific creationism

The Omphalos Creationist View
 The Omphalos argument presents the view that the universe was created not long ago but with the old appearance of age, indeed that an old appearance of age is necessary.  The problem with this view is that taken to the extreme, the Earth, and the Universe could have been created 1 second ago, but forced to look old. This theory recognizes that the universe and the Earth are old, in contradiction to the Bible. This is a way to reconcile that contradiction.

Old Earth Creationism
Accept the bible, but also accept some science. That is the Old-Earth Creationists view. They accept the evidence for an ancient earth, millions of years old but still believe that life was specially created by God; that God was at the forefront of the creation. So they still base their beliefs on the Bible.  In this respect they believe what they choose to believe.

Gap Creationism
Look at the Bible and compare Genisis 1:1 and Genisis 1:2. This view says that there was a long temporal gap between the two with God recreating the world in 6 days after the gap. The result is that this allows both an ancient earth to exist and a Biblical special creation that makes it possible.

Day-Age Creationism
Accept the views of science, that the Earth and the Universe are millions or billions of years old. So how do you reconcile this view with the Bible? By looking at a day as more than 24 hours long. Day-age creationists interpret each day of creation as a long period of time, a day can be thousands or millions of years old. They see a parallel between the order of events presented in Genesis 1 and the order accepted by mainstream science.  So science and the Bible are not in contradiction.

Science Creationism

Progressive Creationism
Pick and Choose...Pick and Choose. Progressive Creationism is the most common Old-Earth Creationism around today. It accepts most aspects of modern physical science. The Big Bang? Yes they view the Big Bang as evidence of the creative power of God. In this way, God is more powerful by creating a scientific basis for the birth of the Universe, instead of blinking the eye and seeing it created.

Yet modern biology is not valid in their view. Progressive Creationists generally believe that God created some organisms; some types of organisms in sequential order; the kind that are seen in the  fossil record. But they say that the newer kinds are specially and newly created, and not genetically related to older kinds.

So yes, God showed his creative power with the Big Bang. But wouldn't show any creative power using evolution. That is their standing. Once science version is good but the other is not good.

Science...the Study of Nature

Nature has multiple components like force and power(physics), mixture of chemicals (chemistry), life (biology), the structure of the planet (geology), the structure of the universe (astronomy and quantum mechanics). Science has changed over time because new theories and supporting facts have come to dominate how science explains nature.

The science of Evolution, a biological science, appeared after scientists, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace  began to investigate the formation of life and how it changed. Before that, no one thought that life would change. Plants would never change; insects would never change; fish would never change; birds and animals would never change; and most importantly, humans would never change. Life was considered permanent. But science changed things.

After Issac Newton with Physics and Charles Darwin with Evolution opened, metaphorically, the door to a large multi-storied Science building where scientists continue the process of investigating how the changes in nature occur. Evolutionary Biological scientists began to see how life changed, and physicists and astronomers began to see how the universe changed.

The Failure of Creationism

Creationism is based on what the Bible says. And when science shows a different way of seeing things, they reject it, or where necessary how science works with the Bible.

The problem for Creationism is that they respond to science because it is a threat to their way of looking at nature, that is life, the earth, and the universe. Instead of delivering a new approach to the creation of these segments of nature, they fall back to the Bible. Their view is that science is wrong or they adjust their Biblical view to conform to science.

Creationism fails because it does not offer a new approach to how the Universe or life was created. Creationisms approach is to find an explanation to the Biblical mythology in order to make it true. To make the Bible true they alter its stance in order to conform to the findings of science: The universe is not 10,000 years old, instead the "six days" of creation involved millions and millions of years. The Big Bang did occur but evolution did not occur. They select some thing of science and leave others out.

Creationism is a pick and choose model. That is what Creationism is all about. They pick the science to explain the Bible, but discard the science that cannot explain or contradicts the Bible. Creationism succeeds in showing that you need to explain the Bible in terms of the effects of science. But if fails to show any new way of looking at the Universe or Life. It is a successful failure.

The Science of Science

What is science? It is the study of nature. Science is the study of the difference components of nature, like forces, chemicals, the structure of matter, the way that objects interact with one another, how those objects are made, and how and why they behave the way that they do.

Science is Theory

One of the criticisms of evolution is that it is just a theory.That is right, evolution is a theory. But all science, that is ALL science is theory. But there are supporting facts that make it relevant and real. Without the supporting facts, it would be a hypotheses. Which is what the critics of evolution really are trying to say, and they confuse theory with hypothesis.


Science is About Facts,  A Hypothesis is About Observation

A hypothesis is not about making predictions, it is about trying to explain certain actions, certain observations. Take for example, the Michelson Morley experiment.in the late 1800's. At that time physicists were very comfortable with Newtonian physics. They could explain about 90% of all occurrences in nature. But one event was a mystery. How did light travel across space? That is, was there an underlying structure that light traveled through, much like water wavers traveled over water.

Their experiment tried to measure the speed of light and see if there was some impact on the speed by comparing the speed across different directions. They measured it by comparing the speed as it traveled north to south, east to west, north-east to south-west, up and down, and so on. If it changed it was because the light traveled on an ether. That was their hypothesis. To their surprise, the speed was constant, it never changed.

This was not a fact, it was an observation, because no one knew what it meant. How could light always travel at the same speed?

It was not until Einstein, in 1905, published his special theory of relativity, that explained how the constancy of light speed affected the force of time, that the observation about the constancyof the speed of light became a fact.

Later on, in 1917, Einstein published the general theory of relativity. One of the remarkable incidents, that is observations, was used to verify that the theory was correct. It had been know for some time that Newton's theory of gravity could not explain stars with light rays that passed near the Sun would appear to have been slightly shifted. This was a well known observation, but they could not rely of Newtonian physics for an explanation. But the General Theory of Relativity did offer an explanation. But could the observations be verified and explained by the theory?

The astro-physicist, Arthur Eddington, travelled to the Principe island near Africa to watch the solar eclipse of My 29, 1919. During the eclipse, Eddington took pictures of the stars in the region around the Sun. According to the theory of general theory, stars with light rays that passed near the Sun would appear to have been slightly shifted because their light had been curved by its gravitational field. This effect is noticeable only during eclipses, because the Sun's brightness otherwise obscures the affected stars. Eddington showed that Newtonian gravitation could be interpreted to predict half the shift predicted by Einstein. So the observation became a fact, and it supported the theory of general relativity.

Science is About Making Predictions

A hypothesis is an observation or idea but one that has no supporting facts to make it a theory. Furthermore, a hypothesis cannot be used to make predictions. A theory not only explains how certain sciences act and behave, they have a predictive element. For example, a baseball pitcher throws a baseball at a batter in a baseball game. The batter hits the ball. Sometimes it is caught, sometimes it is not. But scientists can predict certain elements about the speed of the ball before and after it is hit, where it will go, and how far the ball will travel. These predictions come from understanding the basic function of force, which is matter times acceleration.

That is not to say that a scientist will predict when the batter will strike out, when he will hit a fly ball or a ground ball or a fowl ball or a home run. These elements have variables. The speed of the ball, the direction of the pitchers ball, whether it is a curve or straight ball, the reaction of the batter, the location of the baseball bat.  If all of the variables are known and  the aspects of the variable are also known, then predictions can occur. But with enough details, and instruments to measure the force and direction of the ball it may eventually become possible to make such predictions. But that is the point. If there are variables that scientists cannot take into account they cannot make a prediction. Science can make predictions about the behavior of objects when the variables are known. To make a prediction there have to be facts and how those facts play out in the theory.

Science is About Verifiability

Once a theory is put into public attention, that is scientific attention, where other scientists view the theory and try to confirm it or to falsify it.

But verifying it means that the same theory is confirmed by more than one scientist, this makes it a more reliable theory because it can be replicated. If a new experiment confirms the theory, then there is another supporting fact. This explains the reason why scientists feel sure about the theory and its results. They can also add predictive features. it explains the conditions under which the theory is applied.


Science is About Falsifiability

In any science, the details which show the structure of the operation of science, there is the possibility that the explanation is wrong. Science is not about perfection, it is about explanation, and there may be events for which there is insufficient explanation about what happened. The two examples, the Michaelson-Moreley experiment, and the Eddington photographs showed that the existing theory of physics was false. The Newtonian theory of physics could not explain the speed of light behavior, nor the shifting geometry where light was concerned. So yes the Newtonian theory of  physics was false...or was it?

What these experiments showed was that there are different areas that cannot be explained by the current theory, which leaves open to have another theory be created to explain. those events.

Since the bulk, say 95% of Newtonian physics, was still workable it is hard to dismiss it. What has to happen is that a new theory has to come into play to account for the areas that can't be explained by the current theory. That falsifiability leads to the sense of improvement of the theory by adjusting and showing its limitations. This falsifiability element is the reason that science grows. The observations need to become facts. To become facts, you need a theory. The theory explains the facts, and can make predictions. That is science.

How to Prove That god Exists

Any time anyone asks an atheist who says that god does not exist, the remark is...Prove it.

Of course, the problem is that you cannot prove a negative. That is you cannot prove that god does not exist. That is a problem of logic, not evidence. In other words, you cannot prove a negative. From a logical point of view, you can only prove that god exists...not that god does not exist. You can only prove a positive, not a negative.

A clear example of this comes from the fact that if a person is accused of committing a crime, the prosecution has to prove that the defendant committed the crime; the defendant does not have to prove that he/she did not commit the crime.

And if that is not clear, try this. Suppose you said that you were a good cook, and I said you were not. What would I have to do to prove that your are not a good cook?

Nothing.

I don't have to do anything to show that your are not a good cook. But on the other hand, you would have to cook meals; you have to show your cooking talent. You have to prove that you are a good cook. That is the positive side of logic. Proving that you are not a good cook is a negative side of logic. You can't prove a negative, only the positive. So if you are a good cook, prove it.

What does this have to do with talking about the existence of god? Well if god exists, then prove it. If I say god does not exist, I don't have to do anything. If you believe that god exists, the you have to prove it.

So there we have it. If god exists, then prove it.
So now we can go ahead a prove that god exists. To do so I will show five examples which can be used to prove that god exists.

To prove that god exists, there has to be some showing of how god can modify the rules of science. In other words, if you can show that a normal operation of science will be modified under normal circumstances, then there is a good likely hood that the change in science originated from outside of science; from some ad-normal operation. If we can show that a normal operation, under normal science rules is now being changed then we can support the view that an outsider modified the scientific operation. So science can be changed from the outside. This could be from an outsider, like god.

Proof #1. Gasoline.
In this view, take a person and cover their body with a cloak full of gasoline. Put the person into a box that also is filled with gasoline, then light a match and put it into the box where the person is. Now, if the gasoline starts to burn and the person does not get burned, then this would violate the rules of chemistry. In such a case if the person survives, completely intact without harm, then this would show that god interfered with the laws of science; specifically with the laws of chemistry. That would be proof that god exists.

Proof#2. Flight
Take a 747 jet airplane with about 400 passengers in the plane. They are flying at over 50,000 feet and at about 500 miles per hour. So then if the jet engines stop working but the jet plane continues to fly, that is it doesn't fall from the sky and hit the ground, but it continues to fly for 10, 50, or 200 hundred miles, then it is operating with out the laws of chemistry (jet fuel), physics (force), and evolutionary biology (human pilot). If it continues to fly and then lands, that would show that three laws of science are compromised; if they are compromised then something or someone compromised them. Then this would be proof than an outsider affected these laws. That could be proof that god exists.

Proof #3. Drowning.
Take a person and put that person into a boat and go to a deep part of a lake. Put a couple of 100 lb objects on the persons legs and then tie the person's arms around their back and throw them into the lake without any air support to their lungs. When the person delves under the water the chance of drowning has 100% probability. So if the person is brought back up to the surface after two days underwater, without any human or device support and is still alive, then there is a high likely hood that an outsider made that possible, made that survival possible, because the laws of chemistry and biology were affected. The laws were changed for this event. So that could be proof that god exists.

Proof#4. Gun control
Take a person who is contemplating suicide. The person has a guns with multiple bullets. The person starts shooting himself in the head, over and over again. If the bullets make a connection into the person's head, and the person continues to shoot again and again, with the bullets entering the brain so that the person does not die, then there is a violation of the laws of physics. The laws of physics show that the force created by the exploding bullet should create damage into the brain, and kill the person. But without the damage, the rules of physics are affected, making the person free of the laws of physics. So that could be proof that god exists.

Proof#5. Parachute
Take a person who is jumping out of a airplane at 10,000 feet. The person jumps out of the plane without a parachute and with his hands and legs tied together and falling over the ocean . Furthermore, the person is falling without any device that would slow the download to the water. So when the person hits the water, and goes under and stays there for hours, and later comes back up alive, then there is a violation of the laws of physics (the force hitting the water didn't kill the person) and chemistry (the drowning of the person didn't kill the person). So that could be proof that god exist.

Miracles
Having made the case the science is the determining factor about the existence of god, one thing comes to mind though, what about a miracles? If they occur, doesn't that prove that god exists?

Indeed, what is a miracle?

A miracle is an event that occurs for which there is no rational or scientific explanation; at least not now. Take, for example, the situation where a hundred years ago, someone drowned in a lake. The body was recovered, and the person was dead. But it may have occurred that the person woke up and came back to life. A miracle? Yes. At least then, because there would not have been a scientific explanation for the event.

But now it is possible to say that that the recovery event may have been due to the fact that the lungs were not filled with water, and that the brain and heart continued to function, even if under a very limited form. But they functioned enough for the person to recover.

Was that a miracle then? Now there seems to be a rational and scientific explanation for the occurrence. So, no, it was not a miracle. And such events have been reported over the last several decades.

Similarly, 2000 years ago, if a person recovered from leprosy, it would have been called a miracle, but now we know that there is medicine drugs used like dapsone, clofazimine, and refampicin to cure leprosy. This is not a miracle, it is science.

So from the five examples mentioned above, is it possible that the events could occur, and not lead to a disaster? Could a jet plane fly for 200 hundred miles without power? Could a person shoot themselves in the head and still survive? Could a person survive a gasoline fire on their entire body for an extended period of time? Could a person survive a fall of 10,000 feet, into an ocean or lake and not have their body break apart? For these five examples, the answer is no, but if it did happen, wouldn't that be a miracle? It would be an event that we would not have a scientific explanation or rational explanation for. But in due time, it could be explained.

Does god Exist?
So now, with these five examples, it shows that a clear proof that god exists is possible, but it also shows that these examples do not have a probability of success.  So does god exist? Well these examples do not show that it is possible. The answer is not likely. Although a violation of the rules of science makes it a possible...but it is unlikely. If an atheist says god does not exist, it would be very hard to prove that such an entity does exist.

Is it possible that god exists? Logically possible? Under those circumstances, sure. But that is opening up a Pandora's box of possibilities. Is is logically possible for god to exist and not exist at the same time? If god can do anything, then god can do anything that is possible. See? It is not the kind of entity that we are accustomed to talking about.

What Makes Us Human

It is understood that in the field of molecular evolution new genes can only evolve from duplicated or rearranged versions of preexisting genes. Furthermore, it seemed unlikely that evolutionary processes could produce a functional protein-coding gene from what was once inactive DNA.

But that view is changing as some evidence suggests that this phenomenon does in fact occur. It has been found that genes have arisen from non-coding DNA in yeast,flies, and also primates. No such genes had been found to be unique to humans until now, and the discovery raises questions about how these genes might make humans different from other primates.

One gene was identified in chronic lymphocytic leukemia. This is the first evidence for entirely novel human-specific protein-coding genes originating from ancestrally noncoding sequences. A non-coding sequence involves RNA (ncRNA) is a molecule that is not translated into a protein.In other words, a gene that was once dormant is now active.

The consequence of the finding is that while many coding sequences exist, there are some that are dormant in primates, but become active in humans. This makes us different

Flu in U.S. found resistant to main antiviral drug: Evolution in Action

Virtually all the flu in the United States this season is resistant to the leading antiviral drug Tamiflu, and scientists and health officials are trying to figure out why.
The problem is not yet a public health crisis because this has been a below-average flu season so far and the chief strain circulating is still susceptible to other drugs — but infectious disease specialists are worried nonetheless.
Last winter, about 11 percent of the throat swabs from patients with the most common type of flu that were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for genetic typing showed a Tamiflu-resistant strain. This season, 99 percent do.
"It's quite shocking," said Dr. Kent Sepkowitz, director of infection control at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. "We've never lost an antimicrobial this fast. It blew me away."
The single mutation that creates Tamiflu resistance appears to be spontaneous, and not a reaction to overuse of the drug. It may have occurred in Asia, and it was widespread in Europe last year.

Resistance appeared several years ago in Japan, which uses more Tamiflu than any other country, and experts feared it would spread.
But the Japanese strains were found only in patients already treated with Tamiflu, and they were "weak" — that is, they did not transmit to other people.
"This looks like a spontaneous development of resistance in the most unlikely places — possibly in Norway, which doesn't use antivirals at all," Monto said.
Dr. Henry Niman, a biochemist in Pittsburgh who runs recombinomics.com, a Web site that tracks the genetics of flu cases around the world, has been warning for months that Tamiflu resistance in H1N1 was spreading.
He argues that it started in China, where Tamiflu use is rare, was seen last year in Norway, France and Russia, then moved to South Africa (where winter is June to September), and back to the northern hemisphere in November.

This is another example of evolution in action. Mutations occur which change the DNA features of a virus, where it was resistant to drugs, is not so now.

Neanderthal Timeline

The Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) or Neandertal was a species of the Homo genus that inhabited Europe and parts of western Asia. The first proto-Neanderthal traits appear in Europe as early as 350,000 years ago. By 130,000 years ago, full blown Neanderthal characteristics had appeared and by 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals disappeared from Asia, although they did not reach extinction in Europe until 33,000 to 24,000 years ago, perhaps 15,000 years after Homo sapiens had migrated into Europe.

LUCA:Last Universal Common Ancestor

In trying to find the elements necessary for the origin of life, another question of importance is "what was the last universal original ancestor of life?"

A 3.8-billion-year-old organism was not the creature usually imagined. In LUCA, the prevailing belief is that it was a heat-loving or hyperthermophilic organism; like those odd organisms living in the hot vents along the continental ridges deep in the oceans today, above 90 degrees Celsius .
However, the new data suggests that LUCA was actually sensitive to warmer temperatures and lived in a climate below 50 degrees.

The research compared genetic information from modern organisms to characterize the ancient ancestor of all life on earth. Researchers identified common genetic traits between animals, plant, bacteria, and used them to create a tree of life with branches representing separate species. These all stemmed from the same trunk – LUCA, the genetic makeup that we then further characterized.

The RNA Connection to the Origin of Life
What this means is that in the origin of life question an important step has taken place towards reconciling conflicting ideas about LUCA. In particular, they are much more compatible with the theory of an early RNA world, where early life on Earth was composed of ribonucleic acid (RNA), rather than deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

RNA is particularly sensitive to heat and is unlikely to be stable in the hot temperatures of the early Earth. But the data indicate that LUCA found a cooler micro-climate to develop, which helps resolve this paradox and shows that environmental micro domains played a critical role in the development of life on Earth.

RNA and the Origin of Life

What were the conditions necessary for the formation of life? Some scientists believe that RNA was responsible for the development. RNA, the single-stranded precursor to DNA, normally expands one nucleic base at a time, growing sequentially like a linked chain. The problem is that in the primordial world RNA molecules didn't have enzymes to catalyze this reaction, and while RNA growth can proceed naturally, the rate would be so slow the RNA could never get more than a few pieces long (for as nucleic bases attach to one end, they can also drop off the other).

The RNA mechanism to overcome this thermodynamic barrier has been studied by incubating short RNA fragments in water of different temperatures and pH. Under an acidic environment and temperature lower than 70 degrees Celsius, the RNA pieces ranging from 10-24 in length could naturally fuse into larger fragments. This was generally accomplished within 14 hours.

The operation involved the RNA fragments which came together as double-stranded structures then joined at the ends. The fragments did not have to be the same size, but the efficiency of the reactions was dependent on fragment size in which case the larger the better until an optimal efficiency is reached around 100 and then it drops again.

The researchers note that this spontaneous fusing, or ligation, would a simple way for RNA to overcome initial barriers to growth and reach a biologically important size; at around 100 bases long, RNA molecules can begin to fold into functional, 3D shapes.

RadioActive Dating - Potassium-Argon

Potassium-Argon dating

The element potassium (symbol K) has three nuclides, K39, K40, and K41. Only K40 is radioactive; the other two are stable. K40 can decay in two different ways: it can break down into either calcium or argon. The ratio of calcium formed to argon formed is fixed and known. Therefore the amount of argon formed provides a direct measurement of the amount of potassium-40 present in the specimen when it was originally formed.

Because argon is an inert gas, it is not possible that it might have been in the mineral when it was first formed from molten magma. Any argon present in a mineral containing potassium-40 must have been formed as the result of radioactive decay. F, the fraction of K40 remaining, is equal to the amount of potassium-40 in the sample, divided by the sum of potassium-40 in the sample plus the calculated amount of potassium required to produce the amount of argon found. The age can then be calculated from equation (1).

In spite of the fact that it is a gas, the argon is trapped in the mineral and can't escape. (Creationists claim that argon escape renders age determinations invalid. However, any escaping argon gas would lead to a determined age younger, not older, than actual. The creationist "argon escape" theory does not support their young earth model.)

The argon age determination of the mineral can be confirmed by measuring the loss of potassium. In old rocks, there will be less potassium present than was required to form the mineral, because some of it has been transmuted to argon. The decrease in the amount of potassium required to form the original mineral has consistently confirmed the age as determined by the amount of argon formed.

Human Migration From Asia To Americas

Finding A new set of ideas on migration to North America have been proposed. One idea is a hypothesis that seems to map the peopling process during the pioneering phase and well beyond, and another is that at the same time there was much more genetic diversity in the founder population than was previously believed.
The Conventional View

Questions about human migration from Asia to the Americas have perplexed anthropologists for decades, but as scenarios about the peopling of the New World come and go, the big questions have remained. One questions is do the ancestors of Native Americans derive from only a small number of “founders” who trekked to the Americas via the Bering land bridge? Also, how did their migration to the New World proceed? And was climate change involved; did the climate have anything to do with their migration? And finally what took them so long?

Changing the Conventional View

A phylogeographic analysis of a new mitochondrial genome dataset allows scientists to draw several conclusions.

30,000 years ago - clades

First, the ancestral population on its way to the Americas paused in Beringia long enough for specific mutations to accumulate. These mutations separate the New World founder lineages from their Asian sister-clades. (A clade is a group of mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs ) that share a recent common ancestor. Sister-clades would include two groups of mtDNAs that each share a recent common ancestor and the common ancestor for each clade is closely related.)

Another way to express this is the ancestors of Native Americans who first left Siberia for greener pastures perhaps as much as 30,000 years ago, came to a standstill on Beringia – a landmass that existed during the last glacial maximum that extended from Northeastern Siberia to Western Alaska, including the Bering land bridge – and they were isolated there long enough – as much as 15,000 years – to maturate and differentiate themselves genetically from their Asian sisters.

Lineages are distributed quickly not gradually
Founding lineages or haplotypes are uniformly distributed across North and South America instead of exhibiting a nested structure from north to south. So after the Beringian standstill, the initial North to South migration occured in a swift pioneering process, not a gradual diffusion.

Bi-directional Migrations to North America then Back to Beringia

The DNA data also suggest a lot more going back and forth than was previously suspected of populations during the past 30,000 years in Northeast Asia and North America. The dataset analysis shows that after the initial peopling of Beringia, there were a series of back migrations to Northeast Asia as well as forward migrations to the Americas from Beringia. There was a bi-directional gene flow between Siberia and the North American Arctic.

Using Mitochondrial datasets from populations in the Americas and East Asia
The investigation of the pioneering phase in the Americas, a research team, a group of geneticists from around the world, pooled their genomic datasets and then analyzed 623 complete mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) from the Americas and Asia, including 20 new complete mtDNAs from the Americas and seven from Asia.

What Mitochondrial DNA data reflects

Mitochondrial DNA, that is, DNA found in organelles, rather than in the cell nucleus, is considered to be of separate evolutionary origin, and is inherited from only one parent – the female. The dataset sequence was used to direct genotyping from 20 American and 26 Asian populations.

The Discovery 3 New Sub-Clades
The team identified three new sub-clades that incorporate nearly all of Native American haplogroup C mtDNAs – all of them widely distributed in the New World, but absent in Asia; and they defined two additional founder groups, which differ by several mutations from the Asian-derived ancestral clades.

Disconnect in migration dates
Did the migration occur quickly or slowly? Migration may have occured 30,000 years ago, but the earliest archeological evidence is that it occurred only 15,000 years ago.

The point of departure places Homo sapiens at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in Siberia as early as 30,000 years before the present, but the earliest archaeological site at the southern end of South America is dated to only 15,000 years ago.

Two possible scenarios
First the ancestors of Native Americans peopled Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, but remained locally isolated – likely because of ecological barriers – until entering the Americas 15,000 years before the present (the Beringian incubation model, BIM).

The second is that the ancestors of Native Americans did not reach Beringia until just before 15,000 years before the present, and then moved continuously on into the Americas, being recently derived from a larger parent Asian population (direct colonization model, DCM).

The conclusion of the study
The team set out to test the two hypotheses: one, that Native Americans’ ancestors moved directly from Northeast Asia to the Americas; the other, that Native American ancestors were isolated from other Northeast Asian populations for a significant period of time before moving rapidly into the Americas all the way down to Tierra del Fuego.

The data supports the second hypothesis: The ancestors of Native Americans peopled Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, but remained locally isolated until entering the Americas at 15,000 years before the present. So they moved into the Americas quickly.

Genome Sequence of Neanderthal Man

Were Neanderthals and Humans connected at some time in the past? This question is still up for debate, but recently the complete mitochondrial genome of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal has been sequenced.

At the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany scientists have reconstructed the genome sequence. They sequenced the Neanderthal mitochondria—powerhouses of the cell with their own DNA including 13 protein-coding genes—nearly 35 times over. This coverage allowed them to sort out those differences between the Neanderthal and human genomes resulting from damage to the degraded DNA extracted from ancient bone versus true evolutionary changes.

This new sequence and its analysis confirms that the mitochondria of Neanderthals falls outside the variation found in humans today and it provides no evidence of integration between the two lineages although it remains a possibility. It also shows that the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and humans lived about 660,000 years ago, give or take 140,000 years.

The new sequence revealed that the Neanderthals have fewer evolutionary changes overall, but a greater number that alter the amino acid building blocks of proteins. This means that the Neanderthals had a smaller population size than humans do, which makes natural selection less effective in removing mutations.

That notion is consistent with arguments made by other scientists based upon the geological record. Anthropologists argue there were a few thousand Neanderthals that roamed over Europe 40,000 years ago. That smaller population might have been the result of the smaller size of Europe compared to Africa. Another geological issue was that the Neanderthals also would have had to deal with repeated glaciations.

Single Main Migration Across Bering Strait

Did a relatively small number of people from Siberia who trekked across a Bering Strait land bridge some 12,000 years ago give rise to the native peoples of North and South America?

Researcher working with an international team of geneticists and anthropologists, have produced new genetic evidence that's likely to hearten proponents of the land bridge theory. The study, is one of the most comprehensive analyses so far among efforts to use genetic data to shed light on the topic.

The researchers examined genetic variation at 678 key locations or markers in the DNA of present-day members of 29 Native American populations across North, Central and South America. They also analyzed data from two Siberian groups. The analysis shows:

• genetic diversity, as well as genetic similarity to the Siberian groups, decreases the farther a native population is from the Bering Strait -- adding to existing archaeological and genetic evidence that the ancestors of native North and South Americans came by the northwest route.


• a unique genetic variant is widespread in Native Americans across both American continents -- suggesting that the first humans in the Americas came in a single migration or multiple waves from a single source, not in waves of migrations from different sources. The variant, which is not part of a gene and has no biological function, has not been found in genetic studies of people elsewhere in the world except eastern Siberia.

The researchers say the variant likely occurred shortly prior to migration to the Americas, or immediately afterwards.

The Genetic Markers for North American Populations originate in East Asia
There is reasonably clear genetic evidence that the most likely candidate for the source of Native American populations is somewhere in east Asia, the research concludes. If there were a large number of migrations, and most of the source groups didn't have the variant, then you would not see the widespread presence of the mutation in the Americas.

Studies with Genetic Markers

Researchers studied the same set of 678 genetic markers used in the new study in 50 populations around the world, to learn which populations are genetically similar and what migration patterns might explain the similarities. For North and South America, the current research breaks new ground by looking at a large number of native populations using a large number of markers.

The pattern the research uncovered -- that as the founding populations moved south from the Bering Strait, genetic diversity declined -- is what one would expect when migration is relatively recent. There has not been time yet for mutations that typically occur over longer periods to diversify the gene pool.

The study also found that:

• The study's findings hint at supporting evidence for scientists who believe early inhabitants followed the coasts to spread south into South America, rather than moving in waves across the interior.


• Assuming a migration route along the coast provides a slightly better fit with the pattern that are seen in genetic diversity.


• Populations in the Andes and Central America showed genetic similarities.


• Populations from western South America showed more genetic variation than populations from eastern South America.


• Among closely related populations, the ones more similar linguistically were also more similar genetically.

RadioActive Carbon Dating

The radiocarbon dating method was developed in the 1940's by Willard F. Libby and a team of scientists at the University of Chicago. It subsequently evolved into the most powerful method of dating late Pleistocene and Holocene artifacts and geologic events up to about 50,000 years in age.

Carbon Dating Carbon has unique properties that are essential for life on earth. Familiar to us as the black substance in charred wood, as diamonds, and the graphite in “lead” pencils, carbon comes in several forms, or isotopes. One rare form has atoms that are 14 times as heavy as hydrogen atoms: carbon-14, or 14C, or radiocarbon. Carbon-14 is made when cosmic rays knock neutrons out of atomic nuclei in the upper atmosphere. These displaced neutrons, now moving fast, hit ordinary nitrogen (14N) at lower altitudes, converting it into 14C. Unlike common carbon (12C), 14C is unstable and slowly decays, changing it back to nitrogen and releasing energy. This instability makes it radioactive.

We can take a sample of air, count how many 12C atoms there are for every 14C atom, and calculate the 14C/12C ratio. Because 14C is so well mixed up with 12C, we expect to find that this ratio is the same if we sample a leaf from a tree, or a part of your body. The C-14 within an organism is continually decaying into stable carbon isotopes, but since the organism is absorbing more C-14 during its life, the ratio of C-14 to C-12 remains about the same as the ratio in the atmosphere. When the organism dies, the ratio of C-14 within its carcass begins to gradually decrease. The rate of decrease is 1/2 the quantity at death every 5,730 years. That is the half-life of C-14. Obviously, this works only for things which were once living. It cannot be used to date volcanic rocks, for example. The rate of decay of 14C is such that half of an amount will convert back to 14N in 5,730 years (plus or minus 40 years). This is the “half-life.” So, in two half-lives, or 11,460 years, only one-quarter of that in living organisms at present, then it has a theoretical age of 11,460 years. Anything over about 50,000 years old, should theoretically have no detectable 14C left. That is why radiocarbon dating cannot give millions of years. In fact, if a sample contains 14C, it is good evidence that it is not millions of years old.

Because the decay rate is logarithmic, radiocarbon dating has significant upper and lower limits. It is not very accurate for fairly recent deposits. In recent deposits so little decay has occurred that the error factor (the standard deviation) may be larger than the date obtained. The practical upper limit is about 50,000 years, because so little C-14 remains after almost 9 half-lives that it may be hard to detect and obtain an accurate reading, regardless of the size of the sample.

The ratio of C-14 to C-12 in the atmosphere is not constant. Although it was originally thought that there has always been about the same ratio, radiocarbon samples taken and cross dated using other techniques like dendrochronology have shown that the ratio of C-14 to C-12 has varied significantly during the history of the Earth.

This variation is due to changes in the intensity of the cosmic radiation bombardment of the Earth, and changes in the effectiveness of the Van Allen belts and the upper atmosphere to deflect that bombardment. For example, because of the recent depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere, we can expect there to be more C-14 in the atmosphere today than there was 20-30 years ago. To compensate for this variation, dates obtained from radiocarbon laboratories are now corrected using standard calibration tables developed in the past 15-20 years.

When reading archaeological reports, be sure to check if the carbon-14 dates reported have been calibrated or not.

The major developments in the radiocarbon method up to the present day involve improvements in measurement techniques and research into the dating of different materials. Briefly, the initial solid carbon method developed by Libby and his collaborators was replaced with the Gas counting method in the 1950's. Liquid scintillation counting, utilising benzene, acetylene, ethanol, methanol etc, was developed at about the same time.

Today the vast majority of radiocarbon laboratories utilise these two methods of radiocarbon dating. Of major recent interest is the development of the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry method of direct C14 isotope counting.

In 1977, the first AMS measurements were conducted by teams at Rochester/Toronto and the General Ionex Corporation and soon after at the Universities of Simon Fraser and McMaster. The crucial advantage of the AMS method is that milligram sized samples are required for dating. Of great public interest has been the AMS dating of carbonacous material from prehistoric rock art sites, the Shroud of Turin and the Dead Sea Scrolls in the last few years.

The development of high-precision dating (up to ±2.0 per mille or ±16 yr) in a number of gas and liquid scintillation facilities has been of similar importance (laboratories at Belfast (N.Ireland), Seattle (US), Heidelberg (Ger), Pretoria (S.Africa), Groningen (Netherlands), La Jolla (US), Waikato (NZ) and Arizona (US) are generally accepted to have demonstrated radiocarbon measurements at high levels of precision).

The calibration research undertaken primarily at the Belfast and Seattle labs required that high levels of precision be obtained which has now resulted in the extensive calibration data now available. The development of small sample capabilities for LSC and Gas labs has likewise been an important development - samples as small as 100 mg are able to be dated to moderate precision on minigas counters with similar sample sizes needed using minivial technology in Liquid Scintillation Counting.

The radiocarbon dating method remains arguably the most dependable and widely applied dating technique for the late Pleistocene and Holocene periods.







Figure: The "Curve of Knowns"

The first acid test of the new method was based upon radiocarbon dating of known age samples primarily from Egypt (the dates are shown in the diagram by the red lines, each with a ±1 standard deviation included). The Egyptian King's name is given next to the date obtained. The theoretical curve was constructed using the half-life of 5568 years. The activity ratio relates to the carbon 14 activity ratio between the ancient samples and the modern activity. Each result was within the statistical range of the true historic date of each sample.



Other forms of Radioactive Dating

There are various other radiometric dating methods used today to give ages of millions or billions of years for rocks. These techniques, unlike carbon dating, mostly use the relative concentrations of parent and daughter products in radioactive decay chains. For example, potassium-40 decays to argon-40; uranium-238 decays to lead-206 via other elements like radium; uranium-235 decays to lead-207; rubidium-87 decays to strontium-87; etc. These techniques are applied to igneous rocks, and are normally seen as giving the time since solidification.

Rubidium occurs in nature as two isotopes: radioactive Rb-87 and stable Rb-85. Rb-87 decays with a half-life of 48.8 billion years to Sr-87. This half-life is so long that the Rb-Sr method is normally only used to date rocks that are older than about 100 million years.

Neutral Evolution and the Shape of Our Genome

Finding: There is a growing body of evidence which shows that many of the genetic bits and pieces that drive evolutionary changes do not confer any advantages or disadvantages to humans or other animals.

The conventional view
The basic belief of evolution was that all random genetic changes that manage to stick around have some selective advantage on the species.

But a study concludes that we are what we are largely due to random changes that are completely neutral. This study reinforces and highlights the equal, and in some cases greater, importance of neutral genetic drift.

Repeat Elements
Repeat elements are fragments of DNA containing the same repetitive sequence of chemical base pairs several hundred times. Experiments demonstrate that repeat elements rose to prominence without offering any benefits to the organism it inhabits. They are one of the major architectural markers of the human genome, and they make up over 40 percent of our genome,

Numts or Copies of mitochondrial sequences found in DNA portions

One type of repeat element was found while looking at genes associated with Bardet Biedl syndrome, a rare disorder. Researchers found portions of DNA that had been copied from the mitochondria, the energy-making apparatus of human cells that has its own small genome. These mitochondrial sequences are known as numts.

More Numts as the species gets more sophisticated
The whole human genome, has more than 1200 such pieces of mitochondrial DNA of various lengths embedded into chromosomes. While chimps have a comparable number, mice and rats only have around 600 numts. Since they increase in frequency as species advance, it suggested there was some evolutionary purpose to keeping them around.

But none of these numts contained an actual gene to make a protein that does anything, nor did they seem to control the function of any nearby genes. These numts are a neutral part of our genome. If anything, they may be mildly negative since long repeat sequences can be unstable or get inserted inside genes and disrupt them.

The researchers believe they have uncovered a possible reason why these potentially damaging but mostly neutral bits of DNA accumulate over time by comparing the sequences of human numts with those in different animals. How closely the different species' sequences match can provide an estimate of when that particular sequence got inserted into the ancestor of the human genome.

Numts became embedded roughly when primates emerged: 54 Million years ago
Calculations made about the location and structure of the numts revealed that most numts became embedded in our genome over a 10-million-year period centered roughly 54 million years ago -- right around the time when the first primates emerged. When new species emerge, their numbers and therefore their genetic differences are very small. The consequences are that this creates a genetic bottleneck during which any changes in the genome will either get eliminated quickly or spread to the whole population quickly.

Numts expanded because they were not eliminated - they were not detrimental

Numts, being "neutral," were generally at low levels in ancient mammals, but during the primate emergence 54 million years ago, they accumulated and spread through the small early primate populations precisely because they were not detrimental enough to be eliminated. Then, as these populations expanded, numts reached stable but higher frequencies.