Wednesday, November 12, 2008

More smarty farty stuff to blow your mind

The number of excruciatingly smart people in this country is amazing.  This profiles a finding by some biologists on how cells actually regulate their own evolution.  Basically, cells can turn themselves "off" if they have a non-useful mutation by altering their own energy usage. They use a mechanism not unlike a thermostat. They monitor their situation (e.g. temperature) and turn on or off their mitochondria (e.g. the furnace) by altering how fast ATP can move through the mitochondrial walls.

In case I'm not getting across the potential "wow" factor here, let me try again.  Organisms have control over their own evolution.  If you have a random mutation that does not improve your adaptive fitness (i.e. your ability to eat and breed) your cells may actually turn off those cells.  It offers an explanation of how we can get such complex organisms (i.e. humans, otters, Donald Trump's hair) without any guiding direction to the random mutations.

By the way, this updates the scoreboard to:
Charles Darwin - 4,576,890
Intelligent Design - zero

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