To wonder what repectable scientific notions of today....

[RubyGates]

will be laughed at in a hundred year's time?

Things that were believed by scientists in the past:
www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-famous-scientific-theories-that-turned-out-to-be-wrong.php

No, no - being clear with language is not the same as "dumbing down". Ahem.

But I suspect that we've been talking at cross purposes because of misunderstandings over definitions which probably wouldn't be there if I wasn't an amateur.

I'm glad you posted. It did prompt a very interesting discussion which I'm going to try and learn a bit more about.

It's much more fun than the usual "science" discussions I find myself involved in...."So, if evolution is true, are you saying that a whale grew legs, ran out of the sea and turned into a cow?" And I'm not joking!!

I think it might be worth throwing this back into the melting pot. Cheap, on Kindle and very helpful in clarifying thought, whatever your 'faith' position

Eh?

Click on the link, Sled : 'this' (coloured purple on my display)

I did. Was just baffled as to why you were suggesting that book at this particular juncture

Well I suppose because the evolution etc debate seemed to be building up, and because he has sections (I recall) which deal with how scientific thought and theories etc actually develop. I found it very helpful in clarifying many of my own thoughts.

If you don't think it helps, that's not a problem to me.

I guess I think it would have been more helpful to say that and say why you were linking the book rather than just linking it as unless anyone's read it, they won't know it's contents.

That's not intended to be combatative, just was generally baffled as to why you were linking a book without any particular explanation!

Just learning how to post I suppose. Forgive me; I've only had these MN 'L' plates on for a week!

Interesting - when I read the epigenetics revolution I didn't read it as saying that it was challenging Darwin's theories at all. I read it as saying that it's an emerging field and that there is some tantalising evidence which shows potential for epigenetic inheritance down generations, but that even if this was the case any effect is likely to be completely insignificant in terms of evolution as compared to Darwin.

Certainly didn't come out of it with the revolution bit was about evolution - more in understanding disease models etc (and even that was pretty tentative).

I looked on amazon for the book you mention, Binkybix: "The Epigenetic Revolution" by Nessa Carey, and the Kindle version is currently 99p, so I bought it.

I like how the author started off by saying that DNA isn't so much a template but more a script (she cites film versions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), where different actors/directors/etc can produce different versions, even though they're using the same script. I know that's an imperfect analogy, but it's a useful start for introducing to non-scientists that DNA isn't as deterministic as they've been led to believe.

I think that in terms of "revolution" I can see what's happening in biology as being similar to what happened in physics, i.e. Einstein versus Newton. From memory: Newtonian physics is fine for getting men on the moon, but Einsteinian physics is needed to ensure GPS satellites are positioned precisely. It's a kind of horses-for-courses scenario.

I don't recall much of what was said by scientists in the past about cloning, except for news stories about Dolly the Sheep. But a different example of cloning that I recently read about was of a cloned pet cat: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CC_%28cat%29, where the cloned version looked very different from DNA donor, and therefore showing that a clone isn't always (ever?) an exact copy.

I had a kind of feeling that even Neil Armstrong needed a bit of Einstein - I may be wrong ....

Did they deliberately choose a calico cat, I wonder or was it serendipitous? Interesting anyway!

DH is currently working through a series of philosophy lectures and recently was taken with someone saying 'What is truth? Truth is what works' ...ie Newtonian physics is still 'true' because it still works. Whereas phlogiston doesn't work.

I don't see anything in new knowledge about epigenetics and gene expression which mean that evolution by natural selection no longer 'works' - there has been no fundamental paradigm shift.

It's not the 'natural selection' that doesn't work - it's the generation of new successful varieties / species by some random process or other (mutation ?) to be selected by the process which seems to be more problematic.

Sorry haven't got into the epigenetics book yet to see if this helps with that issue.

How does epigenetics question random mutations? There is nothing in epigenetics that I can see that would question random events such as mutations. The two things are not mutually exclusive.
This is actually one of the major challenges for us microbiologists, to ensure a strain we are working with in the lab doesn't accumulate too many mutations over time. It's why it is considered good lab practice to go back to frozen stock cultures in regular intervals.

Avuncular, are you refering to evolutionary 'leaps' (Stephen Jay Goulding stylee)? Developmental biologists are quite keen on this particular 'revolutionary' idea. The epigenics research fits in quite nicely with this.

I'm not sure I'm getting this.
I know epigenetics can lead to variation as in the example of the cloned cat but surely this is variation within a species not actually a new species. Even for very closely related species, say humans and chimpanzees, you need to have actual differences in the genome, you couldn't get a human from a chimpanzee just by the power of epigenetics. How does epigenetics actually aid speciation?
Also, isn't the entire point of epigenetic DNA modification that it is reversible rather than something fixed? Something that allows an organism to react to an environmental change? In microbes it is although I wouldn't call it epigenetics in microbes. In microbes DNA modification is just one of several ways to control protein expression.

I think they theory goes that the epi mod enables the species to 'leap' in form/colour etc. If the environment favours continued DNA methylation for example, the epi effect will be maintained. If this continues to be advantageous, genetic modifications will be recruited to fix the new phenotype. New species are created by fixation of new phenotypes (adaptations) and time of course (build up of genetic differences). Speciation in microbes has long been the bane of evolutionary scientists .

I hope I'm not inventing too much of this as it all this comes from a long time ago . waits for correction

Also worth bearing in mind as you say Gracelo that a genome may well be genetically programmed to respond to environmental cues i.e. methylate under environmental stresses....so all boils back to DNA in the end anyway.

I want to speak up for homeopathy. It might be the placebo effect but that is irrelevant if it cures people's illness.

Imo much of medicine is placebo effect eg drugs which lose their efficiency over time eg sleeping pills, some painkillers, but patients take these things for years/ decades, convinced that they work.

It doesn't suit the giant pharma companies to admit that there might be a psychological effect on illness so any info is suppressed.

Hopefully the effects on health of thoughts and beliefs will be proved by more clinical study in the near future.

I want to speak up for homeopathy. It might be the placebo effect but that is irrelevant if it cures people's illness.

No, its not irrelevant. It needs to be recognised for what it is - and for what it isn't. Once you've done that and dismissed the pseudoscience, you can look properly at how it actually does 'work' - placebo, patient-healer relationship and so forth.

Hopefully the effects on health of thoughts and beliefs will be proved by more clinical study in the near future.

I'd love to see that happen- of course the problem with this is that many 'alternative' therapists shy away from the searchlight of proper clinical trials, as do faith-based 'healers'. In the latter case presumably because they really don't want any possible beneficial effect to have a non-supernatural cause, let alone find that people who know they're being prayed for might have worse outcomes.

"Speciation in microbes has long been the bane of evolutionary scientists" It's certainly been the bane of my life. I worked on Archaea for a long time (and miss working on them), early evolution is something all Archaea people are interested in. Eukaryote evolution I find very difficult.

Mayisout, I don't think anybody, not even big bad pharma, is denying the Placebo effect but that doesn't make the entire premise of homeopathy any more plausible. There have been loads and loads of studies and there is no evidence that homeopathy helps beyond the placebo effect. Of course, you could do more but I doubt they will have a different outcome.

Just got to say I'd never thought I'd see a debate about epigenetics and methylation on AIBU.

Its nice to find a debate about evolution which is about scientific theories without non/pseudoscientific rubbish diverting it (I think that's why your book suggestion was queried, Avuncular - coming soon after a passing reference to creationists there may have been an assumption it was related to that sort of crap )

Just got THE BOOK on Kindle and wading in.
See you in a fortnight .... maybe

'Pray for me' .... as they might say in some circles

But a question - looked at this on Wikipedia and it all seems to have started a long time ago. What's new in the book? Or is it just a well-written account?

It did start a long time ago but the technical advances in genomic analysis have been mindblowingly enormous. There is just so much more data available now, not only genomes but transcriptional and expression data and computation capability.
I did my very first gene sequence "by hand" from scratch as in: grow microbe, find protein from amongst thousands, isolate enough of it, N-terminal sequence it, design redundant primers, hybridize radio-labelled primer to DNA in agarose gel, get X-ray film, squint at x-ray film and hope that faint black splotch is your wanted piece of DNA not a just a random splotch, cut band out of a gel, clone, isolate plasmid DNA and sequence DNA on an enormous gradient acryl amide gel in about 250-300 nucleotide-long runs. Now, a PhD student who I am the second supervisor of got an entire microbial genome sequenced because she was looking for one specific gene. She found it too, designed primers, PCR'd, cloned, expressed, got crystals, resolved protein structure. And if the nanopore sequencing is anything as good as hyped we will all be doing a lot more sequencing too.

Haven't actually read the book Avuncular, but I would guess the 'new' bit is based on the renewed interest/research field linking together how things develop to how things evolve. There's a lot of it about at the moment. It's very interesting but a few people like to think this will reinvent how we see evolution (i.e. giant leaps or Lamarkian-type adaptations) - these people are not, in general, evolutionary biologists though.