BA77’s Off Topic Thread volume 5, Maltose and Isomaltose are such nice looking molecules
α-D-glucopyranosyl-(1→4)-D-glucopyranose α-D-glucopyranosyl-(1→6)-D-glucopyranose This is your chance to talk Off Topic. Keep it civil please.
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AP GfK poll, more non-Darwinists than Darwinists
Here are the numbers for extremely or very confident in the following positions from March 2014 poll by AP GfK Darwinism: 31% non-Darwinism: 42% Earth 4.5 billion: 27% Earth NOT 4.5 billion years old: 36% Anthropogenic global warming: 33% non-Anthropogenic global warming: 37% Big Bang: 21% non-Big Bang: 51% Universe so Complex there must be a creator: 54% Not (Universe so Complex there must be a creator): 25% HT JoeCoder reddit.com/r/creation
No past infinity? But what about a minus past infinity?
This season’s science: Life got started without water?
If most molecular evolution is non-Darwinian, how can codon bias and duon codes evolve?
Most molecular evolution is neutral. Done. PZ Myers From wiki: Codon usage bias Codon usage bias refers to differences in the frequency of occurrence of synonymous codons in coding DNA. A codon is a series of three nucleotides (triplets) that encodes a specific amino acid residue in a polypeptide chain or for the termination of translation (stop codons). There are 64 different codons (61 codons encoding for amino acids plus 3 stop codons) but only 20 different translated amino acids. The overabundance in the number of codons allows many amino acids to be encoded by more than one codon. Because of such redundancy it is said that the genetic code is degenerate. Different organisms often show particular preferences for one Read More ›
Never mind. Today is just a dream
What would the universe look like, if the past was infinite?
Technically, we don’t believe in the Darwin awards, but …
Universe before Big Bang? Almost surely part of multiverse
Pop liberal theologian Karl Giberson on debate with Meyer
Oxford evolutionary psychologist on unselfishness, Earth Day
Is Richard Dawkins leading people away from The Blind Watchmaker …
Deal on Kindle price for Woodward’s Darwin Strikes Back
Supersymmetry MUST BE true
Why fixation in gigantic but widely separated human populations doesn’t happen
If there was any time the human population was very small, fixation was likely inevitable as discussed in Neutral Evolution for Newbies, Part 2. The time for required for fixation in a population according to standard population genetics is approximately 4 Ne, where Ne is the effective population size.
For example, for an Ne of six individuals, the approximate time to fixation using this approximation is:
4 x 6 = 24 generations
In 24 generations, assuming they don’t die from inbreeding depression, everyone will be pretty much genetically identical according to standard theory. Even if their differences were huge (maybe millions of nucleotides), they should fix in 24 generations using this approximation.
In contrast consider the current human population of 7 Billion, and suppose the effective reproductively viable population is 1.5 billion. Using the approximation, the time to fixation with Ne = 1.5 billion is
4 x 1,500,000,000 = 6 billion generations
Read More ›