[Quasi-Off-Topic:] A Crash Course in Economics

If you take off on a tangent unrelated to or only tenuously related to the topic it makes topical dialog in the commentary difficult for others. sparc

off topic: Ribosome in action http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jml8CFBWcDs bornagain77

off topic: Ribosome SRP.mpg http://video.scientificblogging.com/item/8GBXBTRCV8D37BW3 bornagain77

Off topic: Two-ton, 500 Million-year-old Fossil Of Stromatolite Discovered In Virginia, U.S. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080704122847.htm of note: A stromatolite is a mound produced in shallow water by mats of algae that trap mud and sand particles. Another mat grows on the trapped sediment layer and this traps another layer of sediment, growing gradually over time. Stromatolites can grow to heights of a meter or more. They are uncommon today but their fossils are among the earliest evidence for living things. The oldest stromatolites have been dated at 3.46 billion years old. They were discovered in 1999 in Western Australia, near the town of Marble Bar. --- With the fact that the life (photosynthetic (cyano) bacteria) found in the fossil record is exceedingly similar to its modern conterpart, This seems to be over 3 billion years of confirmed stasis for the earliest life on earth. (oxygenation of the earth and atmosphere was its ultimate function.) bornagain77

This was really interesting, and an ID crash course along these lines would be great, but it would obviously take a lot of effort. Note chapter 16 where the author talks about "fuzzy numbers," how data is manipulated and presented to make inflation look lower than it is and GDP look bigger than it is. This is exactly the kind of thing we get from the Darwin camp (e.g., trying to make the fossil record look like it supports Darwinian gradualism when it doesn't, and claiming that minor variations can explain macroevolutionary changes when they can't). GilDodgen