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The Encyclopedia of Life, No Bookshelf Required
by NY Times
Thanks to Mark for the link.
Reposted from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/science/26ency.html
By CARL ZIMMER
Published: February 26, 2008
Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you'd have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.
It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life ( http://www.eol.org ). On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million.
While many of those pages may be sparse at first, the authors hope that the world's scientific community will pool all of its knowledge on the pages. Unlike a page of paper, a page of the Encyclopedia of Life can hold as much information as scientists can upload. "It's going to have everything known on it, and everything new is going to be added as we go along," said Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who spearheaded the Encyclopedia of Life and now serves as its honorary chairman.
Other experts not involved in the project hail it as tremendously promising. "I certainly think it is a great idea," said Jody Hey, a biologist at Rutgers University.
Yet a number of researchers wonder if it will reach its final goal. The encyclopedia is not the first attempt to catalog every species on the planet, and previous efforts have failed. "I have seen 20 years of good ideas go nowhere," said Daniel Brooks, a University of Toronto biologist.
Dr. Wilson has been involved with some of those failed attempts. But in the past few years major advances in databases have made the goal more realistic. Today biologists can consult databases that hold DNA sequences from hundreds of thousands of species, for example. There are also more detailed databases about groups of species, like mammals, fungi and parasites. In 2003, Dr. Wilson wrote a paper in which he called for all that information to be available in one place.
He and his colleagues then persuaded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to contribute money to a consortium of universities, museums and scientific institutions. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and some of the partners are adding money as well. The encyclopedia will have a budget of about $50 million in its first five years.
When Dr. Wilson and his colleagues announced the start of the Encyclopedia of Life last May, their site was little more than a few mocked-up pages. Behind the scenes, designers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., were busy building a system for getting scientific information online fast.
"If we had sat down at a blank screen and started to write, word by word, preparing the encyclopedia would have been virtually impossible," said James Edwards, the project's executive director.
The designers wrote software that could automatically draw information — maps, DNA sequences, bird songs, photographs, evolutionary trees, and so on — from many sources and organize them in one place in one standard format. Ten of the biggest natural history libraries in the world are scanning millions of pages of scientific literature, which computers are text-mining to add more information to species pages.
"The actual development has astonished me," Dr. Wilson said. "I thought we'd be talking about it and pushing it for a long time."
The version of the encyclopedia to be introduced Thursday is far from the finished product, Dr. Edwards warned. "It's going to be rough," he said. "We're releasing early to get feedback from people."
The 30,000 species in the first version will come mainly from databases of fish, amphibians and plants. Experts also created 24 detailed "exemplar" pages, to show just how much information the encyclopedia can handle. Those pages include well-studied species like the yellow fever mosquito, the eastern white pine and the death-cap mushroom.
The researchers wanted to make the site useful to scientists and nonscientists, so they created a sliding button that readers can move to choose how much detail they want. They are also developing ways of manipulating the information to make it useful in many ways.
"You'll be able to download a personalized field guide," Dr. Edwards said. "You can say, 'I'm going to go to this preserve in Thailand — what do we know about what might be there?' "
Scientists, meanwhile, will be able to use the Encyclopedia of Life to do original research. One team of scientists is already planning to compare how different species grow old in order to understand the biology of aging.
Experts on biodiversity are generally excited about the site. "The Encyclopedia of Life is a fantastic and long overdue project," said Quentin D. Wheeler, the director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. But, he said, "my concern is about the content, and where the content will come from."
The ranks of taxonomists — the scientists who describe species and revise old descriptions — have been shrinking steadily for decades.
"We have not given enough thought to the people who provide the information on which the Encyclopedia of Life is built," Dr. Edwards acknowledged. "We are looking into ways to keep that community going."
Dr. Wilson hopes the Encyclopedia of Life will foster the growth of that group. For the past 60 years, he has been studying ants, and in May he and other ant experts will be meeting at Harvard to plan how they can take advantage of the Encyclopedia of Life.
The goal he would like them to set would be to add all 14,000 known species of ants to the encyclopedia, and then add all the unknown ones — perhaps an additional 15,000 to 25,000 species. "It's going to be a fun adventure for the next few decades," Dr. Wilson said.
Reposted from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/science/26ency.html
By CARL ZIMMER
Published: February 26, 2008
Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you'd have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.
It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life ( http://www.eol.org ). On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million.
While many of those pages may be sparse at first, the authors hope that the world's scientific community will pool all of its knowledge on the pages. Unlike a page of paper, a page of the Encyclopedia of Life can hold as much information as scientists can upload. "It's going to have everything known on it, and everything new is going to be added as we go along," said Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who spearheaded the Encyclopedia of Life and now serves as its honorary chairman.
Other experts not involved in the project hail it as tremendously promising. "I certainly think it is a great idea," said Jody Hey, a biologist at Rutgers University.
Yet a number of researchers wonder if it will reach its final goal. The encyclopedia is not the first attempt to catalog every species on the planet, and previous efforts have failed. "I have seen 20 years of good ideas go nowhere," said Daniel Brooks, a University of Toronto biologist.
Dr. Wilson has been involved with some of those failed attempts. But in the past few years major advances in databases have made the goal more realistic. Today biologists can consult databases that hold DNA sequences from hundreds of thousands of species, for example. There are also more detailed databases about groups of species, like mammals, fungi and parasites. In 2003, Dr. Wilson wrote a paper in which he called for all that information to be available in one place.
He and his colleagues then persuaded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to contribute money to a consortium of universities, museums and scientific institutions. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and some of the partners are adding money as well. The encyclopedia will have a budget of about $50 million in its first five years.
When Dr. Wilson and his colleagues announced the start of the Encyclopedia of Life last May, their site was little more than a few mocked-up pages. Behind the scenes, designers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., were busy building a system for getting scientific information online fast.
"If we had sat down at a blank screen and started to write, word by word, preparing the encyclopedia would have been virtually impossible," said James Edwards, the project's executive director.
The designers wrote software that could automatically draw information — maps, DNA sequences, bird songs, photographs, evolutionary trees, and so on — from many sources and organize them in one place in one standard format. Ten of the biggest natural history libraries in the world are scanning millions of pages of scientific literature, which computers are text-mining to add more information to species pages.
"The actual development has astonished me," Dr. Wilson said. "I thought we'd be talking about it and pushing it for a long time."
The version of the encyclopedia to be introduced Thursday is far from the finished product, Dr. Edwards warned. "It's going to be rough," he said. "We're releasing early to get feedback from people."
The 30,000 species in the first version will come mainly from databases of fish, amphibians and plants. Experts also created 24 detailed "exemplar" pages, to show just how much information the encyclopedia can handle. Those pages include well-studied species like the yellow fever mosquito, the eastern white pine and the death-cap mushroom.
The researchers wanted to make the site useful to scientists and nonscientists, so they created a sliding button that readers can move to choose how much detail they want. They are also developing ways of manipulating the information to make it useful in many ways.
"You'll be able to download a personalized field guide," Dr. Edwards said. "You can say, 'I'm going to go to this preserve in Thailand — what do we know about what might be there?' "
Scientists, meanwhile, will be able to use the Encyclopedia of Life to do original research. One team of scientists is already planning to compare how different species grow old in order to understand the biology of aging.
Experts on biodiversity are generally excited about the site. "The Encyclopedia of Life is a fantastic and long overdue project," said Quentin D. Wheeler, the director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. But, he said, "my concern is about the content, and where the content will come from."
The ranks of taxonomists — the scientists who describe species and revise old descriptions — have been shrinking steadily for decades.
"We have not given enough thought to the people who provide the information on which the Encyclopedia of Life is built," Dr. Edwards acknowledged. "We are looking into ways to keep that community going."
Dr. Wilson hopes the Encyclopedia of Life will foster the growth of that group. For the past 60 years, he has been studying ants, and in May he and other ant experts will be meeting at Harvard to plan how they can take advantage of the Encyclopedia of Life.
The goal he would like them to set would be to add all 14,000 known species of ants to the encyclopedia, and then add all the unknown ones — perhaps an additional 15,000 to 25,000 species. "It's going to be a fun adventure for the next few decades," Dr. Wilson said.
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Posted: Tuesday, February 26, 2008 | PermalinkComments 1 - 50 of 71 |
Reload Comments | Back to Top | Page Numbers2. Comment #133602 by Geoff on February 26, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Yeah, I saw this on the BBC website earlier today. Wonderful idea! Other Comments by Geoff
3. Comment #133609 by adonais on February 26, 2008 at 12:33 pm
The moonshot equivalent of biology, truly an awe-inspiring project. Unsurprisingly, the eol.org web site has been flaky and mostly unavailable all morning...wonder why :)
EDIT: whoops - here it says the new pages will available on Thursday? That's not what it said on BBC earlier today....(maybe hence the server load!)
Other Comments by adonais
4. Comment #133611 by Bertybob on February 26, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Can't wait to read the page on Homo Sapiens!!Will Creationists get their own page as a seperate species??
Other Comments by Bertybob
5. Comment #133621 by Gymnopedie on February 26, 2008 at 12:46 pm
That would sure beat Wikipedia for all my biological inquiries!Other Comments by Gymnopedie
6. Comment #133634 by Kevin A Jones on February 26, 2008 at 12:52 pm
And to think, Adam named all of those animals.....Wow, all I can say is 'Wow"....
Other Comments by Kevin A Jones
7. Comment #133645 by theantitheist on February 26, 2008 at 1:05 pm
No matter what religion throws at science, science just seems to slowly keep chugging along. (Maybe not so slowly). It's breathtaking the advances that are happening and the projects undertaken, a few spring to mind - the facilities in Sweden to store seeds of every flora, the LHC, the bleedin space station!!
I don't care about the whitterings of the religous as long as these types of events keep happening my "faith" that science will continue to astonish me will still be strong.
Viva la Study, Viva la Knowledge, Viva la Truth
Other Comments by theantitheist
8. Comment #133647 by Nails on February 26, 2008 at 1:06 pm
6. Comment #133634 by Kevin A Jones on February 26, 2008 at 12:52 pm
And to think, Adam named all of those animals.....
Wow, all I can say is 'Wow"...
Wow indeed.
at 10 seconds to name each organism, to tag 1.8m would take:
306000 minutes.
5100 hours.
212.5 days.
Continous.
ludicrous.
just wait till I mention this to some creationist friends of mine....(evil laugh)
Other Comments by Nails
9. Comment #133655 by theantitheist on February 26, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Nails,
the 1.8 to the power of ten hypothesised. 2125k days or nearly six years (as surely Dog would have made sure Adam found them all (even the ones under the Antarctic))
Other Comments by theantitheist
10. Comment #133659 by Frankus1122 on February 26, 2008 at 1:30 pm
This has been in development for a while now.
No matter what religion throws at science, science just seems to slowly keep chugging along.
This is a good point. Science devastates a lot of religious thinking. It is really overwhelming.
I know Prof. Dawkins will not argue with creationists and I completely understand why. We know so much and so little at the same time. We realize there is a vast amount yet to discover and figure out. We have some of the answers and seek to find new questions. The sad sorry creationist 'knows'.
However, I always feel the need to try to educate. I believe this encyclopedia will help all but the willfully ignorant.
Other Comments by Frankus1122
11. Comment #133662 by troodon on February 26, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Nails,And that doesn't even include travel time, building the pressurized submarines for deep sea species etc. How did he and Eve have time to make babies? She must have been one frustrated woman, unless she got a bit of help from one of Kirk Cameron's perfectly-designed bananas.
But Adam's accomplishments surely pale when compared to Noah. Adam just had to name them while Noah had to bring them all back to the Ark, then take them back to their homes all over the world when the flud was over. Must have been tens of thousands of years to accomplish that. But wait - the earth is only 6000 years old!
Other Comments by troodon
12. Comment #133670 by bluebird on February 26, 2008 at 1:46 pm
I remember reading about E.O.L./EO Wilson last year (can be found @ RD.net "archives"). Now it's imminent!
Oodles of kudos to all the people who helped bring this momentous idea to fruition!!
Another reference: http://crossmediablog.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/eolorg-launching-by-mid-2008/
Other Comments by bluebird
13. Comment #133671 by DasSquid on February 26, 2008 at 1:51 pm
This is a fantastic idea.
A pox on any of the people that have said that, 'Oh, it's far too big let's not even bother.'
Perhaps have some sort of Scientist Wikipedia style thing happening, with moderators and scientists able to contribute to any particular page, etc.
This, I must say, is a fanTASTIC idea and once starting, it'll steamroll into awesomeness with easily accessible information for all of us.
Other Comments by DasSquid
14. Comment #133675 by Steve Zara on February 26, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I love this idea, but it will never be able to capture the range of life on our planet.A vital part of the biosphere consists of bacteria. We are discovering new types of bacteria all the time. Craig Venter (who led the commercial effort to sequence the human genome) has been sampling DNA from sea water and has found that we know very little about the range of bacteria in our oceans, and what they can do.
Bacteria exchange DNA all the time, making the idea of a "species" of bacteria meaningless. Each bacterium is a package of genes that could have come from a wide range of sources, and there are many, many, many bacteria. If all the bacteria on our planet were lined up end-to-end they would stretch across the known universe.
Other Comments by Steve Zara
15. Comment #133680 by Damien Trotter on February 26, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Don't forget that most species are now extinct.
And being an orthodox Jew, Adam would have had to perform a naming ceremony for each species. In effect, he would still be in the garden of Eden naming the very early species, with most of his task yet to perform.
DT
Other Comments by Damien Trotter
16. Comment #133687 by onclepsycho on February 26, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Wonderful, inspiring project. Can't wait to browse through it. On a related note, I'd like to remind everyone about http://www.scholarpedia.org/, another amazing project well on its way now.Other Comments by onclepsycho
17. Comment #133695 by Artifactorfiction on February 26, 2008 at 2:43 pm
StunningAnd as for bacteria - it seems that they thrive quite happily in deep rocks as well - a good candidate for life elsewhere in the universe
Other Comments by Artifactorfiction
18. Comment #133697 by DasSquid on February 26, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Steve,
The thing is, if no one even tries because of the reason you've given there, then the human species would be pitiful indeed.
AT THE VERY LEAST they can get the names of the species of Bird/Plant/Blah life onto a centralised website for someone like myself, if I wanted to know more about an animal/plant I don't have to root around and look for something that I have no idea where to begin.
Granted it could never be FINISHED, doesn't mean it should never be STARTED.
Other Comments by DasSquid
19. Comment #133708 by HourglassMemory on February 26, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I remember listnening E.O.Wilson about this project on a TED lecture.It's great that it's still going.
I'm not able to get in at the moment. It stays there for a while, loading...and then it says it can't present me the page.
It's probably having too many people on it.
Other Comments by HourglassMemory
20. Comment #133717 by kaiserkriss on February 26, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Does the wea flea get a separate page?
I think Adam must have been a really old dude by the time he finished with the last naming ceremony. Assuming each naming ceremony took 1 hour (got to make notes and catalog things)and he worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (resting and worshipping on the seventh), it would have taken him 480 years. Hmmm..
Also what happened to Adam's book? Was it not deemed worthy by the bishops at the first council of Nicaea to be included into the holy book?
Questions, questions. Robertson, where are you when we need you? jcw
Other Comments by kaiserkriss
21. Comment #133737 by healthphysicist on February 26, 2008 at 4:09 pm
But doesn't this basically already exist?http://www.tolweb.org/tree/
Other Comments by healthphysicist
22. Comment #133742 by Sauveterre on February 26, 2008 at 4:28 pm
But doesn't this basically already exist?
http://www.tolweb.org/tree/
Yeah, but it's taking way too long to expand. I've been waiting for the site (tol) to start speeding up for about a year now, but new entries still take forever. And entries are often remarkably short considering how long they take to add them. Hopefully the new site improves the process.
Other Comments by Sauveterre
23. Comment #133752 by Deepthought on February 26, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Nails,
These are the numbers I got:
Estimated # of species: 180000000 Seconds, 3000000 Minutes, 50000 Hours, 2083.33Days, 5.72 Years
Known Species only: 18000000 Seconds, 300000 Minutes, 5000 Hours, 208.3333333 Days, 0.57 Years
Other Comments by Deepthought
24. Comment #133791 by Double Bass Atheist on February 26, 2008 at 7:36 pm
What about beetles? ...the bugs not the band! ;-)
Aren't there some 350,000 different kinds of beetles?
I always wondered what was god's fascination with these things? I mean, when you're creating the earth and all the diverse forms of life, wouldn't one or two types of beetles do just fine?
I guess god must have had some kind of serious beetle fetish, eh?
Other Comments by Double Bass Atheist
25. Comment #133792 by Goldy on February 26, 2008 at 7:40 pm
I think Adam must have been a really old dude by the time he finished with the last naming ceremony
Quick perusal of Wikipedia...
According to the Bible, Adam finally died at the age of 930 years
Other Comments by Goldy
26. Comment #133812 by ClemIsMe on February 26, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Have I mentioned lately that I love the internet, and I love being alive here and now?Other Comments by ClemIsMe
27. Comment #133817 by Uhtred on February 26, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Who needs such a thing when we have the Bible!I say destroy its blasphemy now!
Other Comments by Uhtred
28. Comment #133827 by sent2null on February 26, 2008 at 11:04 pm
I stumbled across the EOL project some time early last year and was quite excited by what appeared to be an amazingly intuitive way to describe the relationship of all living things to all other living things. The use of animations is key to bringing the experience of exploring life coupled with a very well designed site could make this take off in a way that wikipedia pages on living creatures may not especially if experts take the time to update the pages with the latest information. Though wikipedia has taken quite a few hits in the press recently due to the "many edit" feature of most pages, the technical articles are extremely refined and errors in them rarely last a few minutes let alone hours or days as they do in less technical subjects or subjects with less viewership. The last time I visited the EOL site about a month ago, it was still under construction so I am glad that the first 30,000 pages are going up in 2 days!!! woo hoo!...looks like I'll have yet another online destination where I can feed myself first rate knowledge.
Gotta love what this internet has wrought! To think that just 20 years ago I would have had to go to a library to get access to information as detailed as what will hopefully be in EOL, today you can get it at a keyboard at home, your laptop or your Iphone ...pretty much any where you can get net access. I vividly remember spending hours behind books in the libraries of my University as an undergrad, reading papers from mathematics journals , the ACM and Siigraph, the IEEE ..today my hard drive is filled with pdf's instead. ;) Will this pervasive access to factual information actually help us expedite the demise of mysticism and religious nonsense and help us avoid world calamity in the form of increased global warming???? It sure looks likely..hmmm.. Sounds like the source of another blog post. ;)
Regards,
Other Comments by sent2null
29. Comment #133829 by LorienRyan on February 26, 2008 at 11:05 pm
What an excellent resource and a credit to the internet. Wish I was back in high school. Wonder if the fundie countries are gonna block this one. Other Comments by LorienRyan
30. Comment #133836 by sent2null on February 26, 2008 at 11:16 pm
26. Comment #133812 by ClemIsMe on February 26, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Have I mentioned lately that I love the internet, and I love being alive here and now?
so so true, I've stated this often in the last 10 years, we are living at a most revolutionary time in human history it behooves us to embrace the significance of this moment and enjoy it!
Other Comments by sent2null
31. Comment #133854 by Barry Pearson on February 27, 2008 at 12:41 am
The following briefly discusses "Tree of Life Web Project/Encyclopedia of Life Collaboration":
http://www.tolweb.org/tree/home.pages/toleol.html
Other Comments by Barry Pearson
32. Comment #133858 by Logicel on February 27, 2008 at 1:12 am
This may sound nutty, but most people want to reach some kind of milestone before they die, and for me it was to be part of a global, user-generated network (this was my fondest dream over 30 years ago when I was studying McLuhan and getting bowled over by what many now consider to be the print precedent of what we have in the net, Brand's Whole Earth Catalog). So being the weirdo that I am, I often muse out loud, I can die happy now because we have the Net. That's when the folks next to me on the bus or train move on over to some vacant seat, somewhat far from little ole me.
Other Comments by Logicel
33. Comment #133888 by Spiral on February 27, 2008 at 2:13 am
26. Comment #133812 by ClemIsMe on February 26, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Have I mentioned lately that I love the internet, and I love being alive here and now?
Comment #133836 by sent2null on February 26, 2008 at 11:16 pm
so so true, I've stated this often in the last 10 years, we are living at a most revolutionary time in human history it behooves us to embrace the significance of this moment and enjoy it!
Aye aye!
Other Comments by Spiral
34. Comment #133891 by rod-the-farmer on February 27, 2008 at 2:15 am
It is now working. Go to the http://www.eol.org/home.html
and click on the intro. I would suspect that anyone on THIS blog will end up with a big smile on his/her face, after seeing it, and understanding what they want to do with this.
It will be interesting to follow the evolutionary links function, and what the fundies say when this feature becomes common knowledge.
Other Comments by rod-the-farmer
35. Comment #133978 by 4horsefins on February 27, 2008 at 5:39 am
What about when the devilish fundies install their "ARK" virus? How will we stop the mass migration to Ararat....Why the hell am I driving towards Ararat?Other Comments by 4horsefins
36. Comment #133982 by bugaboo on February 27, 2008 at 5:45 am
Ive just had a look at the demonstration pages and looks amazing. Was wondering if viruses will be included.Other Comments by bugaboo
37. Comment #134004 by ianmkz on February 27, 2008 at 6:13 am
But Adam's accomplishments surely pale when compared to Noah. Adam just had to name them while Noah had to bring them all back to the Ark, then take them back to their homes all over the world when the flud was over.
Poor old Noah. Still, he must have been quite a man to build a 450 foot vessel out of gopher wood and stocked it with fowl, cattle, and every creeping thing in seven days. (I just received an estimate for building a porch - time for completion 2 weeks) A remarkable man!
BTW When the whole earth was flooded, would that not have made all aquatic environments brackish - killing in the process every freshwater and saltwater fish?
Other Comments by ianmkz
38. Comment #134008 by Steve Zara on February 27, 2008 at 6:16 am
BTW When the whole earth was flooded, would that not have made all aquatic environments brackish - killing in the process every freshwater and saltwater fish?
No, as it was flooded due to rain. The brackish water, being more dense, would have stayed below the fresh water.
Of course, having a layer of fresh water on the sea would have killed off all the surface-living organisms, including all the oxygen-producing plankton.
Other Comments by Steve Zara
39. Comment #134025 by rod-the-farmer on February 27, 2008 at 6:36 am
I would like to have been there when Noah said to his neighbours "I need (1) all your animals, (2) two of each of all the other animals on the planet, (3) all your feed crops for the next three years so I can feed them all, (4) all the lumber within a 500 mile radius, and (5) you have to transport all that yourself, because my family & I are busy building a boat (which we have never done before - we are farmers, not boat-builders). So....get a move on, it is starting to rain. And no, you can't come for a ride on it." Other Comments by rod-the-farmer
40. Comment #134109 by prettygoodformonkeys on February 27, 2008 at 9:08 am
I suppose if we look deep in the old Aramaic texts we may come across the List of Everything. After all, there's no point in naming everything (as the only man on earth, and it's your most important job directly from God) unless someone eventually wrote it down.Never mind that most haven't even been found, has it occurred to any fundies that most of the existing names are not in Aramaic? They may have a name for Ant, or Camel, but surely not Platypus?
Other Comments by prettygoodformonkeys
41. Comment #134126 by gimlibengloin on February 27, 2008 at 9:53 am
Although comments 24, 25, 39 raise understandable objections against the Genesis account it would appear that they are unfamiliar with the well publicised creationist answers to such objections. For examplewww.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3831
which provides not only a response to the issue raised but also a summary of the creationist position on the limitations of biological change.
Other Comments by gimlibengloin
42. Comment #134131 by gimlibengloin on February 27, 2008 at 10:03 am
see also richard dawkinswww.youtube.com/watch?v=zaKryi3605g
happy viewing.
Other Comments by gimlibengloin
43. Comment #134133 by Steve Zara on February 27, 2008 at 10:05 am
Comment #134131 by gimlibengloinwhich provides not only a response to the issue raised but also a summary of the creationist position on the limitations of biological change.
I would be interested how creationists would explain why everything points to life having a thermophilic ancestor. I am particularly interested in the issue of the bacteria/archaea split.
Also, the flood (as explain above) would have killed all the phytoplankton, resulting in reduced oxygen levels. We see no evidence for such reduced oxygen. I would love to hear the explanation.
Other Comments by Steve Zara
44. Comment #134166 by rod-the-farmer on February 27, 2008 at 10:53 am
Sorry, gimlibengloin, but your link has no answers to the questions I raised about Noah's Ark. Your response claimed I raised questions about Genesis, and thus you directed me to a site addressing this question. Nope, not me. The Ark story was my target. In my opinion, posing the questions I listed reveals the problems with that story - common sense says that cannot be quite how it happened. And I did not raise ALL of them. Just the first level questions. Also, PLEASE do not conflate the origin of life with evolution. Two separate issues, but a common creationist attempt to confuse the question. Evolution assumes life already existed, then tries to explain the incredible variety of species. Other Comments by rod-the-farmer
45. Comment #134176 by Geoff on February 27, 2008 at 11:04 am
I've still never seen them define "created kinds" with any degree of sense. Are they still trying to make "Baraminology" work? Other Comments by Geoff
46. Comment #134208 by Geoff on February 27, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Lest we forget, god is allegedly creating 1,000,000 new species every second*, so it's gonna take a while to finish this encyclopaedia... (*the holy book of wooter, Ch3 v24)
Other Comments by Geoff
47. Comment #134282 by gimlibengloin on February 27, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Good evening!(44)rod-the-farmer. Point taken. Your first two points suggested (at least to me) that you were running with the issue raised in 24 and 25 but maybe I misunderstood you.
However, in regard to the alleged confusion of the origin of life with evolution this is really an evolutionists attempt to 'confuse the issue'. It may be true that the supposed mechanism of evolution ie selection and mutation is not applicable to origin of life. However, the main reason for seperating the two is because there are so many problems with the chance origin of life the average evolutionist prefers to leave it on one side if only for polemic purposes. Afterall, does not Prof Dawkins et al believe that life evolved from chemicals and then subsequently diversified?
My main reason for citing the Dr Sarfati link was that it seemed that some were raising questions that had already been dealt with. Its preferable, at least in my opinion, to know what creationists have and ae saying rather than just guess.
kind regards, GBG
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48. Comment #134286 by Steve Zara on February 27, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Comment #134282 by gimlibengloin However, the main reason for seperating the two is because there are so many problems with the chance origin of life the average evolutionist prefers to leave it on one side if only for polemic purposes.
There aren't problems with the chance origin of life. We have sound ideas as to how this may have happened. The problem is that the possible initial stages of this process (such as metabolic cycles within vesicles) won't fossilise.
The other issue is that the way life progressed changed dramatically once nucleic acids became the material for inheritance, so it is reasonable to treat life after this separately.
However, even if the chance of the origin of life turns out to be very low, it is not anywhere close to the low chances of spontaneous origin of a creator.
I note you have not responded to my questions yet.
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49. Comment #134288 by Brian English on February 27, 2008 at 2:38 pm
However, even if the chance of the origin of life turns out to be very low, it is not anywhere close to the low chances of spontaneous origin of a creator.
So true.
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50. Comment #134291 by Geoff on February 27, 2008 at 2:42 pm
gimli:
It may be true that the alleged mechanism of evolution ie selection and mutation is not applicable to origin of life. However, the main reason for seperating the two is because there are so many problems with the chance origin of life the average evolutionist prefers to leave it on one side if only for polemic purposes.
It's simpler than that; before life (or at least a replicator) appears there are no mutations to be selected, therefore no evolution.
Having said that, there isn't really a concrete definition of what actually constitutres life. Is a virus alive? A prion?
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1. Comment #133598 by Nails on February 26, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I hope this may help to reverse the trend of shrinking taxonomists; I imagine I would love a website like this but I still cringe when I think of the long, lonely days revising classification....
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