Chapter 30, Verse 27: He originates creation; THEN REFASHIONS IT- for Him an easy task. His is the most Sublime Symbol in the heavens and the earth(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
"In Islamic belief, knowledge is two-fold. There is that revealed through the Holy Prophet (s.a.s.) and that which man discovers by virtue of his own intellect. Nor do these two involve any contradiction, provided man remembers that his own mind is itself the creation of God. Without this humility, no balance is possible. With it, there are no barriers. Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that CREATION IS NOT STATIC BUT CONTINUOUS, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
"THE CREATION ACCORDING TO ISLAM IS NOT A UNIQUE ACT IN A GIVEN TIME BUT A PERPETUAL AND CONSTANT EVENT; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)
Thus Islam's basic principle can only be defined as mono-realism and not as monotheism. Consider, for example, the opening declaration of every Islamic prayer: "Allah-o-Akbar". What does that mean? There can be no doubt that the second word of the declaration likens THE CHARACTER OF ALLAH TO A MATRIX WHICH CONTAINS ALL AND GIVES EXISTENCE TO THE INFINITE, TO SPACE, TO TIME, TO THE UNIVERSE, TO ALL ACTIVE AND PASSIVE FORCES IMAGINEABLE, TO LIFE AND TO THE SOUL. Imam Hassan has explained the Islamic doctrine of God and the Universe by analogy with the sun and its reflection in the pool of a fountain; there is certainly a reflection or image of the sun, but with what poverty and with what little reality; how small and pale is the likeness between this impalpable image and the immense, blazing, white-hot glory of the celestial sphere itself. Allah is the sun; and the Universe, as we know it in all its magnitude, and time, with its power, are nothing more than the reflection of the Absolute in the mirror of the fountain"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)
The above are 4 quotes and excerpts from Blogpost Four Hundred, a collection of about 100 quotes on the subjects of Knowledge, Intellect, Creation, Education, Science and Religion:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
1)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/02/445darwins-evolution-life-and.html
2)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/404sorry-charley-church-apologizes-to.html
3)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/11/423part-3-peter-mcknight-hitting-brick_02.html
4)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/11/422part-2-peter-mcknight-religion-in.html
5)
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/39754/title/SN_Special__Darwin_turns_200
6)
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/40014/title/Darwins_Evolution
7)
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/39999/title/Evolutions_Evolution
8)
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/40006/title/Molecular_Evolution
9)
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/39974/title/Step-by-step_Evolution
10)
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/40012/title/Computing_Evolution
11)
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/40016/title/A_Most_Private_Evolution
12)
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2009/01/441the-peter-mcknight-collection-of.html
13) February 10, 2009
Darwin, Ahead of His Time, Is Still Influential
By NICHOLAS WADE
New York Times
Darwin’s theory of evolution has become the bedrock of modern biology. But for most of the theory’s existence since 1859, even biologists have ignored or vigorously opposed it, in whole or in part.
It is a testament to Darwin’s extraordinary insight that it took almost a century for biologists to understand the essential correctness of his views.
Biologists quickly accepted the idea of evolution, but for decades they rejected natural selection, the mechanism Darwin proposed for the evolutionary process. Until the mid-20th century they largely ignored sexual selection, a special aspect of natural selection that Darwin proposed to account for male ornaments like the peacock’s tail.
And biologists are still arguing about group-level selection, the idea that natural selection can operate at the level of groups as well as on individuals. Darwin proposed group selection — or something like it; scholars differ as to what he meant — to account for castes in ant societies and morality in people.
How did Darwin come to be so in advance of his time? Why were biologists so slow to understand that Darwin had provided the correct answer on so many central issues? Historians of science have noted several distinctive features of Darwin’s approach to science that, besides genius, help account for his insights. They also point to several nonscientific criteria that stood as mental blocks in the way of biologists’ accepting Darwin’s ideas.
One of Darwin’s advantages was that he did not have to write grant proposals or publish 15 articles a year. He thought deeply about every detail of his theory for more than 20 years before publishing “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, and for 12 years more before its sequel, “The Descent of Man,” which explored how his theory applied to people.
He brought several intellectual virtues to the task at hand. Instead of brushing off objections to his theory, he thought about them obsessively until he had found a solution. Showy male ornaments, like the peacock’s tail, appeared hard to explain by natural selection because they seemed more of a handicap than an aid to survival. “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick,” Darwin wrote. But from worrying about this problem, he developed the idea of sexual selection, that females chose males with the best ornaments, and hence elegant peacocks have the most offspring.
Darwin also had the intellectual toughness to stick with the deeply discomfiting consequences of his theory, that natural selection has no goal or purpose. Alfred Wallace, who independently thought of natural selection, later lost faith in the power of the idea and turned to spiritualism to explain the human mind. “Darwin had the courage to face the implications of what he had done, but poor Wallace couldn’t bear it,” says William Provine, a historian at Cornell University. (Read commentary by Dr. Provine on passages from "On the Origin of Species." )
Darwin’s thinking about evolution was not only deep, but also very broad. He was interested in fossils, animal breeding, geographical distribution, anatomy and plants. “That very comprehensive view allowed him to see things that others perhaps didn’t,” says Robert J. Richards, a historian at the University of Chicago. “He was so sure of his central ideas — the transmutation of species and natural selection — that he had to find a way to make it all work together.” (Dr. Richards comments on "On the Origin of Species.")
From the perspective of 2009, Darwin’s principal ideas are substantially correct. He did not get everything right. Because he didn’t know about plate tectonics, Darwin’s comments on the distribution of species are not very useful. His theory of inheritance, since he had no knowledge of genes or DNA, is beside the point. But his central concepts of natural selection and sexual selection were correct. He also presented a form of group-level selection that was long dismissed but now has leading advocates like the biologists E. O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson.
Not only was Darwin correct on the central premises of his theory, but in several other still open issues his views also seem quite likely to prevail. His idea of how new species form was long eclipsed by Ernst Mayr’s view that a reproductive barrier like a mountain forces a species to split. But a number of biologists are now returning to Darwin’s idea that speciation occurs most often through competition in open spaces, Dr. Richards says.
Darwin believed there was a continuity between humans and other species, which led him to think of human morality as related to the sympathy seen among social animals. This long-disdained idea was resurrected only recently by researchers like the primatologist Frans de Waal. Darwin “never felt that morality was our own invention, but was a product of evolution, a position we are now seeing grow in popularity under the influence of what we know about animal behavior,” Dr. de Waal says. “In fact, we’ve now returned to the original Darwinian position.”
It is somewhat remarkable that a man who died in 1882 should still be influencing discussion among biologists. It is perhaps equally strange that so many biologists failed for so many decades to accept ideas that Darwin expressed in clear and beautiful English.
The rejection was in part because a substantial amount of science, including the two new fields of Mendelian genetics and population genetics, needed to be developed before other, more enticing mechanisms of selection could be excluded. But there were also a series of nonscientific considerations that affected biologists’ judgment.
In the 19th century, biologists accepted evolution, in part because it implied progress.
“The general idea of evolution, particularly if you took it to be progressive and purposeful, fitted the ideology of the age,” says Peter J. Bowler, a historian of science at Queen’s University, Belfast. But that made it all the harder to accept that something as purposeless as natural selection could be the shaping force of evolution. “On the Origin of Species” and its central idea were largely ignored and did not come back into vogue until the 1930s. By that time the population geneticist R. A. Fisher and others had shown that Mendelian genetics was compatible with the idea of natural selection working on small variations.
“If you think of the 150 years since the publication of ‘Origin of Species,’ it had half that time in the wilderness and half at the center, and even at the center it’s often been not more than marginal,” says Helena Cronin, a philosopher of science at the London School of Economics. “That’s a pretty comprehensive rejection of Darwin.” (Dr. Cronin's comments on Darwin's text.)
Darwin is still far from being fully accepted in sciences outside biology. “People say natural selection is O.K. for human bodies but not for brain or behavior,” Dr. Cronin says. “But making an exception for one species is to deny Darwin’s tenet of understanding all living things. This includes almost the whole of social studies — that’s quite an influential body that’s still rejecting Darwinism.”
The yearning to see purpose in evolution and the doubt that it really applied to people were two nonscientific criteria that led scientists to reject the essence of Darwin’s theory. A third, in terms of group selection, may be people’s tendency to think of themselves as individuals rather than as units of a group. “More and more I’m beginning to think about individualism as our own cultural bias that more or less explains why group selection was rejected so forcefully and why it is still so controversial,” says David Sloan Wilson, a biologist at Binghamton University.
Historians who are aware of the long eclipse endured by Darwin’s ideas perhaps have a clearer idea of his extraordinary contribution than do biologists, many of whom assume Darwin’s theory has always been seen to offer, as now, a grand explanatory framework for all biology. Dr. Richards, the University of Chicago historian, recalls that a biologist colleague “had occasion to read the ‘Origin’ for the first time — most biologists have never read the ‘Origin’ — because of a class he was teaching. We met on the street and he remarked, ‘You know, Bob, Darwin really knew a lot of biology.’ ”
Darwin knew a lot of biology: more than any of his contemporaries, more than a surprising number of his successors. From prolonged thought and study, he was able to intuit how evolution worked without having access to all the subsequent scientific knowledge that others required to be convinced of natural selection. He had the objectivity to put aside criteria with powerful emotional resonance, like the conviction that evolution should be purposeful. As a result, he saw deep into the strange workings of the evolutionary mechanism, an insight not really exceeded until a century after his great work of synthesis.
14) February 10, 2009
Essay
Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live
By CARL SAFINA
New York Times
“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” Robert Darwin told his son, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him.
Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more.
By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.
That all life is related by common ancestry, and that populations change form over time, are the broad strokes and fine brushwork of evolution. But Darwin was late to the party. His grandfather, and others, believed new species evolved. Farmers and fanciers continually created new plant and animal varieties by selecting who survived to breed, thus handing Charles Darwin an idea. All Darwin perceived was that selection must work in nature, too.
In 1859, Darwin’s perception and evidence became “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” Few realize he published 8 books before and 10 books after “Origin.” He wrote seminal books on orchids, insects, barnacles and corals. He figured out how atolls form, and why they’re tropical.
Credit Darwin’s towering genius. No mind ran so freely, so widely or so freshly over the hills and vales of existence. But there’s a limit to how much credit is reasonable. Parking evolution with Charles Darwin overlooks the limits of his time and all subsequent progress.
Science was primitive in Darwin’s day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwin’s Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term “dinosaur.” Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it.
Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved “spontaneous generation,” the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things.
Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. “Darwinism” implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And “isms” (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. “Darwinism” implies that biological scientists “believe in” Darwin’s “theory.” It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.
Using phrases like “Darwinian selection” or “Darwinian evolution” implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, “Newtonian physics” distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So “Darwinian evolution” raises a question: What’s the other evolution?
Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the “isms” imply equivalence. But the term “Darwinian” built a stage upon which “intelligent” could share the spotlight.
Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). That’s science.
That’s why Darwin must go.
Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea.
Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor. “Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?” he wrote in “Zoonomia” in 1794. He just couldn’t figure out how.
Charles Darwin was after the how. Thinking about farmers’ selective breeding, considering the high mortality of seeds and wild animals, he surmised that natural conditions acted as a filter determining which individuals survived to breed more individuals like themselves. He called this filter “natural selection.” What Darwin had to say about evolution basically begins and ends right there. Darwin took the tiniest step beyond common knowledge. Yet because he perceived — correctly — a mechanism by which life diversifies, his insight packed sweeping power.
But he wasn’t alone. Darwin had been incubating his thesis for two decades when Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to him from Southeast Asia, independently outlining the same idea. Fearing a scoop, Darwin’s colleagues arranged a public presentation crediting both men. It was an idea whose time had come, with or without Darwin.
Darwin penned the magnum opus. Yet there were weaknesses. Individual variation underpinned the idea, but what created variants? Worse, people thought traits of both parents blended in the offspring, so wouldn’t a successful trait be diluted out of existence in a few generations? Because Darwin and colleagues were ignorant of genes and the mechanics of inheritance, they couldn’t fully understand evolution.
Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered “genetics” met Darwin’s natural selection in the “modern synthesis” of the 1920s did science take a giant step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick bestowed the next leap: DNA, the structure and mechanism of variation and inheritance.
Darwin’s intellect, humility (“It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance”) and prescience astonish more as scientists clarify, in detail he never imagined, how much he got right.
But our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwin’s genius and the fact that evolution is life’s driving force, with or without Darwin.
Carl Safina is a MacArthur fellow, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University and the president of the Blue Ocean Institute. His books include “Song for the Blue Ocean,” “Eye of the Albatross” and “Voyage of the Turtle.”
15) February 10, 2009
Genes Offer New Clues in Old Debate on Species’ Origins
By CAROL KAESUK YOON
New York Times
Charles Darwin called it the “mystery of mysteries,” a problem so significant and one he was so sure he had solved that he named his world-changing work after it: “On the Origin of Species.” So he might be surprised to learn that 150 years after the publication of his book, the study of how species originate, a process known as speciation, is not only one of the field’s most active areas of study, but also one of its most contentious.
While researchers agree that many of the recent breakthroughs would have come as a huge surprise to the grand old man, they seem to disagree about almost everything else, from what a species is to what exactly is meant by the origin of species and even whether Darwin shed any light on the process at all.
“Speciation is definitely one of the big-picture grand themes of evolutionary biology,” said Mary Jane West-Eberhard, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. She described study of the process as “an apparent turmoil that might be misunderstood by an outsider as a caldron of doubts and uncertainties but that in fact is a vitally alive science.”
Part of the difficulty with studying the origin of species comes from the vastness of the question — how did the diversity of all life on Earth arise, from orchids to elephants to bacteria to ourselves? It is difficult, too, to try to reconstruct events — the birth of species — long past.
“A decade ago, the joke was that spell-checkers regularly attempted to substitute the word ‘speciation’ with ‘speculation,’” Mohamed Noor, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University, wrote in a commentary in the journal Nature. But he added, “Speculation in this area will soon be a thing of the past.”
To support such optimism, researchers point to the recent discovery of so-called speciation genes. Most biologists define a species as a group that is reproductively isolated — it cannot interbreed or exchange genes with any other. The newly discovered genes cause reproductive isolation between two groups by causing their offspring, or hybrids, to be infertile or die. Scientists say the identities of the long-sought genes, several of which have recently been pinpointed in fruit flies, mice, fish and yeast, came as a surprise.
On Friday, Daven Presgraves, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Rochester, and colleagues published a paper in the journal Science identifying the latest such gene to be discovered. It is the second one that the team has found in fruit flies. The newly discovered gene, Nup 160, like its predecessor, Nup 96, causes reproductive isolation between the species Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila simulans.
Unexpectedly, the genes both produce proteins that are part of a large piece of cellular machinery known as the nuclear pore complex, a gateway that controls what molecules move into and out of the nucleus. It is still unclear why, in what Dr. Presgraves describes as a blind search for genes that cause problems in hybrids, his team twice pulled out genes involved in the nuclear pore complex or why the complex might be particularly important in the evolution of reproductive isolation.
“The question is,” said Douglas Futuyma, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, “what the hell does this have to do with hybrid sterility?”
One reason some scientists object to the use of the term “speciation genes” is that although the genes cause reproductive isolation, it is not clear whether the genes in question caused the initial reproductive isolation responsible for the origin of the species.
To get closer to the crucial early stages of reproductive isolation, Kirsten Bomblies, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, and colleagues study hybrids that are the offspring of crosses between strains of plants within a single species. Surprisingly, even among different strains of the weed Arabidopsis thaliana, Dr. Bomblies said, “some crosses fail catastrophically.” The hybrids are “tiny, their leaves are twisted and warped, they have massive die-off of cells, and the worst cases are unable to flower.”
As with the Drosophila genes, the function of the hybrid-disrupting genes found in Arabidopsis has come as a surprise. They appear to be genes for disease resistance, suggesting that the rapid evolution of disease resistance in different strains may be the beginning of the evolution of reproductive isolation between them. The study may have significance far beyond Arabidopsis; Dr. Bomblies, who last year won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her research, notes that breeders have noticed the withering of different strains’ offspring in a variety of species, including wheat, tobacco, cotton and the houseplant Streptocarpus.
Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved with the study, said the work was important because it suggested that an entire class of genes, those involved with fending off disease, and a particular kind of natural selection — that imposed by disease organisms — could be broadly important in speciation in plants. (Read comments by Dr. Rieseberg's on "On the Origin of Species.")
The surprises now being found in the DNA of diverging species are, of course, things Darwin could never have guessed at. Having written “Origin of Species” decades before Gregor Mendel’s genetic work was rediscovered, he certainly did not anticipate such findings in his vision of the diversification of life.
“Genetics was one area where he really fell down,” said Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the author of “Why Evolution Is True” (Penguin, 2009).
Yet the strongest pattern emerging from the study of these speciation genes is one Darwin might well have expected. The single widespread commonality is that nearly all appear to have diverged to produce reproductive isolation as a result of adaptation under powerful natural selection.
More than anything else, Darwin focused on adaptation via natural selection in the shaping of the diversity of life. The finding comes as something of a surprise to modern biologists, however, because in the absence of evidence, it was plausible that random divergence over time might also have been an important force leading groups to becoming distinct species.
“Probably the most important finding,” Dr. Rieseberg said, “is that selection is driving the process.”
The harking back to Darwin’s emphasis on selection goes well beyond studies of DNA. A particularly powerful type of selection that Darwin emphasized was sexual selection, as when females choose showy mates and male suitors violently combat one another, which can lead to the evolution of things like peacock tails or massive deer antlers.
Now new studies are providing increasing evidence that sexual selection is capable not only of producing outrageous structures but also new species, an idea of Darwin’s that Dr. West-Eberhard describes as “almost completely forgotten for nearly a century.”
A small Amazonian frog known as Physalaemus petersi provides a particularly strong example of how females’ choosiness in mates may be driving the formation of a new species. Males of the mottled brown species reach just over an inch in length and can be found singing in choruses to attract females. In some populations, the males’ song is what is called a “whine” — a kind of frog meow. But in other populations, males whine and add a squawk. Michael J. Ryan, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas, Austin, and colleagues have found that the difference evolved because females in one population preferred pure whine, whereas in another they preferred whine and squawk.
What is particularly interesting about petersi, though, is that the female frogs’ preference for different songs in different populations also appears to be causing the populations to begin to evolve into distinct species. When given a choice of songs from either population, females nearly uniformly prefer their own population’s song, as strictly as if the two populations belonged to two long separated species. The researchers have even gathered evidence that the populations that prefer different songs, while very closely related, appear to be beginning to diverge from one another genetically, suggesting they are moving down the path toward becoming separate species.
So if Darwin pointed out the importance of selection, and even the power of sexual selection, why the often heard claim that the “Origin” has little to say about how species originate?
The problem lies in how biologists define a species. Today, the most common definition of a species is a group that is reproductively isolated from other groups, the biological species concept set out by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr in 1942. As a result, the origin of species is, necessarily, considered the origin of reproduction isolation. Yet both concepts would have been rather foreign to Darwin.
Darwin, who once wrote that species were “indefinable,” might have described a species as a segment of a branch on the ever-expanding tree of life, the same tree he drew as the only figure in the “Origin.” Or he might have said it was something more distinct than a variety and less than a genus.
And there are some biologists today who say that Darwin in all his vagueness, not modern biologists, had the definition right. David Wake, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied Ensatina salamanders for decades. He says their patterns of interbreeding and adaptation simply do not yield to their being divided into species as dictated by the biological species concept.
His salamanders, he said, like so many other real living things, are “much messier” than a definition like the biological species concept allows. Consider asexual species. If a species is an entity that does not exchange genes with others, then every asexual organism, every individual bacterium, for example, could be considered a separate species, hardly a useful distinction. And the complications go on and on.
So perhaps Darwin hit the mark, at least the mark he intended, when he chose his famed title.
“I think he’s not referring to how do you get two species of finch out of one,” Dr. Futuyma said of “Origin of Species.” “I think what he means is something much more embracing, something we would today call the origin of biological diversity. You could be talking about two species of finches or a human versus a giraffe or an oak tree for that matter. The world is full of species, and his book clearly embraces the whole thing.”
Darwin’s own last words in the book suggest just such a broad scope: “There is grandeur in this view of life,” he wrote, that “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
16) February 10, 2009
Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life
By CARL ZIMMER
New York Times
Michael Sanderson is worried. Dr. Sanderson, a biologist at the University of Arizona, is part of an effort to figure out how all the estimated 500,000 species of plants are related to one another. For years now the researchers have sequenced DNA from thousands of species from jungles, tundras and museum drawers. They have used supercomputers to crunch the genetic data and have gleaned clues to how today’s diversity of baobabs, dandelions, mosses and other plants evolved over the past 450 million years. The pace of their progress gives Dr. Sanderson hope that they will draw the entire evolutionary tree of plants within the next few years. “It’s within striking distance,” Dr. Sanderson said.
There’s just one problem. “We have no way to visualize such a tree at the moment,” he said. If they tried, they would end up with a blurry, inscrutable thicket. “It would be ironic,” Dr. Sanderson said. “We’d be saying, ‘We’ve built it, but we can’t show it to you.’ ”
Ever since Charles Darwin first sketched a spindly sapling in 1837, biologists have relied on evolutionary trees to understand the history of life. Today biologists draw evolutionary trees to help them track the emergence of new diseases, identify species at risk of extinction, and trace the history of disease-related genes in the human genome. Within the next few decades, biologists may figure out how the millions of species on Earth are related to one another. But for people to actually see that tree of life, the tree itself will have to evolve.
Biologists have responded to the problem by enlisting the help of computer scientists and software designers from companies like Google and Adobe to find a new way of looking at evolution. Their goal is to create a program that allows scientists and nonscientists alike to fly through evolutionary trees.
“Just like Google Earth changed the way people look at geography, a sophisticated tree of life browser could really change the way we look at the life around us,” said Mark W. Westneat, the director of the Biodiversity Synthesis Center at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Darwin drew the first evolutionary tree when he was 28. He had recently returned to England from his five-year voyage around the world aboard the Beagle, and his theory of evolution was still in an embryonic state. It occurred to him that evolution could explain the similarities and differences between species. The descendants of an ancestral species might have evolved into different forms, splitting into separate lineages “like the branching of a great tree from a single stem,” as he would later write in “On the Origin of Species.”
Darwin’s first tree is now a familiar sight in books, museum exhibits and, of course, on Wikipedia. But David Kohn, the director of the Darwin Digital Library at the American Museum of Natural History, has recently discovered 10 other trees that Darwin drew in later years. “It’s a long-term preoccupation,” Dr. Kohn said. “It feels like he’s using it to think.” While pondering how humans evolved, Darwin drew a cluster of branches to represent our common ancestry with apes and monkeys.
But during Darwin’s life, he published only a single tree. In the “Origin of Species” he included a set of branching lines, marked only by letters. “It was all at a very theoretical level,” said David Hillis, a biologist at the University of Texas. (Read Dr. Hillis's comments on Darwin's "On the Origin of Species.")
Darwin left it to other biologists to figure out what real evolutionary trees looked like. In 1879, for example, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel published a tree, complete with bark and leaves, showing humans and animals evolving from single-celled creatures.
The science of tree-building took a significant step forward in the late 1900s. Biologists set up standard rules for comparing species and figuring out who was most closely related to whom. Once they were all speaking the same scientific language, they could test each other’s hypotheses with new evidence. They also began to get new kinds evidence for their trees. It became possible to compare not just the skeleton or color patterns of species, but also their proteins and genes.
At first biologists could draw only small trees, typically with a dozen branches at most. They were held back by the fact that a group of species may possibly be related in many different ways. If a biologist adds more species to a group, the possibilities explode. “For 25 species, there are more possible trees than there are stars in the known universe,” Dr. Westneat said. “For 80 species, there are more trees than there are atoms in the known universe.”
Simply comparing every single tree would be impossible. Fortunately, mathematicians developed statistical methods for searching quickly through potential trees to find the ones that do the best job of explaining all the evidence. Computers could do millions of calculations for biologists and store a growing database of information on Web sites. Trees grew hundreds of new branches, then thousands. “We’re overwhelmed with information,” Dr. Hillis said.
Today trees with thousands of branches, sometimes called “supertrees” or “megatrees,” are starting to appear in scientific literature. Their branches reveal patterns in evolution that were missed in smaller studies.
In 2007, for example, Olaf Bininda-Edmonds, a biologist at Carl von Ossietzky University in Germany, and his colleagues published a tree of 4,500 mammals — in other words, just about every known mammal species. The tree allowed researchers to estimate the rate at which mammals have evolved into new lineages. For decades, many researchers have argued that most major groups of living mammals evolved after the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. Based on their mammal supertree, Dr. Bininda-Emonds and his colleagues argued that mammals were diversifying millions of years earlier.
Less than two years later, the mammal supertree is looking puny. In a paper to be published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, Stephen Smith of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina and his colleagues have created a tree containing 13,533 species of plants. Their study shows that ferns — sometimes considered as living fossils that have changed little for hundreds of millions of years — have actually been evolving faster than younger groups of plants, like conifers and flowering plants.
Plants are not just related to one another. They’re also related to us animals, fungi, bacteria and all other living things on Earth. Over the past seven years, the National Science Foundation has been financing a project known as Assembling the Tree of Life, the goal of which is “to reconstruct the evolutionary origins of all living things,” according to its Web site. Research teams are analyzing slices of the tree, while mathematicians and computer scientists work on methods to combine them into a single analysis. “You can just imagine how Darwin would have enjoyed it,” Dr. Kohn said.
Darwin would probably not enjoy trying to draw such a tree, though. “Even when the mammal supertree is printed out at two meters by two meters, the species names remain virtually unreadable,” Dr. Bininda-Emonds said. “It’s a Google Earth kind of problem. You can’t simultaneously see where Central Park is in New York, and where New York is in the United States.”
It has become clear to biologists that they are going to have to find new ways to draw evolutionary trees. “Our advances in understanding evolution are moving really fast now, but the tools for looking at these big trees are lagging behind,” Dr. Westneat said.
The future of evolutionary trees may be on display on a wall in Dr. Sanderson’s laboratory in Tucson. He and his colleagues have mounted a bank of flat-screen monitors that can show off a program they have designed called Paloverde. Dr. Sanderson can transform an evolutionary tree into a three-dimensional structure, and then use his mouse to navigate through it, zooming in on particular branches he wants to inspect.
It’s a mesmerizing sight, but Dr. Sanderson is quick to point out its limits. “My program can handle 1,000 species fairly effectively. When you get to 5,000 species, it gets very slow and not very beautiful,” he said.
To bring evolutionary trees up to date, biologists are working with computer scientists and other visualization experts. Dr. Westneat has been organizing meetings over the past year to bring the two cultures together. “It has the potential to move us beyond what biologists with a little bit of programming can do,” Dr. Westneat said.
Even with the help of visualization experts, biologists won’t be able to fly through the tree of life any time soon. “It’s definitely not small potatoes — it’s cutting-edge research,” said Tamara Munzner, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Munzner is working on methods to allow biologists to see details of the tree of life without losing sight of its overall shape. One of her programs acts like a fisheye lens, blowing up clusters of branches. She has also figured out how to make trees rubbery, so that a biologist can stretch some parts of it open and squeeze others down. Although a few thousand branches may slow down Paloverde, Dr. Munzner’s programs can handle millions of branches.
For Dr. Hillis, drawing the tree of life is not something to do simply because it’s there. He thinks it will become a practical tool, in the same way online databases of DNA have become practical tools for geneticists.
“What I’d really like is the entire tree of life on a small hand-held device,” Dr. Hillis said. Biologists would be able to put a tissue sample from a plant, animal or other organism in the machine, which would then scan its DNA and find its place in the tree of life, even if it’s a new species. The data could then be uploaded to a database, so that every biologist’s machine would get an updated tree. “It would be a ‘tricorder’-like device, able to identify any species on Earth in the field,” he said.
If biologists do ever succeed in drawing the tree of life, it will look profoundly different from Darwin’s sketch. Lineages do branch as they evolve, but sometimes the branches join back together. It has long been known that separate plant species sometimes produce hybrids that can no longer interbreed with their parent species. In other words, they become new species. When biologists draw the relationships of some groups of plant species, their pictures look more like webs than trees.
In other cases, genes don’t have to wait for two species to come together — they simply leap from one branch of life to another.
Viruses sometimes infect a new host species, and in the process they transfer genes from its previous host. Many species of bacteria can slurp up naked DNA or pass it to one another on tiny genetic ringlets.
“Each gene has its own evolution. It’s not inherited from mother to daughter; it’s inherited from a neighbor,” said Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.
Biologists are just starting to understand how this different kind of heredity alters the tree of life. Although genes may move from one species to another fairly often, it may be rare that they become a permanent part of a new genome. Tal Dagan, a biologist at the University of Düsseldorf, has estimated their impact by analyzing hundreds of thousands of genes from microbes. She estimates that 80 percent of the genes in any microbe have been passed from one species to another at some point.
Dr. Dagan and her colleagues have not simply published their results as a table of numbers, though. “We had to have a new picture of evolution,” she said.
For Dr. Dagan, evolution is still shaped like a tree. “Most of the evolution is still going on in the branches,” she said. But over billions of years, thousands of genes have shuttled among the branches. To drive this point home, Dr. Dagan and her colleagues have drawn a dense filigree of lines between the branches of the tree of life. “You see the tree and you see the thousands of edges, and you know this is how it is,” she said.
Could these sorts of evolutionary vines be added to a complete tree of life without letting visitors get lost in the complexity? “It does make things more complicated,” Dr. Munzner said. “But it doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. My answer is, ‘Bring it on.’ ”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 19, 2009 An article on Feb. 10 about efforts to create complete evolutionary trees misspelled the name of a computer program that can navigate through a three-dimensional evolutionary tree. It is Paloverde, not Paleoverde. The article also misspelled a type of tree that researchers have studied. It is the baobab, not baobob.
Easy Nash
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
Saturday, February 28, 2009
449)"I'm Home Honey, What's for Dinner?" The Evolutionary Role of Cookery: Cooking and Other Forms of Preparing Food are Humanity's "Killer App".
"Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval."
"Start cooking, however, and things change radically. Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It “denatures” protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it."
The American Association for the Advancement of Science
What's cooking?
Feb 19th 2009 CHICAGO
From The Economist print edition
Mary Evans
The evolutionary role of cookery
YOU are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.
Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.
In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals.
Humans became human, as it were, with the emergence 1.8m years ago of a species called Homo erectus. This had a skeleton much like modern man’s—a big, brain-filled skull and a narrow pelvis and rib cage, which imply a small abdomen and thus a small gut. Hitherto, the explanation for this shift from the smaller skulls and wider pelvises of man’s apelike ancestors has been a shift from a vegetable-based diet to a meat-based one. Meat has more calories than plant matter, the theory went. A smaller gut could therefore support a larger brain.
Dr Wrangham disagrees. When you do the sums, he argues, raw meat is still insufficient to bridge the gap. He points out that even modern “raw foodists”, members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved.
Firelight
Start cooking, however, and things change radically. Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It “denatures” protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.
In support of his thesis, Dr Wrangham, who is an anthropologist, has ransacked other fields and come up with an impressive array of material. Cooking increases the share of food digested in the stomach and small intestine, where it can be absorbed, from 50% to 95% according to work done on people fitted for medical reasons with collection bags at the ends of their small intestines.
Previous studies had suggested raw food was digested equally well as cooked food because they looked at faeces as being the end product. These, however, have been exposed to the digestive mercies of bacteria in the large intestine, and any residual goodies have been removed from them that way.
Another telling experiment, conducted on rats, did not rely on cooking. Rather the experimenters ground up food pellets and then recompacted them to make them softer. Rats fed on the softer pellets weighed 30% more after 26 weeks than those fed the same weight of standard pellets. The difference was because of the lower cost of digestion. Indeed, Dr Wrangham suspects the main cause of the modern epidemic of obesity is not overeating (which the evidence suggests—in America, at least—is a myth) but the rise of processed foods. These are softer, because that is what people prefer. Indeed, the nerves from the taste buds meet in a part of the brain called the amygdala with nerves that convey information on the softness of food. It is only after these two qualities have been compared that the brain assesses how pleasant a mouthful actually is.
The archaeological evidence for ancient cookery is equivocal. Digs show that both modern humans and Neanderthals controlled fire in a way that almost certainly means they could cook, and did so at least 200,000 years ago. Since the last common ancestor of the two species lived more than 400,000 years ago (see following story) fire-control is probably at least as old as that, for they lived in different parts of the world, and so could not have copied each other.
Older alleged sites of human fires are more susceptible to other interpretations, but they do exist, including ones that go back to the beginning of Homo erectus. And traces of fire are easily wiped out, so the lack of direct evidence for them is no surprise. Instead, Dr Wrangham is relying on a compelling chain of logic. And in doing so he may have cast light not only on what made humanity, but on one of the threats it faces today.
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13139619
Easy Nash
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
"Start cooking, however, and things change radically. Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It “denatures” protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it."
The American Association for the Advancement of Science
What's cooking?
Feb 19th 2009 CHICAGO
From The Economist print edition
Mary Evans
The evolutionary role of cookery
YOU are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.
Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.
In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals.
Humans became human, as it were, with the emergence 1.8m years ago of a species called Homo erectus. This had a skeleton much like modern man’s—a big, brain-filled skull and a narrow pelvis and rib cage, which imply a small abdomen and thus a small gut. Hitherto, the explanation for this shift from the smaller skulls and wider pelvises of man’s apelike ancestors has been a shift from a vegetable-based diet to a meat-based one. Meat has more calories than plant matter, the theory went. A smaller gut could therefore support a larger brain.
Dr Wrangham disagrees. When you do the sums, he argues, raw meat is still insufficient to bridge the gap. He points out that even modern “raw foodists”, members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved.
Firelight
Start cooking, however, and things change radically. Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It “denatures” protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.
In support of his thesis, Dr Wrangham, who is an anthropologist, has ransacked other fields and come up with an impressive array of material. Cooking increases the share of food digested in the stomach and small intestine, where it can be absorbed, from 50% to 95% according to work done on people fitted for medical reasons with collection bags at the ends of their small intestines.
Previous studies had suggested raw food was digested equally well as cooked food because they looked at faeces as being the end product. These, however, have been exposed to the digestive mercies of bacteria in the large intestine, and any residual goodies have been removed from them that way.
Another telling experiment, conducted on rats, did not rely on cooking. Rather the experimenters ground up food pellets and then recompacted them to make them softer. Rats fed on the softer pellets weighed 30% more after 26 weeks than those fed the same weight of standard pellets. The difference was because of the lower cost of digestion. Indeed, Dr Wrangham suspects the main cause of the modern epidemic of obesity is not overeating (which the evidence suggests—in America, at least—is a myth) but the rise of processed foods. These are softer, because that is what people prefer. Indeed, the nerves from the taste buds meet in a part of the brain called the amygdala with nerves that convey information on the softness of food. It is only after these two qualities have been compared that the brain assesses how pleasant a mouthful actually is.
The archaeological evidence for ancient cookery is equivocal. Digs show that both modern humans and Neanderthals controlled fire in a way that almost certainly means they could cook, and did so at least 200,000 years ago. Since the last common ancestor of the two species lived more than 400,000 years ago (see following story) fire-control is probably at least as old as that, for they lived in different parts of the world, and so could not have copied each other.
Older alleged sites of human fires are more susceptible to other interpretations, but they do exist, including ones that go back to the beginning of Homo erectus. And traces of fire are easily wiped out, so the lack of direct evidence for them is no surprise. Instead, Dr Wrangham is relying on a compelling chain of logic. And in doing so he may have cast light not only on what made humanity, but on one of the threats it faces today.
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13139619
Easy Nash
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
Monday, February 23, 2009
448)The Microscopic Universe within a Cell; Genes and their Sidekicks: Uncovering a Marvel of God's Creation; Quotes of Aga Khan IV and others.
"And the more we discover, the more we know, the more we penetrate just below the surface of our normal lives - the more our imagination staggers.........What we feel, even as we learn, is an ever-renewed sense of wonder, indeed, a powerful sense of awe – and of Divine inspiration.....the Power and the Mystery of Allah as the Lord of Creation"(Aga Khan IV, Ottawa, Canada, December 6th 2008)
"The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)
"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah’s Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)
"This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives. Of that I am certain"(Aga Khan IV, Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, August 17th 2007)
"In this context, would it not also be relevant to consider how, above all, it has been the Qur'anic notion of the universe as an expression of Allah's will and creation that has inspired, in diverse Muslim communities, generations of artists, scientists and philosophers? Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah'.The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"(Aga Khan IV,Speech, Institute of Ismaili Studies, October 2003, London, U.K.)
"The spiritual and material realms are not dichotomous, since in the Ismaili formulation, matter and spirit are united under a higher genus and each realm possesses its own hierarchy. Though they require linguistic and rational categories for definition, they represent elements of a whole, and a true understanding of God must also take account of His creation. Such a synthesis is crucial to how the human intellect eventually relates to creation and how it ultimately becomes the instrument for penetrating through history the mystery of the unknowable God implied in the formulation of tawhid."(Azim Nanji, Director, Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, U.K., 1998)
"Discovery of knowledge was seen by those founders(Fatimids) as an embodiment of religious faith, and faith as reinforced by knowledge of workings of the Creator's physical world"(Aga Khan IV, 27th May1994, Cambridge, Massachusets, U.S.A.)
"The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11th 1985)
"Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
"Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)
The above are 10 quotes and excerpts from Blogpost Four Hundred, a collection of about 100 quotes on the subjects of Knowledge, Intellect, Creation, Science and Religion:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
From One Genome, Many Types of Cells. But How?
By NICHOLAS WADE
New York Times
Feb 24 2008
Secrets of the Cell
A Cell's Many Faces
This is the first in a series of occasional articles on a frontier of biology - the workings of the cell.
One of the enduring mysteries of biology is that a variety of specialized cells collaborate in building a body, yet all have an identical genome. Somehow each of the 200 different kinds of cells in the human body — in the brain, liver, bone, heart and many other structures — must be reading off a different set of the hereditary instructions written into the DNA.
The system is something like a play in which all the actors have the same script but are assigned different parts and blocked from even seeing anyone else’s lines. The fertilized egg possesses the first copy of the script; as it divides repeatedly into the 10 trillion cells of the human body, the cells assign themselves to the different roles they will play throughout an individual’s lifetime.
How does this assignment process work? The answer, researchers are finding, is that a second layer of information is embedded in the special proteins that package the DNA of the genome. This second layer, known as the epigenome, controls access to the genes, allowing each cell type to activate its own special genes but blocking off most of the rest. A person has one genome but many epigenomes. And the epigenome is involved not just in defining what genes are accessible in each type of cell, but also in controlling when the accessible genes may be activated.
In the wake of the decoding of the human genome in 2003, understanding the epigenome has become a major frontier of research.
Since the settings on the epigenome control which genes are on or off, any derangement of its behavior is likely to have severe effects on the cell.
There is much evidence that changes in the epigenome contribute to cancer and other diseases. The epigenome alters with age — identical twins often look and behave a little differently as they grow older because of accumulated changes to their epigenomes. Understanding such changes could help address or retard some of the symptoms of aging. And the epigenome may hold the key to the dream of regenerative medicine, that of deriving safe and efficient replacement tissues from a patient’s own cells.
Because the epigenome is the gateway to understanding so many other aspects of the cell’s regulation, some researchers have criticized the “piecemeal basis” on which it is being explored and called for a large epigenome project similar to the $3 billion program in which the human genome was decoded. At present the National Institutes of Health has a small, $190 million initiative, called the Epigenome Roadmap, with the money going to individual researchers.
As is often the case, academic researchers oppose a large, centralized project if the money seems likely to come out of their grants. But it is also true that such projects often fail unless carefully timed and thought out.
“Definitely this is a genome-sized thing, and I believe it will have benefits beyond what are foreseen at present,” says Richard A. Young, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge. But Steven Henikoff of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle says the present methods for studying the epigenome are not yet ready to be scaled up. “It’s too early to mount a technology development that would be large scale,” he says.
The epigenome consists of many million chemical modifications, or marks as they are called, that are made along the length of the chromatin, the material of the chromosomes. The chromatin includes the double-stranded ribbon of DNA and the protein spools around which it is wound. Some of the marks that constitute the epigenome are made directly on the DNA, but most are attached to the short tails that stick out from the protein spools. Marks of a certain kind generally extend through a large region or domain of the DNA that covers one or more genes. They are recognized by chromatin regulator proteins that perform the tasks indicated by each kind of mark.
In some marked domains, the regulators cause the DNA to be wound up so tightly that the genes are permanently inaccessible. The center and tips of the chromosomes are sites of such repressive domains. So is one of the two X chromosomes in every woman’s cells, a step that ensures both male and female cells have the same level of activity of the X-based genes.
In other domains, the marks are more permissive, allowing the gene regulators called transcription factors to find their target sites on the DNA. The transcription factors then recruit other members of the complex transcription machinery that begins the process of copying the genes and making the proteins the cell needs. A third kind of domain must be established ahead of the transcription machinery to let it roll along the DNA and transcribe the message in the underlying gene.
Only a handful of domains are known so far, so it is something of a puzzle that more than 100 kinds of marks have been found in the epigenome, along with specialist protein machines that attach or remove each mark. Some biologists think so many marks are needed to specify a few kinds of domain because the system is full of backups.
The epigenome’s role in marking up the genome seems to have been built on top of a more ancient packaging role. The packaging would have been needed by one-celled organisms like yeast that keep their genome in a special compartment, the nucleus. For multi-celled organisms to evolve, the chromatin’s packaging system presumably adapted during the course of evolution to index the genome for the needs of different types of cell.
The DNA packaging system alone is an extraordinary technical feat. If the nucleus of a human cell were a hollow sphere the size of a tennis ball, the DNA of the genome would be a thin thread some 24 miles long. The thread must be packed into the sphere with no breakages, and in such a way that any region of it can be found immediately.
The heart of the packaging system is a set of special purpose proteins known as histones. Eight histones lock together to form a miniature spool known as a nucleosome. The DNA twists almost twice round each nucleosome, with short spaces in between. Some 30 million nucleosomes are required to package all the DNA of ordinary cells.
For years, biologists assumed that the histones in their nucleosome spools provided a passive framework for the DNA. But, over the last decade, it has become increasingly clear that this is not the case. The histone tails that jut out from the nucleosomes provide a way of marking up the genetic script. Although one kind of mark is attached directly to the bases in the DNA, more than a hundred others are fixed onto specific sites on the histones’ tails. When the DNA has to replicate, for cell division, the direct marks pass only to the two parent strands and all the nucleosomes are disassembled, yet the cell has ingenious methods for reconstituting the same marks on the two daughter genomes. The marks are called epigenetic, and the whole system the epigenome, because they are inherited across cell division despite not being encoded in the DNA.
How is the structure of the epigenome determined? The basic blueprint for the epigenomes needed by each cell type seems to be inherent in the genome, but the epigenome is then altered by other signals that reach the cell. The epigenome is thus the site where the genome meets the environment.
The organization of the epigenomes seems to be computed from information inherent in the genome. “Most of the epigenetic landscape is determined by the DNA sequence,” says Bradley Bernstein, a chromatin expert at Massachusetts General Hospital. The human genome contains many regulatory genes whose protein products, known as transcription factors, control the activity of other genes. It also has a subset of master regulatory genes that control the lower-level regulators. The master transcription factors act on each other’s genes in a way that sets up a circuitry. The output of this circuitry shapes the initial cascade of epigenomes that are spun off from the fertilized egg.
The other shapers of the epigenome are the chromatin regulators, protein machines that read the marks on the histone tails. Some extend marks of a given kind throughout a domain. Some bundle the nucleosomes together so as to silence their genes. Others loosen the DNA from the nucleosome spools so as to ease the path of the transcription machinery along a gene.
Biologists had long assumed that once the chromatin regulators had shaped an epigenome, their work could not be undone because a cell’s fate is essentially irreversible. But a remarkable experiment by the Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka in June 2007 underlined the surprising power of the master transcription factors.
By inserting just four of the master regulator genes into skin cells, he showed the transcription factors made by the genes could reprogram the skin cell’s epigenome back into that of the embryonic cell from which it had been derived. The skin cell then behaved just like an embryonic cell, not a skin cell. Until then, biologists had no idea that the epigenome with its millions of marks could be recast so simply or that transcription factors could apparently call the shots so decisively.
But subsequent research has shown the chromatin regulators are not pushovers. Only one in a million of the skin cells treated with the four transcription factors reverts fully to the embryonic state. Most get stuck in transitional states, as if the chromatin regulators are resisting a possibly cancerous change in the cell’s status. “The take-home story is that yes, the transcription factors are really critical players in determining cellular state, but epigenetics is important, too,” Dr. Bernstein said.
The ideal of regenerative medicine is to convert a patient’s normal body cells first back into the embryonic state, and then into the specific cells lost to disease. But to prepare such cells safely and effectively, researchers will probably need to learn how to control and manipulate the chromatin of the epigenome as well as the transcription factors that shape cell identity.
The treatment of many diseases may also lie in drugs that manipulate the epigenome. Rett syndrome, a form of autism that affects girls, is caused by a mutation in the gene for an enzyme that recognizes the chromatin marks placed directly on the DNA. At least in mice, the neurons resume normal function when the mutation is corrected. In several forms of cancer, tumor-suppressor genes turn out to have been inactivated not by mutation, the usual known cause, but by the incorrect placement of marks that invite chromatin regulators to silence the genes.
Drugs developed by Peter A. Jones of the University of Southern California reverse the chromatin silencing of these antitumor genes. Two have recently been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for a blood malignancy, myelodysplastic syndrome.
Besides governing access to the genome, the epigenome also receives a host of signals from the environment. A family of enzymes called sirtuins monitors the nutritional state of the cell, and one of them removes a specific mark from the chromatin, providing a possible route for the genome to respond to famine conditions. Accumulating errors in the epigenome’s regulation could allow the wrong genes to be expressed, a possible cause of aging.
A principal new technique for studying the marks on an epigenome is to break the chromosomes into fragments, which are then treated with antibodies that bind to a specific mark. The DNA fragments so designated are decoded and matched to sites on the human genome sequence. This provides a genome-wide map of how a particular mark is distributed in a particular epigenomic state. The CHiP-seq maps, as they are called, have been very useful but are far from capturing the full detail of the epigenome, a dynamic structure that can change in minutes.
Individual researchers have made considerable progress but may not be able to assemble the comprehensive set of epigenomic marks and states that would be most useful to those developing new approaches to disease and aging. “I think the effort needs to be organized,” Dr. Young said. “It would benefit from being larger than it is.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/science/24chromatin.html?pagewanted=1&ref=science
Easy Nash
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
"The Qur’an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God’s creation"(Closing Address by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)
"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah’s Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)
"This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives. Of that I am certain"(Aga Khan IV, Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, August 17th 2007)
"In this context, would it not also be relevant to consider how, above all, it has been the Qur'anic notion of the universe as an expression of Allah's will and creation that has inspired, in diverse Muslim communities, generations of artists, scientists and philosophers? Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah'.The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"(Aga Khan IV,Speech, Institute of Ismaili Studies, October 2003, London, U.K.)
"The spiritual and material realms are not dichotomous, since in the Ismaili formulation, matter and spirit are united under a higher genus and each realm possesses its own hierarchy. Though they require linguistic and rational categories for definition, they represent elements of a whole, and a true understanding of God must also take account of His creation. Such a synthesis is crucial to how the human intellect eventually relates to creation and how it ultimately becomes the instrument for penetrating through history the mystery of the unknowable God implied in the formulation of tawhid."(Azim Nanji, Director, Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, U.K., 1998)
"Discovery of knowledge was seen by those founders(Fatimids) as an embodiment of religious faith, and faith as reinforced by knowledge of workings of the Creator's physical world"(Aga Khan IV, 27th May1994, Cambridge, Massachusets, U.S.A.)
"The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11th 1985)
"Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
"Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)
The above are 10 quotes and excerpts from Blogpost Four Hundred, a collection of about 100 quotes on the subjects of Knowledge, Intellect, Creation, Science and Religion:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
From One Genome, Many Types of Cells. But How?
By NICHOLAS WADE
New York Times
Feb 24 2008
Secrets of the Cell
A Cell's Many Faces
This is the first in a series of occasional articles on a frontier of biology - the workings of the cell.
One of the enduring mysteries of biology is that a variety of specialized cells collaborate in building a body, yet all have an identical genome. Somehow each of the 200 different kinds of cells in the human body — in the brain, liver, bone, heart and many other structures — must be reading off a different set of the hereditary instructions written into the DNA.
The system is something like a play in which all the actors have the same script but are assigned different parts and blocked from even seeing anyone else’s lines. The fertilized egg possesses the first copy of the script; as it divides repeatedly into the 10 trillion cells of the human body, the cells assign themselves to the different roles they will play throughout an individual’s lifetime.
How does this assignment process work? The answer, researchers are finding, is that a second layer of information is embedded in the special proteins that package the DNA of the genome. This second layer, known as the epigenome, controls access to the genes, allowing each cell type to activate its own special genes but blocking off most of the rest. A person has one genome but many epigenomes. And the epigenome is involved not just in defining what genes are accessible in each type of cell, but also in controlling when the accessible genes may be activated.
In the wake of the decoding of the human genome in 2003, understanding the epigenome has become a major frontier of research.
Since the settings on the epigenome control which genes are on or off, any derangement of its behavior is likely to have severe effects on the cell.
There is much evidence that changes in the epigenome contribute to cancer and other diseases. The epigenome alters with age — identical twins often look and behave a little differently as they grow older because of accumulated changes to their epigenomes. Understanding such changes could help address or retard some of the symptoms of aging. And the epigenome may hold the key to the dream of regenerative medicine, that of deriving safe and efficient replacement tissues from a patient’s own cells.
Because the epigenome is the gateway to understanding so many other aspects of the cell’s regulation, some researchers have criticized the “piecemeal basis” on which it is being explored and called for a large epigenome project similar to the $3 billion program in which the human genome was decoded. At present the National Institutes of Health has a small, $190 million initiative, called the Epigenome Roadmap, with the money going to individual researchers.
As is often the case, academic researchers oppose a large, centralized project if the money seems likely to come out of their grants. But it is also true that such projects often fail unless carefully timed and thought out.
“Definitely this is a genome-sized thing, and I believe it will have benefits beyond what are foreseen at present,” says Richard A. Young, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge. But Steven Henikoff of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle says the present methods for studying the epigenome are not yet ready to be scaled up. “It’s too early to mount a technology development that would be large scale,” he says.
The epigenome consists of many million chemical modifications, or marks as they are called, that are made along the length of the chromatin, the material of the chromosomes. The chromatin includes the double-stranded ribbon of DNA and the protein spools around which it is wound. Some of the marks that constitute the epigenome are made directly on the DNA, but most are attached to the short tails that stick out from the protein spools. Marks of a certain kind generally extend through a large region or domain of the DNA that covers one or more genes. They are recognized by chromatin regulator proteins that perform the tasks indicated by each kind of mark.
In some marked domains, the regulators cause the DNA to be wound up so tightly that the genes are permanently inaccessible. The center and tips of the chromosomes are sites of such repressive domains. So is one of the two X chromosomes in every woman’s cells, a step that ensures both male and female cells have the same level of activity of the X-based genes.
In other domains, the marks are more permissive, allowing the gene regulators called transcription factors to find their target sites on the DNA. The transcription factors then recruit other members of the complex transcription machinery that begins the process of copying the genes and making the proteins the cell needs. A third kind of domain must be established ahead of the transcription machinery to let it roll along the DNA and transcribe the message in the underlying gene.
Only a handful of domains are known so far, so it is something of a puzzle that more than 100 kinds of marks have been found in the epigenome, along with specialist protein machines that attach or remove each mark. Some biologists think so many marks are needed to specify a few kinds of domain because the system is full of backups.
The epigenome’s role in marking up the genome seems to have been built on top of a more ancient packaging role. The packaging would have been needed by one-celled organisms like yeast that keep their genome in a special compartment, the nucleus. For multi-celled organisms to evolve, the chromatin’s packaging system presumably adapted during the course of evolution to index the genome for the needs of different types of cell.
The DNA packaging system alone is an extraordinary technical feat. If the nucleus of a human cell were a hollow sphere the size of a tennis ball, the DNA of the genome would be a thin thread some 24 miles long. The thread must be packed into the sphere with no breakages, and in such a way that any region of it can be found immediately.
The heart of the packaging system is a set of special purpose proteins known as histones. Eight histones lock together to form a miniature spool known as a nucleosome. The DNA twists almost twice round each nucleosome, with short spaces in between. Some 30 million nucleosomes are required to package all the DNA of ordinary cells.
For years, biologists assumed that the histones in their nucleosome spools provided a passive framework for the DNA. But, over the last decade, it has become increasingly clear that this is not the case. The histone tails that jut out from the nucleosomes provide a way of marking up the genetic script. Although one kind of mark is attached directly to the bases in the DNA, more than a hundred others are fixed onto specific sites on the histones’ tails. When the DNA has to replicate, for cell division, the direct marks pass only to the two parent strands and all the nucleosomes are disassembled, yet the cell has ingenious methods for reconstituting the same marks on the two daughter genomes. The marks are called epigenetic, and the whole system the epigenome, because they are inherited across cell division despite not being encoded in the DNA.
How is the structure of the epigenome determined? The basic blueprint for the epigenomes needed by each cell type seems to be inherent in the genome, but the epigenome is then altered by other signals that reach the cell. The epigenome is thus the site where the genome meets the environment.
The organization of the epigenomes seems to be computed from information inherent in the genome. “Most of the epigenetic landscape is determined by the DNA sequence,” says Bradley Bernstein, a chromatin expert at Massachusetts General Hospital. The human genome contains many regulatory genes whose protein products, known as transcription factors, control the activity of other genes. It also has a subset of master regulatory genes that control the lower-level regulators. The master transcription factors act on each other’s genes in a way that sets up a circuitry. The output of this circuitry shapes the initial cascade of epigenomes that are spun off from the fertilized egg.
The other shapers of the epigenome are the chromatin regulators, protein machines that read the marks on the histone tails. Some extend marks of a given kind throughout a domain. Some bundle the nucleosomes together so as to silence their genes. Others loosen the DNA from the nucleosome spools so as to ease the path of the transcription machinery along a gene.
Biologists had long assumed that once the chromatin regulators had shaped an epigenome, their work could not be undone because a cell’s fate is essentially irreversible. But a remarkable experiment by the Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka in June 2007 underlined the surprising power of the master transcription factors.
By inserting just four of the master regulator genes into skin cells, he showed the transcription factors made by the genes could reprogram the skin cell’s epigenome back into that of the embryonic cell from which it had been derived. The skin cell then behaved just like an embryonic cell, not a skin cell. Until then, biologists had no idea that the epigenome with its millions of marks could be recast so simply or that transcription factors could apparently call the shots so decisively.
But subsequent research has shown the chromatin regulators are not pushovers. Only one in a million of the skin cells treated with the four transcription factors reverts fully to the embryonic state. Most get stuck in transitional states, as if the chromatin regulators are resisting a possibly cancerous change in the cell’s status. “The take-home story is that yes, the transcription factors are really critical players in determining cellular state, but epigenetics is important, too,” Dr. Bernstein said.
The ideal of regenerative medicine is to convert a patient’s normal body cells first back into the embryonic state, and then into the specific cells lost to disease. But to prepare such cells safely and effectively, researchers will probably need to learn how to control and manipulate the chromatin of the epigenome as well as the transcription factors that shape cell identity.
The treatment of many diseases may also lie in drugs that manipulate the epigenome. Rett syndrome, a form of autism that affects girls, is caused by a mutation in the gene for an enzyme that recognizes the chromatin marks placed directly on the DNA. At least in mice, the neurons resume normal function when the mutation is corrected. In several forms of cancer, tumor-suppressor genes turn out to have been inactivated not by mutation, the usual known cause, but by the incorrect placement of marks that invite chromatin regulators to silence the genes.
Drugs developed by Peter A. Jones of the University of Southern California reverse the chromatin silencing of these antitumor genes. Two have recently been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for a blood malignancy, myelodysplastic syndrome.
Besides governing access to the genome, the epigenome also receives a host of signals from the environment. A family of enzymes called sirtuins monitors the nutritional state of the cell, and one of them removes a specific mark from the chromatin, providing a possible route for the genome to respond to famine conditions. Accumulating errors in the epigenome’s regulation could allow the wrong genes to be expressed, a possible cause of aging.
A principal new technique for studying the marks on an epigenome is to break the chromosomes into fragments, which are then treated with antibodies that bind to a specific mark. The DNA fragments so designated are decoded and matched to sites on the human genome sequence. This provides a genome-wide map of how a particular mark is distributed in a particular epigenomic state. The CHiP-seq maps, as they are called, have been very useful but are far from capturing the full detail of the epigenome, a dynamic structure that can change in minutes.
Individual researchers have made considerable progress but may not be able to assemble the comprehensive set of epigenomic marks and states that would be most useful to those developing new approaches to disease and aging. “I think the effort needs to be organized,” Dr. Young said. “It would benefit from being larger than it is.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/science/24chromatin.html?pagewanted=1&ref=science
Easy Nash
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
447)Einstein's General Relativity Experiment, The Warping of Space-Time, Gets Saudi Funding:Softening Towards a Balance between Revelation and Reason?
"Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which Allah sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they Trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth; (Here) indeed are Signs for the people of intellect"(Noble Quran)
"Allah thus makes clear to you His Signs that you may intellect"(Holy Quran 2:242)
Einstein's General Relativity Experiment, The Warping, Frame-Dragging and Twisting of Space-Time, Gets Saudi Funding: Wahhabism Perhaps Softening Towards a Balance between Revelation and Reason; Religion and Science?
"But by mid-2008, that $1.5 million was running out. That is when Dr. Everitt turned to Turki al-Saud, vice president for research institutes at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and a member of the Saudi royal family. Dr. Saud, who has a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford, arranged a $2.7 million grant. The work goes on.
“I didn’t imagine I would ever visit Riyadh,” Dr. Everitt said. “We will need more money, but $2.7 million by itself is really helpful. We now have a clear end in sight.”
That month, however, Dr. Saud visited Stanford and spoke briefly with Dr. Everitt. Saudi Arabia, which has built 12 small satellites, “was interested in forming partnerships” for future space missions, Dr. Saud said in a telephone interview, and has since done so with Stanford and NASA. Dr. Everitt met with Dr. Saud in London in July, and Gravity Probe B received $2.7 million."
February 17, 2009
Perseverance Is Paying Off for a Test of Relativity in Space
By GUY GUGLIOTTA
New York Times
STANFORD, Calif. — For 46 years, Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist, has promoted the often perilous fortunes of Gravity Probe B, perhaps the most exotic, “Star Trek”-ish experiment ever undertaken in space. Finally, with emergency financial help from a pair of unusual sources, success is at hand.
Conceived in the late 1950s, financed by $750 million from NASA and launched into orbit in 2004, the Gravity Probe B spacecraft has sought to prove two tenets of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The first, called the geodetic effect, holds that a large celestial body like Earth will warp time the way a rubber sheet stretches when a bowling ball is placed on it. The second, known as frame-dragging, occurs when the rotation of a large body “twists” nearby space and time; turn the resting bowling ball, and the rubber sheet twists.
To measure these phenomena, Dr. Everitt and his Stanford team equipped Gravity Probe B with a special telescope attached to several gyroscopes. They pointed the telescope at a “guide star,” IM Pegasi, and then spun up the gyros with their axes also fixed on the guide star. If Einstein was right, the gyros would drift slightly over time to follow the space-time distortion.
The Stanford team collected 11 ½ months’ worth of transmissions from Gravity Probe B, but tiny unforeseen drift in the gyros fouled the results. Dr. Everitt had to ask NASA for extra time and money so his 11-member team could figure out how to scrub the data.
Four painstaking years later, the team has confirmed the geodetic effect and put a credible frame-dragging result within reach. Nevertheless, NASA was forced to stop financing the project last May. This 11th-hour catastrophe might have been terminal, but Dr. Everitt, long known for his tenacity as well as his charm, had nursed Gravity Probe B through several near-death experiences over the years.
To persevere into 2008, he had already won a $500,000 contribution from Richard Fairbank, the founder and chief executive of Capital One Financial and the youngest son of his old mentor, the Stanford physicist William Fairbank. Richard Fairbank stipulated that Stanford and NASA each match his contribution, and they did.
But by mid-2008, that $1.5 million was running out. That is when Dr. Everitt turned to Turki al-Saud, vice president for research institutes at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and a member of the Saudi royal family. Dr. Saud, who has a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford, arranged a $2.7 million grant. The work goes on.
“I didn’t imagine I would ever visit Riyadh,” Dr. Everitt said. “We will need more money, but $2.7 million by itself is really helpful. We now have a clear end in sight.”
The Gravity Probe B experiment was conceived at the dawn of the Space Age by the Stanford physicist Leonard Schiff and George E. Pugh of the Defense Department. Dr. Schiff brought William Fairbank into the project in 1959, and in 1962 Dr. Fairbank induced the British-born Dr. Everitt to come for a visit. Now 74, Dr. Everitt has directed Gravity Probe B ever since.
While the experiment itself was relatively straightforward, the engineering demands were unprecedented. The theoretical distortion in space-time for the geodetic effect was 6,614.4 milliarcseconds per year; for frame-dragging it was only 14 milliarcseconds per year. A milliarcsecond is about one four-millionth of a degree of arc.
To make measurements that fine using an object as large as Earth, the spacecraft’s gyros had to be virtually friction-free and unaffected by heat, magnetic fields or unpredictable movements. The pristine environment of space made the attempt possible.
But success was not guaranteed. Arcane, often unprecedented technologies were needed. The four fused-quartz, Ping-Pong-ball-size gyroscopes, coated with the metal niobium, were the most perfectly spherical objects ever created by humans. A coffin-size lead “bag” shielded the gyros from Earth’s magnetic field.
A large thermos-like container called a dewar contained 645 gallons of liquid helium to be cooled to within two degrees of absolute zero. The helium held the niobium coating at superconducting temperatures, so the metal could track the deviations in the gyros’ spin axis.
By the time the 21-foot-long, 3-ton spacecraft was launched on April 20, 2004, Gravity Probe B had become a very expensive tool designed to prove something that many scientists over the years had come to accept as already proved by theoretical physics and some previous experiments.
That argument has no heft with Dr. Everitt. “We are doing a measurement with a massive object, and this is valid,” Dr. Everitt said. “This is what the general theory of relativity says, and this is the experiment.”
The mission, however, did not go according to plan. The niobium coating on the gyros and their housings was slightly uneven, causing tiny unpredictable electrical torques that made the gyros drift. The mission ended in 2005, but since then the Stanford team has been mapping niobium anomalies on each gyro, finding the patterns of distortion and subtracting the noise from the data.
NASA had budgeted money for a year’s worth of post-flight data analysis, but Dr. Everitt needed a lot more time, and NASA financed the project through 2007. That, it seemed, would be the end.
Richard Fairbank, whom Dr. Everitt had known since he was a child, thought differently. “Nearly 50 years ago, my father had talked with me about the integrity of a bold quest and never giving up,” Mr. Fairbank said. “I just felt that the project was on the 1-yard line.”
The financing brought about by his contribution took the project into 2008, but in May, Gravity Probe B went before NASA’s senior review, where an independent committee of scientists rates continuing agency projects to determine financing priorities. “We ended up dead last,” Dr. Everitt said.
That month, however, Dr. Saud visited Stanford and spoke briefly with Dr. Everitt. Saudi Arabia, which has built 12 small satellites, “was interested in forming partnerships” for future space missions, Dr. Saud said in a telephone interview, and has since done so with Stanford and NASA. Dr. Everitt met with Dr. Saud in London in July, and Gravity Probe B received $2.7 million.
The team has forged ahead. In August, graduate students made a breakthrough in data analysis to bring the frame-dragging deviation within 15 percent of the predicted result. Dr. Everitt hopes to get it within 3 percent by mid-2010. The geodetic effect is currently within 1 percent of the predicted result and is expected to go even lower.
“They fly the mission and have what seems like an insurmountable problem,” said Michael Salamon, program scientist for the Physics of the Cosmos Program at NASA and a staunch supporter of the project despite the senior review decision. “Then they do this. It’s spectacular, frankly, and when it’s done we are going to have a press announcement.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/science/17gravity.html?_r=1&ref=science&pagewanted=print
Easy Nash
Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)
Seek knowledge, even in China(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)
One hour of contemplation on the works of the Creator is better than a thousand hours of prayer(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)
The ink of the scholar is better than the blood of the martyr(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)
"Allah thus makes clear to you His Signs that you may intellect"(Holy Quran 2:242)
Einstein's General Relativity Experiment, The Warping, Frame-Dragging and Twisting of Space-Time, Gets Saudi Funding: Wahhabism Perhaps Softening Towards a Balance between Revelation and Reason; Religion and Science?
"But by mid-2008, that $1.5 million was running out. That is when Dr. Everitt turned to Turki al-Saud, vice president for research institutes at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and a member of the Saudi royal family. Dr. Saud, who has a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford, arranged a $2.7 million grant. The work goes on.
“I didn’t imagine I would ever visit Riyadh,” Dr. Everitt said. “We will need more money, but $2.7 million by itself is really helpful. We now have a clear end in sight.”
That month, however, Dr. Saud visited Stanford and spoke briefly with Dr. Everitt. Saudi Arabia, which has built 12 small satellites, “was interested in forming partnerships” for future space missions, Dr. Saud said in a telephone interview, and has since done so with Stanford and NASA. Dr. Everitt met with Dr. Saud in London in July, and Gravity Probe B received $2.7 million."
February 17, 2009
Perseverance Is Paying Off for a Test of Relativity in Space
By GUY GUGLIOTTA
New York Times
STANFORD, Calif. — For 46 years, Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist, has promoted the often perilous fortunes of Gravity Probe B, perhaps the most exotic, “Star Trek”-ish experiment ever undertaken in space. Finally, with emergency financial help from a pair of unusual sources, success is at hand.
Conceived in the late 1950s, financed by $750 million from NASA and launched into orbit in 2004, the Gravity Probe B spacecraft has sought to prove two tenets of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The first, called the geodetic effect, holds that a large celestial body like Earth will warp time the way a rubber sheet stretches when a bowling ball is placed on it. The second, known as frame-dragging, occurs when the rotation of a large body “twists” nearby space and time; turn the resting bowling ball, and the rubber sheet twists.
To measure these phenomena, Dr. Everitt and his Stanford team equipped Gravity Probe B with a special telescope attached to several gyroscopes. They pointed the telescope at a “guide star,” IM Pegasi, and then spun up the gyros with their axes also fixed on the guide star. If Einstein was right, the gyros would drift slightly over time to follow the space-time distortion.
The Stanford team collected 11 ½ months’ worth of transmissions from Gravity Probe B, but tiny unforeseen drift in the gyros fouled the results. Dr. Everitt had to ask NASA for extra time and money so his 11-member team could figure out how to scrub the data.
Four painstaking years later, the team has confirmed the geodetic effect and put a credible frame-dragging result within reach. Nevertheless, NASA was forced to stop financing the project last May. This 11th-hour catastrophe might have been terminal, but Dr. Everitt, long known for his tenacity as well as his charm, had nursed Gravity Probe B through several near-death experiences over the years.
To persevere into 2008, he had already won a $500,000 contribution from Richard Fairbank, the founder and chief executive of Capital One Financial and the youngest son of his old mentor, the Stanford physicist William Fairbank. Richard Fairbank stipulated that Stanford and NASA each match his contribution, and they did.
But by mid-2008, that $1.5 million was running out. That is when Dr. Everitt turned to Turki al-Saud, vice president for research institutes at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and a member of the Saudi royal family. Dr. Saud, who has a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford, arranged a $2.7 million grant. The work goes on.
“I didn’t imagine I would ever visit Riyadh,” Dr. Everitt said. “We will need more money, but $2.7 million by itself is really helpful. We now have a clear end in sight.”
The Gravity Probe B experiment was conceived at the dawn of the Space Age by the Stanford physicist Leonard Schiff and George E. Pugh of the Defense Department. Dr. Schiff brought William Fairbank into the project in 1959, and in 1962 Dr. Fairbank induced the British-born Dr. Everitt to come for a visit. Now 74, Dr. Everitt has directed Gravity Probe B ever since.
While the experiment itself was relatively straightforward, the engineering demands were unprecedented. The theoretical distortion in space-time for the geodetic effect was 6,614.4 milliarcseconds per year; for frame-dragging it was only 14 milliarcseconds per year. A milliarcsecond is about one four-millionth of a degree of arc.
To make measurements that fine using an object as large as Earth, the spacecraft’s gyros had to be virtually friction-free and unaffected by heat, magnetic fields or unpredictable movements. The pristine environment of space made the attempt possible.
But success was not guaranteed. Arcane, often unprecedented technologies were needed. The four fused-quartz, Ping-Pong-ball-size gyroscopes, coated with the metal niobium, were the most perfectly spherical objects ever created by humans. A coffin-size lead “bag” shielded the gyros from Earth’s magnetic field.
A large thermos-like container called a dewar contained 645 gallons of liquid helium to be cooled to within two degrees of absolute zero. The helium held the niobium coating at superconducting temperatures, so the metal could track the deviations in the gyros’ spin axis.
By the time the 21-foot-long, 3-ton spacecraft was launched on April 20, 2004, Gravity Probe B had become a very expensive tool designed to prove something that many scientists over the years had come to accept as already proved by theoretical physics and some previous experiments.
That argument has no heft with Dr. Everitt. “We are doing a measurement with a massive object, and this is valid,” Dr. Everitt said. “This is what the general theory of relativity says, and this is the experiment.”
The mission, however, did not go according to plan. The niobium coating on the gyros and their housings was slightly uneven, causing tiny unpredictable electrical torques that made the gyros drift. The mission ended in 2005, but since then the Stanford team has been mapping niobium anomalies on each gyro, finding the patterns of distortion and subtracting the noise from the data.
NASA had budgeted money for a year’s worth of post-flight data analysis, but Dr. Everitt needed a lot more time, and NASA financed the project through 2007. That, it seemed, would be the end.
Richard Fairbank, whom Dr. Everitt had known since he was a child, thought differently. “Nearly 50 years ago, my father had talked with me about the integrity of a bold quest and never giving up,” Mr. Fairbank said. “I just felt that the project was on the 1-yard line.”
The financing brought about by his contribution took the project into 2008, but in May, Gravity Probe B went before NASA’s senior review, where an independent committee of scientists rates continuing agency projects to determine financing priorities. “We ended up dead last,” Dr. Everitt said.
That month, however, Dr. Saud visited Stanford and spoke briefly with Dr. Everitt. Saudi Arabia, which has built 12 small satellites, “was interested in forming partnerships” for future space missions, Dr. Saud said in a telephone interview, and has since done so with Stanford and NASA. Dr. Everitt met with Dr. Saud in London in July, and Gravity Probe B received $2.7 million.
The team has forged ahead. In August, graduate students made a breakthrough in data analysis to bring the frame-dragging deviation within 15 percent of the predicted result. Dr. Everitt hopes to get it within 3 percent by mid-2010. The geodetic effect is currently within 1 percent of the predicted result and is expected to go even lower.
“They fly the mission and have what seems like an insurmountable problem,” said Michael Salamon, program scientist for the Physics of the Cosmos Program at NASA and a staunch supporter of the project despite the senior review decision. “Then they do this. It’s spectacular, frankly, and when it’s done we are going to have a press announcement.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/science/17gravity.html?_r=1&ref=science&pagewanted=print
Easy Nash
Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)
Seek knowledge, even in China(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)
One hour of contemplation on the works of the Creator is better than a thousand hours of prayer(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)
The ink of the scholar is better than the blood of the martyr(Prophet Muhammad, circa 632CE)
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
446)"The Quran Says......."; Quotes of Aga Khan IV and Others on the Subjects of Knowledge, Intellect, Creation, Education, Science and Religion
"The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation"(ClosingAddress by His Highness Aga Khan IV at the "Musée-Musées" Round Table Louvre Museum, Paris, France, October 17th 2007)
"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)
"Quran Symposium:....a reflection of how Islam's revelation, with its challenge to man's innate gift of quest and reason, became a powerful impetus for a new flowering of human civilisation.This programme is also an opportunity for achieving insights into how the discourse of the Qur'an-e-Sharif, rich in parable and allegory, metaphor and symbol, has been an inexhaustible well-spring of inspiration, lending itself to a wide spectrum of interpretations. In this context, would it not also be relevant to consider how, above all, it has been the Qur'anic notion of the universe as an expression of Allah's will and creation that has inspired, in diverse Muslim communities, generations of artists, scientists and philosophers? Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah'.The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"(Aga Khan IV, Speech, Institute of Ismaili Studies, October 2003, London, U.K.)
"The Quran very often refers to nature as a reflection of Allah's power of creation and says: Look at the mountains, look at the rivers, look at the trees, look at the flowers all as evidence ofAllah's love for the people whom He has created. Today I look at this environment and I say that I beleive that Allah is smiling upon you, may His smile always be upon you"(Aga Khan IV, Khorog, Tajikistan, May 27th 1995)
"The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims. Exchanges of knowledge between institutions and nations and the widening of man's intellectual horizons are essentially Islamic concepts. The Faith urges freedom of intellectual enquiry and this freedom does not mean that knowledge will lose its spiritual dimension. That dimension is indeed itself a field for intellectual enquiry. I can not illustrate this interdependence of spiritual inspiration and learning better than by recounting a dialogue between Ibn Sina, the philosopher, and Abu Said Abu -Khyar, the Sufi mystic. Ibn Sina remarked, "Whatever I know, he sees". To which Abu Said replied," Whatever I see, he knows"."(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11th 1985)
"Above all, following the guidance of the Holy Quran, there was freedom of enquiry and research. The result was a magnificent flowering of artistic and intellectual activity throughout the ummah" (Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
"It (Surah of Light from the Quran) tells us that the oil of the blessed olive tree lights the lamp of understanding, a light that belongs neither to the East nor West. We are to give this light to all. In that spirit, all that we learn will belong to the world and that too is part of the vision I share with you"(Aga Khan IV, Speech, 25 Sept. 1979)
"Islam is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion. Throughout the Quran God's signs (Ayats) are referred to as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the relations between natural phenomenon in cause and effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon, earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine order. Even in the Ayeh of Noor, divine is referred to as the natural phenomenon of light and even references are made to the fruit of the earth. During the great period of Islam, Muslims did not forget these principles of their religion"(Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952)
Kathalika yubayyinu Allahu lakum ayatihi la'allakum ta-'aqiloona: "Allah thus makes clear to you His Signs that you may intellect"(Holy Quran 2:242)
"Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which Allah sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they Trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth; (Here) indeed are Signs for the people of intellect"(Noble Quran)
"Here is a relevant verse from the Noble Qur'an, cited by Nasir-i Khusraw, hujjat-i Khurasan in his Khawaan al-Ikhwaan : "It is He who created you from dust, then from a sperm drop, then from a blood clot, then He brings you forth as a child, then lets you reach your age of full strength, then lets you become old - though some of you die before - and then lets you reach the appointed term; and that haply you may find the intellect (la'allakum ta'qilun)."(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet)
Chapter 30, Verse 27: He originates creation; then refashions it - for Him an easy task. His is the most Sublime Symbol in the heavens and the earth(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 21, Verse 30: Do not the unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together before We clove them asunder, and of water fashioned every thing? Will they not then believe?(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 51, verse 47: We built the heavens with might, and We expand it wide(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter79, verse 30: And then he gave the earth an oval form(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 86, verse 11: I swear by the reciprocating heaven.....(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
The above are 16 quotes and excerpts taken from Blogpost Four Hundred, a collection of about 100 quotes on the subjects of Knowledge, Intellect, Creation, Education, Science and Religion:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Easy Nash
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
"......The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation - in the heavens and the earth, the night and the day, the clouds and the seas, the winds and the waters...."(Aga Khan IV, Kampala, Uganda, August 22 2007)
"Quran Symposium:....a reflection of how Islam's revelation, with its challenge to man's innate gift of quest and reason, became a powerful impetus for a new flowering of human civilisation.This programme is also an opportunity for achieving insights into how the discourse of the Qur'an-e-Sharif, rich in parable and allegory, metaphor and symbol, has been an inexhaustible well-spring of inspiration, lending itself to a wide spectrum of interpretations. In this context, would it not also be relevant to consider how, above all, it has been the Qur'anic notion of the universe as an expression of Allah's will and creation that has inspired, in diverse Muslim communities, generations of artists, scientists and philosophers? Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah'.The famous verse of 'light' in the Qur'an, the Ayat al-Nur, whose first line is rendered here in the mural behind me, inspires among Muslims a reflection on the sacred, the transcendent. It hints at a cosmos full of signs and symbols that evoke the perfection of Allah's creation and mercy"(Aga Khan IV, Speech, Institute of Ismaili Studies, October 2003, London, U.K.)
"The Quran very often refers to nature as a reflection of Allah's power of creation and says: Look at the mountains, look at the rivers, look at the trees, look at the flowers all as evidence ofAllah's love for the people whom He has created. Today I look at this environment and I say that I beleive that Allah is smiling upon you, may His smile always be upon you"(Aga Khan IV, Khorog, Tajikistan, May 27th 1995)
"The Holy Qu'ran's encouragement to study nature and the physical world around us gave the original impetus to scientific enquiry among Muslims. Exchanges of knowledge between institutions and nations and the widening of man's intellectual horizons are essentially Islamic concepts. The Faith urges freedom of intellectual enquiry and this freedom does not mean that knowledge will lose its spiritual dimension. That dimension is indeed itself a field for intellectual enquiry. I can not illustrate this interdependence of spiritual inspiration and learning better than by recounting a dialogue between Ibn Sina, the philosopher, and Abu Said Abu -Khyar, the Sufi mystic. Ibn Sina remarked, "Whatever I know, he sees". To which Abu Said replied," Whatever I see, he knows"."(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University Inauguration Speech, Karachi, Pakistan, November 11th 1985)
"Above all, following the guidance of the Holy Quran, there was freedom of enquiry and research. The result was a magnificent flowering of artistic and intellectual activity throughout the ummah" (Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
"It (Surah of Light from the Quran) tells us that the oil of the blessed olive tree lights the lamp of understanding, a light that belongs neither to the East nor West. We are to give this light to all. In that spirit, all that we learn will belong to the world and that too is part of the vision I share with you"(Aga Khan IV, Speech, 25 Sept. 1979)
"Islam is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion. Throughout the Quran God's signs (Ayats) are referred to as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the relations between natural phenomenon in cause and effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon, earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine order. Even in the Ayeh of Noor, divine is referred to as the natural phenomenon of light and even references are made to the fruit of the earth. During the great period of Islam, Muslims did not forget these principles of their religion"(Aga Khan III, April 4th 1952)
Kathalika yubayyinu Allahu lakum ayatihi la'allakum ta-'aqiloona: "Allah thus makes clear to you His Signs that you may intellect"(Holy Quran 2:242)
"Behold! in the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of the night and the day; in the sailing of the ships through the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which Allah sends down from the skies, and the life which He gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds which they Trail like their slaves between the sky and the earth; (Here) indeed are Signs for the people of intellect"(Noble Quran)
"Here is a relevant verse from the Noble Qur'an, cited by Nasir-i Khusraw, hujjat-i Khurasan in his Khawaan al-Ikhwaan : "It is He who created you from dust, then from a sperm drop, then from a blood clot, then He brings you forth as a child, then lets you reach your age of full strength, then lets you become old - though some of you die before - and then lets you reach the appointed term; and that haply you may find the intellect (la'allakum ta'qilun)."(Nasir Khusraw, 11th century Fatimid Ismaili cosmologist-philosopher-poet)
Chapter 30, Verse 27: He originates creation; then refashions it - for Him an easy task. His is the most Sublime Symbol in the heavens and the earth(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 21, Verse 30: Do not the unbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were joined together before We clove them asunder, and of water fashioned every thing? Will they not then believe?(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 51, verse 47: We built the heavens with might, and We expand it wide(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter79, verse 30: And then he gave the earth an oval form(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
Chapter 86, verse 11: I swear by the reciprocating heaven.....(Noble Quran, 7th Century CE)
The above are 16 quotes and excerpts taken from Blogpost Four Hundred, a collection of about 100 quotes on the subjects of Knowledge, Intellect, Creation, Education, Science and Religion:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Easy Nash
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
Monday, February 2, 2009
445)Darwin's Evolution: The Life And Contributions To Science of Charles Darwin; Quotes of Aga Khan IV and Aga Khan III
Darwinian Natural Selection: compatible with Islam IMHO
"Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation IS NOT STATIC BUT CONTINUOUS, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
"The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but A PERPETUAL AND CONSTANT EVENT; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)
The above are 2 quotes and excerpts taken from Blogpost Four Hundred, a collection of about 100 quotes on the subjects of Knowledge, Intellect, Creation, Education, Science and Religion:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Darwin's Evolution
Darwin's life and his contribution to science
By Tom Siegfried
January 31st, 2009; Vol.175 #3
Charles Darwin was born into a world that today’s scientists wouldn’t recognize.
When baby Darwin arrived on February 12, 1809, modern science was also in its infancy. Dalton had just recently articulated the modern theory of the chemical atom, but nobody had any idea what atoms were really like. Physicists had not yet heard of the conservation of energy or any other laws of thermodynamics. Faraday hadn’t yet shown how to make electricity from magnetism, and no one had a clue about light’s electromagnetic identity. Geology was trapped in an ante-diluvian paradigm, psychology hadn’t been invented yet and biology still seemed, in several key ways, to be infused with religion, resistant to the probes of experiment and reason.
Then came Darwin. By the time he died in 1882, thermodynamics possessed two unbreakable laws, chemistry had been codified in Mendeleyev’s periodic table, Maxwell had discovered the math merging electricity and magnetism to explain light. Lyell had established uniformitarianism as the basis for geology, Wundt had created the first experimental psychology laboratory, and science had something substantial to say about how life itself got to be the way it was, thanks to Darwin’s perspicacious curiosity, intellectual rigor, personal perseverance and power of persuasion.
Superlatives are commonplace in accounts of Darwin’s life. “An intellect which had no superior, and with a character which was even nobler than the intellect,” wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s champion in the original evolution debates. More recently Stephen Jay Gould called Darwin “the Muhammad Ali of biology.” But all Ali did was fight. Darwin was more like Willie Mays — he could hit, hit with power, run, field and throw. Translated to science, Darwin could read, reason, experiment, theorize and write, all as well or better than any of his contemporaries. Several scientists before Darwin had expressed the idea of evolution, some even hinting about the role of selection. But none had the wherewithal to perceive the abundance of evidence for evolution, deduce its many nuances, explain its mechanism, foresee and counter the many objections, and articulate it so convincingly to the world.
And even had Darwin never written a word about evolution, he would be remembered today as one of the 19th century’s premier botanists, a superb entomologist and prominent geologist. He was a leading authority on carnivorous plants and coral reefs, pigeons and bees, earthworms and orchids, beetles and barnacles (especially barnacles). And yet he was never educated to be a scientist and held no academic position. All he brought to the scientific table was his brain. What a brain.
Woe unto the beetles
In his youth, Darwin was an average student but an avid reader. He had an early interest in observing and collecting, mainly beetles and butterflies. (“Woe unto the beetles of South America, woe unto all tropical butterflies,” a friend wrote in advance of Darwin’s famous sea voyage.) When it came time for higher education, Darwin headed to Edinburgh, a few hundred kilometers north of his birthplace in Shrewsbury, England, to study medicine. Soon discovering that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood, Darwin headed back south to Cambridge, to prepare for the clergy, a profession in which blood wouldn’t be such a problem.
His heart was not in religion, though, and his Cambridge years exposed him to other intellectual pursuits — lectures on botany, for instance, fieldwork with geologist Adam Sedgwick and friendships cultivated with biologists like John Stevens Henslow. Darwin’s interest in science was most significantly stirred while reading books by the German savant Alexander von Humboldt and the English astronomer John Herschel, which imbued in him “a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science,” Darwin wrote decades later.
Henslow was perhaps the first to see in Darwin the makings of an uncommon scientist, and recommended him to serve as naturalist on the exploration voyage of the Beagle. During that ship’s leisurely circumnavigation of the globe, Darwin spent five years observing the diversity of the planet’s life, its sundry geological formations and rich fossil record of life long gone. Darwin’s eye saw more than what met it. He remarked on the variations between fossils and living forms, on the similarities of animals separated by vast distances and on the subtle differences and relationships among organisms on the South American mainland and the nearby Galápagos Islands.
By the time the voyage ended in October 1836, Darwin had amassed a mental catalog of life’s diversities and subtleties never before held in one head. It gave him a lot to think about.
Sick at Down
Darwin’s dispatches to England during the Beagle trip made him a scientific celebrity by the time he returned, and he hobnobbed with the leading lights of London’s elite. But soon ill health drove him southeast of London to a rural home (known as Down House) near the town of Downe.
For the rest of his life, Darwinsuffered, almost daily, from a mystery illness something akin to repetitive food poisoning. Doctors of his day couldn’t help him; modern diagnosticians have speculated on a variety of disorders, ranging from lactose intolerance to Crohn’s disease.
Whatever it was, Darwin’s illness, a curse to him, perhaps established the circumstances subserving his scientific success. Forced to live in the country, he had no job and few distractions. He could devote his time to investigating nature in his own way. He spent eight years studying every aspect of every species of barnacle, for instance. All that time he also read with a vengeance, compiling and indexing detailed notes from book after book. He read virtually all of every issue of the journal Nature, taking special delight in the physics and math articles that he admitted he could not understand. He read science and philosophy and history and even trashy novels (there should be a law, he said, against unhappy endings). When Darwin opined, he knew what he was talking about, and he knew what everybody else knew, too.
He knew so much that he could often see what others couldn’t, and he could also reason about things without wondering whether his suspicions would be supported by observations — he knew what observations had already been made. If they were insufficient, he made his own, growing orchids, breeding pigeons, spying on earthworms.
Of all his reading, the most signal was the 1798 essay on population by Thomas Malthus, which Darwin perused “for amusement” in 1838. About 15 months earlier, Darwin had begun a systematic investigation of “the species question,” an issue at biology’s foundation. Conventional wisdom held that species had been created individually and were immutable (in much the way that astronomers assumed the universe to be everlastingly static). Some thinkers, though (including Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus), believed otherwise. While on the Beagle, Darwin began to suspect that immutability could not be correct (though he had been unimpressed by grandpa’s book, finding it to contain an excessively high ratio of speculation to fact). But the idea of natural selection had not yet entered the grandson’s mind.
Malthus helped. Population, unchecked, would grow uncontrollably and run out of resources, he wrote. Scarcity kept populations in check; not all who were born could survive to reproduce. Darwin recognized in this account the “struggle for existence” he had observed in all manner of plants and animals. “It at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at least got a theory by which to work.”
By 1842 he had prepared a rough 35-page outline (in pencil) of his evolutionary ideas, expanded by 1844 to a 230-page manuscript. In a letter to his wife, he allowed that his theory would be “a considerable step in science,” if it ever were to be accepted “even by one competent judge.” He asked in that letter that she be sure to publish the manuscript if he died before getting around to it himself. He did show it to a couple of colleagues, but otherwise the most earthshaking ideas in the history of biological science remained unpublicized. Darwin was busy classifying barnacles.
By 1854 he had begun spending most of his time on the species question, and in 1856 the geologist Lyell warned him to publish soon, before another naturalist anticipated him. Sure enough, two years later Alfred Russel Wallace, working in Indonesia, arrived at nearly the same notion, that species developed over time as small variations accumulated, with favorable ones enhancing survival. For counsel and comment, Wallace sent his paper to — Darwin.
Dismayed, Darwin sought advice from Lyell. Wallace’s idea was sound, and deserved to be published. Could Darwin now dare publish himself, without appearing to be stealing Wallace’s discovery?
Lyell and Henslow brokered a compromise. Wallace’s paper would be read to the Linnean Society, and so would an extract of Darwin’s 1844 manuscript, at one session, with Lyell and Henslow vouching that they had indeed seen Darwin’s work years earlier. Wallace was acknowledged, but Darwin’s claim to priority was preserved.
That hardly mattered, though. It was Darwin’s artful reasoning and marshaling of the evidence that established evolution by natural selection, as propagated in his masterwork, On the Origin of Species. Published in 1859, it electrified the scientific and intellectual world, evoking the prejudicial condemnation that afflicts most great new insights, but also filling the open-minded with food for centuries’ worth of future biological thought.
A simple solution
For so momentous a problem, Darwin’s solution seems elegantly simple, although also so subtle that its exposition is often badly mangled. Offspring differ slightly from their parents and each other (descent with modification), making some “fitter” than others in the struggle for existence (survival of the fittest). Over periods of time unimaginably long, the small changes from generation to generation accumulate, mutating one species into others. On smaller scales, over shorter times, such accumulated changes can be seen in various breeds of dogs or pigeons or plants, often induced by the artificial selection of particular traits by human breeders. On evolutionary scales of millions of years, the selection driving the appearance of new species is natural.
Some scientists (such as Huxley) saw the truth in Darwin’s views immediately; others came to agree gradually. Many, of course, disagreed bitterly and attacked both Darwin and his book. But most of the “rebuttals” of evolution, even today, merely raise points that Darwin anticipated and countered. Gaps in the fossil record? To be expected, Darwin explained, because the geological record was so imperfect, as if only a few pages remained from only the most recent volume in the entire encyclopedia of the Earth’s history. Complexity of the eye? The slightest sensitivity to light would aid in survival, and more versatile, focused organs should develop over a long enough time.
Besides explaining the vagaries of life-forms that nature presented, Darwin’s work, in a sense, also made spectacularly successful predictions. One was the requirement for a mutable mechanism of heredity. Subsequent genetic research, from Mendel to Watson and Crick, produced just what Darwin ordered. The other was the need for a very old Earth, providing the eons of time necessary for natural selection’s choices to accumulate. Prominent physicists of the day contended the planet was much too young for that, but Darwin’s original intuition eventually proved accurate.
Darwin attributed his success to “love of science” and “unbounded patience” and “industry in observing and collecting facts.” He understood fully the importance of his work, but his humility permitted only understatement. “With such moderate abilities as I possess,” he wrote, “it is truly surprising that I should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points.”
As a scientist, Darwin was both chronicler and synthesizer, experimentalist as well as theorist. His power to unearth biology’s secrets so successfully stemmed from his devotion to acquiring all the evidence and assessing it honestly. He compiled facts from all possible sources, arranging them to reveal the most logical general conclusions. He could explain all the subtle points of natural selection and its power by citing observations from the Beagle voyage, the writings of experts from around the world, or his own experiments in breeding pigeons, dissecting barnacles, tormenting ants. He could demonstrate how natural selection reconciles observations otherwise irreconcilable if species had been created separately and remained immutable.
Today Darwin’s original idea survives, although it has spawned many mutated forms, with nuances and complexities that make evolutionary science a constantly advancing field of research. And Darwin’s logic has been borrowed by other investigators in diverse disciplines. Psychologists try to explain behavior based on what mental habits would have enhanced survival as human ancestors were evolving. Biomedical researchers grapple with evolutionary principles in fighting microbial resistance to antibiotics. Computer scientists mix and select segments of binary code to generate optimal computer programs. Even in physics, the word “Darwinian” appears in papers on thermodynamics, quantum physics and black holes. Darwin would have been fascinated by such research and would no doubt have understood a lot of it, as so much of the underlying reasoning was his.
Darwin would also have been happy with the many modifications and adaptations to his ideas found in modern reformulations of evolutionary theory. Speciation isn’t always gradual, change isn’t always the result of selection, organisms are not the only units of selection, evolutionists now believe. Darwin foresaw some of these views, and he would have embraced them all — as a man of science willing “to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved … as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it,” in his words. “If I know myself, I work from a sort of instinct to try to make out truth.”
And in the battle to wrest truth from nature, none fought better than Darwin. “He found a great truth,” Huxley wrote in Darwin’s obituary, “trodden under foot, reviled by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world; he lived long enough to see it, chiefly by his own efforts, irrefragably established in science, inseparably incorporated with the common thoughts of men.”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/40014/title/Darwins_Evolution
Related from Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090130.wdarwin0131/BNStory/Science/home/?&pageRequested=all&print=true
Easy Nash
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
"Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation IS NOT STATIC BUT CONTINUOUS, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation"(Aga Khan IV, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983, Karachi, Pakistan)
"The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but A PERPETUAL AND CONSTANT EVENT; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will"(Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954)
The above are 2 quotes and excerpts taken from Blogpost Four Hundred, a collection of about 100 quotes on the subjects of Knowledge, Intellect, Creation, Education, Science and Religion:
http://gonashgo.blogspot.com/2008/09/400blogpost-four-hundred-knowledge.html
Darwin's Evolution
Darwin's life and his contribution to science
By Tom Siegfried
January 31st, 2009; Vol.175 #3
Charles Darwin was born into a world that today’s scientists wouldn’t recognize.
When baby Darwin arrived on February 12, 1809, modern science was also in its infancy. Dalton had just recently articulated the modern theory of the chemical atom, but nobody had any idea what atoms were really like. Physicists had not yet heard of the conservation of energy or any other laws of thermodynamics. Faraday hadn’t yet shown how to make electricity from magnetism, and no one had a clue about light’s electromagnetic identity. Geology was trapped in an ante-diluvian paradigm, psychology hadn’t been invented yet and biology still seemed, in several key ways, to be infused with religion, resistant to the probes of experiment and reason.
Then came Darwin. By the time he died in 1882, thermodynamics possessed two unbreakable laws, chemistry had been codified in Mendeleyev’s periodic table, Maxwell had discovered the math merging electricity and magnetism to explain light. Lyell had established uniformitarianism as the basis for geology, Wundt had created the first experimental psychology laboratory, and science had something substantial to say about how life itself got to be the way it was, thanks to Darwin’s perspicacious curiosity, intellectual rigor, personal perseverance and power of persuasion.
Superlatives are commonplace in accounts of Darwin’s life. “An intellect which had no superior, and with a character which was even nobler than the intellect,” wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s champion in the original evolution debates. More recently Stephen Jay Gould called Darwin “the Muhammad Ali of biology.” But all Ali did was fight. Darwin was more like Willie Mays — he could hit, hit with power, run, field and throw. Translated to science, Darwin could read, reason, experiment, theorize and write, all as well or better than any of his contemporaries. Several scientists before Darwin had expressed the idea of evolution, some even hinting about the role of selection. But none had the wherewithal to perceive the abundance of evidence for evolution, deduce its many nuances, explain its mechanism, foresee and counter the many objections, and articulate it so convincingly to the world.
And even had Darwin never written a word about evolution, he would be remembered today as one of the 19th century’s premier botanists, a superb entomologist and prominent geologist. He was a leading authority on carnivorous plants and coral reefs, pigeons and bees, earthworms and orchids, beetles and barnacles (especially barnacles). And yet he was never educated to be a scientist and held no academic position. All he brought to the scientific table was his brain. What a brain.
Woe unto the beetles
In his youth, Darwin was an average student but an avid reader. He had an early interest in observing and collecting, mainly beetles and butterflies. (“Woe unto the beetles of South America, woe unto all tropical butterflies,” a friend wrote in advance of Darwin’s famous sea voyage.) When it came time for higher education, Darwin headed to Edinburgh, a few hundred kilometers north of his birthplace in Shrewsbury, England, to study medicine. Soon discovering that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood, Darwin headed back south to Cambridge, to prepare for the clergy, a profession in which blood wouldn’t be such a problem.
His heart was not in religion, though, and his Cambridge years exposed him to other intellectual pursuits — lectures on botany, for instance, fieldwork with geologist Adam Sedgwick and friendships cultivated with biologists like John Stevens Henslow. Darwin’s interest in science was most significantly stirred while reading books by the German savant Alexander von Humboldt and the English astronomer John Herschel, which imbued in him “a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science,” Darwin wrote decades later.
Henslow was perhaps the first to see in Darwin the makings of an uncommon scientist, and recommended him to serve as naturalist on the exploration voyage of the Beagle. During that ship’s leisurely circumnavigation of the globe, Darwin spent five years observing the diversity of the planet’s life, its sundry geological formations and rich fossil record of life long gone. Darwin’s eye saw more than what met it. He remarked on the variations between fossils and living forms, on the similarities of animals separated by vast distances and on the subtle differences and relationships among organisms on the South American mainland and the nearby Galápagos Islands.
By the time the voyage ended in October 1836, Darwin had amassed a mental catalog of life’s diversities and subtleties never before held in one head. It gave him a lot to think about.
Sick at Down
Darwin’s dispatches to England during the Beagle trip made him a scientific celebrity by the time he returned, and he hobnobbed with the leading lights of London’s elite. But soon ill health drove him southeast of London to a rural home (known as Down House) near the town of Downe.
For the rest of his life, Darwinsuffered, almost daily, from a mystery illness something akin to repetitive food poisoning. Doctors of his day couldn’t help him; modern diagnosticians have speculated on a variety of disorders, ranging from lactose intolerance to Crohn’s disease.
Whatever it was, Darwin’s illness, a curse to him, perhaps established the circumstances subserving his scientific success. Forced to live in the country, he had no job and few distractions. He could devote his time to investigating nature in his own way. He spent eight years studying every aspect of every species of barnacle, for instance. All that time he also read with a vengeance, compiling and indexing detailed notes from book after book. He read virtually all of every issue of the journal Nature, taking special delight in the physics and math articles that he admitted he could not understand. He read science and philosophy and history and even trashy novels (there should be a law, he said, against unhappy endings). When Darwin opined, he knew what he was talking about, and he knew what everybody else knew, too.
He knew so much that he could often see what others couldn’t, and he could also reason about things without wondering whether his suspicions would be supported by observations — he knew what observations had already been made. If they were insufficient, he made his own, growing orchids, breeding pigeons, spying on earthworms.
Of all his reading, the most signal was the 1798 essay on population by Thomas Malthus, which Darwin perused “for amusement” in 1838. About 15 months earlier, Darwin had begun a systematic investigation of “the species question,” an issue at biology’s foundation. Conventional wisdom held that species had been created individually and were immutable (in much the way that astronomers assumed the universe to be everlastingly static). Some thinkers, though (including Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus), believed otherwise. While on the Beagle, Darwin began to suspect that immutability could not be correct (though he had been unimpressed by grandpa’s book, finding it to contain an excessively high ratio of speculation to fact). But the idea of natural selection had not yet entered the grandson’s mind.
Malthus helped. Population, unchecked, would grow uncontrollably and run out of resources, he wrote. Scarcity kept populations in check; not all who were born could survive to reproduce. Darwin recognized in this account the “struggle for existence” he had observed in all manner of plants and animals. “It at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at least got a theory by which to work.”
By 1842 he had prepared a rough 35-page outline (in pencil) of his evolutionary ideas, expanded by 1844 to a 230-page manuscript. In a letter to his wife, he allowed that his theory would be “a considerable step in science,” if it ever were to be accepted “even by one competent judge.” He asked in that letter that she be sure to publish the manuscript if he died before getting around to it himself. He did show it to a couple of colleagues, but otherwise the most earthshaking ideas in the history of biological science remained unpublicized. Darwin was busy classifying barnacles.
By 1854 he had begun spending most of his time on the species question, and in 1856 the geologist Lyell warned him to publish soon, before another naturalist anticipated him. Sure enough, two years later Alfred Russel Wallace, working in Indonesia, arrived at nearly the same notion, that species developed over time as small variations accumulated, with favorable ones enhancing survival. For counsel and comment, Wallace sent his paper to — Darwin.
Dismayed, Darwin sought advice from Lyell. Wallace’s idea was sound, and deserved to be published. Could Darwin now dare publish himself, without appearing to be stealing Wallace’s discovery?
Lyell and Henslow brokered a compromise. Wallace’s paper would be read to the Linnean Society, and so would an extract of Darwin’s 1844 manuscript, at one session, with Lyell and Henslow vouching that they had indeed seen Darwin’s work years earlier. Wallace was acknowledged, but Darwin’s claim to priority was preserved.
That hardly mattered, though. It was Darwin’s artful reasoning and marshaling of the evidence that established evolution by natural selection, as propagated in his masterwork, On the Origin of Species. Published in 1859, it electrified the scientific and intellectual world, evoking the prejudicial condemnation that afflicts most great new insights, but also filling the open-minded with food for centuries’ worth of future biological thought.
A simple solution
For so momentous a problem, Darwin’s solution seems elegantly simple, although also so subtle that its exposition is often badly mangled. Offspring differ slightly from their parents and each other (descent with modification), making some “fitter” than others in the struggle for existence (survival of the fittest). Over periods of time unimaginably long, the small changes from generation to generation accumulate, mutating one species into others. On smaller scales, over shorter times, such accumulated changes can be seen in various breeds of dogs or pigeons or plants, often induced by the artificial selection of particular traits by human breeders. On evolutionary scales of millions of years, the selection driving the appearance of new species is natural.
Some scientists (such as Huxley) saw the truth in Darwin’s views immediately; others came to agree gradually. Many, of course, disagreed bitterly and attacked both Darwin and his book. But most of the “rebuttals” of evolution, even today, merely raise points that Darwin anticipated and countered. Gaps in the fossil record? To be expected, Darwin explained, because the geological record was so imperfect, as if only a few pages remained from only the most recent volume in the entire encyclopedia of the Earth’s history. Complexity of the eye? The slightest sensitivity to light would aid in survival, and more versatile, focused organs should develop over a long enough time.
Besides explaining the vagaries of life-forms that nature presented, Darwin’s work, in a sense, also made spectacularly successful predictions. One was the requirement for a mutable mechanism of heredity. Subsequent genetic research, from Mendel to Watson and Crick, produced just what Darwin ordered. The other was the need for a very old Earth, providing the eons of time necessary for natural selection’s choices to accumulate. Prominent physicists of the day contended the planet was much too young for that, but Darwin’s original intuition eventually proved accurate.
Darwin attributed his success to “love of science” and “unbounded patience” and “industry in observing and collecting facts.” He understood fully the importance of his work, but his humility permitted only understatement. “With such moderate abilities as I possess,” he wrote, “it is truly surprising that I should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points.”
As a scientist, Darwin was both chronicler and synthesizer, experimentalist as well as theorist. His power to unearth biology’s secrets so successfully stemmed from his devotion to acquiring all the evidence and assessing it honestly. He compiled facts from all possible sources, arranging them to reveal the most logical general conclusions. He could explain all the subtle points of natural selection and its power by citing observations from the Beagle voyage, the writings of experts from around the world, or his own experiments in breeding pigeons, dissecting barnacles, tormenting ants. He could demonstrate how natural selection reconciles observations otherwise irreconcilable if species had been created separately and remained immutable.
Today Darwin’s original idea survives, although it has spawned many mutated forms, with nuances and complexities that make evolutionary science a constantly advancing field of research. And Darwin’s logic has been borrowed by other investigators in diverse disciplines. Psychologists try to explain behavior based on what mental habits would have enhanced survival as human ancestors were evolving. Biomedical researchers grapple with evolutionary principles in fighting microbial resistance to antibiotics. Computer scientists mix and select segments of binary code to generate optimal computer programs. Even in physics, the word “Darwinian” appears in papers on thermodynamics, quantum physics and black holes. Darwin would have been fascinated by such research and would no doubt have understood a lot of it, as so much of the underlying reasoning was his.
Darwin would also have been happy with the many modifications and adaptations to his ideas found in modern reformulations of evolutionary theory. Speciation isn’t always gradual, change isn’t always the result of selection, organisms are not the only units of selection, evolutionists now believe. Darwin foresaw some of these views, and he would have embraced them all — as a man of science willing “to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved … as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it,” in his words. “If I know myself, I work from a sort of instinct to try to make out truth.”
And in the battle to wrest truth from nature, none fought better than Darwin. “He found a great truth,” Huxley wrote in Darwin’s obituary, “trodden under foot, reviled by bigots, and ridiculed by all the world; he lived long enough to see it, chiefly by his own efforts, irrefragably established in science, inseparably incorporated with the common thoughts of men.”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/40014/title/Darwins_Evolution
Related from Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090130.wdarwin0131/BNStory/Science/home/?&pageRequested=all&print=true
Easy Nash
The Qur'an itself repeatedly recommends Muslims to become better educated in order better to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
The Quran tells us that signs of Allah's Sovereignty are found in the contemplation of His Creation: Aga Khan IV(2007)
This notion of the capacity of the human intellect to understand and to admire the creation of Allah will bring you happiness in your everyday lives: Aga Khan IV(2007)
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation: Aga Khan IV(2006)
The first and only thing created by God was the Intellect(Aql): Prophet Muhammad(circa 632CE)
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