new post after much downtime focusing on other things. first, obama won. am glad, voted for him and think good things will be in the near to mid near future. but not immediately. i am pragmatic and realize that the economy is going to bounce back instantly or painlessly. i do have some problems with the big three bailout. they haven't really said anything convincing about how they will change their model (both business and car) with the money. they have proven to be more stubborn than i am (believe me, that's a bold statement) about changing their ways. iococca was able to do a little with the bailout he got, but generally, the only changes of consequence that have come out of detroit in my lifetime is to make cars bigger and less efficient. they react more to the market than try and drive it. "you want big suv's? sure we'll make 'em ad naseum. what's that? want more efficient environ friendly cars, but we are still building big suv's. we'll keep doing this for a few more years and you'll come back. damn, we were wrong (pronounced with the same great difficulty that the fonz used to experience). ok, we need money to do the same old crap."

i must comment on the utter dearth of scientific knowledge i run into on the web these days. i don't expect everyone to be on the same level as i am. i have a phd in cell biology. but, i routinely see posts on news message boards that simply make me say hmmm. without delving deeply into my issues with organized religion, why is it people are so willing to dismiss convincing, hardcore scientific data that leads to only logical conclusions about evolution to instead believe it was all done by the invisible guy. fossils are not there to test faith, they are all pieces of data all increasing the fact that evolution is the way we came about. a few concepts people refuse to grasp. we did not descend from chimps. we descended from a common ancestor as the chimp. it didn't look like us. it didn't look like a chimp. it is an animal more primitive than us. people don't seem to remember that when we split from the line that lead to chimps, the chimps have undergone the same amount of evolutionary time and number of (but not kind of) stresses that we did. but we headed into the savanna and they stayed in the jungle, so we went on different paths to where we each are now. another item-the time scale is vast. people complain about not seeing evolution going on around them. it's not that fast. evolutionary time is in the ballpark of geological time. to the people who try and use statistics to prove "random" evolution is not possible in the time frame of the existence of the earth. two major issues. first evolution is not wholly random. genetic drift and natural selection, while arise from the random accumulation of mutations that lead to preferable traits, are not random, but driven by forces of selection. also, the stats are complete foolish. often based upon the size of the entire genome instead of the coding and "functional" (i.e. not just genes, but additional rna species, structural units, and epigenetics) which is a much smaller number, destroying much of the statistical argument of impossibility. also, random changes of an a, g, c, or t to another nucleotide is not the only way for evolution to occur. horizontal exchange of dna, i.e. between bacteria; the incorporation of viral dna into a genome and hijacking of genes (link many in cancer - the normal gene in a human is a protooncogene, but when certain viruses hijack the gene and it becomes mutated or disregulated when replaced into the infected genome (see src, ras, etc). gene duplication and divergence of function of paralogs is also a way of evolving. fruit flies have one hox cluster, we have 4 (through 2 duplications and divergence and compartmentalization of functions). point is it isn't just the random mutation that can drive evolution, there are a lot of things going on at once.

well, the point of the ramble was that the evidence is there. just because you don't "believe" in evolution, it is. there is no faith involved, just observation and rational thought.