Neil deGrasse Tyson said in Season 1 Episode 2 of the Cosmos reboot, near the end of the episode,

"Nobody knows how life got started. Most of the evidence from that time was destroyed by impact and erosion. Science works on the frontier between knowledge and ignorance. Not afraid to admit what we don't know. There's no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers. Maybe someone watching this will be the first to solve the mystery of how life on Earth began."

So tell me this. Why do people keep calling evolution "fact" when there still is no clear answer to how life started? There's plenty of research on how the "building blocks" might have formed, but noting solid beyond that. There is missing information. It's a "best guess". In scientific terms, a "best guess" is called a hypothesis, not even a theory. So it's actually the Hypothesis of Evolution.

In continuing to call evolution "fact", people are pretending to "have all the answers", and as Tyson said, they should be ashamed.

Unless of course people would like to try and separate Abiogenesis from the other aspects of evolution, in which case it becomes very obvious that those people are attempting to hide the missing information. It's like people fighting to prove that the speed of light is a constant, despite the repeated experiments that show variations, so that General Relativity isn't broken in the process.

There continues to be debate on other aspects. Some have claimed that the Dover trial was "proof" against Irreducible Complexity, when it was actually a straw man argument against Behe claiming that he said the components couldn't have worked anywhere else in the organism, which is not what he said. Also evidence submitted as "proof" was nothing more than an opinion piece buried in a document that had nothing to do with Irreducible Complexity, which itself should have resulted in charges of falsifying evidence. The entire trial was an embarrassment to people seriously researching evolution. But that hasn't stopped internet atheists from parading it around as some triumph of science over religion.

http://www.discovery.org/a/142...
http://www.discovery.org/a/856...

And one other thing, since I mentioned "Black Science Man". He was in a Big Think interview a few years ago where he explained that there is no conflict between science and faith. I only mention this because these forum "debates" always contain raging atheists desperate to create a straw man argument of religion opposing science so they can attack that instead of providing actual scientific information.
http://bigthink.com/videos/nei...

Likewise, Michio Kaku has spoken about many physicists being spiritual if not fully religious. And I will remind you that not only does the current Pope have a masters degree in Chemistry, but also the Vatican employs 4 astrophysicists. So kindly shove the straw man attacks and focus on a lack of proof for Abiogenesis, among other holes in evolution that continue to be researched.

Doesn't all this effort to prevent people plagiarizing jokes set a legal precedent for people reposting images without full credit to the owner, as we see on sites like imgur, 9gag, lolcats, and "I can has cheezeburger" in general? Will all memes require a lengthy set of movie style credits? How would this affect "reposts"?

Nicotine from a patch enters the blood, but people assume chemicals in sunscreen don't? If you can't eat it, don't put it on your skin. But do go ahead and respond with the obligatory "water soluble" "hydrophobic" and "non-carcinogenic" arguments. It's always fun to see how successful corporate funded "science" propaganda has been lately.

I'm good with a cap. If the movie industry wants to fight piracy, they should support caps because downloading multiple movies through torrents will make those free movies not so free. Cable and Satellite would benefit that people trying to marathon 12 hours of Netflix a day would start paying a lot more. Netflix should be about convenience and not be a replacement for Cable and Satellite. I support data caps.

Let me be more clear, as I'm distracted by trying to cook at the same time. The idea of hybridization re-expressing genes is the classic redhead in a family of blonds. We're well aware that breeding a dog with a kind of dog its predecessors was bred with can make it likely to bring out a few traits from that particular kind of dog. But it isn't going to be a trigger to create some radical new biological function. And even on the odd chance that some reaction did wind up with some mutation, it would have to simultaneously occur in a large enough population to prevent inbreeding being necessary to continue that mutation. The key problem being hybrids breeding with a general population that does not share that mutation.

As for the chimp reference, I suppose the idea of Adam and Eve's kids inbreeding goes right along with those hybrid chimps creating the longer chromosome.

All interesting theories yes, but much of it applies to single celled organisms. I read that the California Institute of Technology did some research with bacteria along those lines. http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...

But it still doesn't directly apply to complex sexually reproducing organisms. You can't seriously compare the DNA changes in things that reproduce by cell division with multicellular organisms that reproduce sexually. And even with recessive genes, there is no "trigger" that causes a group to suddenly express a gene at the same time. That kind of reactive evolution has been disproven time and again.

There is some evidence of non-random mutations, which has been called a "risk management strategy for evolution". Only certain parts of DNA chains tend to mutate, causing things like coloration and size to alter, and not the cartoon mutations of growing odd horns and limbs. It has been suggested that those regions of DNA, the "hot spots", are marked by the presence of "pseudogenes".

This and the idea of "co-opting" genetic material have been kicked around for some time now. But coming up with where some "random" mutation might come from is pointless in the face of hereditary traits being a limiter. Charles Darwin was inspired by animal breeding. Animal breeders are well aware you cannot cross breed two very different animals. They are also very aware that any odd mutation being bred with the general population that does not share that mutation will produce a hybrid. Breeding hybrids with the general population that does not share that mutation tends to "breed out" the mutation. We have this issue with white tigers. It's not albinism, but rather a specific mutation. To continue the mutation, we have to inbreed them, and the practice has been outlawed for obvious reasons. So no matter how many different ways a "random mutation" is explained, it still has to occur simultaneously in a large enough population that "breeding out" the mutation is not an issue.

But then again, sexual reproduction seems to confuse many people. Add science nerd joke here.

If the "joke" is about her being against using cleanses or detox routines, all a skeptic has to do is Google "How to beat a drug test" for proof.

The concept of "co-opting" genetic material is old news. It was a key argument in the Behe Dover trial over Irreducible Complexity, which itself devolved into straw man attacks and false claims made about research papers. http://www.discovery.org/a/142... This article also elaborates on the over simplification in defining "genetic material", and is a good start in understanding why genetic co-opting isn't a widely accepted theory.

One key problem with any mutation, including attempts to explain new genetic material via "co-opting", is that sexually reproducing organisms are usually governed by hereditary traits. An example of this is seen in White Tigers, in that they must be inbred to continue the mutation. Any complex sexually reproducing organism that experiences a significant mutation that then breeds back with the general population that does not share that mutation will create hybrids and usually see the mutation "bred out" in a very few generations. This has led researchers to look for things like ways that several of a species could express suppressed genes simultaneously so that a sufficient population mutated simultaneously to eliminate the problems with "breeding out" a mutation and still avoid the problems from inbreeding. Thus regardless of where and how a mutation gets its genetic material, hereditary traits still present a barrier to that mutation continuing, especially with more extreme mutations.

Actual genetic research is far beyond what is mentioned with the monkey brain, but it's still interesting that such a forced mutation could have such dramatic effects on a primate.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... [Effect of fluoride on human hypothalamus-hypophysis-testis axis hormones].
(PubMed)

RESULTS:
"The concentrations of fluoride in the water, food and soil of the fluoride polluted district were significantly higher than those of control district (P 0.05). The serum level of LH in men of fluoride polluted district was significantly higher than that of control group (P 0.05), and the serum level of T in men of fluoride polluted district was significantly less than that of control group (P 0.05). "

From "Our quantum problem", Adrian Kent
http://aeon.co/magazine/scienc...

"...Its great rival was first set out in a 1957 paper and Princeton PhD thesis written by one of the stranger figures in the history of 20th-century physics, Hugh Everett III. Rather unromantically, and very unusually for a highly original thinker and talented physicist, Everett abandoned theoretical physics after he had published his big idea. A good deal of his subsequent career was spent in military consultancy, advising the US on strategies for fighting and ‘winning’ a nuclear war against the USSR, and the bleakness of this chosen path presumably contributed to his chain-smoking, alcoholism and depression. Everett died of a heart attack at the age of 51; possibly we can infer something of his own ultimate assessment of his life’s worth from the fact that he instructed his wife to throw his ashes in the trash. And yet, despite his detachment from academic life (some might say from all of life), Everett’s PhD work eventually became enormously influential.

One way of thinking about his ideas on quantum theory is that our difficulties in getting a description of quantum reality arise from a tension between the mathematics – which, as we have seen, tells us to make calculations involving many different possible stories about what might have really happened – and the apparently incontrovertible fact that, at the end of an experiment, we see that only one thing actually did happen. This led Everett to ask a question that seems at first sight stupid, but which turns out to be very deep: how do we know that we only get one outcome to a quantum experiment? What if we take the hint from the mathematics and consider a picture of reality in which many different things actually do happen – everything, in fact, that quantum theory allows? And what if we take this to its logical conclusion and accept the same view of cosmology, so that all the different possible histories of the evolution of the universe are realised? We end up, Everett argued, with what became known as a ‘many worlds’ picture of reality, one in which it is constantly forming new branches describing alternative – but equally real – future continuations of the same present state..."

Dr. Ian Malcolm: "John, the kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is."

"Scientists" are only human, and subject to financial influence and personal bias. Some examples of "perfectly safe" products follows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

"List of withdrawn drugs"

"Some drugs have been withdrawn from the market because of risks to the patients. Usually this has been prompted by unexpected adverse effects that were not detected during Phase III clinical trials and were only apparent from postmarketing surveillance data from the wider patient community."

There follows a long list of drugs that underwent clinical trials and were declared perfectly safe for human use, yet were recalled for various reasons.

There is a continuing conflict over the safety of prolonged cell phone use, with many stating that there are currently no studies showing adverse effects. However, the World Health Organization (WHO) says the following:

"...However, because many cancers are not detectable until many years after the interactions that led to the tumour, and since mobile phones were not widely used until the early 1990s, epidemiological studies at present can only assess those cancers that become evident within shorter time periods. However, results of animal studies consistently show no increased cancer risk for long-term exposure to radiofrequency fields..."

There has also been a shift from using Chlorine for water treatment to using Chloramine. This is particularly annoying to me as I previously worked as a licensed Wastewater Lab Analyst.

http://www.chloramine.org/chlo...

"The EPA states that there are NO dermal (skin) and NO inhalant (respiratory) studies on chloramine as used as a disinfectant for drinking water."

"The EPA states that there are INADEQUATE cancer studies on humans or animals."

"Chloramine is a less effective disinfectant than chlorine. The World Health Organization (WHO, PDF 145 KB) says that "monochloramine is about 2,000 and 100,000 times less effective than free chlorine for the inactivation of E. Coli and rotaviruses, respectively.""

So there are a great many things that have been declared "perfectly safe for human use" that are in fact very questionable, especially if you have a deeper understanding of the process by which these things are declared "safe".

"Alister was a dreamer, clean air, free energy, noble concepts, but we live on a planet that's addicted to petroleum. Now what happens if you dump free energy onto the world market, stock markets around the world would plummet, our own economy would collapse overnight, recession, unemployment, war....the world is speeding up too fast, we can barely hold on as it is."

"Power and money. Is that what this was all about?"

"He was a sixty-year-old scientist who did nothing but good and they put a bag over his head."