Speciation

Any idea?

You know I have a feeling we have discussed what actually constitutes a species before. Do you recall us talking about mules and horses and chromosomes? Can't think when it was, I searched our blog and couldn't find it. Then again I think the search feature at the top of page is broken, as I searched for "René Descartes" (remember the joke?) and couldn't find it. I was sure I put that joke on our blog. Anyway, there are 84 occurrences of the word God though :-)

Species - I think it's about whether they can successfully breed together, if they can then they are possibly said to be of the same species. There is an interesting article on the subject - well worth a scan read at:

http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/full/8/1/1

I think the human brain is evidence enough that we aren't totally local to the planet Earth. We're more likely the outcome of some engineering of something that did evolve on this pretty little blue and green ball.

You wrote:

I reject the idea that the universe simply "always was" and that by the random bumping of atoms into atoms, molecules were formed

Aha! I was on the line a few weeks ago asking "what is randomness"? In a Universe created by God true randomness cannot exist. Therefore all this "random bumping" is actually part of His plan. Randomness and Chance are a real gift from God. This appeals to me from the perspective of quantum mechanics. I suspect if one looks very closely at the concept of "randomness" one sees God looking back.

I'm glad that Brazil is working out, I am on vacation this week and having so much fun building a new PC and overclocking it - it's smoking, literally. New PSU coming tomorrow which should hopefully give me better voltage stability, it has two independent rails. My multiplier is at 10x, I put the HTT down to 4x, RAM frequency is divided at 166, with 2.5-3-3-8 timings, the FSB is overclocked from 200 to 230 using clockgen, giving me a nice boost of 600 mhz (dual core). All this with a stock vcore of 1.35 volts, using the stock AMD HSF. Now, unless you're a pointy headed geek you will not have understood any of that so I apologise, but it had to be said.

I'll be in Germany next week with "our friends".

Safe travels sir !