The "What Are You Up To" Post for Spring 2012 (Part 1)

 
     Every May with the end of the college school year, I turn around and take a look at how much I have or have not posted on this and realize that life is really full for me. Its a wonderfully complicated feeling.  I know stuff has happened that I should of taken time to absorb and remember, but as soon as I sit down it feels like the next thing comes along to get wrapped up in.  The biggest downside for me to this is that I don't tell other people everything that's going on, even if they want to know.  It's too tiring to keep trying to explain it all.  So friends, here's what's been going on. I'm still in the middle of some of this, and I won't be slowing down for at least 4 more weeks so rather than continue to shut you all out with minimal information because I'd much rather share life with you all, I'm writing it down.

     First off, I'll tell you about work in the lab this Spring.  Some of you may know this, but all last year my boss, Dr. Jeffery, was out of the country on sabbatical from teaching at the University.  He used the time to go do field research on many different cave organisms in the mountains of Croatia.  (Croatia is one of the richest parts of the world for caves and cave life.)  While he was gone, the rest of us here settled into our own rhythms and patterns of work that incorporated whatever else we had going on, like families, starting a business, or church. Then in January we got our boss back.  This is great and hard at the same time.  Its a lot like living without a roommate for a year and then trying to adjust to having one again.  We are all a little different from what we were in January 2011.  Some of our responsibilities have changed, some of our projects have changed.  So this semester as a Lab manager, I've been dealing with how to adjust my own workload and how the lab operates to incorporate having Bill back again.  There's a lot more to all this than I'm saying here on the Net, and it would make for a good cup of tea sometime, but suffice it to say, this has been a lot more work than I expected.

     One of the cool things about having Bill back is that I get to work on new experiments! Unfortunately I can't go into too much detail here until some things are published to the public, but I get to learn new techniques for dissecting tissues from adult fish and I'm going to be playing with some cave planaria (those little flatworms that you grow in Biology class in high school).  The technique I'm best as is staining tissue with specific antibodies that we can then change the color of to look at cellular structures under the microscope.  (Now that think about it, I could put that method up here, I might do that one of these days).  The dissection stuff is all new to me, so I'm studying up on what tools I need and the methods I'll use.  *laugh* Yum, fish guts!

      Having Bill here again is also getting everyone else to focus more efficiently on their own work, so things are also picking up for the second part of my job, being a Lab Technician.  Lab technicians can be one or more of 4 different types:  animal technicians, who specialize in the care and breeding of lab animals;  equipment technicians, who know how to use and maintain every specialized machine in the lab;  technical specialists, people who excel in one particular technique or method and so everyone in the lab relies on them for that specifically; and general technicians, people who make general stock solutions, perform basic tasks at the request of laboratory staff, order supplies, and so forth.  I'm a bit of all four.  I manage all our fish, equipment, and general tasks with the help of a few undergrad students, and then do whatever preparatory tasks Bill asks me to do so he can do his experiments.  When everyone else starts moving quicker on their own research, the amount of support I need to give increases too.  So while its great to have them be so productive (especially since that's how we'll get funding for the next few years), it can get kind of tiring to cover everything. 

     In April and May, the administrative part of my job tends to take over and I spend a lot of time dealing with paperwork.  That's because everyone tries to get things turned in before the end of the school year so they can do field work or specialty classes over the summer.  The end of June is also the end of the fiscal year for the University of Maryland, so there's a fair bit of accounting stuff to do as well.  This May is especially heavy because we need to re-apply for permission to continue to work with fish for the next three years.  This permission is called an Animal Protocol, and it is an extensive document covering all the methods, chemicals, and procedures we use to study our cavefish.  It goes into detail about how we house them, feed them, train people to work with them, how we keep records, what levels of pain we expect them to suffer and how we would alleviate it, the chemicals they might be treated with and their possible reactions, and detailed explanations of our research procedures if we are working with them alive. We are also required to justify why our research is valuable to humanity at large, why we want to use these animals in particular, and why we need the number of animals we are asking for over the next three years.  All this information is then sent to the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee here on campus, and they evaluate our proposal for compliance with all federal and state laws.  If we are approved, we are allowed to continue our work with cavefish for the next three years.  If we aren't, our lab essentially has to shut down until we get approved, and we can't publish papers with our results or get new grants during that time.

     I've invested a lot of time over the past 8 years learning all the lingo and detailing our methods, so I'm not concerned about being approved by the IACUC.  Actually, we are a model lab that they like to show off to the rest of the university.  But it is a lot of paperwork all the same, and prayers are always appreciated! This is something I strive to do my best in as much as possible, because it is one way that I can love on these people God has sent me to serve.  Excellence here may be the biggest ways they will know that God does indeed care about them and their lives, something I can't really say to them with words without any action to back it up.

     So that's all about work.  The other major part of my life is all the stuff going on at Cornerstone! I'll put that up in Part 2.

A Lesson From Biology - Why There's No Such Thing As "Status Quo"

Right now at my home church, we're very blessed to have our senior pastor Mark Lehmann and his wife home safe from sabbatical. I knew when we sent them on their well-earned break that we'd have to be prepared to keep up with him when they returned and boy, was I right! Its a good thing. Pastor Mark said last night at Wednesday service that he's found that when he just tries to maintain where he's at with God, he actually starts to lose ground. For that reason its important for all of us to keep moving forward after our Lord. And being the science nerd that I am, it hit me...that's just like the human body.

Most of you probably remember from high school that the body is composed of millions of tiny cells, each with their own characteristics and lifespans. In order for a human to gain mass and size as he develops from a child to adult, the cells in his body must divide and produce more cells at a rate much much faster than they die off. So if the average cell lives for ~1 month, the cells of a child will divide around twice as much as the cells of an adult during that lifespan, giving the child's body more mass.

The interesting thing is that once you become an adult, your cells still have to divide and produce offspring to keep you being you. They don't just sit there and stay the same all the time. Every time you eat, breathe, touch something, think something, or just plain exist with your environment you lose cells due to damage. So if your body didn't constantly produce replacements for those, along with replacements for the cells that naturally die, you'd cease to be a form anyone would recognize as human. This is a major cause of many diseases in the body, such as sickle cell anemia and osteoporosis. In addition to that each cell you are born with has a genetic timecode in it for the number of times it can divide without losing important DNA. Once that limit is reached there is no more cell division from that line. This is the fundamental cellular reason why we all age, we basically start to lose the body's ability to renew itself and maintain its form.

Here's the parallel: our bodies must constantly expend energy to grow in order for us not to die. There's a certain level of energy and effort required to keep us being us. Anything above and beyond that allows us to develop beyond our current state. If this is true for us physically, its certainly true of us spiritually; after all, we are uniquely physical-spiritual beings and many of the rules of physically mirror those of the spiritual realm. This is why there is no such thing as "status quo" for Christians. When we stop running after God, when we stop feeding on His Word or loving His people, when we stop praying and worshiping Him, we cut off our own lifesource. We start to age. We start to die inside. And then we wonder why He seems so distant, why we feel so empty, why we have little joy in our lives.

I'm currently poking at a brand new book called "The Me I Want To Be" from one of my favorite authors, John Ortberg. In it he very honestly talks about the difference between the "status quo" and flourishing in his own life, and why spiritual growth is vital to the everyday Christian. The point he tries to make is that all of us need to be intentional about our walk if we are going to survive as a Christian. It doesn't matter if you are a passionate person or not, a learned person or not, a hurting person, broken person, confused person, whatever. Every time you choose to make an effort with Christ, no matter how small, you are choosing to live. Our bodies make that choice for us automatically so we don't have to think about it much beyond eating the right kinds of foods and getting good sleep. Unfortunately we can't treat our new spiritual bodies the same way. We are saved, we are destined for heaven, and we won't ever lose that, BUT we have to choose: either we cross the finish line on our own two feet as heirs of the kingdom or we get dragged across by God's wind of motion as the kingdom charity cases. Diane Duane puts it like this in "High Wizardry" from her Young Wizard series:

Those who refuse to serve the Powers,
become the tools of the Powers.
Those who agree to serve the Powers,
themselves become the Powers.

Beware the Choice! Beware refusing it!

And its true. There's no such thing as "status quo", friends. Not in this Life.

May 2009 - In Which Amy Makes A Little Experimental Progress

For the first two week of May, my job was to provide support and resources for one of our collaborating scientists who visited us to do some research in our lab. Yoshiyuki Yamamoto (aka. Yamachan) worked for Bill for seven years as a post-doc before starting his own Evo-Devo lab at University College London. In my opinion, he's the world's best hand at doing lens transplantation in fish embryos. He's also very good at micromanipulation techniques like microinjection, and wrote the protocol we use in the Jeffery Lab as our standard. This year he came to do some injections of shh mRNA into surface fish for Bill with a new microinjection method he's developed, and as a result Masato and I got the opportunity to see him in action first hand.

For those of you who don't know, microinjection is a technique wherein you use a very tiny glass needle under a microscope to puncture the membrane of a cell or embryo and inject foreign material into it. It looks much like the video below when you look through the scope:

The only real difference for us is that we are injecting tiny volumes of mRNA right when the embryo first starts dividing so that we can affect genetic expression from the start. This video show cells being injected into a more mature embryo called a blastocyst. The technique itself is fascinating to learn and I will need a lot more practice to gain the dexterity to be really good at it but you can do a lot of neat experiments with it, especially in developmental biology.

The only downside to the two weeks was that since you have to inject the fish right when the cells start dividing, you have to be around when the fish start spawning. And our fish spawn during the night. I'm not a big fan of staying up all night, I never have been. I also had to pull a lot of 14 hour days at work since just because I was learning a new technique didn't mean that I got out of managerial duties the next day. I had to be in by 9am at the latest, even if I was up 'till 2 the night before, for two straight weeks. Boy was I tired and cranky at the end of it all! The third week of May was supposed to be recovery time, but I ended up being too busy prepping for the major water pipe refit the campus went under during the last week of May, and the annual review of our Animal Use protocol was due then too. Oh! And I was trying out a new staining technique on fat cells for Bill to look at before he left to spend the summer at Woods Hole.

Seriously, I need a clone of myself.

March 2009 - Attack of the Scientific Conference

For me, the month of March was dominated by two main events: the first, the prep and packing required for the scientific conference Bill was to head for the world's cavefish researchers down in Mexico, and the second, my own preparation as a choir member for the Easter program and my church membership class. It just turned out that all of these things came about in the same month and it took an amazing amount of work. For the first two weeks I went to class and struggled with the baptism of the Holy Spirit as a necessary part of every Christian's walk (I'm still not 100% on board, but Cornerstone took me anyways) and learning the alto part for the Easter musical. I ordered banners and T-shirts designed by Spela for the conference, did laundry, packed luggage, and did as much paperwork ahead of time as possible. Since everything was right up to the deadline, it was rather nerve-wracking though more for Spela than for me, since I was just too busy to worry much. But by March 12, we had everything together and relatively in order and apart from Ben (the lab tech from Daphne Soares' lab) losing his passport to the driver's seat of his car, we had no trouble flying in to Tampico, Mexico.

From there we picked up our rental cars and drove 3 hours inland the hacienda-turned-hotel/health spa Hotel Taninul. Our lab arrived about 2 days before the conference began to set up the conference room and confirm all our arrangements with the hotel. Spela was invaluable as our only Spanish speaker, and aside from the fact that we had to bring our own projection equipment the conference room was clean and spacious. We had some tropical rain but that just served to keep the bugs and heat in check.



On Sunday, our conference guests and fellow organizers began to arrive en masse. We set up a table at the hotel entrance with badges and welcome packets for everyone and I spent most of the day at the table welcoming people as Spela worked as a translator at the hotel desk. We had a few mix-ups on rooms and the hotel has been doing so very well that we were not the only group to visit in large quantities at the time but in the end most everyone was confortably settled. I was constantly reminded of how difficult it is to not be able to speak Spanish as many of the other guests came up to ask us what we were there for. The ones that did speak English were really interesting to talk to and full of questions. I met two high school girls who loved Friends and Seinfeld, and was told by an older retired gentleman that I wasn't getting paid enough for the number of years I've been in the lab! That felt good to hear from him, even if I know that the budget this year will not allow for pay raises.

My primary function for the three days of the conference was to run the whole technical side of things, so for 3 days I was up early and rushing through meals to set up the projector, load presentations onto my laptop, and get everything in order for the conference talks. As a result I actually attended every talk given and learned a lot, even if most of it was over my head and I was braindead at the end of the day. I also directed people to various locations, offered first aid supplies, worked with the hotel electricians to find a way to run projector and computer without tripping the fuses, and generally did whatever I could to make things go smoothly. It was a LOT more work than I thought it would be and I had no problems falling asleep at night.





Of course 3 days of non-stop scientific jargon is hard for anyone to handle, no matter how advanced you are in the field. So we didn't just spend our time talking, we also had coffee breaks where we made new acquaintances, spend the evenings by the sulfur pools talking, swimming, and (for most of the attendees) drinking. Its kind of an odd thing that community among science people is done with alcohol involved somehow. I am fortunate that I have health problems that allow me to not participate in a socially acceptable way. We also had an afternoon off from presentations to visit the small number of local sites. The British contingent unfortunately had car trouble, but I think they made it to the Choy river eventually. Since the hotel has finally installed wireless internet access, almost every member of the conference ended up online at some point or another. Scientists are worse than teenagers about being online nowadays, in my opinion.













I used my afternoon to finally go visit the ruins of the Huasteca Indians that are located about half an hour away from Hotel Taninul. I know very little about them other than I was told that they are one of the oldest Indian tribes in Mexico and to this day call themselves "people of the fields". Their ancient ruins consist of elevated platforms made of thousands of small, smooth rocks, perhaps constructed to allow their cities (when they built them) to survive plain floods. The site we visited was well cared for and even had a few slabs of stone carvings that it looks like they are working to restore. I wish them the best of luck, because it looks like that art is carved in the indigenous limestone, which is very soft compared to other kinds of rock.







Once the sessions finished on the third day, we ended the conference with a last dinner together with Mexican food traditional to the Huasteca area. Very yummy. We also showed our appreciation to the organizers of the whole show by giving them gifts, applause, and a good ribbing. Megan and Katarina bought Bill a belt made out of a snake (he hates snakes, I discovered) and signed by everyone who attended the conference. He may not like snakes, but he was a good enough sport to wear it for the rest of the night. Overall the conference was a great success and hopefully over the next few years more and more people will become interested in cavefish as a model organism in the lab.







At this point, most of the participants began to make their way back home to whichever country they were from. About half stayed for the bonus day, which was a field trip to Pachon cave where most of our fish in the Jeffery Lab come from. I did drive folks up to the town of Pachon (my first time driving in Mexico!) and we all arrived safely and un-arrested by county border police. ^_^ We then split into two groups of about 10 people. My group first went to a cave up the road that was easy to walk into and quite impressive. That ended up being a brilliant idea because so many of our conference people have never been in a cave before, and this one was quite majestic.









We returned to the town of Pachon and had lunch while we waited for the other group to return from visiting Pachon cave. Once they were back, it was time to put on some more serious caving gear and hike the short distance to the cave entrance. Pachon cave is actually rather spacious and straightforward, and the only climbing you have to do is through the rock pile at the entrance.





Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the inside of the cave to post here because just as we reached the pool in the back, we heard a voice yelling at us to get out like NOW! It turns out that this past year, the local government has been blasting in that mountain range looking for limestone quarries during the afternoons. While not close enough to cause anything like a cave collapse, the blasts were powerful enough to regularly break the glass windows in the village and possible cause the rocks at the entrance to shift. The members of the second team found this out over their lunch and ran to warn us, so we had to leave the cave in a hurry.

The rest of the trip was mostly uneventful until we tried to get back to D.C. from Houston. The plane we were in experienced problems with the landing gear dropping out of their bay about 30 minutes after we took off, and caused us to drop a bit in the air. Since the pilots couldn't get them to retract, they decided to fly back to the airport and make an emergency landing. They did a fantastic job, and aside from being nervous because I've never been in a faulty airplane before, I felt perfectly safe. They had fire trucks on the runway just in case the landing gear collapsed as we touched down, but we were fine.





I really appreciate all the prayers many of you offered for me and for this trip to be successful. I truly believe that they were the reason that I never got sick, overly-stressed, or anxious the whole time I was in Mexico. Out of all the trips I've been on down there, this was the best I've had. I finally got a chance to feel like I truly belonged in the scientific community even as a technician, and that I was able to serve above and beyond the range of people I thought I could. I was even able to talk to older women in science, and got a chance to do a little talking about how faith and science might mix. And I also discovered that there are people older than me who still get all excited over interesting bugs or animals at the drop of a hat. I knew I would never outgrow that, so I feel much less of an oddball! ^_^ Thanks to this conference, I also feel much better about my right to be in Biology.





The bug, by the way, is a bona fide stinkbug. ~_^

A Short Update From Mexico

Greetings all! Here's the last 2 weeks in pictures.

For the last month my desk has looked like

(and trust me I felt like this too) as the lab has prepped to attend



So currently I'm surrounded by 40


who are all here to talk about
. Its been very informative for the half of the material I've been able to understand. Not a bad first scientific conference!

In other news, my second wisdom tooth may be coming in. Woot.

Blogspot's a little slow this morning, I don't know why.

Well the latest news on the home front is that my glasses have now faded to the point where I am physically having trouble: dry eyes, headaches, no depth perception, stomach problems, sleep problems, etc. The situation has not deteriorated anywhere near the point I hit about 2-3 years ago with this fortunately, and my backups are already mailed to my father in CA where he will take them to the Irlen clinic and get them to boost the tint back up. I'm still safe driving and work is still possible (though more difficult of course), but why did my glasses have to go while I'm trying to finish my tastebud counts?! Its already hard enough looking through a microscope for 3+ hours in a row. *pbbbt*

Last night Danny, Luke, Kendrick and I went out to dinner/dessert to celebrate Kendrick traveling to Germany tomorrow. He's going as part of an Intervarsity outreach program there and I'm happy to say he reached his funding goals so he can go sooner rather than later. I'm really looking forward to what the Lord is going to do over there through him and how he's going to grow. He's been waiting a long time for this opportunity. 'Course we're all going to miss him horribly, but right now I'm just feeling more excited than bummed. Knock 'em dead, General! ^_^

My big bay window has started leaking again and this time Chris and I are serious about getting it fixed for good, so it looks like an adventure is beginning. I don't know how long its going to take before the problem is finally solved, but I'm getting really tired of having water dripping on my desk and computer. Ah household problems.

I uploaded some new pictures on Photobucket from the Mexico caving trip this past March so I can share some of the trip with everyone. Sorry its so late.


This is the team that went down to central Mexico in front of the hotel we used as our base. From the left front is Masato, me, Dan from American University and Spela. Behind Masato is Ed, Jon, Megan, Katarina, my boss Bill, and Jack. Ed, Masato, and Spela are my labmates and none of us have much if any caving experience. Everyone else are fellow collaborators and cavers from the Caving and Drinking Club Bill is a member of here in D.C. and they are all very experienced in difficult cave climbs and rescues. They all research some cave animal or insect. But most of all, they are all a lot of fun!


This here is a cavefish in its natural habitat. I forget which cave this is from at the moment, unfortunately. Being blind, these fish are naturally attracted to disturbances in the water which usually for them means that something they can eat has dropped in. They come investigating on their own, which makes them a lot easier to catch then their surface cousins. Ah, the best bait we've found so far for either fish is fresh corn tortillas. ^_^


This is Dan, Megan, and Katarina working with cavefish in one of the caves we visited. Our goal this trip was not to bring any fish back to the US with us, but rather to take fin clips to extract DNA from when we got home. Kat and Megan are part of a project working on dating the age of the earth from the different points of view of several science disciplines. Their part of it is to construct a molecular clock using the divergence of the various cavefish in Mexico from the surface fish ancestors as a base. But to do that, we needed a lot more DNA samples from a lot more caves than we had available here in the US, hence the need for a trip.


This pic is probably going to scare my parents (sorry!) but here's me in a cave. I didn't go down very far into this one since we had a couple of other amateurs with us at the time and I didn't want to slow the team down even more. The ladder is one of several ways you can descend into a cave, but is usually the one that requires the least equipment and so is the easiest for newbies to use. The drop was only about 20 feet so it wasn't that high at all. I stayed up at the top lip and took pictures. Or rather, Dan took this one of me. ^_^ He's threatening to make a caver out of me yet. I'm fine with that as long as he doesn't mind that I'm timid when I don't have experience with something. I get over it soon enough.

Believe it or not, this actually my first real post on this blog. Everything else was moved and compiled from various other blogs, websites, and files that I've had scattered over the internet for years. Now that Blogging sites have become mainstream and have for the most part become very easy to use, there is no real reason for me to keep trying to come up with code of my own when I'm not very good at it. I can save my efforts for the lab webpage which is in dire need of an upgrade. Eh heh.

I'll be add a few more things from my backlog as I find the time this month - old poems, notes, things like that. After that is finished though I'm hoping to start using this more often to keep all of my friends and family up to date. With my job being the kind that it is, I spend a lot of time and energy in just a couple of locations, and don't often have the spare gumption to reach out to you all. But I haven't forgotten about you, and as much as possible I would like to share my world, especially since (as my mum tells me) I don't really talk about it enough. When your mum says something like that, you should probably listen. ^_^

For the latest activity I've been up to, you'll have to go read the post over at my other blog, Amy's Oddiments. I decided to split off my hobbies from this site because if I combined them all together, it'd be one unmanageable mess. (I'm all about better management these days.) Going to Otakon with some of my friends was a treat for me in the middle of a tough work month. Right now, I'm the only staff member here at the Jeffery Lab, and while that's nice in the sense that I'm not trying to keep up with 5 people at once, its hard because I'm babysitting all of their animals and projects while they are gone. August is turning out to be an unpredictable month in my work calendar, usually I'm doing this sort of thing over the Christmas holidays. o_O

I'm not sure how much of my research projects I'm allowed to talk about on here since this is a public domain, but what I can talk about I will. This month, I am working to count tastebuds in 6-day-old fish fry. I've done this sort of work before, but only on the upper lip after I removed the lower jaw. This time around we want to count tastebuds on the lower lip too so I have to be extra careful when removing the jaw that I don't tear anything I'm not supposed to. It takes a while, as you can imagine. My best time for one sample is about 30 minutes right now. I've finished about 25 at the moment and I have around 60-70 left to go. My goal is to have all of these samples done by Labor Day so I can start a new research project this fall. Let's hope I make it!

When I get the ok, I'll explain why I care about tastebuds in the first place. ^_^

A Conversation on Evolution

Interesting that just as I started talking about evolution in my blog, it came up over dinner. The Linehans and Gabby basically had the same questions as everyone else, and while I can't claim to be anywhere near an expert, I offer up the gist of the convo for your contemplation.

From what I understand so far, the theory of evolution as it exists in Biology today rises from two important, consistently verifiable observations. The first is famous because Darwin observed it the best, namely the effects environment have on a population of any given species over time. He saw it happen in the Galapagos Islands (sp?), where the same species of finch had been separated and isolated on different islands with different environments, predators and food sources. Over the course of several generations those birds that had physical features best adapted for survival in their new environments came to dominate the gene pool of that population, because those that survived were the ones that could produce offspring. Even if we ignore for now the supposed difficulties in genetics, this pattern is something we can observe in nature over and over again. The best example I can think of is the HIV virus. Like all other viruses, it reproduces extremely quickly and has a large amount of genetic variation among its population in those genes that code for non-life-sustaining functions (things like reproductive speed, genes for immune resistance, that sort of thing). That variation rises from the very lax nature of a virus' genetic error-checking system, so basically that DNA/RNA can mutate without being corrected. And as long as its only in those non-vital areas, the virus can exist.

Thus when you try to treat a virus with any drug, there almost certainly will be one or a few of them that can resist the drug in some way. The longer the drug is administered, the better those few will survive, since the environment will kill off all the other forms and leave the resources of the host for the taking. Depending upon the virus type, those few can become predominate in the body as fast as a few days, and the drug become ineffective. That's why we currently treat HIV by combining several different drugs into a "cocktail". Its the best way to kill off as many possible variants as we can. All in all this observation is called "natural selection" by most and "adaptation" by the rest. Its observable, quantifiable, and nobody debates it.

The second observation that led to the theory of evolution in science is the similarity that exists between living things. Again this is something that is easily seen for oneself. All creatures on earth capable of walking on 2 legs possess a tailbone, whether we have a tail or not. All vertebrates have spinal cords, digited appendages, stomaches, and similar patterned brains. During the early stages of development all vertebrates or invertebrates develop exactly the same and even look the same excluding size. Once species specific characteristics start to show development is still governed by similar genes, protein families, signaling functions. All life on earth uses the same genetic building blocks, similar building patterns, similar pathways for processing energy. Why? Why is everything so different, yet so similar?

The earlier scientists of last century were in the center of all of these observations, so it made perfect sense to them to connect the two areas. Someone successfully observed a process by which similar things became different thru inheritance. At the same time others were discovering fossils and similar geological formations all around the world. In this century, we've learned much about DNA and its structure, how much its allowed to change in an individual before it causes problems, how fast it can mutate and how it can be read many different ways to make different proteins. We've even observed how different environments can directly change how DNA is expressed in the body, so that you end up with small, large, fat, or thin individuals. So the theory of evolution as I see it used in science today is basically that given a certain period of time and different environments, genetic change can happen at a certain rate and be passed on to those generations that survive in each environment, causing originally similar things to become different.

This is the practical form of the theory that modern biologists operate under. That, however, is as far as I can go. The step further that given enough time and change in the environment, the world as it exists today could arise from basic chemical processes...I can't go there. I'm still learning about the discoveries that lead some to think that. But as far as the basic idea goes, I think Darwin and his colleagues were on to something. After all, if you think about the logistics of the story of Noah, his ark could not of held a male and female of every currently existing species on the planet, even if you only consider the land animals. Unless there was some serious divine intervention, its spatially impossible. Not to mention the fact that from a gene pool of 8 people every person on the earth arose, with all different skin types, heights, shapes and sizes. If from such a small gene pool such variety could arise even among us humans (and if you go by the biblical clock, in such few millenia), than I certainly think the practical form of evolution is possible, even significantly reasonable.

That's why I referred to the philosophy and the science of evolution before. Origin is actually a philosophical question, and while we can logically extrapolate back thru time using our math and what we know of our world, we can't observe, test, or confirm anything we say about it. The biggest flaw in intellegent design as a theory is that it isn't practical. While it rightly questions how such similar things can be so different, it doesn't address why such different things are so similar. As such its more idea then observation, and that doesn't help us go about the business of science (which is basically the business of describing, understanding, and subduing the world). Creationism is even more dangerous to throw in there. Once and for all, the story of creation is NOT a scientific theory. And it CANNOT be taught as one. Creation is accepted on the evidence of witnesses, not the evidence of physical interaction with a physical world. If you ask me, the physical evidence that God exists is that this world, this universe operates under a certain set of orderly conditions, apart from which it cannot exist as it is now. Just like evolution assumes, something cannot come out of nothing. Something can only come from something else. To an evolutionist, that something could be another universe that existed before this one. To a creationist, that something is God. But to prove that one way or the other is something that science can't do, and I don't think its meant to. "Proof", after all, isn't evidence, but the acceptance of some meaning attached to that evidence as truth.

That's what I think so far. I'm still learning, and there's a lot to read and study. If I come across something I think you guys will appreciate I'll recommend it, so you can read for yourselves. But this is a pretty good summary of what I've found so far.

*laugh*

Well, judging from my last post, my friends are kind of confused about my occupation in life. I guess I should of put this up earlier, just for clarification, but I was having so much fun messing with all of you.... ~_^

I work as a senior lab tech at an evolutionary developmental biology lab at the University of Maryland, College Park. Basically we're working on how things evolve when environmental factors influence the development of a species over a long period of time. To do this, we keep two forms of the fish species Astyanax mexicanus in our lab. The "surface" sub-set comes from rivers, and have pigmented skin and eyes. The "cave" sub-set comes from, well, caves in the mountains, and they are albino with no eyes. These two sub-species are exactly the same genetically and even start out developing the same, but at about 36 hours various switches get thrown in the cavefish that change the expression patterns of various genes, which results in the different phenotype. Its kind of like why there are white humans and black humans...our genes are exactly the same, but because of a difference in gene expression as we develop, we end up with different phenotypes. We want to know how those changes first started and how they became permanent enough that our fish can pass them on to their offspring.

Since most of this stuff happens during early development, our research requires a lot of fish embryos and young fry to study and compare. We breed our adult fish here at the lab so we can have the samples we require at the right timepoints in development. The cycle takes about one week to go thru, and during that time, we're just crazy-busy because the adult fish need more care than normal and we have to collect the embryos they lay. We generally breed the fish every other week...hence the term "breeding week". And let me tell you, those weeks are a LOT of work!

I do a lot more stuff than just running that, but that's the basic idea. ^_^