Talk:Nylon-eating bacteria

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[edit] Hyphen, or No Hyphen

I'm pretty sure there should be a hyphen in between the "nylon" and the "eating" in the title of this article. Can someone move it? Thanks. --24.11.177.133 04:59, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I did some web searchs and I found it split about 50 50 between nylon eating and nylon-eating. So I think rather than change the name of the article I will just add a redirect for nylon-eating bacteria to this article. Thanks for the input Rusty Cashman 06:05, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why Creationism

Why is there a paragraph discussing Creationism? It appears biased in favour of Creationism, and is irrelevant to the rest of the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.49.31.155 (talk) 20:27, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

It was the role of this topic in the creation-evolution controversy, specifically the fact that the discovery seemed to refute a couple of prominent creationist claims, that made the topic noteworthy enough (in my opinion when I started the article back in Sept 06) to merit an encyclopedia article. Without the attention called to it by creationism critics and the responses from creationists I doubt these discoveries would have ever come to the attention of anyone other than micro-biologists, and biochemists intersted in enzyme evolution. Although at some point it might have become of interest to folks interested in doing toxic wast cleanup with bacteria. As to your comment that the text is somehow biased in favor of creationsim. I don't understand it. As I read the paragraph, it seems pretty clear that the scientific consensus is that this does represent a case where completely new information was added to a genome, and where a new useful enzyme (actually multiple enzymes) arose from already existing enzyme(s) as a result of mutation combined with natural selection. Both things that many creationists have said can never happen. Rusty Cashman (talk) 06:26, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm not too happy with the large emphasis on the evolution controversy here. It doesn't seem to be a genuine scientific controversy, but rather the old "evolutionists versus creationists" battle fought out between people on either side waving citations of scientific publications at one another. I hesitate to remove it myself, but wouldn't mind if we reach consensus to remove, or at least drastically trim, the discussion in this section. Since the argument may have cultural importance in itself, perhaps the section could be merged into a more appropriate article or even (though I don't think it's likely to be that important) placed in a new stub article of its own. --Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The 12:34, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
I note that the subject is currently mentioned in the Answers in Genesis article but not in creation-evolution controversy. --Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The 12:37, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
"Undue weight" is a criterion of neutral point of view--an article that contains a section giving undue weight to a facet of its subject is not neutral. Since I'm not the only one to dispute the prominence and size of the section about Answers in Genesis in this article, and there's clearly a dispute, I've added the {{NPOV}} tag to that section. --Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The 12:55, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] RFC: Section on evolution and creationism

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I've called an RfC to get more eyes on this subject. I propose that we trim back or possibly even remove the section describing a controversy between evolutionists and creationists over whether or not this is evidence for evolution. In the scientific community this is a non-issue. The usefulness of natural selection and other well established evolutionary theories does not hang on this example. --Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The 13:03, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

  • Pulled and perhaps reworked It should go. AIG is not an RS. This reads like apologetics. Aunt Entropy (talk) 23:41, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep as is At the risk of repeating some of my earlier comments when this issue came up a few weeks before:
The only reason this article exists is because of the creation-evolution controversy. I did the research to create it because I was encountering references to nylon-eating bacteria on many websites discussing that controversy. It is far from clear that nylon eating bacteria would be noteworthy enough to merit an article if it wasn't for the prominent role the topic has played in the creation-evolution controversy. I created the article because everyone on the web was citing scientific evidence selectively and I thought it would be useful to have an article that summerized the topic and cited all the relevent sources.
  • If you do a google search on nylon eating bacteria. This article is the first site you get. The majority of other sites found in the first 2 pages of results (I didn't check any further) are references to the topic as part of the evolution-creationism controversy. I had a heck of a time (this was before Google scholar) wading through them all to find the actual scientific papers that described the real research.
  • If you look at other Wikipedia articles that link to this one. More than half of them are either articles (including specified complexity and objections to evolution) or talk page discussions (ie Talk:Evidence of common descent) that allude to this topic as part of a discussion of the evolution-creation controversy.
  • "AIG is not an RS" Yes and no. AIG is not a reliable source on scientific topics, but it is considered to be a reliable source on the views of creationists about the creation-evolution controversy. This is a very important distinction and has been discussed at length. In fact it would not be WP:NPOV to cite the NMSR and NCSE sites that criticizes the AIG posting without also citing the AIG material itself.
  • "It doesn't seem to be a genuine scientific controversy" This is a true statement, but there is an ongoing and (like it or not) important public controversy over creationism and intelligent design in the US (and increasingly in other countries as well), and this topic has played a significant role in that controversy.

Rusty Cashman (talk) 18:03, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

    • I don't doubt that you'll get a lot of hits on web debates about nylon-eating bacteria on Answers In Genesis and the like. The question for me is: are these debates significant enough to go into this Wikipedia article? The fact that lots of people are interested in nylon-eating bacteria is a good reason for creating the article (thanks for doing so). However just because we have the article doesn't mean we should include a note about some online debate in it. It's a scientific subject and there are (as we see) ample scientific papers about the phenonenon, so obviously it merits an article, even if it wouldn't have one but for your happening to see these online debates. It looks to me as if the article is in danger of overemphasizing the role of these bacteria in a debate. The scientific community isn't about to change its mind on evolution because of the outcome of some debate on a creationist website. If someone presents a paper on these bacteria at a scientific conference, and someone stands up on the floor and says that somebody posted something about the subject on Answers in Genesis, the author of the paper isn't going to slap his forehead and say, contritely, "I'm sorry, I failed to conduct a proper literature search. My paper is invalid!" In short, the "debate" is of little or no no scientific interest and, if it has a cultural significance, the discussion can be covered at Answers in Genesis or somewhere. --Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The 18:26, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
I think there are many scientific topics that have had more scientific papers written on them than nylon eating bacteria that have never ended up with Wikipedia articles. However, that may be besides the point. More to the point is that it is far from unusual to cover non scientific (or fringe scientific) references to a scientific topic in Wikipedia articles on the topic if those references are well enough known to be notable. A classic example is Archaeopteryx and the Hoyle controversy. Another example is catastrophism and Velikovsky's views. To me the key issue is whether or not the material is likely to be of interest to a likely reader of the article, and since I think many (perhaps even most) readers of this article will be coming to it because of encountering some reference to the topic in the evolution-creation controversy (either here on Wikipedia or elsewhwere on the web) the material on how this topic has figured into that controversy is relevent. Rusty Cashman (talk) 20:03, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
  • I'm not familiar with the supposed controversy over nylon-eating bacteria. Internet postings on creationist websites are one thing, but if it's been mentioned prominently in reliable sources that would be a different matter. Can you see the distinction? I mean, if the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal or Guardian or Figaro mentions the controversy, that's different from some creationist website making a comment and some evolutionist website making a response. --Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The 20:29, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
The very first reference to this topic in the evolution-creationism controversy that I am aware of is this article entitled New Protiens without God's Help which was first printed in a 1985 issue of the National Center for Science Education's journal. The NCSE is a partisan organization with a strong POV, it was formed to fight the first efforts to teach "scientific creationism" in US public schools back in the 70s and 80s, but unlike AiG it is generaly considered a reliable source on matters of science education. The point of the author (a Biology professor at San Diego State) is that the research on nylong-eating bacteria (and in particular on the Nylonase enzymes) refuted the claim frequently made by creationists that proteins were too complicated and specfic in function for new ones to arise through a process of mutation and natural selection. The topic was picked up by NMSR (New Mexicans for Science and Reason). At some point AiG responded and NMSR modified their post to critize AiG's response. There have been manhy other posts, but as far as I am aware those were the three that fueled the flame.Rusty Cashman (talk) 16:41, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
  • 'Keep per Rusty. AiG is an RS regarding AiG. AiG is not being used to source anything other than for AiG opinion.--ZayZayEM (talk) 10:22, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Behavior of Nylonase

Does anyone know how the various nylonases work to cleave the nylon byproducts?--Mr Fink (talk) 20:56, 8 February 2008 (UTC)