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Predicting Evolution: A Beginner's Model
Silance writes "According to ScienceDaily , Scientists have developed a method of accelerating evolution in the lab that accurately mimics natural evolution. Drug-resistant E.coli strains from the 1940's that were subjected to the evolutionary speed-up process indeed followed the same evolutionary path as their natural bretheren. It is believed that the process could be used to predict the future monkey-wrenches that evolution might lob our way. Neat-o!"
but which is the more perfect God?
The One who builds a grand machine starts it running and enjoys the show?
Or the One who continually needs to tune it up?
Did God create the universe? Is solely a question of of religion. How does the universe work? Is the domain of science, but most importantly, not answered by the first question. A fact lost on most creationists.
I'm not sure if this source is accurate, but if the e-coli bacterium has more than 4 million base pairs... damn, isn't that a lot of combinations? a lot of possibilities for mutatiions? How can you simulate such mutations if each mutation occurs within the next day (maybe even hours) or so??? I don't know where my logic failed, but this seems to me as an awful lot of computation and experimenting if you want to look at the development over a period of 40 years...
i reccon that must amount to at least 40*365.25=15 thousand reproductions, multiply this with 4*3 million if you want to change (not cut one out, add one or anything) just 1 base pair per reproduction and it starts to become a mind boggling big project.
And sure, there are a lot of paths that won't result in viable bacteria, but still..
can someone tell me how they do this and where my calculations go wrong?
else it is a very interesting idea, researching all possibililities... i wonder when we will be able to do this with human genes... just to find out what kind of creatures may evolve from our genome in due time.
"We live in our minds, and existance is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality" Ayn Rand
I'm sorry - but by making it clear that your religion is at stake, and is in serious danger should 'macro' (your term) evolution be real, you have made your argument very weak. Scientific data is meant to be examined objectively, without influence from personal agendas. It is sadly true that sometimes scientists (being only as human as the rest of us) do fail in this regard; it is one of the strengths of science that the data can be re-examined and better (more objective and explanatory) hypotheses reached.
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Actually, it's not a BS experiment. If you can see how bacteria can evolve around potential treatments for them, you can see how long they will be suceptable to the treatment, and by what evolved mechanism they are able to survive. You could then use that information to develope a drug that delivers an initial punch while also preventing the predicted evolutionary escape route.
Let's see the independantly-verified study on Mt. St. Helens lava. You know what's interesting? After a fairly exhaustive search (after a creationist that I know brought up this very point) both online and in the real world, I could find nothing on this study anywhere EXCEPT within Creationist writings. Nowhere in any of them were sources cited (other than unqualified fellow creationists). This is the most common rule of Creationism: Anything a fellow creationist comes up with, that fits what you want to believe, is accepted as fact without question.
Now, I'm willing to accept that qualifications aren't everything. If you'd like to claim that earning a Masters of Archeology prejudices a person to believe in radiocarbon dating's accuracy, fine. It doesn't matter to me who presents the proof. Proof is proof. Perform a double-blind test here; publish your results.
The advantage to science is this; the biggest way to make a name for yourself is to disprove or enhance a long-standing theory. If you can prove that radiocarbon dating is inaccurate, you may not be popular at first, but you will be famous. But if you and your fellow creationists wish to be taken seriously, present proof based on facts. Speeches by other creationists (one of Kent Hovind's favorite sources) and "the bible says so" does not count as fact.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
The quote you provide from the Creationists.org site could be construed as a misrepresentation. The quote is:
"...Evolutionists don't want the weaknesses of evolutionary theory to be known to the public. In fact the negative effects of engaging in a debate with a Creation Scientist is so bad that evolutionist, Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, Berkeley, California, says, ?Avoid Debates. If your local campus Christian fellowship asks you to ?defend evolution,? please decline....you probably will get beaten" [creationists.org]
The quote from Eugenie Scott is probably accurate, and as a student of molecular biology and biology enthusiast I have encountered the same advice on several occassions. In fact, a similar observation is early in the preamble to the excellent "Abusing Science: The case against creationism" by Philip Kitcher. Humorously enough though, it isn't the weakness of Evolution that prompt this advice, but the weaknesses of "Creation Science".
Virtually every old, threadworn, thoroughly debunked fallacy from a hundred years or more ago is still part of the "Creation Science" arsenal vs Evolution - just because a claim has been closely inspected and soundly refuted doesn't mean that a "Creation Science" advocate won't trot it out. As a result, it is easily possible to embarass Evolutionists by simple "Crapflooding" - a "Creation Science" advocate can trot out more shoddy thinking in thirty seconds than can be cleaned up by even the best prepared Evolutionists careful scholarship in thirty hours. The result? The audiences attention wanders off, and the lesson carried home by everyone is 'Well, the Evolutionist couldn't refute everything...'
The evidence against "Creation Science" is out there, it is thourough, complete, and utterly ignored by "Creation Science" advocates (the talk-origins faq is probably a good starting point)- because they are only trying to promote an agenda. Solution? Don't try to argue - it is impossible to move them from their position, even if you did manage to convince them - denying them a forum is the one of the only ways to keep the pseudo-science from spreading. The other is a good education, complete with scientific literacy and critical thinking skills; a seemingly impossible dream for public schools here in the US.
More of a rant than I really intended - hope I didn't offend, but this is one of my pet peeves...
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