Is Evolution Predictable?

An anonymous reader writes "C|Net is carrying a story about some research out of Rice University. They are exploring the possibility that we can predict the evolution of a species, given environmental factors." From the article: "Typically, the bacteria can continue to thrive when the temperature hits 73 degrees Celsius (163 degrees Fahrenheit). The experimental strain of bacteria contained a mutated version of a gene that, in the naturally occurring strain of the microbe, produces a protein that made existence possible. They then put these mutant strains in environments where the temperature rose slowly but steadily, and studied how different generations coped with the changing temperature. In the breeding that followed, millions of new mutations of the gene in question were produced, but only about 700 of those variants replicated some of the functionality of the naturally occurring gene."

Comments

Just throwing this out there

[Kawahee]

Just throwing this out there, are there any fundamentalist Christians out there who think that evolution inherently incorrect and this test is just a scientific oddity? What about the Miller-Urey expiriment?

Quote mining ID idiot

[DrXym]

We still do know that organisms evolve into new species. And, dare I say, I doubt we ever will. The late Dr Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book, Evolution. In reply to a questioner who asked why he had not included any pictures of transitional forms, he wrote: "I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them ... . I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." The renowned evolutionist (and Marxist) Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."

As if your arguments weren't absurd enough we can still see your ingrained dishonesty from the mined quotes you chose to tack on.

Regarding Dr Collin Patterson, let's see what Talk Origins says about him. Ooops, you totally misrepresented what he said. There's a surprise.

And now Stephen Jay Gould. Oh yes you quote mined him too. There's another surprise.

Intellectual dishonesty seems to be a hallmark of the ID movement.

Re:Quote mining ID idiot

[pintpusher]

Dude, this is so annoying.

It's not back-peddle, it's back-pedal. You know, like pedalling backwards to slow or stop a bicycle. Back-peddling would be essentially going from door-to-door BUYING things from people.

Damn you ID idiots are annoying.

Re:So it almost seems evolution follows a... desig

[Jay9333]

Sure. After some mistakes as a teenager and getting into some hallucinatory drugs (beginning at 12 years old) I ended up one fucked up kid. I was hearing voices and exhibiting some very, very odd behavior. I had no idea what reality was and probably would not have been able to function in the world very well.

I was brought to a secular therapist and it did no good. I was then brought to a Christian therapist. He didn't "cast a demon out of me" or anything like that, but simply presented the worldview that, though he didn't have all the answers, God did, and God's word is the key to understanding life.

While in jail for some crimes I had committed while on drugs I read through some of the Christian Scriptures. As I read through Proverbs I began to realize how much wisdom really was contained in the Bible... though I had trouble believing or understanding some of the harder truths presented therein. And on top of that, my mind was still quite warped and the schizophrenic tendancies continued unabated. I could not believe in Christ... it had to be a fantastic work of fiction, all this bullshit about him paying for our sins.

After about a year I was contemplating suicide because 'the voices' were still getting me to do things that I otherwise would not be doing and were still effecting my life in a negative way. That is when I stopped at a church and heard some Scripture being read. I don't even remember what verse it was, but I know the feeling that came over me... something happened. The voices stopped immediately. I had a feeling like someone was holding me tight, and all the sudden my doubts in Christ's love were gone. I didn't just "believe" but I *knew* Christ had provided for my forgiveness and redemption. I felt healed, I felt clean, I felt peace, and I felt loved to the nth degree. I felt as if God had allowed all these things to happen to me so that, one day, I would turn back to Him, His friendship and love that He desires for us. The bible teaches that faith is a gift from God, and at that point in time I was given it. That's all I know.

From that point on the truths in the Scriptures have shown themselves to be powerful time and time again, and the love of God has continually provided for me. I've never heard another "voice", and to be honest that stage of my life seems like some nightmare that I woke up from. It's hard to believe it even actually happened.

As I've applied the truths in the Scriptures to my life I've continually become a better person and my quality of life has steadily increased. There is no figure in history one can model himself after that will provide more peace then Christ. By all accounts he is an absolutely beautiful person. And I know he has provided for my peace and life.

Another, less serious, but important (at the time) anecdote involves my first heartbreak. I was 19 at the time, and had been a Christian for several years. The girl I was dating at the time was pressuring me to do sexual things that I felt were out of place outside marriage, given my Christian values. She would claim to want to be "more pure" in our relationship when I brought up my concerns, but later she'd start right back up with asking me to do the same things. And, as she was very beautiful, I kept giving in.

I had grown to love her, my first love, but I ended up breaking up with her because of all this. I was heart-broken and ended up very depressed, lying around my place wondering if I should've been a better man and helped "bring her up" to a more Christian lifestyle instead of just leaving her. As a young kid I remember feeling like it had been 19 years before I fell in love for the first time... maybe it would be 19 more before I ever had a chance to love a girl like this again.

I kept telling myself what an asshole I was, but then I remember the thought entering my mind, "She was weak-willed." Weak-willed wasn't a word I normally used in my vocabularly, and it was the first semi-encourging thought I'd had for days so it stu

You're STILL misrepresenting!

[DG]

The mechanism for evolution has been proven out so completely and so thouroughly now that there is no room for doubt that It Actually Happened. So far, WITHOUT FAIL, *every* argument brought forward by the ID/Creationist camp has been conclusively refuted by science.

But Science is also honest to a fault, and the truth of it is that determining the exact chain of species to species as a matter of HISTORY is patently impossible, as most of the evidence of each link in the chain is long rotted away.

We are utterly dependant on the happy accidents of fossils to provide examples of links - and fossils preserve, at best, the outlines of form and some structural anatomy. Without a matching DNA sample from each fossil, we are left to infer decendancy from form only - and form can (and has been proven to actually DO) evolve separately in unrelated species.

So Archaeopteryx might very well be the ancestor of all birds, or it might be a side branch of a family of birdlike dinosaurs, or it might be an independantly-evolved spur with no more relation to birds than a common reptile ancestor millions of years in the past.

But here's the point - the structure of the actual chain from microbe to man (or whatever species you choose) is UTTERLY UNIMPORTANT. It's a complete and total red herring. All you need to do is understand the mechanism of evolution, and then note that we share almost all of our DNA with great apes, to understand that we share a recent ancestor with apes. If fossils never ever happened, that alone is sufficiant evidence to prove that evolution is "correct".

The fact that we DO have fossil evidence for evolution in action over the course of millions of years only serves to underscore and reinforce an already rock (heh) solid argument.

Why are there no "transitional forms"? EVERYTHING is a "transitional form". Each species is a point on a smooth continum, not a discrete island. (Dr Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium" speaks to the distance in TIME from ancestor to descendant, not in delta DNA)

BTW, typifying Dr Gould as a "marxist" does nothing to reinforce your argument, and instead outs you as Yet Another Close Minded Creationist who, in the face of an overwhelmingly strong factual argument, is forced to sling mud in ad hominum attacks. You destroyed what little credibility you might have been extended the second you made that choice.

DG

Trolllllinggggg!

[ChePibe]

Oooh, I'm so scared! Alcohol avoidance is crazy? Caffeine avoidance crazy? Please... "Forced missionary work"? Please... "Tablet story"? Uh, dude, they were plates, not tablets. You're an uninformed idiot. Frankly, no better than the Christian "fundamentalists" you disparage. Thanks for the laugh, though. My Saturday was getting a bit dull.

And it sinks yet lower...

[ChePibe]

Oh, you brave doer of great research! What an idiot.

A simple googling of "LDS evolution" results in the following: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~seanl/stuff/Evolution.html

If you were to bother to read it (I find that highly unlikely), you would discover that Mormon declarations on the matter were 16 years BEFORE the Scopes trial.

Oh brave scientist and doer of great research! You rational one! You bastion of knowledge!

Re:And it sinks yet lower...

[ChePibe]

Failing to read and understand the rest of the post and the argument is a clear sign you're illiterate.

The grandparent to your post babbled on about the Scopes trial as his argument without doing even the most basic research to discover that the church in question had addressed the issue some 16 years earlier.