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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."
The crux of Darwinism is precisely that evolution is undirected, stemming from *random* mutations. Those who say there is a purpose and pattern to evolution are no longer in the Darwinist paradigm. Whether they want to or not, they are advocating Intelligent Design. Since purpose, direction, and non-random order can be observed everywhere in nature, perhaps they will eventually inspire a scientific revolution.
... . 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 fossi
Some people use the controversy over Intelligent Design to warn about "fundamentalists" who want to reverse modern science and take us back to the Dark Ages. The overheated reaction- including purges of scientists who doubt Darwinism, censorship of dissident ideas, and legal action against promulgating Intelligent Design--is a textbook illustration of what the pioneering historian of science Thomas Kuhn describes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
He shows how scientists develop "paradigms," or explanatory models, the terms of which they use to organize their findings and interpret their research. For example, for centuries, the Ptolemaic model of the universe, the assumption that the moon, the sun, and the planets revolve around the earth, was adequate to account for nearly all astronomical observations. But then someone discovered "anomalies" that the model cannot easily explain. Galileo with his telescope observed that some other planets had moons revolving around them, as earth does.
Typically, the old-paradigm scientists first defend the model by attacking the anomaly detectors, often virulently, sometimes using the law and institutional power to silence the critics of the established model. Galileo was tried, forced to recant, and put in prison. Meanwhile the scientists tinker with the model and try to make it fit the observations. The Ptolemaic system was modified with epicycles and complex new mathematical models. Eventually though, as more and more anomalies are discovered, the old paradigm is abandoned and a new one that explains the anomalies takes its place (such as the Copernican model that the earth revolves around the sun along with the other planets).
Intelligent Design has found anomalies that just cannot be explained in terms of Darwin's random natural selection. As Michael Behe has shown, the most basic mechanisms of life--the structures within a cell, the chemistry of blood-clotting, the processing of oxygen--display "irreducible complexity" that could not have evolved randomly. If these already complex and finely tuned structures were not in place, life on any level could not exist.
Apologists for evolution often simply ignore these anomalies. They launch off on "evidence" for Darwinism, such as how bacteria develop strains that are resistant to antibiotics through natural selection. But no one denies that natural selection occurs... of course the fittest survive. However, Darwinism insists that natural selection is what creates new species. And the evidence for that happening--for bacteria turning into another life form--is lacking. As more discoveries like the one in the article above come about, perhaps a revolution will begin to take place.
We know that evolution can help an organism adapt... and, as the article shows, we are beginning to show that organisms do this in accordance to a pattern or (dare I say) a design.
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