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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."
You have got to be kidding. To even have a BASIC understanding of evolution you have to know that it means species evolve to fit new environments. This, at its very basic, means that if the climate is hotter, the species adapts to the extra heat. DUH. When a new predator comes along, the prey ... adapts to defend/hide from that predator. DUH.
They didn't need to perform their silly experiments to come up with this hypothesis. It's built in to the basic nature of the idea.
Now, as for the article... They perform and experiment TWICE and said that was enough to produce this theory. Because out of 2 million possible mutations, the same 6 occurred both times in large numbers.
Uhh... Don't forget CHANCE you fools. Twice is not very conclusive.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I had to read this several times before it started making sense... It's encrypted, really, it is.
> 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.
That should read:
The experimental strain of bacteria contained a mutated version of a gene that, in the naturally occurring strain of that gene, produces a protein that made existence in these temperatures possible.
So, in short, they disabled the microbes heat resistence, and saw if the buggers could grow it back.
since the human race is subject to the same laws of evolution i think this gene should be added to the human race so when global warming really starts to warm things up those humans that can use and evolve with this gene will survive...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Slashdot probes the responsiveness of the crazy fundies by posting "fundy bait" article at 5:30AM on a Saturday.
That environment is absolutely different to real life. Try at least to have different temperature zones with more food in the hotter ones, for example. Or repeat the experiment not two, but a thousand times, and see if the result is always the same. That will be a bit more similar to real life, and so have a bit more prediction value.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Sure, you can predict evolution if you control all of the life-or-death variables that influence the viability of the bacteria species you're watching. I mean, for fun, I go to Drudge for headlines like that because, well, it's amusing to see the twisted contexts... but isn't this audience/editorial team just a skosh more thoughtful about this sort of thing? Given the traditional dialog and debate here about all thinge evolution-related, throwing that word in the headline in that way drags all of that baggage in with it. Come on, there, Zonk! How about a headline like "Unnatural Selection Works Too" or something similar.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Oh wait, maybe, by that time, our Sun will be white dwarf.
hilarious
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?
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Is that a group of graduate students have returned from E3 with an unauthorized copy of the game Spore instead of working on their project for the final. I predict that these lazy students will evolve into hard working game testers.
If you know _all_ environmental variables, then, yes, you can predict which specimens survive and will probably reproduce with a simple species, such as the microbes in these experiments. With more complex species, for example humans, other, less easily determined factors, including one commonly known as 'attraction', will come into play.
In other words: you can survive all you want, but if you're butt-ugly you won't get no sexx0r*.
*: If you're butt-ugly: This is not meant to give offense, just stating a biological fact.
Wrong. You're looking at it from the wrong angle.
Darwin stated that the mutations were RANDOM and that those that led to better survivors would out live those without.
E.g., if my kids can cope with the sun better than your kids then there is a chance they won't die off from cancer. If all their kids and grandkids and so on, I'd have a family tree that tends to live longer and reproduce more, etc.
It has nothing to do with the mutations being guided.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Explain how I'm wrong, again, plese. I stated, as you said, that Darwin stated that the mutations were random. What I was responding to was the article that said perhaps the mutations aren't random b/c we can predict them.
The article said, to be exact, "The group then conducted the experiment again, and the same mutations developed." In other words, not only did the same mutations *survive*. The same mutations *occured*.
From TFA: "Can we predict how animals and plants evolve in response to changes in the environment? Maybe, according to preliminary research from Rice University."
Can we guess the numbers from the lottery? Maybe, says preliminar research I just did.
Evolution works by having random variations and mutations based on what is physically possible and better adapted to the environment.
You can never guess which mutation will be best fitting though. We can guess some mutations that might work somewhat better, but nature will surprise you with something you never thought of.
Let's not imagine we're that smart, we still barely know the details about our own species let alone make guesses for the entire nature.
But of course: if we put a cat and a catfish in deep water I think it's obvious which one the natural selection will prefer.
Bah. Strongly biased anti-intellectual rant. Nothing to see here.
They aren't talking about predicting the mutations. They are talking about predicting the *surviving* mutations, which in a case where they are actively and in a somewhat controlled way killing off the least fittest really isn't as remarkable as the headline implies.
I'll bet there WERE other mutations but they died off and the one with the heat resistance won out twice in a row.
Big deal. That doesn't fly in the face of Darwinism.
That the same mutation eventually occurred twice given a limited genome doesn't surprise me.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It also said MILLIONS of different mutations occured. sounds random to me. The fact that 700 of those mutations happened to work better when it got hot is just lucky chance. Now, the millions (minus 700 survivors) die off, leaving the 700. The chance that their offspring can also cope with heat has just increased dramatically, and they will be the bacteria that survive global warming.
The mutations are random, evolution is random and unguided, but the ones best able to cope do so, and have kids who are also generally able to cope, barring other mutations that put them back at the original level.
Hope that makes sense. (:
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Again, what is interesting about the article, to me, is that not only do they predict he surviving mutations... but they predict which mutations will *form*. The same exact mutations *occured* in the same order the second time... and, as you said, the same ones eventually died off and the same one or two survived as the most fit.
I'm not saying one experiment is the straw that breaks Darwin's hypothesis. I of course observe the survival of the fittest like everyone else. I'm just saying it is an interesting find, that's all.
May not suprise you, but it seemed to suprise the scientists in the article somewhat.
I'm not saying one experiment is the straw that breaks Darwin's hypothesis. I of course observe the survival of the fittest like everyone else. I'm just saying it is an interesting find, IMHO, that's all.
I knew one day this question would be asked....
If you continue to slowly increase the temperature, at what point do the bacteria reach an evolutionary dead-end and die? There are bacteria that survive on or near geothermal vents.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That does make sense. Again, what is interesting about the article, to me, is that the same exact mutations occured (not just survived, but occured in the first place and then survived) in the same order the second time. Then the same ones eventually died off and the same one or two survived as the most fit.
I'm not saying one experiment is the straw that breaks Darwin's hypothesis. I of course observe the survival of the fittest like everyone else. I'm just saying it is an interesting find, that's all.
It's interesting but you have to take things into context.
Darwin states survival of the fitest.
This experiment didn't say the ideal mutation was the ONLY mutation that occurred.
That the same mutation occurred is particularly interesting but you also have to look at the amount of variation available. I mean, just how long is the DNA of a microbe anyways? Laws of probability state that if the available mutation pool is small enough you should see a good overlap.
It's like putting six playing cards in a bag and pulling 3 of them, placing them back, pulling 3 more and being amazed that you had pulled at least one of them twice.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
This is a remarkably stupid objection, confusing randomness with unpredictability. If random events were completely unpredictable, then casinos would not make money. The experiment describes exactly the kind of conditions--very large numbers of bacteria--in which one can make predictions about the outcome.
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.
Considering that it has now been shown by genetic sequencing that all of the differences among species can be attributed to the kinds of genetic changes that have been shown to arise by mutation--perhaps the most dramatic example in the history of science of the discovery of evidence confirming a theory--this is also pretty foolish.
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....
Ah, the sine qua non of the Creationist/ID crackpot: the quotes taken out of context. The fact that they always seem to regard this as a particular telling point (note that the poster saved it for last, apparently under the delusion that it is some sort of haymaker of argumentation) is illustrative of how little they understand science. I suppose that this sort of textual hair-splitting must make some kind of sense in the context of Biblical interpretation. But science is based on evidence, not the words of the prophets.
Very good point. I'm not sure how applicable the "6 card" analogy is... most likely what they've found is a bit more noteworthy then that. But nonetheless, you're right that just one experiment isn't nearly enought to get hysterical about.
I believe Darwin's comments have often been missunderstood because of an unfortunate choice of words. Evolution doesn't rely on the survival of the fittest, but of the most sustainable. If the mutant variants can sustain themselve they will survive, and be the DeFacto higher organism. Those that can't, don't, and become history.
... But this is not necessarily the case. Bacteria will almost certainly outlive humankind, for example.
Fittest suggests that you must be 'more' something. Stronger, faster, smarter,
Because you can - or because you should?
No, because we do not evolve anymore since the advent of agriculture (or so).
You just got troll'd!
I'm a 'geek', system admin at Duke University, MCSE certified, CCNA certified, and responsible for a wide range of systems that are used by doctors, scientests, and other geeks.
So don't tell me I don't want to learn or that I don't think information or science is useful just because I pray and have experienced the power of prayer where science fails (and, believe it or not, science doesn't hold the answer to all of life's problems).
That having said, it can even be viewed at a higher abstraction level. Maybe organisms have already gone through a selection process with the result that mutations that have a higher chance of occurring in a warmer environment, will also benefit the fitness of that organism in a higher environment.
But it seems clear to me that stating that mutations occur randomly, underestimates the process. It's a simplification which usually is fine, but now it seems that research is showing that maybe it isn't that random. The next step in research is unraveling how mutations aren't random, and then try to answer how this has evolved.
You have got to be kidding. To even have a BASIC understanding of evolution you have to know that it means species evolve to fit new environments.
Actually it isn't just that... (Well if you include evolving because other species are eating you, but that could be lumped into 'environment')
It is that mutations are random and often times ill suited for their environment, but it is only a matter of chance that something survives to pass on its genes. Whether it is not being eaten into extinction by another species, not over populating until you destroy existing resources and then you go extinct, not dying because of an ice age, or not being wiped out by a meteor.
One can say... Well that was the environment that killed off those species... Well it isn't because that the species evolved to adapt to the environment, but only those whose random mutations made them more suited for the environment survived.
As in... If you put a million grizzly bear in the polar region none of them are going to spontaneously evolve his fur white more like a polar bear because that was the best choice.
However, if any of those bears happened to spontaneously mutate into where their hair turned white making them better hunters so that the seals couldn't see them. Then those species may actually do better than there brown counterparts and may survive in times of hardship where as the browns die out.
What I am trying to say is that any mutation that doesn't kill off the species will continue in the species, but it is more probable that mutations that allow a species to survive will get passed on.
Take our appendix for example... What the hell does that do?
It may or may not have had some purpose in the past, but we simply don't evolve it away because it doesn't kill us so we pass it on to the next generation.
Basically, evolution isn't about mutating into the best possible creature for the environment, but rather we mutate constantly and the mutations that kill us don't get passed on.
Now that leads to the question "What really causes DNA mutations?"
Chances are it could be do to higher radiation events during magnetic pole reversals or gamma ray bursts where the radiation is so high that many species die of cancer and health problems, but those who do survive have random mutations. After that... Any mutation that doesn't kill the species off due to environmental factors passes those genes on.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Hey bud, copy and paste much?
http://www.worldmag.com/articles/11485
All I had to do was copy and paste one phrase into google with quotes.
... I pray and have experienced the power of prayer where science fails...
Care to share?
To use your casino analogy, the experiment is like poker player drawing the same 7 hands in a row... twice. Sure, randomness and predictability aren't to be confused. But the same gene's in the same order twice??? That is a bit more specific then a casino predicting they'll win a little less then one percent of the time in craps.
And I'm not so sure I've given a false representation of Patterson. What is the context? You said I ripped him out of context, but you failed to give it. The fact is the passage quoted continues '... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test.'"
I think it's pretty clear what he is saying there. There is no way to know how one form gave rise to another, or if one form is an ancestor of another (i.e. he says "is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds?"). He can try to back-peddle if he wants, but what he said certainly seems clear to me. Perhaps now he thinks he was being *to* honest when he said, "such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test." Maybe he would now take that statement back since it (obviously) has given creation scientists plenty of ammo... but that doesn't change the fact that he said it.
Obviously you can't predict evolution perfectly, but it is an extremely complicated (one could say the most complicated) mechanism in existence and so with a good understanding of the dynamics, organisms, their biology and environments you might very well be able to do something useful. For example the increasing of temperature gradually is in fact one such attempt.
If you had a very good understanding for example of a given gene and its mutations in an organism throughout history and in different evironments, you ought to be able to predict something of how it would act if inserted into another organism, and if it is a very successful gene it may have a great impact on "evolution". But it is probably 99% fantasy if you think those picture books illustrating "future creatures" are going to be what will come to pass.
The only meaningful answer to this question is, if you have full control over the environment can you direct evolution of an organism to develop in your desired direction. Of course this is possible, happens every day in the lab. But once you get away from talking about the evolution of say a given gene, and start talking about what a creature looks like, I think this is beyond our current knowledge though possibly not out of reach if we had far more powerful, half-sentient computers handling most of it. We are talking more about genetic engineering though now, not evolution. Possibly if we had a way to describe biomes and evolutionary stresses on organisms it might be possible to predict things like giraffes' necks elongating. Deducing the structure of an eye or a human's gait would seem to be far more difficult.
Of course, by itself, the experiment proves little. However, a reproduceable experiment that suggests, in even a small way, predictable genetic responses to environmental pressures is very interesting. Sure, we want more than two runs, but the results so far seem very convincing.
"Miller-Urey only showed that the amion-acids could be produced by "accident". Of course, it proved this by going through a lot of hard work to make them."
m ath-dembskis-bad.html
Well no, not really. Until them, we didn't know that the basic amino acids will form under some fairly pedestrian chemical conditions. Miller and Urey DIDN'T sit down and build them: they instead set up an environmental condition and they came about by themselves. That's only a tiny piece of the picture in the field of abiogenesis, but it was most definately a fascinating surprise that changed the way we thought about organic molecules.
"What it dosen't accout for it the information."
This has become the latest creationist trope, but it's complete nonsense.
Define "information" any way you like, and evolution produces it. It's mathetically demonstrable, we do it all the time in practice when we use genetic algorithms, and we observe it in nature. Generating new information is a BASIC function of the evolutionary process (depending on how you define information, it's either random mutation ITSELF, or the outcome of natural selection). Heck, the article here describes it happening. It might not phrase it in the language of information, but when the demands of an environmental pressure is imprinted onto a gene pool, that's an information increase in the gene pool (information about the environment).
The claim that evolution cannot produce information is a garbled version of the arguments of William Dembski, whose arguments have been roundly debunked too many times to count.
http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/king-of-bad-
"Once DNA would be formed out of the acids it has to code for orgenelles and cell walls and whatever else."
Well, eventually, but almost certainly not right away. You're imagining that early life would immediately need to become like life today. Almost certainly, that amount of complex cell structure was not there at the beginning. Single celled life ruled the world far longer than the multicelluar life and complex single-celled structures we have today.
"Even the scientists that support Evolution are having a hard time coming up with an explination with where the information came from, not just the medium it is carried on."
As I said, no. Information is trivial. What you are probably referring to is that we don't know how specifically early life arose, largely because we just don't have much to go on to direct us in one direction or another. But like most things in science, we're working on it, and fascinating discoveries and insights happen almost every other month.
Sweet. They didn't have the article online when I originally read it (I have the print subscription) and so I hand typed the entire thing and saved it on my computer (I thought it was interesting). I also did a little more investigation into the quote of Paterson, etc. and recorded that too.
Good to know they're putting their stuff online now.
Absolutely. The pattern is that adaptations that are good for survival and reproduction in the prevailing environment are successful and will proliferate within a population, while those that do not will become less common. The rate at which the adaptations become common depends on factors such as reproduction rate (most bacteria reproduce very quickly) and how intense the selection pressure is (surviving/not surviving in near-boiling water is a pretty intense selection pressure).
There are many mechanistic nuances to exactly how mutations occur, and what factors affect their selection and there is healthy scientific debate over the details, but the basic idea remains - it's not rocket science.
Say it all you like - it won't make it true. Or science.
"E pur si muove!" - attributed to Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642
Will Wright's Spore (tm) He probably knew this all along.
I think you are missing what random means. Random doesn't mean without any causal connection to anything whatsoever: it doesn't really even mean unpredictable (know all the causal conditions and a random dice throw is predictable).
What is means is that mutations are not directly correlated with anything having to do with functional needs. Chemical bonds like DNA don't "know" anything about the larger functional structure they are a part of, and they don't act like they do. And this experiment doesn't show anything otherwise. MILLIONS of mutations, and only 700 were of the short that improved function, and it sounds like they did so in different ways. That's precisely in line with the idea that mutation is random, not in contradiction to it.
To use your casino analogy, the experiment is like poker player drawing the same 7 hands in a row... twice. Sure, randomness and predictability aren't to be confused. But the same gene's in the same order twice??? That is a bit more specific then a casino predicting they'll win a little less then one percent of the time in craps.
More like the winning hand in a poker game of a billion players being the same several times in a row: "Oh my god, the winning hand is a royal flush once again!!!! The game must be fixed!"
if and only if linux is compile to only use the four letters...
This message is brought to you by the letters "G", "A", "T" and "C".
It doesn't say that they same exact mutations happened. It says that 700 mutated in some way to get back some of the same sort of functionality. We've done many many "knockout" experiments like this before and had similar results: various new solutions to the broken system crop up. Usually they are innovative and surprising new solutions. It's certainly possible that if you delete an A from the DNA, it will randomly mutate and return: that's not surprising either. But by and large it will solve the problem in a different way, and that's exactly what we are seeing here.
What's important to understand is that there are many many functionally identical genetic sequences. Proteins can vary wildly in their amino acid sequence but still fold the same way. There are many many ways to accomplish the same thing.
It's Darwin's theory, not hypothesis. Dembski and Behe's argumentum ad ignorantiam is a hypothesis. However it is nice to see an IDist who actually understands that calling it a hypothesis is more snide than calling it a theory.
Even if this did break Darwin's theory, I'm afraid to tell you that you're gunning at the wrong target. Pure Darwinian evolution was superceded some time ago by the Modern Synthesis. If you want to attack evolution, it's probably better to attack current theory rather than Victorian Age thinking, wouldn't you say?
Abiogenesis and the formation of the earliest RNA/DNA molecules is largely outside of the domain of evolution. Evolution describes changes in biodiversity among a group of living organisms in an environment. How those organisms got here, (panspermia vs. hot springs vs. mud) is a question for biochemistry.
Scientist: "Hm, that's strange. Let's see if this can be reproduced by anyone else. If so, we can come up with a theory and some experiments later."
Creationist: "OMG! Look! It's God! See, I told you! All of you! You wouldn't believe me the last 7267 times I told you, but now you must believe me! Now go to church!"
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
"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."
... . 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 de
But he hasn't shown this at all. Your argument doesn't even make sense: life could not exist without blood clotting? This will come as a huge surprise to bacteria! Sea cucumbers will all die in shock at the news! Inability to process the corrosive poison oxygen: oh noes! Yeast is a miracle!
Fact is, blood clotting has turned out to be as embarrasing an example for Behe as all the rest: there has in fact been extensive work done to figure out how blood clotting evolved.
And the larger point is even if we didn't have good leads on how something evolved, historically, simply saying "I don't see how it could have" is not a good argument: it's merely incredulity, not a demonstration of impossibility.
This is the reason Behe's arguments are not taken seriously. ID theorists, of course, would have you believe that it's because of a giant conspiracy or dogma. It couldn't POSSIBLY be because the arguments of ID proponents are incorrect. Merely being able to make arguments against evolution proves that these arguments are right and evolution is just a fad!
"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."
This is always fascinating to me. People like you claim that evolution is flawed... but when you actually start talking about it, you imply that you don't even understand what it is.
This is a REALLY key point to grasp. Evolution is cladistically conservative. What that means is that is one life form does not "turn into" another. Everything that descends from bacteria will still be rightly classed as bacteria (that is, everything that set bacteria apart from all other life will still set all its descendants apart), just like we humands are still eukaryotes, still tetrapods, still eutherians, still apes, and so on.
The evidence for speciation is not only solid, but has been observed in nature. The mechanisms, despite what ID theorists would have you believe, are not even mysterious. Speciation at base simply involves two population genetically drifting away from each other to the point where they can no longer interbreed. For some species we even know how this happens down to the point by point mutation (like in abalone, where the "lock/key" mechanism of sperm and eggs is constantly changing, often leaving islands of incompatibility where certain populations are stranded off of from others).
"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."
Did you even READ the article? That's not what it shows at all. Where in the article are you finding this? Even patterns of mutation is not the same thing as design: mutation is a physical process with its own observable constraints and quirks.
"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
It's called "Spore" is it not? And it's not released yet.
We're all victims here, I think. From TFA: "Conceivably, if scientists can predict how the microbes will adapt to changes in their environment, they can develop antibiotics that won't be rapidly rendered ineffective by stronger, successive generations." That's probably the real goal, the message just gets mangled by some dumbassed reporter.
We've been working at predicting evolution and using evolutionary results to explain why animals have certain characteristics for quite some time. c.f. Evolutionary Game Theory, Behavioral Ecology, Adaptive Dynamics, etc. Of course these are mostly all theoretical results. The guys from TFA are doing experimental research that happens to verify the theories, which is in itself pretty cool - it's hard to do evolutionary experiments for obvious reasons. Using bacteria isn't a particularly new idea, but modern technology is enabling more sophisticated and precise experiments.
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
One theory on the appendix has been that the smaller the appendix comes, the MORE likely it is to get infected and kill. So once evolved, and once run out of a useful purpose, it has become very hard to get rid of, because many of the avenues are blocked.
Likewise, it's worth noting that very often disparate elements are linked. The appendix itself might not be a good thing, but it's developmentally linked to or even just very close to something on the genome that is hard or dangerous to tinker with. And thus, it has been left alone since tinkering with that area of the genome breaks something else important.
Now that leads to the question "What really causes DNA mutations?"
Chances are it could be do to higher radiation events during magnetic pole reversals or gamma ray bursts where the radiation is so high that many species die of cancer and health problems, but those who do survive have random mutations. After that... Any mutation that doesn't kill the species off due to environmental factors passes those genes on.
Not bad up until this point.
For one thing, most evolution has less to do with mutations, and more to do with subtle variations between members of a species. So with the case of fur color in mammals, you have multiple genes that contribute to the quantity of melanin in hair. Individuals with combinations ideally suited to the environment are more successful than others.
Secondly, we know many of the actions for how mutations happen at the biochemical level. Most mutations occur because of errors in DNA replication and repair. Another class of mutations occurs because DNA can fold back on its self under certain conditions, or become attached to other strands. These mutations occur all the time and with a frequency stable enough that we can use them as timers to estimate the geologic time that has elapsed since Kodiak bears and Polar bears shared a common ancestor.
As for the ID attempt to bring about a paradigm shift in science: good luck. Seriously! The crux of ID is that of bias in observation of the natural world, and as such, ID attacks a fundamental difference in philosophy that separates spirituality from science: un-biased falsification. My mind spins at the notion of how that kind of paradigm shift would change what we call "science" - perhaps we could classify the current experiments involving neural imaging and Buddhist meditation as such. A revolutionary scientist is not attached to any particular scientific paradigm.
That being said, the only thing that creates new species is the human mind. Species do not exist: individual organisms exist. Individual organisms exhibit their characteristics (phenotype) based on the expression of their hereditary information (genotype in the form of nucleic acids) in their particular environment. The current model for biological evolution is really quite simple: it's a change in the frequency of alleles of genes in a population of organisms over multiple generations. And that brings me back to Darwin and your comment on the directionality of biological evolution. Of course it isn't random! J.T. Bonner's model for evolution is quite nice and has but a few basic ideas, as follow. The unit of evolution is the life cycle, not the individual. At the smallest stage in the life cycle, novel changes are introduced into the DNA. The life cycle develops through an interplay between its genetics and environment, during which time the weakest and unluckiest variations of the life cycle will die. The life cycle that develops to it's pseudo-largest stage will be able to reproduce, but will do so selectively. The frequency of alleles of genes in the population of life cycles changes in that moment of producing an offspring, and so evolution happens under the influence of both random and intelligent change.
But perhaps this is where the creationist root of ID takes charge, because ID always seems to want the intelligence to be outside the limits of the natural world. I think I'd have a lot less of a problem with the notion of intelligent design if the designer could be a sufficiently advanced product of biological evoltuion.
This belief that humans are no longer evolving is wrong. The advent of agriculture, the improvements in medicine and so on may now mean that certain features that used to be favoured are no longer so beneficial, e.g. the ability to run fast, but this does not mean that we are no longer evolving. Agriculture wasn't the end of the road for human evolution, if anything was it was (good) medicine, the ability to cure potentially fatal diseases and allow people to reproduce who would otherwise not be able to. Despite this there are still features that make some people more likely than others to survive and reproduce, therefore passing on their genes to future generations; medicine hasn't turned all humans into perfect identical clones. We still have features that distinguish us from each others, some of which will be passed on, we are still evolving. The future however could make things considerably worse (designer babies etc).
While the lack of transitional fossils is a mild gap in the theory of evolution. But it highlights a few misconceptions about evolution as a theory.
1: The core of evolution is not about which species begat another species, but about collections of species as cousins and siblings. We have a family tree of tens of thousands of species catalogued and identified. We can sort these species into groups by morphology, physiology, and similarities in DNA. And what we get is a pattern that looks a heck of a lot like descent with modification.
2: Transitional fossils really are not that important to evolutionary biology. Why? Because there is abundant evidence for evolution, using multiple chains of evidence that evolution is a slam-dunk in science. No one has ever directly observed the Milky Way galaxy, and yet, the Milky Way galaxy is not a controversial theory. No one has directly observed the Big Bang, but we have multiple chains of evidence that it happened. No one has directly observed the effects of Special Relativity, but we have multiple chains of evidence that they exist. The evidence for evolution as the dominant mechanism for biodiversity is as strong, if not stronger, than the Milky Way, the Big Bang, and Special Relativity.
It has been know for thousands of years that a species' evolution can be predicted given a set of selecting factors (notice i used that instead of environment) and then made to follow that path by applying those factors. Its called selective breeding.
Natural environment selection is just one form of selection. But the farmer can also be the "environment" and force a certain selection. He can select for milk-producing capacity in dairy cows or goats. He can select for bulkiness in beef cattle or hogs. He can select for egg laying in hens. A good study for historical purpose would be too look at maize corn.. look at the natural grass that it descended from and then look at the hybrid versions that we grow today. A dramatic difference in size of the grainhead (cobb) and kernel. I would hazard a guess that you could take the ancestoral grass (which I've heard still grows in the Andes) and apply the same selecting factors that have been applied over the last 5 millenia by native american farmers. Over a few hundred generations, you would probably end up with a form of maize-corn
These knucklehead scientists are just rediscovering and codifying what has been ancient knowledge all along. The are repackaging selective breeding as a new concept.
Another way of looking at this is that combining the same ingrediates the same way will yield the same result. That is sort of a 'duh' factor.
The concept was also explored in science fiction. Dr. Who fans will remember the genesis of the daliks. The mad scientist predicted the mutations of the Kalids given their poisoned world and then genetically engineered the Daliks to match the predicted mutations.
Actually, "we" have evolved since the beginning of the agricultural age. This report (OMIM here and PubMed here) demonstrates a shift in the frequency of an allele of a gene that is expressed in the brain.
Oh yeah, turns out you're right. Funny, like two years ago, the philosophy teacher said that we were not evolving anymore. Back then I said it was bullshit, then I read in a scientifical magazine (Science & Vie) that it was so. Now we just found out it's wrong.
Awesome, I was wrong two years ago by claiming what's considered true now, and I am wrong now for claiming what was considered true up to 3 months ago. Thanks for making me update the truth.
allow people to reproduce who would otherwise not be able to
Oh yeah that's right, with all these people not living up to reach 14 back then, the only problem is that I can't think of a genetic cause for these deaths that would prevent reproduction. If there's not really any, this factor should have a limited impact on our evolution.
Which raises a question, if people who died of genetic diseases to young to reproduce themselves can live to reproduce themselves, does it mean that it will turn out that more and more of us will have such early-age deadly genetic diseases such as mucoviscidosis for example?
You just got troll'd!
So don't spout of pretending to understand the importance of this. On one hand you appear to take the theory of evolution as given. I have no problems with that but then you say that they didn't need their "silly experiment" to come up with this hypothesis. Their experiment wasn't to see WHETHER the bacteria would mutate but rather HOW they would mutate given changes in the environment.
Now think about the chances/probabilities of any given outcome. Billions of bacteria are going through thousands of generations in a changing environment. The potential number of outcomes are uncountable but the observed result is that six dominant mutations arise. Now another experiement is run with billions of bacteria going through thousands of generations. The SAME six dominant mutations arise in the same order! That is a truly ASTOUNDING result!
My only concern is that there was possible contamination of the bacterial incubator between experimental runs causing the same mutations to arise in which case 10 repetitions of the experiment are going to give the same result. If the two experiements were truly independent, ie no contamination, this is a big result.
In a way, yes, I knew it some kind of primate will evolve in the cave, and I knew it that the military will do somethig retarded, like they do in all movies, so bombing was a bad idea from the onset.
..guys?
But hell, did ANYONE expect that they'll beat the aliens with Head & Shoulders? I totally didn't see that coming. But it was lame nonetheless.
We're talking about the movie, right, guys?
"And I'm not so sure I've given a false representation of Patterson. What is the context? "
That fact that you don't know what it is suggests that you pulled it off of some creationist/ID list of "quotes that show evolution is bogus." Shouldn't that make YOU suspicious?
"The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question."
While this is true, you are using this statement to draw false conclusions, and that is the crux of your misuse or misunderstanding of the quote. The fact that we cannot usually say for sure who the descendants of a particular individual creature was does not prevent us from understanding that it fits into an overall tree of relationships, and where. If you had a big family reunion, the chances of a random person pulled out of the crowd being your direct ancestor would be unlikely: it would more likely be a cousin or somesuch. It's the same way with fossils. Patterson is rightly warning against the temptation to make up "just-so" stories that explain the whys and hows of a particular lineage when in fact we almost never have that level of detail.
However, the key features of various fossils DO allow us to figure out structures of relationships. It is THAT which scientists use to demonstrate common ancestry, not relying on the need to know that this particular fossil is the direct descendant of modern birds (because the chances are always very likely that it is not).
Furthermore, Archaeopteryx is a transitional by any definition. It has features otherwise unique to both dinosaurs and modern birds, thus providing some pretty solid evidence that birds are descended from dinos. A fossil need not be the direct ancestor of a modern form of life to demonstrate a particular branching off of a particular line.
And over the years, all the further evidence has demonstrated that the implication of Archaeopteryx is dead-on: birds are in fact descended from the dinosaurs (in a very real cladistic sense, this means that they ARE dinosaurs, the last of the dinosaurs).
And again, back to the example of the bacteria, you are again trying to draw suprious conclusions from the results. There is no evidence at all in the study that mutations were anything but random. That they hit upon the same mutational functionalities twice suggests only that the various solutions to the heat problem were quite nearby in this case, and so random variation quickly hit upon them each time. Your analogy is tortured:
"To use your casino analogy, the experiment is like poker player drawing the same 7 hands in a row... twice. Sure, randomness and predictability aren't to be confused. But the same gene's in the same order twice???"
They were very much NOT played twice in a row. Billions of billions of hands were played, and each time there was only a couple of "correct" hands after which the game would be over. These "correct" hands were eventually dealt in each round, which is very very different from them being dealt twice in a row. And in fact, in both cases, they had the exact same selection pressure: i.e. a particular guide as to HOW to deal the hands to be more likely to get the correct combo.
My philosophy professor in college once said that if you know enough about any environment, everything in that environment is predictable.
-ted
Well, given that Linux is usually compiled to a form consisting of only two digits (0 and 1), it shouldn't be too hard to translate it into four letters instead.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Slashdot probes the responsiveness of the crazy fundies...
Do we get to see the results of that research? http://www.bachelorette.com/fununfortwo.html
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Single celled life ruled the world far longer than the multicelluar life and complex single-celled structures we have today.
I'd just like to add to that and say that there's no reason to assume that life began at the single cell.
I can certainly imagine earlier life that had no protective cell around it and basically just had to bump into the right molecules at random in order to reproduce.
Last post!
Well, in fact, the current consensus is exactly that: complex cell walls with transport didn't come until much later.
Sex can potentially introduce a lot more information per generation. For example, one dose of human sperm has somewhere on the order of 2^25 to 2^28 sperm in it (a fraction of that is viable sperm). Only one is going to make it. So that can introduce up to 28 bits of information (the number of halvings that take place). If a female gets sperm from multiple males, that can add a few bits of information (excluding the contribution from the males too!) as well.
Some fraction will be noise. For example, if a meteorite hits and kills part of the population off instantly, that selection adds no real information since genetic disposition wouldn't help survival chances. OTOH, a disease infects the whole population and kills a certain fraction of them. That would probably have a high genetic component and would be a relatively low noise source of information for the genome.
I am a doctor, but I don't play one on TV. That aside, I've always thought that the so-called 'eye of the needle' is the most interesting part of evolution. What I mean by that is: When there are severe constraints on the survival of a species which happen over a few short generations (i.e. climate changes), remarkable changes can occur. In short, evolution proceeds quickly. If the environmental changes are too catestrophic, the species cannot change and becomes extinct. If the climate changes are too slow, then the gene pool that makes it through the eye of the needle is too large and there's too much opportunity for the changes to be diluted when the survival pressure is released.
For instance this happened in northern Europe when the climate became a lot colder over a few hundred years. I remember reading this was about 7000 years ago, but I might be wrong on the date. Drastic genetic changes in humans resulted. I wonder if they were made more drastic by isolation from other groups of humans due to the climate change (glaciers?) But the changes weren't so drastic as to create a new species, but a new race.
If you do the math, the article says the odds of these mutations occuring are
millions:700
dead:live
So something like 99.9999% of mutations were useless.
They could have done the same experiment with
a) increasing acidity
b) increasing salinity
c) longer periods of starvation
And the odds are probably 99.9999% of the mutations would be useless for surviving those environments (including the nifty "survive in heat" mutation which would be useless in a saline environment).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
And if they used a more realistic environment and got results that weren't so clear, then people would argue that they should have done something simpler where they could control all the variables. The answer is to use both approaches, but not necessarily in the same study.
There was an interesting paper on that touched on the same issues using a 'natural experiment'. They looked at a group of spiders that colonized the Hawaiian islands. Each island contains a collection of the same ecotypes of these spiders, but they all have different histories. If only one spider species colonized an island, evolution lead to it forming several different species to fill the basic ecotypes. If two or more spiders colonized the island, they divied up the ecotypes. So what you get was species 1 splitting into three species to match ecotypes A,B, and C on one island. On another island species 1 evolved to fill ecotype C, and other species 2 filled in A and B. And on another island species 2 had evolved to fill all three ecotypes.
In a nutshell, the evolutionary pattern was repeated over and over, with the same ecotypes arising from different ancestors. It didn't matter which species you started with, you always got the same product. This agrees with evolutionary theory, but I don't think you would expect such consistent results in an uncontrolled environment.
If you're interested in the details, it's Gillespie et al in Science 16 January 2004:Vol. 303. no. 5656, pp. 356 - 359
yp.
Of course, humans already have a defense against the sun, that being melanin. It seems likely to me that random mutations in human DNA probably constantly vary the amount of melanin, which leads to some inidividuals being more sun resistant (and having darker skin). In today's society, we have other coping mechanisms, and we travel enough that the color of skin is most likely no longer a factor. In the old days, people got killed by other random events earlier in life such that resistance to skin cancer made little statistical difference anyway. But over many millions or perhaps even billions of years, odds are that people that lived in warmer climates would have evolved darker skin. Except that in that time frame, they probably would have moved to another climate anyway.
Anyway, what I meant to suggest was that perhaps the "random" mutation that popped up in the bacteria to protect against heat was something already "built into" DNA, like our melanin level, and that some of them randomly increased this and became more adapted to that environment. So it was not that evolution was directed, but more that an already existing defense mechanism randomly fired in certain individuals.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The fact that you cheerfully admit that your posts contain verbatim quotes from this article, which you pass off as your own, is mind boggling. If you truly want to defend your beliefs, then at least have the decency to espouse your own views. I don't know if you're lazy or simply trolling, but your actions certainly cast doubt on both your sincerity and honesty.
Indeed. The major problem with any system of classification with static levels like "order" or "kingdom" is that the levels don't end up meaning anything consistent across all of life: that's why the system is plauged with weasel terms like "sub-phylum, intra-order, super-class" and so forth. The other problem is speciation. When one species branches into two more, we need species names for each. Now, sure, we can just get rid of the species name, and give them two more within the same genus. But the problem is, the species name probably still describes a good group, into which the two new species both still fall. So by throwing it out, we lose something descriptive: lose a level that was still useful. It quickly becomes obvious that the entire ranked classification system is built for taking a single snapshot of life and classifying it. It wasn't built with evolution in mind, and so ends up being crudely shoehorned to fit reality.
There are systems that try to stick to just describing branchings in numerical order rather than levels, but of course those are sort of hard for laypeople too.
Trying to take credit for another persons work (you didn't indicate in the origional post that this was some article you copied)... We used to call that plagiarism, the highest of all academic crimes. You don't seem bothered by this at all.
I must question your integrity.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Because history is written by the winners?
What, precisely, do you mean by "fundamentalist"? You know, not all Christians are nuts...
By fundamentalist, do you mean one who adheres to a traditional Christian lifestyle? Obeys various scriptural commandments? Fundamentalist is an inherently loaded term, would you compare a Christian "fundamentalist" to, say, a member of Al-Qaeda, often erroneously referred to as a Muslim "fundamentalist"?
I, for example, am a Mormon, which fits me under the group of Christianity. I am a "fundamentalist" in that I hold to fundamental and traditional doctrines of my faith. I also believe in evolution. There is no official stance of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on evolution, the closest thing coming to it being a statement many years ago essentially saying, "it doesn't really matter to us either way." So called "fundamentalist" Christians routinely misread and misinterpret scripture on the matter of evolution and essentially everything in Genesis 1, demonstrating a lack of knowledge about the doctrines rather than a well-informed, "fundamental" belief in them (i.e., 1 day is not literally 1,000 years, 1 day refers to a period of time (and "1,000" refers to a big, incomprehensible number, much as "40" means simply "a lot"), to read a Hebrew scripture literally in English with no regard for the period of time it was written in is both ignorant and hardly "fundamental" to Christianity). The university system owned by my faith teaches evolution to its students with little to no controversy and has large and respected biology programs. Required biology classes teach the theory of evolution as it is, and Miller's Finding Darwin's God was required reading back when I took the course.
Yet, I remain a "fundamentalist" Christian. I believe in fundamental doctrines and live my life accordingly. I also read scripture with a reasonable attempt to understand its authors culture and intentions, which is a "literal" reading.
We're not all crazy, you know.
There are two kinds of evolution (not micro and macro, you silly creationists). Firstly, there is evolution in which the population responds to a simple change in the environment and has the option to either evolve or become crippled or even extinct. Slowly raising the temperature on a population of bacteria will obviously result in either the bacteria adapting or becomming extinct. This kind of evolution is very predictable.
The second kind of evolution is CREATIVE evolution. In this kind of evolution an old system or a new mutation is co-opted with some minor change into a feature or behaviour that increases chances of reproduction. Eventually this new feature may evolve to become a complex pathway or even a new organ. This kind of evolution is the way in which new complexity and new systems arise to take advantage of oppurtunities in the environment. It may even change the ecological niche of the eventual descendants. This kind of evolution has been demonstrated without guidance or a "goal state" in systems like Tierra where machine-code programs are allowed to self replicate (the system does not impose replication, they are written to replicate themselves using the instruction set) but an occasional bit is flipped to simulate mutation and crashed processes (equivalent of death) are removed. This is classic open-ended evolution. Google Tierra and read about it. Also Avida. Anyways....this kind of evolution is impossible to accurately predict. We have no way of knowing how man tentacles the octopus would evolve by looking at the ancestral slug. We cannot tell by looking at a fish that it's descendants will have lungs and walk on land. They may evolve into land creatures, and they may not, and they may not even use lungs. Sometimes evolution even stops and stagnates. Look at sharks, they have not evolved for millions of years even though they could certainly benefit from a four chambered heart or more intelligence. I would be impressed if someone could predict this kind of evolution, not the simple linear type where they either become heat-resistant or die.
[...] And the evidence for that happening--for bacteria turning into another life form--is lacking. [...]
/.!
Huh?! I am confused, but this might explain a lot -- must be all amoebae posting on
617B3B7F7E7C7D7F00EOF
I don't think it works quite like that. Tail = spine + length, thus can be in any species that includes genes for spine building. Extra Eyes = Eye gene + "Number of eyes" gene, thus this gene combo can exist in any species that has eyes. Exoskeleton = Hard Material building genes + some schema genes to produce an internal/external structure, it's probably concievable that some of this code is shared with plants (cell walls maybe?), tho I wouldn't know, and this is just my own speculations.
I guess it would make more sence if you have done any sort of object oriented programming. Not that I'm trying to use programming as an analogy, at any rate, the "code" isn't liniar, and is based on interactions of atoms. I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more complex then any one person can concieve.
Any Star Trek fan knows that evolution will result in small boned guys with expanded craniums, like the Talosians. And then a few million years later, we'll evolve into those glowing light energy beings, like the Organians.
NO wait, in Voyager Janeway and Paris go thru evolvo-tronic rays and ends up a slug.
I suppose that between the '60s and the '90s, our notion of evolution has devolved.
"The crux of Darwinism is precisely that evolution is undirected, stemming from *random* mutations."
Nope. It's directed by selection, and selection is determined by environment and genotype. Mutation introduces changes in the genotype. Of those with non-lethal changes, some will fare as well as their parents, some do better in the original environment than their parents, some will find adjacent environments where they may compete successfully for resources not exploited by its parents, and if the environment changes, some will have the change of genotype that best aids survival in the new environment.
"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."
Wrong. See above. With respect, you need to understand evolution better. Also, think about it logically; you are asserting that there is some kind of meta-knowledge in the system.
For example, a fish in a hot country. The pools it inhabits sometimes dry-up. Most of the fish dies before the rain came. Occasionally one fish would 'tough it out', having genetic change that better resisted de-hydration or air-blood oxygen exchange, or increased the chance of getting to a deeper pool of watter.
As the ONLY fish that survived in such situations would have those characteristics, you have what is known as run-away evolution. There is a super-selection going on, far more stringent that classic 'Lions and Antelope'.
No one or thing 'says' at the onset of the pool-shrinkage 'right-o chaps, we need to evolve into something that can also breathe air, with a thicker skin, and limb-like fins, that's the way to survive'. But that is what ends up evolving, as those are the characteristics required to survive. It's pure chance they arose, and just as the water in the above pools fit the depression in the ground they are in very well, they fit their environment very well.
As if they were made for it.
But the randomness of the process goes away that it is totally non-randomised by the fact all those fish without those characteristics died.
You are seeing 'something' in the process guiding it by not understanding phenotype fit their environment as all the other ones died - all those genotypes without a phenotype that could survived died out.
"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. This is The overheated reaction- including purges of scientists who doubt Darwinism,..."
I suggest you research 'the Wedge strategy'; try Wikipedia. More about 'purges' below.
"He shows how scientists develop "paradigms," or explanatory models, the terms of which they use to organize their findings and interpret their research... "
Indeed so; paradigm shifts attract resistance from those impacted by the shift. Thing is the ones you mentioned were contrived explanations of what was observed which didn't work perfectly. When they were challenged by new paradigms, as the old ones were contrived, even if those with a vested interest in them resisted, eventually the new paradigm won as it had facts on it side. Flat Earth - Globe, Earth centric - Solar centric, etc..
I don't think you can conclude that evolution can be predicted from that kind of experiments. Just that evolution can be observed. Evolution just happens. But the fact that we can observe it doesn't mean we can understand and predict it.
Even if in some cases the expected outcome is deterministic, we don't know how really works, see folding@home, that stuff is really computationally expensive. We would need to know the folding behavior of all possible protein and then a fast, effective way to model the interactions between those proteins. Then we can think about modelling organisms with some features (notice that this is a huge jump, we skipped modelling tissues and organs, however because some organism features are directly mapped to specific proteins, it can be done after some assumptions/observations).
If evolution can be predicted, they would not need to make experiments to make hypothesis, they would feed that data to a computer, the computer would predict some outcome (including specific genes and mutations), and then the experiment would match (or not) the outcome.
We are years, even centuries away from that.
This experiment is just bayesian inference. The sun appeared today (and appeared every day of my life before that), so I predict it will appear tomorrow, with (very close to 1) probability. I don't need to understand HOW the sun appears to predict that.
But if the article had said: "evolution can be observed" then I would agree with the article.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Biologists like to be life-affirming.
Harry Seldon
*/cough*
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
Evolution is not the same as lottery.
Even though mutations are random, its results are not.
That's what the scientists in TFA are investigating.
Let's review the experiment, I'll show you why it's not that random.
You take a few million bacteria.
You zap the bug's ability to withstand heat and the you heat them up.
Evolution says they will gain the ability to withstand heat again.
However, there are certain mechanisms that allow the critters to survive.
Let's assume from now on that mutations give a beneficial or at last neutral trait (harmful traits kill the bugs).
Of whatever traits that can be evolved, some are neutral, thus the bugs will gain nothing and will get cooked. I wouldn't bt on these mutations.
Sam thing if they gain a beneficial trait, but not for this environment (cruel joke to evolve resistance to cold in a cooking pot).
Some will evolve heat resistance. Let's assume there are three mutations that solve the heat problem.
Solution A allows the bacteria to survive, but takes a lot of energy (or food or whatever).
Solution B is cheap, easy to evolve, but can't be used in a very hot environment.
Solution C is more complex, but lets the bugs survive in all temperature ranges.
If I were to heat them to a hot (but not too hot for solution B) temperature, the scientists in TFA say you will get solution B evolved. Even if they are all equally possible, any critter who gets A or C is at disadvantage compared to B (instead of using energy to build A or C, they use less energy to do B, and the rest to breed). Even if A is evolved first, whenever a mutant evolves B, it will take over (it will breed faster).
If you turn up the heat, solution C will be the best, A will still be at a disadvantage and B does not work.
So, even if all mutations are random, I would bet on either B or C depending on the temperature. If the pot is not very hot, I'll choose B and almost certainly guess right. If the temperature is above the solution B threshold, if I choose C, it is very likely I will be right too.
That's what the scientists have been doing, they cook the bugs and notice they evolve the same solutions every time.
Of course, there might be a solution D undiscovered. However, once discovered (by the scientists) it can be added to the list and evaluated with the others. That's why they should try the experiments lots of times.
GPG 0x1B479C78
Hey, i don't know about you but _my_ evolutionary process uses C++ functions!
(Of course that means that i have to worry about developing a memory leak as i get older...)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I wouldn't be surprised if it's even more complex then any one person can concieve.
(for the non-creationists), this code is probably no so much as complex as just dis-organized....
I mean, we have code for parts that are no longer needed (appendix?). All sorts of codes for reflexes, etc that we no longer need. And even worse, there probably aren't any comments!!!
If we could read DNA like a program (e.g. truly understand it), we probably would find that it was worse than the equivalent of 100 drunk undergrads writing an operating system in perl... Amazingly it works, but it ain't pretty and would never pass a code review...
God might have been a civil engineer (recreation area and sewer area co-located), but he certainly is not a programmer.
Mutations are random which means evolution is random which means it isn't predictable
I think it's safe to say that Darwin's intended audience was familiar with the practice of selective breeding. Those cows, chickens, sheep, and pigs which did not display a desired phenotype were sold as meat. Those that did were used as breeders. Nature simply selects for organisms that can reproduce organisms that can survive to reproduce. Those that can't get eaten or starve.
> the possibility that we can predict the evolution of a species, given
> environmental factors.
That it will occur: definitely, and in most cases too trvial to mention.
That the species will successfully adapt to a specific new and controlled environment, and survive: You can get good odds on it, until the "OOPS, we turned up the heat too much for that strain" happens.
That a given species will survive environmental changes when those changes are unpredictable in themselves: Not just no, but HELL no.
The article proves that an experiment with appropriate controls can be carried out to its intended conclusion. As Bohr said, it tells us something about the experiment; it does not tell us anything about nature.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Information is introduced via mutations. It is filtered via selection. Filtering information does not add information. It may increase its quality, but not its quantity.
No, it means that the genetic information contained in the non-breeding half is lost when that half dies off, except the parts that were also contained in the other half.
No. Killing off half the population does not magically insert an extra bit of information into the genome of the remaining half. It might filter the information, resulting in the populations genomes containing less information in total, but in no case will it increase it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Obviously the American organisms came into panspermia, the Japanese ones from hot springs and the European ones out of spite.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I meant to write: "Obviously the American organisms came through panspermia, the Japanese ones from hot springs and the European ones out of spite."
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The parent post really deserves to be moderated up. A good concise rebuttal of the "information theory" carnard. Darwin's whole point was that the natural environment acts as a selective breeder, and that you don't need an intelligent force to produce the vast panoply of life.
Other people have addressed what I consider your misrepresentation of what Darwin's theory of natural selection has turned into. What doesn't strike me as correct is your historical analogies. As I know the history, the Catholic Church prosecuted Galileo because their political power was threatened by the Reformation. Copernicus published his papers with the Church's blessing. But this doesn't seem to be a valid analogy for why ID might represent a new paradigm. Whatever power biologists have isn't going to be threatened by ID. They would just study biology in the framework of testing ID. What's more, I don't think anybody doubted the genius of Galileo or Newton while they were alive. Let's look at what could be considered a "paradigm shift" from classical to modern physics. The really radical shift was driven by Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli. All those guys came up with discoveries that won them the Nobel prize regardless of whether this shift in thinking about the world as deterministic and mechanical to thinking about it as nondeterministic and nonlocal had taken place. Also, physics at the end of the 19th century was ripe for a change. Everyone agreed that blackbody radiation, hydrogen spectra, and the photoelectric effect would take some pretty radical new ideas. It's just that no one could imagine how radical. What nobel prize winning discoveries have taken place to make us think about the origin of the species differently? Also, I should point out that a requirement of quantum physics was that "turn into" classical physics when talking about large things. Classical physics wasn't proved "wrong", exactly- just incomplete. So using this as a model, any new theory that replaces natural selection would in some sense "connect" to natural selection in an analogous way. I don't see how ID does that.
While I disagree with the content of this article, I request that it be modded down not for content, but for plagarism. The poster if this article has copied it verbatim from an article written by Gene Edward Veith. Note that that Jay9333 offers no attribution to the author of this article. This level of dishonesty and intellectual theft does not deserve further mod points.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Information is introduced via mutations. It is filtered via selection. Filtering information does not add information. It may increase its quality, but not its quantity.
Is there a difference?
Suppose you are interested in making chili. As you probably know, there are any number of variations that can be made on a basic recipe of a spice cabinet, chili powder, tomatoes, pork, chili peppers and beer. Some work, some don't work. The secret to making good chile is to systematically vary your style, until you hit on a variation that impresses your guests. Some variations will flop. Some will be so good that varying that recipe will produce the most consistency. Over years and years, you may test dozens or hundreds of recipes. But some will be forgettable, and some will be very memorable. As a cook, your reputation will not rest on the fact that you have tried everything, but on your very best. The quantity of information matters not. The quality, however, does.
I will be impressed if they can get single cell organisms to evolve into multi-cell organisms. Now that would be groundbreaking. I think the key would be to somehow put the organisms into a situation where they would have to work together as one to survive a common threat or predator. The thing is, it might not take several of the same organisms but a few different ones with varying skills/abilities that complement each other.
What do other slashdotters think of this?
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
The appendix is part of the immune system... it has a similar function to Tonsils, Meyers Patches, etc. contains Lymphoid tissue and contributes to the lymphatic system. You can remove it without major immune system degradation because it's functionality is duplicated in multiple parts of the body, even near it's own location... so it may be an original organ from a time when we needed additional immune response, especially in our large intestine (it's a pouch of tissue adjacent to large intestine).... possibly when human ancestors were carrion eaters... dead rotting flesh can have some pretty nasty bacteria in it.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
As in... If you put a million grizzly bear in the polar region none of them are going to spontaneously evolve his fur white more like a polar bear because that was the best choice.
However, if any of those bears happened to spontaneously mutate into where their hair turned white making them better hunters so that the seals couldn't see them. Then those species may actually do better than there brown counterparts and may survive in times of hardship where as the browns die out.
Also, the chances of one bear spontaneously mutating to have white hair is equally likely to occur if you put the grizzly bears in the artic, as it would if you'd left them where they were. White fur being advantageous has no bearing on the likelihood of such a random mutation occurring.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Cell membranes may well have formed independently of other elements of protolife. For example, fatty acid molecules can can spontaneously self-assemble into vesicles and tranport protons into their interiors, providing a pH gradient that could serve as an energy source for other processes
Define "information" any way you like, and evolution produces it. It's mathetically demonstrable, we do it all the time in practice when we use genetic algorithms, and we observe it in nature. Generating new information is a BASIC function of the evolutionary process (depending on how you define information, it's either random mutation ITSELF, or the outcome of natural selection). Heck, the article here describes it happening. It might not phrase it in the language of information, but when the demands of an environmental pressure is imprinted onto a gene pool, that's an information increase in the gene pool (information about the environment).
You remind me of an artificial intelligence class I had once.
We spent a few class sessions on genetic algorithms, of course, because they're a big part of modern AI research.
We got to watch a program that a grad student had written attempt to evolve a match for a given cartoon face. The faces had about ten distinct features, with a number of permutations for each one.
After we'd been there for around twenty minutes, there were still no good candidates (the program showed the four closest candidates to date in a display area).
Finally, our prof stopped the demo, saying in his Russian accent, "It is possible there is bug in program, it is not finished."
Someone who was safely ensconced in the back row replied, "Or maybe there aren't enough bugs in it. It's been a while since I last saw a duck turn into a chicken."
The whole class (except the prof, of course) found that pretty amusing.
"Oh, I like geeks way better than I like humans." - Mari Sarris
You are convincing yourself that evolution is the way God designed us. If that is the way you want to resolve the conflict between your desire to believe in God and the scientific evidence starting at you, fine. There is no problem. Who knows, may be God is making me write this posting so that the last ounce of guilty feelings can be purged from you.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The more you know about certain things, the less you know about certain other things. Intrinsicly and irreducably. Your professor's philosophy is stymied by simple physics. :)
As an aside, I have to wonder why you would refer to Gould as a "Marxist" in this discussion? I can't quite see how it's relevant, beyond the typical shameful attempt to smear him by presenting an irrelevant fact that may make him less popular. I only ask because that type of well poisoning is typical in these sorts of discussions, and nobody else seems to have pointed it out.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
You mean Hari.
*/burp/*
Someone's been drinking too much Spudwiser...
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
1) Even if evolution *is* predictable, this does not preclude the possibility of that intelligent design source *not* being 'external' to 4D reality. Just because we do not *know* how bacteria "think", does not mean that they do *not*. (By 'think', here, I do not mean the human process of thinking -- a reactive process of a neural net -- but the more general concept of making meaningful decisions based on past experiences. Until we can get inside a bacteria's head -- so to speak -- we will not *know*.) It is possible that a bacteria has as much as a non-material 'mind' as a human and that it is just as observable to us as a human mind -- to wit, not; except by the results of its actions in the universe.
2) As other posters have noted, environmental situations are inherently non-predictable, regardless of the predictability of evolution. If it *could* be shown that organisms are able to "pre-cognitively" adapt *before* the environmental disruption, this has ramifications far beyond evolutionary theory. (This still does not prove the existence of an external designer; in fact, it might strengthen the concept of an *internal* designer.) Of course, it's easy to say that survivors were merely "lucky" to have randomly evolved the very genetic stances that enabled them to pass through the 'eye of the needle', but this is a post-hoc rationalization that does not question the received wisdom of the randomness of evolution. How the reducible algorithm of science might adquately design an experiment to test the hypothesis of "pre-cognitive adaptation" remains a provocative exercise for the reader.
3) Evolution may, in fact, not *be* predictable. Merely showing -- as the article does -- that 'evolution' (or, more accurately, the mechanism of genetic selection) appears to tend to follow the same pattern when faced with the same gradual environmental change -- proves nothing. While it may be a data point pointing to the *possibility* that evolution is -- sometimes -- predictable, it makes no comment at all upon the possibility that the intelligent designer may, in fact, be 'internal'. (If, of course, there is an 'intelligent designer' at all.)
Merely arguing that, since a materialistically-based science has not *yet* found an intelligent designer, it therefore does not exist, simply demonstrates the limit of our knowledge, not an inherent fact of the universe. Scientism's touching faith in randomness is still a form of faith. Postulating that an intelligent designer *may* exist -- without resorting to any kind of hand-waving faith-based theory that such a thing 1)*does* exist and 2)is *external* -- should give anyone who considers him or herself a 'scientist' pause. Just as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so is any insufficiently understood ontology indistinguishable from randomness. And is that not where we presently stand?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
I used to think the same thing. But selection/filtering really is the key. Mutations increase the state space, but not the amount of information. In fact, it can actually decrease the amount of information through inperfect copying. Filtering of those states is what creates information. And I'm not sure that a distinction between quality and quantity can be made in this case.
Brilliant post - thank you.
Yes you did by cutting his remark in half, just at the point where it was qualified. You simply cut and pasted and expected to run away with victory. In every case where ID proponents have quote mined, without fail they have done so in a fashion that attempts distort or invert what was being said originally. Once might be considered a mistake, twice sloppy research, but dozens upon dozens of times? It is pure blatant deception.
It is pretty clear what both of these people saying here. There is no way to say with exactitude that one set of bones is a direct descendant of another set of bones. That would be an absurd thing to claim. It doesn't mean that there is no distinct lineage that can be observed through the fossil records. Since evolution is falsifiable, all you need do is dig up a fossilized cat amongst dinosaur bones or a bird-amphibian creature and and evolution will be proven wrong.
It still won't mean ID is right though, since ID has yet to produce a testable theory. All we get from IDers are lies, distortion and misdirection.
Also note that whenever ID comes up, you can bet that some ID nitwit with moderation points will attempt to mod down anyone who points out the hypocrisy of these people. I would have though that a devout christian (for this is what they are mostly) would consider lying to be a major sin. But it seems not.
For one thing, most evolution has less to do with mutations, and more to do with subtle variations between members of a species.
Can you define the difference between mutations and "subtle variations between members of a species" please? Surely one is the effect over time of the other, so they can't be so easily seperated.
The research is not trying to prove natural selection. That's been done to death (pun, haha). Natural selection is when _existing_ genes are selected or deselected from the gene pool based on circumstances of the population. "Breeding" domestic animals has little to do with mutation and selection, and is mostly just selection of desirable traits from the _existing_ gene pool.
The research shows that a specific mutation has a high probability of recurrance. This isn't exactly new either, it has been know for more than 15 years that certain mutations has higher probability than others, based on their molecular dynamics. Some genes are "weak", so to speak, and are more likely to undergo mutation. Using this knowledge, it would be easier to predict the immediate mutational response of an organism to an environmental change. Long term response would become more "fuzzy" to prediction as more time would allow more improbable mutations to occur.
This is unpublished research. They are probably putting a paper together right now to submit for review. I bet it gets a 6 or 7 on a scale from 1 to 10. It's not earth shaking, since it just re-affirms existing theory of the skewed probability of spontaneous, molecular mutations.
> find that it was worse than the equivalent of 100 drunk undergrads writing an
> operating system in perl... Amazingly it works, but it ain't pretty and would
> never pass a code review...
That is true, it is a very jumbled code. Much of it is redundant or useless. In genetics these are called "junk genes". Trying to find the genes that code for necessary protein functions is a real challenge because of all this junk in the code.
Why does the cell retain so much "junk"? Maybe it increases the probability of future useful mutations. Maybe it just doesn't matter that it is in there, so there is no positve selection for removal. Imagine if you had almost unlimited storage space and no penalty for load or execution time. Would you bother to remove any code? Why not leave every library you have ever written linked into the final object? Some vestigal code will become corrupted with time and you will ocassionally replicate whole libraries to only use one function.
That's the way the DNA and RNA look. It is very bizarre and tangled, like it was cut, pasted and mangled together in a haphazard way. Intelligent design? Only if the designer had a weird sense of humor.
True.
> Things like genes for tails, extra eyes, exoskeletons, fins, etc... What happens
> is changes in the environment trigger these genes to express themselves.
Well, it doesn't really "trigger" them. Changes in the environment cause a reshuffling of priorities in natural selection of the pre-existing, recessive genetic traits and encourage a new direction for the species. This is how we create domestic breeds from wild stock and we can create lines that look very different from the wild stock. The genetic variations are pre-existing in the gene pool and inbreeding causes them to become exposed.
> Unless you're a bacterium with a really short reproductive cycle enabling rapid
> expotential growth, it's really hard for a single mutation to have an instantaneous
> effect on survival rate.
That's true. Sexual reproduction causes a mixing and in an actively interbreeding species a spontaneous mutation is likely to just wander around in the gene pool, not causing much overall effect on the species population. The mutation becomes fodder for future variation.
Some species of animals seem to have gone through a genetic bottleneck, causing their gene pool to have low variation. An example of this is the cheetah.
This effect of rapid evolution based on pre-existing (but unseen in the phenome) genetic variation was brought up by several evolution theorists back in the 1940's to explain the rapid evolution of whales and dolphins. The genome contains the mutations, but it is hidden by the phenome. When change is needed, the varaition is there to help the species survive.
Another interesting species is the King Conch of Florida. It lives in intercoastal lagoons around Florida. It is considered one species, but each lagoon up and down the coast has it's own phenotype variation of the species. Gene exchange is slow between these pockets of populations. The other interesting thing is that the gene exchange is highest with the geographical neighbor population, so gene flow is geographically linear in this species.
Back to the original article, it is not so much about selection as it is about the bias in probability of certain mutations occuring over others. This has been known for a long time. Some molecular structures in the DNA have weak points that are more likely to change than others. Interesting study, but not earth-shaking.
Mostly what I'm reacting to is the concept of x-men style views of evolution where once in a blue moon, some magical event happens and you have a mutation that provides that organism with a relatively super-power (at least compared to other members of its species.)
Quantitative genetics focuses on the distribution of phenotypes among a population. In any population of bears that has not been severely bottlenecked, you will have a range of hair color due to multiple genes acting together along with environmental inputs. If one end of the range experiences higher mortality than the other end of the range, the mean for that will drift one way or the other.
I still wouldn't buy it. Nothing man-made and complex was ever created by a single designer - it always evolved over time, with dozens or sometimes even thousands of designers involved, and painstaking trial-and-error testing as an essential ingredient. Only some of the one-step ideas happened in a flash (the Moebius strip is said to be one) - these are analagous to single mutations with immediate and clear phenotypical effects.
There are two purposes of sex. One is procreation. The other is, as you put it, "fun". I have no idea where you got the idea that I thought otherwise. If I or my wife were infertile that wouldn't prevent us from having and enjoying sex often. In fact, studies have shown that Christians and others who keep sex as something to be enjoyed only in the context of marriage tend to have better, more satisfying and more 'fun' sex lives.
The Christian Scriptures are very clear that the place intended for sex is marriage. Because of that my conscience was stricken when I was tempted to bring sex outside of marriage. There is nothing wrong with sex inside marriage, in fact, everything about it is right.
Physicists have a very specific definition of the word 'predictability'. Any other science that doesn't meet this standard, no matter how useful is usually relegated to the world of descriptive science. However, the emergence of chaos, complexity theory, and a new world of informationally driven biology has given rise to a new pardigm. A new world of quasi-descriptive phenomena has emerged. While 'God doesn't play dice', it seems man must.
Is evolution predictable? Is a random walk predictable? I might know what neighborhood you happen to be visiting, but I certainly can't predict with certainty were you'll be.
Incidentally, physics has also formed areas of study to study the philosophical nature of physics. Especially gravitational and astronomical physics. We call this area cosmology. (Yeah, I've always thought metaphysics was a better term -- but it's taken.) Biology hasn't made this distinction yet. When philosophers and theoretical biologists discuss the philosophical and 'fundamental' side of their field, it's quickly relegated to the 'philosophy of science'.
My point is that biology is still defining it's 'mathematical spine'. Ideas that have corresponding terms in other fields have no such terminology in biology. Also, science made strong strides in the 20th century towards hyperspecialization. However, modern biology and applied chemistry are starting to blur those lines again.
While the research listed in the article is cool in a fundamental way. I'd have to see something more tangible before I could really comment on it. I'm not a biologist anyway, so I don't know how much good the article(s) in question would do. It's just that when I see a title that asks 'is evolution predictable', I'm inclined to say no.
(On a final note, genetic circuits give some 'predictable' results to. Does this make systems biology 'predictable'? I don't know.)
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Actually, you're incorrect in saying the blood clotting work has turned out to be an embarrasment to Behe. On the contrary he has written defenses of it to contest the attacks on his work. Hardly "embarrasment".
i on=view&ID=2605) says, "Evolution, at the most, is an idea about history, not observational science. There may be inferences we can make about the past based on modern observations, and these may or may not be true, but don't bother claiming that ideas about history are the same as repeatable observations in the present. And don't insult us by thinking that we will believe that they are."
With your comment that speciation has been observed in nature, I assume you're referring to ring species. An article at answersingenesis.org, which lists many scientists among its contributors, states "... there is no reason to believe that the differences between the two... species are the result of any new, more complex, functional genetic information not al-ready present in an ancestral, interbreeding... population. Because there is no evidence of any such information-adding change, it is misleading to say this gives evidence of evolution, of even a little bit of the sort of change required to eventually turn a fish into a philosopher... an ancestral species can split into other species within the limits of the information already present in that kind--just as creationists maintain must have happened."
Lastly, yes, I did read the contexts of the quotes I have cited. The fact that they disagree with my position doesn't mean I can't cite them. Patterson's quote is extremely telling of the fact that there is virtually no conclusive *specific* evidence for evoltution. It shows that he has to look at the universe of fossils and come to a general conclusion. He can't hold up a specific piece of evidence and say, "Here we see the transition from creature X to creature Y." Creation scientists see the same universe of evidence, but come to different conclusions.
John Morris (http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&act
-- Psalm 53
And there you have it. Straight from the Bible itself. Authoritative and unambiguous.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
At least I wrote out the original context of the quote you take issue with (you might've missed it, but it was in response to one of the first comments that quesitoned my use of it), and at least I'm willing to discuss that context and my views of it.
So I'm not sure what you're trying to show by giving a completely unrelated quote for which you've given zero context and whose context you do not discuss. There is no similarity between what you've done and what I did.
Blod-clotting, speciation and all these long words make my head hurt.
The truth is plain and simple, just take look at a banana!
I also have to ask again, since you're still responding to posts, why did you bring up Marxism? It seems like well poisoning to me, but I'm still interested in what your defense of that tactic might be.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
If we place the ability to predict under extreme selective pressure, the humans will either go extinct or become very good at predicting things.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I haven't said, "X thinks that there isn't enough evidence!" I've said, "Here is what X noted about the lack of transitional forms." Granted he may disagree with me about *why* there are no good examples of specific transitional forms, but that doesn't mean I can't quote him as part of my argument nonetheless. And I even acknowledged in this thread that he still holds strictly to Darwinian style evolutionary theory. I'm simply showing that he relies on a large, general body evidence for his position (not specific examples).
From my point of view, it is noteworthy that evolutionists can't rely on their evidence to tell me with much specificity at all what life-forms we specifically evolved from, but still want me to believe with 100% certainty that I evolved from a chimp of some sort. Seems sort of like, "I'm not sure... but trust me, you had to have come from some sort of monkey-like creature." That's not good enough for me, and to be honest my placing faith in such a position would be just as much a leap as it is for me to believe in the God you say doesn't exist (if not more of a leap). And as long as there are more then a few other scientists who are published, working, and respected in their fields who offer other theories, I'm going to be open to hearing what they have to say. And I think most people are like me. Polls show that less then 10% are strict evolutionists and the majority is open to creationism and would like to see it presented. Even though in our public education evolution was the only idea of origins presented to us, we still haven't seen strong enough evidence to completely convince us.
I'm not sure what you're referring to concerning Marxism.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Unlike most organisms that with which we share the Earth, we have not evolved for any specific climate, food source, altitude or seasonality. Most life specializes in something; we are adapted to excel at nothing in particular, but we are at least capable of dealing with most environments that the Earth can throw at us. We have evolved to become very good generalists, much like other members of our extended family; we're just a bit better at it!
The roll of a d20 is random, which means that combat is random, which means we can't predict who'll win a fight between a first-level bard and Asmodeus.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I suppose it would, if you think of Marxism as a poison. On the other hand, I think it is somewhat applicable because Gould's Marxist leanings are well known, and it's easy to understand he could favor a viewpoint that would leave the human race to figure out its own morals without hints provided by any sort of transcendental source.
Bzzt.
Darwin didn't know about mutations, and he certainly didn't say that they were random. He thought that traits of the parents (however they existed) were blended in the offspring. Natural selection and genetics weren't "reconciled" until the 1900s.
"Actually, you're incorrect in saying the blood clotting work has turned out to be an embarrasment to Behe. On the contrary he has written defenses of it to contest the attacks on his work. Hardly "embarrasment"."
See, this is the sort of attitude I find perplexing. To my evolution skeptics, the content of the arguments doesn't seem to matter at all. For them, merely the fact that someone can make words come out of their mouths in response to a refutation of their ideas means a victory.
Yes, Behe has responses. But they are no more satisfying or convincing than his original arguments. He claimed that there was no way blood clotting could have evolved. And yet, while he wrote, Doolittle had already uncovered some pretty powerful evidence of exactly how. Behe's lame response was to shift the goalposts without admitting what he'd done: now instead of showing that it was POSSIBLE that blood clotting had evolved and even laying out a plausible macro-sequence of events based on evidence from life on earth and genetics, Behe starts demanding the mutation by mutation history of its evolution: a rather completely different and silly demand which has none of the strength of his original IC argument.
"With your comment that speciation has been observed in nature, I assume you're referring to ring species. "
No, I'm referring to the countless observed instances of reproductive isolation and eventual genetic incompatibility. As I said, creationists try to pretend that the species barrier is some mysterious line that no one knows how anything could cross. In fact, the basic patterns of genetic drift and how incompatibilities accumulate between two populations is actually fairly easy to understand when you start studying population genetics.
"An article at answersingenesis.org, which lists many scientists among its contributors"
Please. If you are going to make an argument from authority, it has to be a PLAUSIBLE one. Answeringenesis is an activist organization whose members all pledge to defend the the truth of the bible. Their "scientists" are simply not acredited experts in their fields (many of them got degrees from mail-order diploma mills or aren't even tangentially related to biology), and trying to cite them as such is to falsely claim non-existent authority.
It's claims and articles are ludicrous, commonly in gross error, and very often slanderous. Citing them is a TERRIBLE way to make your point. You're trying to argue that evolution is misguided as SCIENCE because an evangelical religious organization who opposes evolution on basis of their believe in the primacy of biblical literalism says so? You were doing much better sticking with Behe.
"Lastly, yes, I did read the contexts of the quotes I have cited. "
That's not what I asked you. I asked you whether you'd actually read their actual work, not read them in the "context" of some website claiming they prove that evolution is a myth. The idea that, for instance, Gould believed that evolution isn't evidentially well supported is hilariously silly and misinformed. Do you know what phyletic gradualism is, off the top of your head? If not, then understand that you probably do not understand what these guys are talking about and debating.
"Patterson's quote is extremely telling of the fact that there is virtually no conclusive *specific* evidence for evoltution."
No, it's not. What Patterson is talking about is direct line ancestry in the fossil record. That's not the same thing at all. What you really need to do is to understand exactly HOW science is done and WHY evolution is considered so certain. You obviously have a lot of misconceptions about how the evidence and arguments actually work, and what they require.
"It shows that he has to look at the universe of fossils and come to a general conclusion."
A conclusion that is simply undeniable. You don't need to know every single individual that ever lived or the micro-level ancestral trees to see that every piece o
"Granted he may disagree with me about *why* there are no good examples of specific transitional forms"
Neither of them would agree with you in the slightest insofar as YOU understand transitional forms and are falsely trying to imply that they understand them.
"From my point of view, it is noteworthy that evolutionists can't rely on their evidence to tell me with much specificity at all what life-forms we specifically evolved from, but still want me to believe with 100% certainty that I evolved from a chimp of some sort."
You're just being disingenuous here. Just because I can't tell you exactly where every solider placed their boots at Gettysburg doesn't mean I can't demonstrate that the battle happened or have a very high degree of certainty about its overall course of events, many and and always increasing grasp of the specifics, and its outcome. Such is the case with common descent as a whole and evolutionary change in particular.
The evidence for our relation to chimps is rock-solid. But you don't understand it at all yet or how it fits together and why a vast convergence of evidence is such a powerful demonstration of accuracy. Which is okay, except that you think you have it all figured out already, which is hardly the sign of an open mind.
Of course, the idea of a creature who fits into every single taxonomic definition of an ape, without exception, telling me that he's incredulous that he's related to other apes is even sillier. You're telling me this with a mouth full of molars that are distinctively ape molars, unlike any other teeth in the entire animal kingdom other than an apes. With the same density of hair folicles. With all, in fact, the features that distinguish apes from all other forms of life. Heck, before evolution overturned the apple cart, even creationists lumped the apes in with man. Linneus dared anyone to show him a major morphological justification for separating them. And that was all before any hint of genetic evidence that cross-confirmed fossil evidence that all of course tied in in exactly the right way with geographic evidence and so forth.
"Even though in our public education evolution was the only idea of origins presented to us, we still haven't seen strong enough evidence to completely convince us."
Again, this is ridiculous. Because of the controversy, evolution is barely covered at all in most non-college realms: you'd be hard pressed to find high school classes that really cover it, and in many places in the Bible Belt, it's not taught at all. It's no wonder that people have such a caricatured and limited view of what evolution is and why it's considered so fundamental to the history of life on earth.
"MILLIONS of mutations, and only 700 were of the short that improved function..."
People keep saying this, but the part of the article which says "millions" was purely the invention of the writer, attempting to link the story to a previous story on c|net which itself said nothing about "millions" of mutations. So far as I know, no research group has the capability of identifying millions of distinct genetic variations in an experiment. Perhaps millions did occur, but these researchers are actually said in the article to have only identified 700 or so different mutations. If that is an accurate count and if the gene involved was longer than 7 base pairs, that means that at p0.05 the mutations themselves were not random. It should also be noted that of the ones that mutated at all, the percentage that were adapted to life at that level of the temperature ramp seems at first glance to have been anomalously high, and of those, the percentage that were adapted to the highest levels of temp. were also anomalously high.
It remains a non-negligible possibility that the bacteria had mutations in response to increasing heat that were more likely to be adaptive than chance would predict. Since that result would be career suicide, the probability analysis is very unlikely to be done, and if it is, it will not be published if it contains such a heretical result. Science needs to look for disconfirming evidence to test its models, but the scientist who tries to publish such evidence faces entrenched opposition in peer-reviewers.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
From Wikipedia:
Her discoveries still have not fully been absorbed into evolutionary theory.
Evolutionary theorists (at the slashdot level, at least) seem to operate with a very shallow understanding of genetic processes. The base sequence is not all that is inheirited - the whole structure of the egg (RNA, proteome, cytoskeleton, etc.)is passed on as well, and the pattern of activation or of portions of the genome depends on its cellular environment. The womb environment is largely pased on in placental mammals. "Epigenetic" effects such as methylation can have dramatic heiritable effects. The cytoskeleton seems to have the capacity for an informational and computational structure, even without the hypothesized quanum effects. (See Mershin and Nanopoulos)
The problem is that people try to pretend that everything is understood despite the fact that there are huge anomalies such as the 90% of the genome that is not expressed as proteins - "introns" which in many cases are actually functional and usually highly structured. (analogous to the reverse of the "missing mass" problem in cosmology) The mechanisms of rapid speciation and of conservation of species in the face of isolated populations with changing environments are both not understood. The supposed single ancestral cell is not supported over panspermia and/or multiple ultimate ancestors. Genetic flows beween species are overlooked. Endosymbiosis and co-evolution are ignored as much as possible. Wild genetic diversity of otherwise virtually indistinguishable species is not accounted for. Probabilities are not calculated and math is discarded in favor of superficially plausible "just-so stories", which may make the some of the most glaring anomalies effectively invisible.
The physicists of 1900 may have had fewer and less troubling anomalies than biology does today - the biologists have no way of knowing since they continue to refuse to make hypotheses which can be quantified and falsified (in a Bayesian rather than Popperian sense) even after the biochemical means have become available.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
This looks like pretty interesting stuff. I confess that biology is not my field, and I don't have a good understanding of your examples . In any case, it would seem that your post brings up challenges to the modern synthesis of Darwin's natural selection, and the discovery of DNA as the mechanism for inheritance that Darwin assumed. Perhaps the inheritance method is more complicated than DNA. I certainly don't know for sure. But of course, this sure doesn't seem to me like an example of (from the original post) Intelligent Design has found anomalies that just cannot be explained in terms of Darwin's random natural selection. I agree with you, though, that the study of the history of the evolution of the species is evidently a living field, which means that there must be things that biologists don't understand about it. Perhaps biology will soon have a radical rethinking of the method of inheritance from one generation to the next. I don't know enough to hazard to guess. I don't think, though, that such a rethinking could result in a shift to ID, and I certainly don't think it would be due to papers by Behe, which I've been told are not that good anyway.
do cite the *proof* to which you refer. it isn't that i don't everyone on slashdot, rather, i like to review the source material.
Yes, the evidence that differences among the DNA of different organisms are of the sort that arise by mutation is available in a number of publicly accessible DNA sequence databases. For comparisons between species, a good place to start is the NCBI taxonomy project, where you may obtain access of the billions of bases of sequence information available for a variety of species, as well as tools for making comparisons between gene sequences.
it seems to me you had a reasonable choice - address the quote and explain why it isn't relevant. you rejected the reasonable option and proceeded to attack the poster.
I did explain why the quote was not relevant: "science is based on evidence, not the words of the prophets." To put it more directly: as a scientist I am interested in evidence, not somebody's opinion. Argument from authority may be considered acceptable in religion--in science, it is not. This fundamental principle dates back to the dawn of science--the motto of one of the earliest scientific societies, the Royal Society of London, is "Nullius in Verba," which loosely translated means "Take nobody's word."
you can't explain why a hybrid land/water ear (not advantageous on land, not advantageous in water - no hybrid environment exists) is an advantage.
I can hear pretty well underwater. I guess I must have a "hybrid land/water ear."