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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Either way, it's like predicting the weather. Depending upon your knowledge of the conditions and your computational power, you can predict to a certain point and to a certain accuracy ... after that it's anyone's guess.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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.
"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.
The effects of more novel mutations, though, are going to be much less predictable for the reasons you give.
"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
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.