Slashdot Mirror
New Findings Confirm Darwin's Theory — Evolution Not Random
ScienceDaily is reporting a team of biologists has demonstrated that evolution is a deterministic process, rather than a random selection as some competing theories suggested. "When the researchers measured changes in 40 defined characteristics of the nematodes' sexual organs (including cell division patterns and the formation of specific cells), they found that most were uniform in direction, with the main mechanism for the development favoring a natural selection of successful traits, the researchers said."
Ah, but did this deterministic development mechanism evolve deterministically or randomly?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
it is determined by nature
The Theory of Evolution is once again mistaken for Natural Selection of Advantageous Traits.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Hopefully this will be an effective means of shutting up the old saw of "there's no way that 'simple random chance' could produce the creatures of today from the creatures of yesterday!" and all that other nonsense.
O'course, it'll probably be misquoted endlessly by the 'intelligent design' folks, given that--at least superficially--it could be seen to "endorse" the concept of a directed design, rather than being an inevitable consequence of the process.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Creationist Interpretation : "God came up with something he liked, so he repeated his design; I mean it must have taken awhile to design millions of organisms, He must have recycled ideas somewhere"
If evolution isn't random, then it must be through a predetermined pattern... ergo intelligent design is correct.
Repent! Repent!!!
Hmm... I don't understand...
From what I picked up in bio, it was known to work as such:
Assume Mutation
(1) If mutation not hindrance, animal likely to live and likely makes babies.
(2) If mutation is boon, animal more likely to live and more likely makes babies.
(3) If mutation is hindrance, animal less likely to live and less likely to make babies
From there, you consider whether or not the mutation is recessive/dominant which determines if the babies get the mutation (then referred to as a trait).
Repeat many many times and you get a separation of a special line.
The proper combination of factors being: mutation = beneficial, mutation dominant, mutated animals screw like proverbial rabbits.
How is this different from the new findings?
Seriously, I *promise* I tagged this wateriswet before I read the dept byline..
This sig all sigs devours
Gee, if you have to give it such a disparaging department name, then why even bother posting the article in the first place? Unless you have a fetish for the creation/evolution wars, which we all know is the best thing about Slashdot....
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
Somehow, I feel that this is indeed novel: as far as I understood it, evolution was taken to be the process by which RANDOM mutations are passed on based on how they affect survival and reproduction rates.
This seems to say that the mutations aren't random, but that they are biased into a specific direction - one that is more advantageous to begin with. As an example, this would indicate that instead of there being random variations of the length of the neck of the giraffe, the mutations tend, on average, to favor a longer neck to begin with.
I'd say that's pretty new and spiffy. Did I miss something?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
From the abstract of the original article: "We propose that developmental evolution is primarily governed by selection and/or selection-independent constraints, not stochastic processes such as drift in unconstrained phenotypic space."
The summary and title are misleading. http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/abstract?uid=PIIS0960982207021938
Selection is deterministic, drift is random. This is really no news, other than for developmental question at hand, whether a variation observed can be explained through deterministic or stochastic process.
...not only plays dice, but sometimes throws them where we can't see?
Or Does God use the same random number generator that XP does?
I probably should have stopped after the first comment...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I think the most interesting thing to come to light in this study is that scientists have identified fourty characteristics of nematode sexual organs.
That it is a deterministic process that will tell how much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood.
They might even be able to write a mathematical expression for it.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This is a link to the paper cited in the article:
http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS0960982207021938
This topic is as much news to Slashdot readers as "Linux Shown to be a Viable Operating System" and "RIAA Aggressively Pursuing Pirates".
Darwinian natural selection has an element of randomness in that "natural selection" promotes those randomly produced mutations that increase the animal's likelihood of survival. Every other theory I've heard of assumes a *more* deterministic process.
The key to understanding evolution by natural selection is understanding how the process of natural selection creates an ordered progression of animals better adapted to their environment using random mutation as the engine.
The cake is a pie
It sounds to me that life has evolved to evolve.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
The reason it doesn't look random is because random mutations that aren't successful don't survive long enough in the first place, so of _COURSE_ the trend will always be towards more productive organisms.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
... with a sort of intelligent design?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
We still won't be seeing the "Law Of Evolution" anytime soon, though.
Natural selection is where you loose characteristics that are less able to compete. This is a loss of genetic information.
Evolution is where you gain genetic information through mutation. Natural Selection dictates whether those mutations survive to become dominant or a separate species.
If you have a better explanation I'd love to hear it though.
Boolean logic: True, False, and File not found.
Seriously, selection of unsuccessful traits?
The blurb advertises alternative evolutionary theories, but I've never heard of any theory that didn't presume selection of superior adaptations. The only critique I've ever heard of that is the accusation of circular reasoning, i.e.
What traits are selected for? Adaptive traits.
What are Adaptive Traits? Traits that are Selected for.
Not sure I've ever heard a good reason *why* that's not circular - [G]. Of course, I suppose it's circular reasoning that lost items are always in the last place I look too, but that doesn't make it logical for me to keep looking once I've found one - [G].
Pug
P.S. "Lameness Filter Encountered?" for using some ascii arrows for clarification? The Lameness filter is arguable pretty damn lame!
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
They are obviously creations of His Noodly Appendage
I've conducted an experiment today wherein several massive objects (1) were released in mid-air at which point they did indeed plummet to the ground in the general direction of the earth's center of mass thus confirming the theory of gravitation.
I am in the process of writing a paper right now and expect this advance in our understanding of the physical world to be prominently featured in the next issue of Nature.
(1) My damned keys
Lasted longer then Fonzie.
activestudios web design
So... That confirms there is no god? Or proves that we should teach Darwin in schools? Instead of the God Creation stuff?
--Matt
Evolution is intelligently designed?
It's ONLY a theory!
THL phish sticks
A chicken and egg are lying in bed together. They are both smoking.
The chicken leans over to the egg and says; "I guess we answered that question."
Get your Unix fortune now!
What's this difference between creating and developing that I'm not aware of?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
nematodes' sexual organs
Nobody ever said the selection was random, except for some pinhead creationists who didn't know what they were talking about. Mutations are random, and selection is the process by which those individuals with advantageous mutations survive while those with disadvantageous mutations do not.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Burn in Hell!!! Someone has to say it.
The other thing that is no explained is the seemingly sudden appearance of certain species which is why there are so many missing links.
Another things is that no one has explained species wide mutation for example turning off of the enzyme that produces vitamin C.
In Infinite Play the Movie http://www.infiniteplaythemovie.com/ they claim that viruses are a way the one member of a species propagates a change to other members of the species. They also claim that DNA is software programmed by something intelligent. But not some personalized God.
A lot of people don't know that 40,000 years there were only 1,000 members of our species based on mitochondrial DNA. The standard theory of evolution is destroyed by a very white beetle, correlation The Beetles White album. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/01/beetle_biomimic.php The Cyphochilus beetle has a highly unusual brilliant white shell. New research by the University of Exeter and Imerys Minerals Ltd. and published in journal Science (19 January), reveals the secret to this beetle's bizarre appearance. The Cyphochilus beetle has evolved its brilliant whiteness using a unique surface structure. At one 200th of a millimetre thick, its scales are ten times thinner than a human hair. Industrial mineral coatings, such as those used on high quality paper, plastics and in some paints, would need to be twice as thick to be as white. According to ISO accredited measurements for whiteness and brightness, the beetle is much whiter and brighter than milk and the average human tooth, which are both considerably thicker. 'This kind of brilliant whiteness from such a thin sample is rare in nature. As soon as I saw it, every instinct told me that the beetle was something very special,' said Dr Pete Vukusic of the University of Exeter's School of Physics. 'In future, the paper we write on, the colour of our teeth and even the efficiency of the rapidly emerging new generation of white light sources will be significantly improved if technology can take and apply the design ideas we learn from this beetle.' Colour in both nature and technology can be produced by pigmentation or by very regularly arranged layers or structures. Whiteness, however, is created through a random structure, which produces 'scattering' of all colours simultaneously. Using electron microscope imaging, Dr Vukusic studied the beetle's body, head and legs and found them to be covered in long flat scales, which have highly random internal 3D structures. These irregular internal forms are the key to its uniquely effective light scattering. By balancing the size of the structures with the spacing between them, they scatter white light far more efficiently than the fibres in white paper or the enamel on teeth.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
I always thought everything was eventually 'deterministic', and that non-deterministic machines were purely theoretical.
where is the surprise in that?
Newtonian mechanics is a deterministic process. Quantum theory is not. And yet, somehow, we get from the non-deterministic phenomena to the deterministic ones.
:)
So now there's a study showing that the seemingly random elements that go into evolutionary pressures can lead to a reliably predictable result.
Good to know folks are doing research in this direction. Let's get more of it.
first - 'deterministic' in this case means 'the selection' part of evolution (I would call it 'cooling'), 'stochastic' means 'the mutation' part of evolution (or 'heating')
second, the experimenters take 'a highly conserved, essential organ' and see how it changes with some iterations, and learn that the changes seem to be more affected by 'cooling' than 'heating'
the report seems to lack info on environment stimuli that were applied to the nematodes
so in the summary they extrapolate that the evolution depends more on 'cooling' than 'heating', but even they (in the body of the report) recognize that the results can be applied to the vulva of the nematodes only - their results tell nothing about the evolution in general
the experiment tells us about one special organ in one species group (51 of them - supposedly all coming from some common ancestor) in a rather short time and with unknown environment (very likely the environment was quite similar for all the nematodes) - the extrapolation to all organs in all species in all environments is unfounded
now, putting aside any jokes about worm vulvas, the original paper says this about the features they chose to focus on: As a model, we used the nematode vulva, a highly conserved, essential organ maybe i'm just not deep enough into the specifics of the exact features they were looking for, but common sense indicates to me that if you pick an "essential" feature to study, you are going to be looking at a feature where selective pressures--whether they favor novelty or conservatism--are going to be extremely strong. wouldn't that predict the results they report, that the selected-for variations, being under heavy selective pressure, show a non-random bias?
i'm inclined to agree with anyone who says this isn't news, and for two reasons:
1) if i'm right (probably not) in thinking this study's choice of subject predicted its results, that's just bad science
and 2) if i'm wrong, and this is just telling us that actual changes in an organism are primarily governed by selective pressures rather than the god Chaos, this adds NOTHING to the current popular understanding of evolution except another opaque and misleading news story.
personally, i'd like to see much more popular science writing on the mechanisms governing variation rather than the mechanisms of selection that pare that variation down into new features--each is one side of the natural selection coin, but it seems like selection gets all the attention.
/. is what happens when geeks talk. get used to it.
Since when was there any shred of doubt on this point?
Intelligent design: Complexity implies a designer, The universe is highly complex, Therefore the universe has a Designer, Therefore a God exists.
Evolution: Complexity implies uncertainty, The universe is highly complex, Therefore the universe is Disorganized and Organized, Therefore disorganized complexity allows for genetics to drift and organized complexity allows for natural selection to occur.
Intelligent design died in the process of natural selection.
Given that the worm penises kept evolving one way... Is Bigger still Better?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
As soon as it jumps species let me know, until then this proves nothing about Darwin's THEORY of MACRO (species level) evolution...
How did the Monkey (or the study's authors) determine (ehem) the selection/mutation was deterministic? Being deterministic is distinct from selection favored for survival/reproduction. Btw, what theory proposes random evolution? No, I didn't RFTA (get OUT!!). I didn't even RTF comments - mod me dupe for all I care.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Skipping over the why of the big bang, at one point the universe was nothing but very hot hydrogen. Somehow from this we evolved. Yet we did. The one lost chapter in this story how did the first DNA come into existence? Truly one of the great mysteries of science. Still we have come a long way from one hundred years ago when we speculated on where does the sun's energy come from?
GA experiments -- whatever they are -- showing reasoning ability is not an adaptive trait?
I VERY much doubt that's accurate.
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
The Platypus is a mammal, it lays eggs like it's reptilian ancestors did. The platypus evolved a great deal on its own, however its adaptations are it's own, its poison is different than snakes or insects. The bill is much different than a ducks. And while it is a mammal. it doesn't have teats, the milk comes out something like sweat would. It is very similar to the echidna, which also lays eggs.
Storm
Yet another theory on how it all happened.
for instance they observe fewer "reversals" (reappearance of traits that were previously common) than would be expected if the variability were entirely stochastic/random.
Ah, thank you. That at least helps me understand what they're saying. I assume they haven't yet proposed mechanisms.
Gappers will delight, no doubt, until they do.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Google and wiki it. You are mistaken. Sickle cell anemia occurs when there are 2 bad alleles.
You are thinking of the reason that this situation is maintained (at least as given in textbooks - whether this is really the case is harder to prove) - heterozygotes with only one sickle cell allele may have an advantage in resisting malaria.
Wow, this is a triple convergence of a bad and confusing title, summary and article (which is a summary of the actual journal article) which is unusual even for slashdot.
This really isn't about Darwinian evolution which involves random mutations and selection of the favorable ones. However, there are some characteristics which are neither advantageous or disadvantageous. There is a debate about how many characteristics are "neutral". For example, did large noses appear because they are advantageous (for warming air perhaps) or because they just worked out that way by chance. So the original paper asked this question about worm vulvas and found that nearly all the characteristics that they looked at did NOT arrive by chance but were selected for (i.e. were advantageous in some way).
It is important to note both possible results would be consistent with Darwinian evolution. The only questions being addressed are the mechanism (does evolution go through mostly neutral phenotypes before a favorable phenotype is selected) and the extent that characteristics are neutral. For worm vulvas, it appears that the vulvas that form are biased towards the most favorable ones.
Like anyone would expect the development favoring a netural selection of unsuccessful traits?
Any mechanism that favoured the selection of unsuccessful traits would be selected out of the population pretty quickly, but people who insist on believing in ID or the creation myth don't see that, just like they don't see the opposite must be true - successful traits HAVE to be selected.
My take on the research was that natural selection was shown to have less "creative power" than has been thought; natural selection is more constrained, and less variable. This makes the case for random mutation as the engine of change harder to maintain. The chance that a potentially beneficial, but rare, mutation will make its way into the population is now lower.
Personally, I remain unconvinced that a random generator (mutation) hooked up to a filter (natural selection) can create an entirely new system, regardless of how many generations are allowed. Whenever the random generator creates a bunch of outlier conditions, they will just get filtered out of consideration, so it is unlikely that truly new forms will arise in this manner.
I think the evidence points towards some kind of self-organizing principles being at work in the creation of new systems. I am speaking of entirely natural causes here, nothing supernatural. The evidence seems to be that life is "designed to design", and is far more complicated than can be explained by the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection alone.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Car accidents found to be serious health risks.
C'mon, people. *Yawn* There have been dozens of studies showing this in fruit flies nematodes, and other simple organisms. Move along.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
This just in! New study proves God exists, and therefore, by his own logic, he does not.
It's not the question of whether the illusion is real.
It's how much of the illusion of reality which you experience is based on axioms, which, if shifted, alter the meaning of the proof.
The doorknob turns, the door opens. Therefore, I am God.
The fist connects. I go down. Therefore, the other guy is God.
A much more sensible conclusion in both cases is "god", but our hubris, fear, and lack of patience push the capitalization.
("God" == that entity which is currently in charge, "god" is an entity which can be in charge of some small domain.)
"Follow the laws of physics or they will torture you forever." Your physics professor.
Long story short: Meh?
Property is theft.
I think this sums up the average atheist's argument against God:
The universe was not the way I thought it ought to have been, so God must be sniggering at me, therefore I must either be angry with God or I must not believe in God.
No chance that maybe I just should, for instance, have studied harder for the test. Can't be a geek and be unsure of myself.
Maybe Einstein was simply comfortable with a God who is not interested in controlling what we do.
A guy named Joseph Smith was also comfortable with a God who is not continually keeping humans from doing stupid things or otherwise controlling what we do, but he claimed to have met God.
I don't think Einstein was being clever about hiding his beliefs. I think he was just refusing to side with people that claimed they knew everything about the entity that created the universe, whether on the "religious" side of their debate or on the "atheist" side. Admitted, I'm making assumptions in saying so, but my assumptions seem to put less burden on his words.
I'm not going to claim Einstein believed the way I believe (and I haven't really described the way I believe). I just think his answer was "None of the above." when asked to take sides in a debate he didn't consider meaningful.
Evolution tries to control the effect of random gene mutation through natural selection. Basically evolution sees randomness as a bad thing unless it produces a being (plant, animal insect, whatever) which solves an existing problem better.
Thinking anything else is just wrong.
If the evolution of the universe has a purpose, it must be to produce the next universe. Maybe it produces a species that can start a big bang by accident while experimenting with a Suprconducting Supercollider. I wonder if there is a safe place in the universe to watch from when that sucker goes off. Bethlehem, maybe?
The word "proof" has more than one meaning. In mathematics and logic, it is used to refer to derivation from postulates--although because for most mathematical/logical systems it is not generally possible to prove that the system itself is without contradiction, even that is somewhat less than absolute.
In science, "proof" is used more to mean "test," as in the sense of "proving ground." So a theory is continuously being proved, but it is never shown to be absolutely true.
Am not a biologist by trade, but had always thought evolution was at its root a random process. It has the potential to try anything, but known survival traits will always be favored.
We do understand the mechanism by which a trait will become dominant; reproduction of that built-in behavior to offspring. What we don't understand is how such dominance prevents other, competing traits from becoming active.
In the Science Daily excerpt, they mentioned long-necked giraffes, and how if evolution was random we would also see those of the short-necked variety.
This logic does not follow. We would see short-necked giraffes only if their survival let them reproduce. As they would tend not to - being unable to reach the leaves at the top of the tall trees, thus denying them the energy required to either attract a mate or carry offspring to term - this hitherto unknown mechanism would not favor that trait becoming dominant, though like the activities of a good pack rat, the DNA which would allow this trait to exist may continue to be stored, and passed - unused - on to future generations.
Thus, evolution hedges its bets. It may come to pass someday that the short-necked giraffe was more easily able to survive than their long-necked counterparts. Perhaps all trees become shorter. Perhaps some form of brittle bone disease kills the ones with longer necks, and they change their neck length and diet in order to survive. Perhaps they enter into a symbiotic relationship with some other creature that digs up food and leaves it on the ground. Who knows what the future will bring. But should conditions change, the potential for such a trait, still dormant within the species, may emerge to dominance.
This is not meant to introduce any talk of "design" into evolution, but the fact is our understanding of the system remains in the realm of how traits are passed on, not why.
The title of the post is misleading. This is not intended to be a confirmation of the modern evolutionary theory. This paper is about HOW actually evolution of certain aspects of the nematodes happen, not about whether evolution happens or not at all. The modern theory of evolution considers three different mechanisms in which evolution occur: * Natural selection (the only one described by Darwin), which consists in the differential reproduction of organisms (let's just say organisms, to keep it simple) determined by inheritable traits (adaptive traits. * Genetic drift, which consists in the "random" change in the frequency of a gene in a population. * Genetic flow, which consists in the transference of genes among populations. From the summary of the paper: "We propose that developmental evolution is primarily governed by selection and/or selection-independent constraints, not stochastic processes such as drift in unconstrained phenotypic space." Put simply, this paper says that natural selection is the prevailing mechanism in developmental evolution. Sorry about my bad English. Not a native speaker.
There are many things that have evolved multiple times without a common origin.
Please read:
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/O/octopus_eye.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
I can't wait until some tele-evangeli$t worms nematodes' sexual organs into his sermon about how Jesus will help you get rich in real estate.
It takes two to evolve: environment and species. When the environment changes, the species adapt in a generally uniform way thanks to selection. No surprises, it's simple logic: if I remove all the water from the oceans, we will witness a massive migration of species from water to land, while species unable to develop legs, lungs, etc will die. You don't need to wait to see whether it will happen, because knowing all parameters to the problem you can guess with good probability the end result.
Those unable to understand evolution should write down a genetic algorithm and watch it run. If you change the fitness function or some other parameter, genes not fitting it will be removed from the population. It may take some time, but eventually it will happen. Sometimes I think that schools teaching evolution should do so by making kids understand how an evolution computer simulation works and then letting them change a few parameters and experiment while they learn (oh, and if recent papers suggesting the universe is simulated are true then we may very well be inside such a school simulation).
Natural selection may not be random, but aren't the the genetic mutations which affect evolution random?
Isn't this just another reason for researchers to examine nematode genitalia? Someone needs a date...
That way, the isolated fact is self-contained, self-consistent, and therefore true.
Take, for example, the "fact" that the United States should not have removed Saddam Hussein from power.
The context of that act was that Saddam had fired over a thousand missiles at our aircraft. The context of that act was that the U.N. sanctions were corrupted by Saddam. The context of that act was that the U.N. sanctions were going to end. The context of that act was that after sanctions ended, Saddam would resume his encysted WMD programs.
And most importantly, the idiots drop the larger context, that in a post-9/11 world, we cannot wait for threats to become imminent. But whenever, and I mean whenever, the administration made that point, the context-droppers would say, "but Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11," and claim that the administration was attempting to "link" Iraq to 9/11. The administration was explaining the necessary change in its worldview, the change necessitated by 9/11, which means that the words "Iraq" and "9/11" appear in sentences together.
Context is so anathema to liberals (using the American sense of "liberal" which is the exact opposite of the dictionary and European conceptions of the word) their entire thought process consists of isolated factettes. "Halliburton." No verb required, just a single word. Sometimes they make little rhymes so they can march in large corporates and destroy MacDonald's restaurants, these might have verbs to make the meter marchable.
These context-free lunatics would even jail those who attempt to provide context. Look what they did when someone attempted to provide the context for the CIA sending an ex-ambassador on an intel mission - they went apeshit.
And really, when someone habitually drops context, they are just apes.
"give orange orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me me give give me you" says Nim Chimpsky.
"Halliburton Cheney Bush lied Neocon Halliburton lied Oil died" say the liberals.
Liberals do not think. Therefore they are not human.
Does /. have a Bevets like Fark does?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Or rather 'stupid design', as the above post points out. If an elephant is born without legs, it's getting eaten; if an elephant is born without wrinkly skin and large ears, it's likely going to die from the heat.
Speaking of elephants, just look at all the number born without tusks now. This would have been more or less neutral if people hadn't started killing them specifically for ivory or had just tranqed the elephants and removed the tusks that way. Instead, tusks became a negative trait and those without tusks increased.
While one could make a case for this being 'artificial' selection because it was done by humans, and thus an 'intelligent' process, humans weren't doing it to breed tuskless elephants; humans were targeting elephants with tusks because they wanted the tusks, making it a more or less 'blind' process.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
These scientists are expressing the gene that leads to splitting hairs, and what's astounding, most of them are probably bald!!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Perhaps I'm missing something, but a unifying trend, while affirming against randomness does not necessary affirm determinism any more than the fact that I prefer and tend to choose apple pie over others. IOW, it would seem to allow the possibility of directed evolution a la Lamark....?
...He comes from the future.
Slashdot, ScuttleMonkey, and Science Daily all really dropped the ball.
The research has not "demonstrated that evolution is a deterministic process, rather than a random selection as some competing theories suggested." What the research has demonstrated is that evolution not only selects DNA for mutations which express themselves as functional advantages within an individual organism, but also for mutations which influence the likelihood of other specific mutations.
All ball-droppers, be very asahmed of yourselves for not being more sensitive to such a controversial subject.
You should all thank Kebes for his post.
Evolution is not just the proliferation of random mutations. Mutations which don't in any way affect an organism's reproductive ability aren't the concern of evolution. Natural selection will tend to make mutations which do enhance an organism's ability to reproduce more prevalent through the simple fact that those organisms will be able to reproduce more. The population dynamics associated with natural selection don't prevent evolution, they facilitate it. All the adaptations observed through evolution are ultimately ways of ensuring more effective reproduction.
Also, the significance of this study appears to be that it provides data to suggest that evolution is driven mostly by the recombination of beneficial genes, rather than random, novel mutations. It seems (from the article) to have little to do with the randomness of mating encounters.
The universe doesn't cleanly divide into your objects and subjects. It's not as misdirecting as the concept that God, in order to be perfect, must be entirely passive (a concept not limited to ancient Greek philosophy), but from my point of view, it looks like a false partition.
However, it's actually one of the axioms that often seems to be hidden in arguments about what Jesus meant when he quoted one of David's Psalms, "... ye are gods." The fear that ordinary men might figure out that the do, in fact, have some of the attributes of gods, leads to strenuous logical acrobatics.
Why use terms that have been burdened with all sorts of stray semantics? If we are too strict with that, of course, we would be unable to use any words at all. But it really isn't necessary to appeal to the absurd.
Just want to give a few fellow geeks an opportunity to consider that you wouldn't really have to argue against God to reject false concepts about the collection of principles (entity, being, influence, whatever) by which the universe was made, and be which it is still governed.
(Could I say that you don't really have to argue with the devil when he claims to be God? Just leave the devil to argue with himself and go on about your business.)
Another issue government/insurance/religion wants to cover up.
http://video.google.com/url?docid=-8506668136396723343&esrc=sr1&ev=v&len=3851&q=bruce%2Blipton&srcurl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2Fvideoplay%3Fdocid%3D-8506668136396723343&vidurl=%2Fvideoplay%3Fdocid%3D-8506668136396723343%26q%3Dbruce%2Blipton%26total%3D75%26start%3D0%26num%3D10%26so%3D0%26type%3Dsearch%26plindex%3D0&usg=AL29H23Vld2cR0xf7WX25cAZN-DHAqYeng