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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."
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?
Is it 'deterministic' or 'random' that a positively charged object is attracted to a negatively charged object, or is it merely a consequence of the way things are?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
This says nothing about the way in which a trait arise--merely that the selection process that determines which traits are likely to be passed on is not random.
Also, there's no reason to have faith in this. Leave faith to the religious folks--these are facts, which are true whether or not you 'believe' them.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Whats really intresting then is that while a whole bunch of stuff is recycled, the pattern makes a tree where recycling never seems to occur among plants-mammals-birds, so no four cycle breathing for mammals, no bird milk, no bat fruit.. really strange that with all the shortcuts that were taken, so much separation would be faithfully preserved.
Storm
It is an unfortunate man who counts another as an enemy--the more you hate 'em, the more you risk becoming like 'em.
Referring to scientific facts in terms of 'faith' and 'belief' is rather an unfortunate choice of terminology. There's no need to believe in facts. There's no need to 'have faith' in random mutations--you can prove to yourself that such things happen, and thus have no need for 'faith'.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Karin Kiontke, Antoine Barrière, Irina Kolotuev, Benjamin Podbilewicz, Ralf Sommer, David H.A. Fitch, and Marie-Anne Félix Trends, Stasis, and Drift in the Evolution of Nematode Vulva Development Current Biology (November 2007), 17, p. 1925-1937.
TFA seems to be misrepresenting the research somewhat. They claim that there is a divide in evolutionary theory between "random inheritance" and "deterministic inheritance." However, the actual article is describing the difference between unbiased (stochastic) and biased (selected or constrained) evolution of variation. In both cases the usual random genetic variation with fitness selection would occur.
The scientists are not claiming that evolution is deterministic or guided, but rather that there are strong selections and constraints that bias some variations to be more likely to appear than others. In their words: As an example of a constraint, they mention "generative constraints" (i.e. fitness is selecting for a certain feature, and there are multiple ways of achieving that feature, but one's genetic heritage will bias one implementation over another). Their evidence for the drift in variations being generally "biased" is based on the occurrence (over generations) of various traits: for instance they observe fewer "reversals" (reappearance of traits that were previously common) than would be expected if the variability were entirely stochastic/random.
This is, in any case, my understanding of the paper... but I'm a chemist/physicist, not a biologist! (So hopefully a biologist in the crowd will further explain this paper.) Overall, however, I think the article doesn't summarize the work properly, since they are suggesting that evolution is highly directed and deterministic, whereas the paper is instead analyzing the "degree of bias" that is inherent to the selection effects of evolution. For instance, the scientific paper doesn't claim that evolution can't produce non-advantageous mutations.
Two points:
While I don't think that this experiment wasn't worth doing, I don't think it's news. It's like going out to measure the mass of a photon and discovering that it's less than you can measure (yes, I know this has been done; it wasn't very exciting). It doesn't break anything we thought was fine, and doesn't prove anything we didn't already know: it simply puts limits on how wrong our theory can possibly be.
This is why I would like to have clarified why people seem to think that the concept of Creationism is even at odds with Evolution.
Personally, I would find it much less insulting as a deity if people realized I was an absolutely incredible systems programmer able to start a ball rolling with some precursor components and have all of earths current life unfold from them as planned. It would kind of belittle the effort to say He just snapped his fingers.
I hear the rebuttal constantly that the words of mankind are unable to contain the meanings God would be trying to impart on the writers, and this type of complexity would be EXACTLY the kind of thing mankind would be unable to even conceptualize millennia ago.
Creationism and Evolution are not mutually exclusive. The roots of creationism are simply unable to be tested or verified by humanity currently so it remains a leap of faith to believe that God designed the layout of dominos. We can't even say if there was a START to the universe, or whether it is some bizarre infinite system, or a finite-yet-recursive system or what.
For the die hard ultra-fundamentalist AS WELL AS the hardcore ultra-atheistic, keep in mind that NOTHING can be known to be 100% accurate, maybe a bunch of nines of significance based on what we know but never 100%. Even the probability we determine based on what we know would be in the same boat (IE: see Newtonian mechanics, almost correct, 'works' depending on frame of reference).
If we could, humanity would have no need for faith, as everything would simply be. Seeing as that would leave even less room in existence for free will, I'm definitely glad things are not that way (despite some things done in the name of faith or in the name of science).
DISCLAIMER: I'm still one who prefers the random swerving to being a gear in a deterministic system, but that doesnt mean what i'd like the model of existence to look like is correct.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Die größten Kritiker der Elche waren früher selber welche
translates to: the greatest critics of the moose have been moose themselves in the past... (rhymes in German and is thus funny, sounds ridiculous in my translation)
I hope you understand my point. Been there, done that - not a hard liner, but a naïve child, ready to believe in something sound - then I turned away in disgust as my mind started liberating itself from all that Christian... propaganda?
I don't think I have a chance of becoming religious once again - and I think that you misunderstood my usage of 'enemy'. I don't hate them, but I must oppose them.
I'm an infovore...
Well... From a scientist who is also very religious...
If you think that science deals in facts, you're mistaken. Science is more a process of coming up with explanations for the observations that we have. For example, we see something, we come up with a theory and then set out to "prove" the theory correct. Unfortunately, we find historically, that the scientific proof of things is almost always flawed, as it was with newtonian physics, but is frequently good enough to get by. There are all sorts of stuff that we're able to build with the flawed scientific information that we gather.
Again, historically, we have shown that as humans, we aren't very good at understanding "fact" through science. We're much better at understanding approximations that are good enough for what we're trying to accomplish at that time. As we come up with different needs or as someone looks a bit further than their colleagues, we come up with better approximations. I see most of science as an exercise of faith quite as much as religion.
As was noted at a medical school. "Half of what we're going to teach you about medical science is false. We're just not sure which half yet."
I agree that facts are true regardless of what you believe. I just don't think that science is all about fact.
Ask me again tomorrow afternoon.
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."
For the "creationists" who believe God coded up the source for the universe in one marathon 6-day hacking spree and then typed "root#make universe" which set off the Big Bang, well, where's the point of argument? The lesser "why" of the mechanics is pure science, and the greater "Why" of the motivation for making it that way is pure abstract philosophy. The two never conflict, or even really overlap.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It's possible to think a particular church hierarchy is despicable without finding Christianity itself objectionable. It's unfortunate that you don't see the distinction, particularly given the overwhelming evidence of the existence of groups which have splintered from the church over the years as a result of similar frustrations.
You offered a German proverb, I'll swap you an English one: you threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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.