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.
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?
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?
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.
I think the most interesting thing to come to light in this study is that scientists have identified fourty characteristics of nematode sexual organs.
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
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!
You bring up a point that many do not understand. Evolution says nothing about how life or DNA started. It simply explains how once life started with DNA, the process by which it evolves. Similarly the "big bang" theory says nothing about how the universe started. It explains how it expanded and changed from a hot, dense, nearly uniform state to its cold, sparse, unevenly distributed state. There are hypotheses about life starting with an RNA world, or starting with undirected metabolism, but these are completely separate from the theory of evolution, for which we have ample evidence.
Your other point seems to do with the fact that some evidence is not completely explained by evolution. In science, there is always some observation left unexplained, which is why Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum theory superseded Newton's laws. It does not mean that there must be a supernatural explanation for the observations that are currently unexplained.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.