Slashdot Mirror
Bacteria Make Major Evolutionary Shift In the Lab
Auxbuss sends us to New Scientist for news sure to perplex and confound creationists: scientists have watched a new, complex evolutionary trait develop in the lab. "A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait. And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events."
Turds often float to the surface even in the genetic pool.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Continuous creation. God put those new bacteria there to test my faith ;-)
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It's a miracle!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"One in a billion odds" means very, very different things for bacteria than it does for humans.
And getting first post on Slashdot improves your chances to reproduce how, exactly? No offense, but I think you may be an evolutionary dead end.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Wasn't that already proven with the rise of homo sapiens?
Careful What You Wish For....
Auxbuss sends us to New Scientist for news sure to perplex and confound creationists: scientists have watched a new, complex evolutionary trait develop in the lab.
Too bad this evidence still won't be enough to make creationists change their minds.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
God performs miracle of transformation on bacteria right before the eyes of watching scientists, yet they still refuse to believe in Him.
:(
Okay... I was just saying
I don't understand why this would perplex or confound creationists. They ignore the facts about evolution anyway; why would this change anything. This will just be added to the list of things to ignore or distort through the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design.
This is why doctors ask people to finish the entire bottle when prescribing antibiotics. This is also why we should ban antibacterial hand soaps for domestic use - because when you bathe a population of microbes in something for millions of generations, the odds are that eventually a spontaneous mutation will occur.
All the anal-retentive clean freaks will just have to figure out how to live with the notion that they - like everyone else - carry microbes on their skin.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
did someone remember to bring a camera, lets post it on youtube!
It's a setback for creationists, sure, but imagine how happy the spontaneous generationists are.
Keep it up and it won't be a "just" a theory any more! I'm so sick of my neighbor saying "evolution is just a theory" with a scornful attitude that implies evolution is a whimsical idea kids will have and common sense will later dispel.
Anything you say will be held against you.
Ha! God let the devil do this so he can test who are the real faithful, and who are the unfaithful to be smitten.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
The sound of a million creationists sensing their world view shatter.
Deleted
But I'm sure there's a missing link in there somewhere!
"Lenski's experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists"
But is it the blind eye or the remaining good eye after looking into the laser?...
Didn't the nylon eating bacteria already demonstrate that a complex trait can arise in short order? Actually I think it was industrial waste products from the nylon manufacturing process but still the same.
So, either evolution is just that much more proven or somewhere in the research materials they have a picture of God's hands! Either way, major science win!
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)
>> A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes
And now a major internet flamewar is about to unfurl right before our eyes.
An American is a thousand times as likely to witness an one in a billion odds.
...welcome our evolutionary innovative bacteria overlords. And so do I.
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
For those of you who didn't RTFA, the new evolution which they claim occurred was the ability to metabolize citrate, a substance in the culture medium that e. coli were previously known to be unable to metabolize, and this occurred in one of twelve populations that were spawned from a single parent bacterium. I think it's pretty interesting :)
And this was meant to be a parent thread.. not a respond to the first post :)
I've been watching bacteria developing complex evolutionary traits in my refrigerator for some time now....
So if the lab represents a natural environment, then I wonder what the scientists represent? They must represent random chance.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
sure to perplex and confound creationists
Why must this be presented in this context? It is quite immature, and most definitely unscientific. Regardless, creationism and mutation are not mutually exclusive anyway.
Better known as 318230.
and Orlando Jones! Kill it quick!
I certainly don't want to downplay the importance of this discovery, but oh man, could you imagine sitting on a stool every day for 20 years watching a dozen petri dishes waiting for something to happen?
That's a lot of crossword puzzles.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Anyway, it's an interesting find, but I wonder, why did they not wait until they finished their investigation of the event? It says that they're still figuring out if the change was a random, incredibly rare mutation, or the result of many small changes. Why not wait until you get the whole story to announce your discovery?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
it's still just bacteria, just now a little better. we already knew that this kind of micro evolution happens. it's not the kind of evolution that proves anything significant. at least not yet.
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
...welcome or new bacterial overlords.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
I often find it amazing how people are stereotyped. Not all people who believe God is responsible for creation of the universe have a problem with evolutionary theory. Roman Catholics believe God is responsible for everything. Including random chance ( which everyone knows is seldom all the random.)
So assuming all science were in and we could prove from end to end the entire evolution of the human species , you would have made no progress in proving or disproving either the existence of God or weather or not He was ultimately responsible for the creation of human beings.
The only group that holds 'evolution can't happen because the bible says' is a very small minority of Christians. Specifically biblical literalists.
Evolution also poses no particular threat to Hindu or Buddhist belief system.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
The intelligent design folks will just say that god caused and was in control of the random events that caused the mutation.
Which is exactly why ID is useless. God, being an all powerful invisible being, can do anything without restrictions, and therefore EVERYTHING can be explained as god's will, if you allow for god. This is not useful to science in any way. ID is not science, and in fact can cohabit perfectly with ACTUAL evolution (just replace every instance of "random" with "god did it").
Therefore, ID people need to stop bitching about evolution being taught in schools, and just tell their kids that god controls the results of random events.
Good thing I'm posting AC because, man, I'm embarrassed at how poorly I constructed this argument.
In an ironic turn of events, the 13th strain of E. coli attacked and devoured one of Dr. Lenski's interns. Within a few hours of the event, the strain contracted some sort of primitive "infection" and died. While the remaining 12 strains show no signs of aggressive behavior, researchers are proceeding with caution.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Ongoing and continual mutations in virii and bacteria will continue to render every major infection untreatable, including AIDS, Hepatitis, the Flu, TB, and the cold. This leads into an uptick in the adoption of religion, largely because science is of no help.
This is my sig.
The last comment in the article should be edited out.
"That's just what creationists say can't happen."
Look creationism is in the same league as astrology.
When astronomers make some new discovery about the cosmos do they tack on the end - "there that will show them astrologers up!"
I guess we will just have to wait and see how this plays out. Either they are right and it will be hailed as finally being the one beneficial mutation many have claimed exist in myriad, or, they will realize how this is not an example of macro but rather micro and it will be misrepresented as many other things oft are in textbooks (piltdown/nebraska man/haeckel's drawings of embryonic 'evidence', etc).
I'm all for science, but I feel the word is being largely abused in this day and age. We see tens if not hundreds of thousands of examples of micro in our everyday lives without even realizing it, no one that can honestly look at the facts can possibly deny that -- but we have yet to see a single example of macro proven, and if we did, we would need to see thousands of more examples to understand its mechanisms and limitations (but isn't that essentially the argument- there are no limitations?)
OMFG scientists found another mutation!!!
So what? It's still just a freaking bacteria. Wake me when it grows legs or starts developing a language. Neo-darwinian macro evolutionary theory predicts that it become something besides a bacteria; we've still never seen that happen. Wishful thinking at best, self-delusion at worst.
This doesn't prove or disprove Evolution (not the big E) or creationism. The bacterium merely adapted to their environment, the evolved (little e), which creationist have no problem with. The presence of Citrate aided at some level in the tiny changes to each successive generation until those changes resulted in the ability to digest citrate.
Show me how how the leafy sea dragon developed its leafiness and I might just start to believe in Evolution (with a big E), othewise, you are just seeing persistent change from generation to generation that eventually produces something useful.
Or, maybe if the bacterium suddenly developed the ability to feed on their glass petri dishes.
Otherwise, neither side should be to quick to exclaim or disclaim anything.
Bearded Dragon
It learned to eat oranges! Woohoo! God must be dead. I know if people saw me eating fruit they would swear hell froze over.
...sure to perplex and confound creationists...
Not really. They're still bacteria. Obviously bacteria can evolve different traits. All of life does that. Now, if they had evolved into multi-cell life forms, that would be big news.
Proverbs 21:19
EOM, you fucktard.
This is just a recommendation that you go RTFA, because it's short yet tells you enough to show that this was an outstanding experiment that showed some remarkable behavior.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
How dare you suggest this possibility.. No bug is getting my dinner!
I for one welcome our citrate metabolising bacterial overlords!
Ah! Oh, boy! The modern miracle of medical science.
They should examine the DNA sequence of the very first generation of the bacteria, and compare it with the one which 'evolved' and see what the differences are. That might show some interesting results.
In spite of what any of you say, I'm betting the resulting organism is a Escherichia coli bacterium. Wake me when it becomes a two celled organism
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
This is not intended as flamebait.
My real hope is that this study will open some dialogue between those who believe in Creation/Intelligent Design and the scientific community, and that the C/IDers are willing to listen. Personally, I find this fascinating as the first documented example of evolution actually witnessed by humans, and a way to open paths of inquiry to further understand the interaction between species, and the nature of natural selection of traits.
This experiment also makes me impressed by the way in which God has created life to be so versatile and adaptable. Although why God 'plays dice' with the world (to paraphrase Einstein on a different subject) is beyond me, I think it is his right to do so, and suppose that He does so in a way that is understandable to us (ie. Scientific method).
Them's my thoughts. I welcome any (thoughtful) critiques of my beliefs that I might refine them and be consistent in my beliefs.
Disclosure: I'm a Christian, and I believe in the account of Creation as it is put forth in Genesis, that God created the universe by his will and directed the way it would turn out. I also believe that it is entirely possible that he did so by means of evolution. (This is not a new idea, Augustine had it long before me. 1-paragraph explanation at bottom of the first page.) I do not believe that science disproves religion, nor that the idea of Creation precludes the possibility of evolution.
While I'm sure I'm not alone in this belief, I know I'm in the minority, neither purely materialist as many in the science community are, nor 'Miraculous' in the vein of Intelligent Design folks or Creationists, nor goofy in the vein of those who believe the FSM said 'ramen' and the world came to be out of the formless wheat...
I don't think the question should be "How does evolution fit within my God hypothesis?" I think the question should be, "What conclusion does my evolutionary data support?" The answer to that question may lead you to create a God hypothesis, which you would then invariably need to test more directly. However, looking at the situation from the perspective you described is like trying to decipher the revolution of the stars and planets about the Earth, because the Earth is in the center of the universe.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Don't discount the size of this discovery. Single cellular mutations in tissue can have very far-reachign effects. When it (re: spontaneous changes) occur in the human body, it's called cancer and is often dire. And Dire Bacteria is a very frightening thought.
Those things you're doing with that stuff you just bought? That's not what it's for! -
I would argue that the ability to metabolize citrate is not be a very complex trait to adopt. Frances Arnold at Caltech (among many, many others) has evolved enzymes that react with novel substrates. The technique has been termed Directed Evolution.
Also, this finding wouldn't surprise any of the Christian friends I have. They all admit that organisms evolve new traits (microevolution). They don't believe, however, that one species evolves into a new species (macroevolution).
I wonder how they arrived at the 1 sample/500 generations mark. It seems low to me, but IANAB [1]. If you want to detect mutations, is that sampling rate high enough?
44000 generations in 20 years means 6 generations/day. That means every colony was sampled once every 83 days. Maybe it was just a matter of space (for storing the samples), although 88 samples per culture doesn't sound like a lot.
1: biologist? biochemist?
They are still bacteria.
This is an important result, and it's going to be more important when the mechanism by which it happened is figured out. Read the article.
The great thing here is that the researcher made a backup every 500 generations of bacteria, by freezing samples. So it's possible to go back and make this happen again and again, which has bee done. Then it's possible to find out exactly when it happened, and eventually decode the DNA before and after the evolutionary jump. This should produce some real insight into the underlying mechanism. We're a step closer to figuring out how evolution really works.
Kirk Cameron! peels! Hand shaped! Arrrgh!
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Creationists don't use logic, they use revealed truth. Anything that contradicts their fixed perspective must be a mistake or an illusion created by the devil.
I miss these web-bubble strategy sessions.
Humans made up god...
1, 2, 3, 4, 5... That's the combination on my luggage!
I really wish people would stop repeating this and focus on the selection that happens and how it happens. Mutations are in essence the random number generators of nature, interesting concept to mathematicians perhaps, but the show is all about selection, not so much the input for that selection.
It's like describing a brilliant new encryption method by saying that it's so good, it operates by chance. While true in the same sense that biological evolution works by chance, it doubt your buyer will respond to that as a good thing.
The interesting thing will be: why were e.Coli never able to metabolise citrate? Has new code been added to allow for citrate metabolisation, or was the mutation much smaller, maybe removing a blockage from existing but dormant code?
The press release is fascinating and infuriatingly incomplete at the same time.
Well 31500 gens. to metabolize citrate? In a few days they shall enter our brains and conquer the world!!
I for one welcome our bacterial overlords!!!
Throw a bunch of chemicals together that starts a new, self-replicating chemical. One that could in a billion years, create a one-celled thing with complex subsytems, including energy conversion, and that can make more of itself.
And if the experiment succeeds, then in a billion years, this new life-form, based on carbon nanotubes, xerox toner and ground up AOL CD's will ask "Were we created or did we evolve?"
Evolution is a no-brainer, even for those of faith. But tell me how the whole DNA system devised itself, and THEN I will be impressed.
I can understand that "wikipedia isin't a source" if there is no source material linked within the wikipedia article, however you my precious troll are wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus#References
If there were no references to the wikipedia article you would be correct, but there are plenty of references. In general most wikipedia articles are referenced with relyable sources. Have a nice day.
Creationists are already perplexed and confounded, which is how they got where they are to begin with.
Don't expect facts to get in the way of their thinking, they rely on beliefs instead.
I was awestruck at the image on the right side of the article. Surely nobody can deny the divinity of his noodliness now, showing his presence at this glorious intersection of science and theology.
Well, now, Human Chromosome 2 really is very interesting. The wikipedia page on ALU could stand to be edited by somebody who knows how to talk to people who don't already have a degree in genetics, but it's interesting, too.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Actually it sucks. Now the lime won't kill the bacteria on the beer bottle.
What?
being said that they may evolve to feed on whats in abundance in their surroundings, could you feed them something that will make em' shit something out that will work in my gas tank?
This is only micro evolution, this bacteria is still the same bacteria, wake me when macro evolution occurs and the bacteria becomes a whole new species.
Why do we correct our criminals but punish our children?
http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/behes-multiple-mutations-needed-for-e-coli/
You're wrong, only a very small minority believe in evolution. Depending on the poll you get either a majority, or close to a majority, who believes that God created humans just the way we are. Then almost all of the rest of them believe that God "guided" evolution, which isn't really the same as believing in evolution.
Only 15% or so believe in evolution.
It's not a small minority.
After 44,000 generations the bacteria can now metabolise citrate. Maybe in another 44,000 generation we humans will be able to metabolise citrate. Assuming 20 years per generation that would be 880,000 years. I can't wait.
If creationists took scientific evidence seriously they wouldn't be creationists. All they will do with this latest evidence is put it in a huge mental box marked "Ignore / Deny" with everything else they must pretend doesn't exist or matter for their faith to work. If you absolutely pushed a creationist on the issue, they would probably try to dodge by making some arbitrary distinction between macro and micro evolution. What you won't ever do is make them concede defeat. They are not rational people and no amount of evidence is going to change that.
Hallowed are the Ori.
Young earth creationists believe in evolution. At least, in the form of microevolution that is present in the experiment. (They don't believe that microbes become jellyfish, chickens become dinosaurs/dragons or apes become human. Heck, we are genetically closer to dogs than apes anyway...)
Creationists believe that there are mutations.
Creationists believe in natural selection (ie, the most genetically matched to the environment will eventually outbreed the others).
Creationists believe that mutations sometimes result in a "net gain" for the organism despite being a "loss" of actual data. That is what most likely happened here. Notice what it says in the article:
a rare chromosome inversion was the most likely cause.
This kind of genetic mistake is well-documented and it's not as if creationists are idiots with their ostrich heads in the sand (despite that constant characterization, which just shows complete ignorance of their position on the part of the speaker). But creationists are still waiting for a single example of a mutation that adds genetic material that was not already there instead of shuffling or removing what they would say God put there to begin with. This could be that kind of example, or, it may end up being a chromosome inversion, which would do nothing to disprove creation science whatsoever.
Time will tell.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I'm so sick of my neighbor saying "evolution is just a theory" with a scornful attitude It will ALWAYS be a theory.
Just like the theory of electricity. No matter how many high-voltage cables we lay, the theory remains a theory.
You can't take the sky from me...
Second, this argument is terrible.
Why would life not form? Because the laws of nature say so? But we just established the laws of nature are not the same in this alternate universe. Its a variation on the first fallacy. "Life" has the characteristics of this universe because it exists in this universe. If there was another set of rules, life might be much more likely, much less likely, extremely different or very similar.
"perplex and confound creationists"
_Nothing_ perplexes or confounds creationists.,
That's an excellent point. I believe it's important to test the people you love, and do so on a regular basis.
With my last girlfriend, I sent her out with my best friend to see what would happen. Everything went great, and she was very faithful to me, so I knew I needed a bigger test.
So, I sent her down to a private Chip and Dale's party with her best friends. Even then, she wasn't tempted. Obviously, my test wasn't good enough for her.
To truly prove her faithfulness, I told her that she was a whore, cut her off from everyone she loved, and kicked her out of her home. After ignoring her pleas for love, I called her ex and told him to come take care of her, then let her stew for a month.
When she didn't return, I obviously knew she wasn't faithful enough for me.
The slut.
(/irony)
You can't take the sky from me...
First off, if you're putting a lime on your beer bottle, you're doing it wrong.
Secondly, if your opened beer bottle still contains beer over the course of the hours it takes for bacteria to colonize it (lime or no lime), you're doing it really wrong.
What I find intriguing here is that we have what would appear to be a falsifying observation being offered for Intelligent Design, which ironically tends to validate it as being a scientific theory, even as it is perhaps being disproved. However, as I try to think of a simply, falsifying observation that would disprove evolution, I'm drawing a blank. Yes, there are many complex possibilities -- develop a time machine and go back and check, etc. -- but nothing simple and straightforward that could happen in the here and now. Maybe I'm wrong, and those wiser than I can offer something. (My training is in philosophy and theology, not biology.) But right now, it looks to me like Intelligent Design is actually *more* scientific by Popper's criteria than Evolution, because it is more easily disproved.
And if evolution is not really falsifiable by a simple observation (and I've debated this more than once and never been offered a *simple* falsifying observation), then perhaps it is evolution that is not scientific?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Someone left a jar of peanut butter in the lab.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
I think you need to read http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/falsify.html
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm glad I don't have to obey the whims of a god whose entire work of creation is just some kind of mysterious "gotcha" game that ends in eternal torture for whoever doesn't "get it".
That sounds more like the kind of sadistic prank some infinitely powerful evil spirit would make all of life boil down to. You know, the devil. Creationists are devil worshippers. OK, now that is more consistent with my experience.
--
make install -not war
They don't believe that microbes become jellyfish, chickens become dinosaurs/dragons or apes become human [...]
Neither does the Theory of Evolution.
There is no difference between "microevolution" and "macroevolution" - except to people with agends, and those who don't know what they're talking about.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/105/23/7899 Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli
Zachary D. Blount, Christina Z. Borland, and Richard E. Lenski*
Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824
Contributed by Richard E. Lenski, April 9, 2008 (received for review March 26, 2008)
The role of historical contingency in evolution has been much debated, but rarely tested. Twelve initially identical populations of Escherichia coli were founded in 1988 to investigate this issue. They have since evolved in a glucose-limited medium that also contains citrate, which E. coli cannot use as a carbon source under oxic conditions. No population evolved the capacity to exploit citrate for >30,000 generations, although each population tested billions of mutations. A citrate-using (Cit+) variant finally evolved in one population by 31,500 generations, causing an increase in population size and diversity. The long-delayed and unique evolution of this function might indicate the involvement of some extremely rare mutation. Alternately, it may involve an ordinary mutation, but one whose physical occurrence or phenotypic expression is contingent on prior mutations in that population. We tested these hypotheses in experiments that "replayed" evolution from different points in that population's history. We observed no Cit+ mutants among 8.4 x 1012 ancestral cells, nor among 9 x 1012 cells from 60 clones sampled in the first 15,000 generations. However, we observed a significantly greater tendency for later clones to evolve Cit+, indicating that some potentiating mutation arose by 20,000 generations. This potentiating change increased the mutation rate to Cit+ but did not cause generalized hypermutability. Thus, the evolution of this phenotype was contingent on the particular history of that population. More generally, we suggest that historical contingency is especially important when it facilitates the evolution of key innovations that are not easily evolved by gradual, cumulative selection.
Hard-core Christian creationists (the crazy kind that believe God created the universe about 6000 years in 6 days) do not have a problem with anything in this article.
... it has been demonstrated by dog breeders for millenia. However, none of the dog breeders ever reported that the German Shepherd dog they were trying to breed turned into another species. It's still a dog. These bacteria are still E. Coli bacteria tens of thousands of generations later ... so it still doesn't knock a leg out from under the creationist argument that macroevolution has never been observed.
For example, there exist both microevolution and macroevolution. Creationist Christians don't disavow microevolution. Microevolution can be shown in just a dozen or so generations with mammals at least
Furthermore, the relative complexity of an acquired trait which shows up in a species has nothing to do with whether or not creationists are perturbed. Creationists agree that many traits can be made to appear in many different species: sheep can be bred with shorter legs, cows can be bred to produce more milk, cats can be bred to have very long hair or no hair at all, and dogs can be bred to be more or less fierce. This is microevolution: at the end of the day, sheeps is still sheeps. The argument of creationists is "irreducible complexity," which states that there are pieces of any biological machinery which must all be in place for the machinery to have any evolutionary advantage. Creationists also don't have a problem with the gradual acquisition of an irreducibly complex trait, *except* when the steps leading up to the expression of the irreducibly complex trait would have lethal or otherwise negative effects on the organism. A classic example of this which is commonly used is the bombardier beetle.
So, whether you're a crazy Christian fundamentalist without sufficient evidence to back your belief or a crazy evolutionary biologist/astrophysicist fundamentalist without sufficient evidence to back your belief, you still require a hell of a lot of faith to hold on to your beliefs. Science would like you to think that it's all based on objective reality, the scientific method, etc. But where science cannot determine the objective reality, many scientists who would rather talk than listen will invent what they do not know. They will filter the scientific method through their own biases and preconceived notions. At the end of the day, religion and science are on more or less equal footing. Christians believe the universe was created out of nothing in 6 days by God, and the scientific world believes that the universe was created instantaneously out of nothing BY nothing. Either position takes an extra-large metric asston of faith.
metabolize not synthesize ..........
enough mutation took place that this substance became a survival enhancing resource (or at least not a debilitating one in the environment)
Creation is about origins. Those who pit creationist ideas against evolutionary ideas are comparing apples and origins. Evolutionary theory provides no initial spark for life nor does it attempt to explain how it could happen. Creationism attempts to define how it all started. Evolution attempts to define the process that keeps it all moving forward. Instead of pitting people against each other why don't we acknowledge this difference and move on.
I'm not against evolution, but I don't understand how this can be said to be evolution. I heard that bacteria share like 98% of DNA with humans... there is a lot of DNA swapping going on all the time, with the result that there is tons of stuff in there that wouldn't have ever been there when bacteria was just evolving for the first time. Doesn't it seem more likely that this is just a case of pre-existing genes or DNA sequences getting turned back on? (ie: not created new, just enabled.)
The article appears to indicate that they don't yet know what type of genetic variance occurred to produce the ability to process citrate. There's a huge difference between having a completely new type of gene, and simple variation of the existing specific settings within an existing gene. If they can show that this was caused by a completely new type of gene, then they'll have something to talk about; otherwise, it's just unlocking an existing-but-previously-unseen potential in an existing gene, which we see all the time.
Lenski and his colleagues are now working to identify just what that earlier change was, and how it made the Cit+ mutation possible more than 10,000 generations later.... Lenski's experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists
Careful here. If it turns out the magic mutation was accidental contamination from outside genes, those claiming evolution proof are going to have mega-egg on their face and we'll never hear the end of it from Creationists.
Table-ized A.I.
Yes. But to make an impression on creationists, one would have to convince them to do two things neither of which is likely to happen: A) Read something other than the Bible. B) Acknowledge that the Bible is not a book of science.
Since we haven't had a good car analogy in this thread yet:
Microevolution would be if you drive your car across town. This has been proven so many times that by now everyone accepts it as true.
Macroevolution would be if you could drive your car all the way to another country. This is, as everyone in America knows, impossible.
Come to think of it, this analogy could help explain why they hardly ever have these kinds of debates in Europe, too...
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
No, they're not random. The Flying Spaghetti Monster reached out with His Noodly Appendage and blessed the bacteria. Ramen.
No,m it won't. These are people tat when it comes to this matter refuse to think.
Evolution is Science, and it is as strong of a theory as Gravity* There are warehouses of facts, and falsifiable tests and it makes predictions.
Most religious people understand that evolution is correct, and the creation is an allegory.
Fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge the contradictions throughout the bible, and the ones I have dealt with refuse to acknowledge the fact that there are 2 creation myths even when it is pointy out to them with the bible.
Fundamentalists move the goal post, bring up old and since proven points.
Fundamentalists are in the minority, but the are load, they are liars, and they are infected the American government uncaring for whomever and whatever gets destroyed as long as they can get their lies out.
So it won't confound them at all, they will makes some excuse are some non-sequitor or strawman and excuse it away. They are rotten SOBs that should be put up against that wall.
*Yes I recognize the irony in that Gravity is a 'weak' force..
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There are no falsifiability test in ID, there are many ways tests for falsifiability with evolution.
Please tell me of a test you can do with ID that it could possible fail, and not failing leads credence to it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... be about this guy's hard work and the very coolness of darwin / evolution / lenski in action, and the postulating of ridiculous new trials to start (like trying to evolve an eyeball or e. coli that consumes leftover pizza and spilt beer) ?? we don't have to pay any attention to "creationists" anymore
A crack team of researchers make something happen, and the evolutionists clamor about how this is proof evolution exists! Pure crap. First of all, it didn't happen on it's own - the bacteria the had help of scientists. Sort of sounds like "intelligent design," if you ask me.
Second of all, and much more importantly, anyone who espouses creation and has really read up on it, will allow for reproduction "within kinds." What that basically means is that you take a collie and a beagle, you get something somewhere in between, but it's still a dog, just like these bacteria are still bacteria.
Furthermore, the creationist expects change. Breaking that down, God made a perfect creation, then something happened. On the spiritual side, sin entered in and brought death. The related physical manifestation is that the creation was corrupted by mutation. If the Universe is a closed system - as the evolutionist must conclude - then evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics, which states "The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium." This is exactly what the creationist believes - that the universe has been acted upon by outside forces and change happens inside - call it mutation.
I wish everyone could be a lot less dogmatic. The truth of the matter is that neither creation nor evolution represent valid theories, because, claim what scientist might, neither is observable nor testable. Don't kid yourselves, folks, evolutionists have just as much faith in evolution as creationists do in creation.
And you know what else, there's room enough for everyone to have a belief; don't be so righteously indignant, you insesitive clods!
http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/06/02/a_new_step_in_evolution.php
The Long Now Foundation
Actually, all scientific hypotheses are unfalsifiable blobs. All that tells us is that falsifiability is a bad demarcation criterion for science.
Are you adequate?
In 44k generations there were billions of bacteria. One of them made it, and was more successful than its buddies.
If some other substance was there, chances (only chances) are there that some other entity would have been lucky and be the happy ancestor of the future generations.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
If you look at this from a neutral perspective this shows that natural selection doesn't always work. The fact that something must have happened thousands of generations ago in order to obtain the new ability, which had no benefit until much later, but if it didn't happen it would not have been possible to obtain the new ability.
If there is no reason why one particular strain should survive over another until all of a sudden thousands of generation later, and it's necessary for that particular strain to survive in order to obtain the new ability, then this shows natural selection is not at work at until that point.
Evolution works because we assume natural selection will make it more likely something will become more advance. If natural selection doesn't work consistently then the chances of evolution being feasible become much slimer.
When evos make the mistake of saying "People can believe what the want" they are making the assumption that beliefs have nothing to do with actions. This, in general, is not the case.
Not necessarily. I understand that beliefs / ideas have behavioral consequences (and therefore I do ridiculous things like spending time arguing with people on the internet), but the fact is that trying to construct a society where people are *not* free to believe what they want is also going to have some very unpleasant consequences.
So, people can believe what they want. Fortunately, I'm also allowed to discuss where I think their beliefs are incorrect.
Tweet, tweet.
But creationists are still waiting for a single example of a mutation that adds genetic material that was not already there instead of shuffling or removing what they would say God put there to begin with
You can shuffle ATCG around quite a bit to spell anything you want with DNA. There are millions of base pairs in E. Coli, and enough of the letters were rearranged to spell out a protein for metabolizing citrate. No "addition" of genetic material was necessary; just shuffling the same old letters around. That's all that evolution needs, because once shuffled the new DNA can be replicated endlessly.
Just so you know, a proper sequence of chromosome inversions is sufficient to form any string of DNA. So long as each of the ATCG base pairs exist in the chromosome, they can be rearranged endlessly. It's already well known that chromosomes can be duplicated or added to, which makes for an endless, changing supply of base pairs in the genome.
The article definitely proves that a species can evolve, but it does not prove they can evolve outside of their species or genus.
:)
The bacterium in question were still bacterium, they just weren't e.Coli anymore. At least not a strain we are familiar with.
It's like the birds that Darwin observed in the Galapagos that had adapted to the kind of nut on the island. Sparrows on one island and long beaks while the sparrows on the other island had short beaks. Yet they had not ceased to be sparrows, but instead were very different sparrows.
Making the leap from observing evolution of a species and saying that such evolution shows that a mole can give rise to a whale is quite a leap indeed. Perhaps that's what they mean by "leap of faith"?
This study is definitely interesting, and will be even more so when they actually finish it and find what changed genetically and why.
In the scientific method, "facts" are observations about the real world, as in "object falls downward". A "theory" is a model that fits the facts, as in "objects are attracted to each other by force whose magnitude is the product ..." -- Newton's Theory of Gravitation. A theory allows you make predictions about the behaviour of the natural world. The newtonian theory allows you to make very accurate calculations of orbital mechanics, i.e. "rocket science".
The point of science is to come up with better models (theories) for the observed world. The Einsteinian theory of gravity (aka General Relativity) fits the observed behaviour of the universe better than the Newtonian theory. A theory is neither true nor false; it merely describes natural phenomena to a lesser or greater extent.
So evolution (organisms and their populations change over time) is a fact, easily observed. The Darwinian theory of evolution is that Natural and Sexual Selection cause the change, and it is a model that fits (very well!) what we observe in the real world. (A competing theory of evolution is Ghod Did I -- which is not exactly useful.)
In contrast to the scientific meaning, the vernacular use of "theory" is as a pejorative, as in "I have a theory that reducing taxes on the rich actually helps the poor."
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
All right since this is so evolutionary, let's do the math and take the data from the research paper and compare to humans:
- 12 kids each generation (we leave that out of the equation, bacteria have more kids, but there should be less in humans)
- 31500 generations to get the one new evolutionary shift
- one generation equals approximately 23 years in humans (chimpanzee 19.6, humans 26.6 at the history of hunter/gatherer)
- ca. 20000000 years since primates rule, and maybe 5 mio since they walk, and 100.000 since we have Homo sapiens
= 20000000/(31500*23)=27,6
So, only 28 meaningful new evolutionary treats for the human ancestors since the start of the primates. That's a drop in the ocean for all the changes we need genetically.
Short essence: the necessary number of generations is ridiculously high!!
The main question still is, what did really change. I cannot open the article from here, only the supplement. But if the citrate synthesis is converted from another gene with only a few mutations necessary, that's not exactly news, and it seems they don't know exactly what happened to which genes exactly.
Another point is, they don't seem to have genetically checked (only with markers) the whole genome for foreign DNA in their new Cit+ bacterial cultures. And with that many generations that is easily possible. There are bacteria in the air/on the hand, and bacteria can take up DNA of their own, for example on that is already Cit+.
Better writeup (and video) at:
http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/06/02/a_new_step_in_evolution.php
This type of evolution would fall under 'microevolution', or the development of new traits within a species. The Roman Catholic church already accepts that microevolution happens; what they don't accept is the creation of new species due to evolution. I'm not sure what the policy of other religions is on this subject, but this doesn't challenge the Catholic church's teachings.
Some rules of it are 'Laws'.
Here is a pretty decent explanation:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070807220925AAwEBXl
FYI: Hypothesis, Theory, and Law are three separate things that happen to be closely related.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
OK Here are the facts and if you don't like it too damn bad. Evolution is science based on facts. Creationism is "Myth Direction". Jesus was a real person but he was the bastard son of a roman soldier. The virgin birth is another "Myth conception"
But when people refer to the "Theory of Evolution", they're usually referring to the idea of Common Descent - not just that species evolve whenever their genes aren't already stuck around a local optimum, but that this evolution led from a common ancestor to every species we see today. The Theory of Evolution is also true, but we needed things like the fossil record and comparison of different species' DNA to prove it; unlike the fact of evolution, the whole theory isn't inevitable or provable in a mathematical sense.
Jihad bil Saif
Yours was a nice idea, but I think it's more likely that early man simply invented religion as a way to explain the (then) unexplainable.
This makes all those movies about biological weapons or killer viruses even more scary...
A set of bacteria ability to metabolize a new substance is an example of evolution, but not one that can stop creationist theoris for a couple of reason:
1. Most of the new creationists accept "speciation" where a basic form of animal/bacterium/etc mutates in a way that allows new functionality to creature, and even separates it from being able to mingle with others of the same species, essentially creating a new species. This has been shown partially before in mosquito breeding.
2. This E-coli is still essentially E-coli. Just has a software patch. It didn't become anything radically different, such as a lizard turning into a bird. So, it doesn't show that this is a practical vehicle for major evolutionary changes, just that such mutation can and do occur. Large scale changes such as that, according to evolutionary theory, take millions of years. So, until we have these bacteria handed down by generation after generation of scientists until they turn into insects, creationists will not cease their theories. It is impractical to claim evolution as truth because we've not been around long enough to ensure it really does happen at the scale claimed.
Ah no fair they got an early copy of Spore!
Okay, *now* scientists can claim evolution is science, now that they've seen it in the lab. However, prior to this, evolution was just a theory, and quite possibly, a religious belief to the science-faithful.
All of you who believed in evolution prior to this belong in the same camp with the religious wingnuts: you both believed in something which hadn't been proven at the time.
But some of you, myself included, were waiting for proof of evolution before we believed it to be true. It's not that I doubted, but rather, believe that in the interests of science, and the scientific method, it is generally best to avoid believing something until proof exists. Those of you who believed before proof did so on faith alone, which - surprise! - gives you more in common with the creationists than you would like to admit.
This is how science is supposed to work, folks. Faith has no place in science - leave that for religion. Does it surprise anyone that arguments about tenets of faith go nowhere? Instead, concentrate on what can be proven.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Your premises are incorrect. If it had evolved an ability to metabolize a substance that was not present, how would the scientists know? Also, natural selection merely states that those traits which give a reproductive advantage will spread. If the substance they become able to metabolize is not present, how does said ability provide a reproductive advantage?
However, as I try to think of a simply, falsifying observation that would disprove evolution, I'm drawing a blank.
Well, how about looking some up? I can't remember who this comes from, but "a modern rabbit fossilized in the precambrian" would falsify evolution pretty well.
I can think of lots more things which would falsify it. A lizard giving birth to a dog. Finding a fish with mammary glands. A flowering plant laying eggs. All those things would falsify evolution. And they're all simple.
And if evolution is not really falsifiable by a simple observation (and I've debated this more than once and never been offered a *simple* falsifying observation), then perhaps it is evolution that is not scientific?
There you go, it's falsifiable. Now you can be happy.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I will leave the evolution "debate" alone. You can't argue science with theology or philosophy.
What the heck is this guy doing evolving E coli.?!? Isn't there a more harmeless bacteria to work with?
Why do we need an E Coli that can flourish on a more diverse food supply than before?
How many times did this guy get the runs from not scrubbing up properly? Does he not catch the clue?
Bacteriophage induced mutation sounds too boring?
An inteligent being created an environment in which these e-coli could prosper. And these e-coli beings randomly changed over time. And this intelegent being is now trying to understand how these random ocurrences happen in the hopes of one day being able to influence them himself? Question is: If he does learn how to influence this change and is able to do it very subtly....will the e-coli ever know that they're being helped along by this benvolent inteligent being....or will it seem like random change over time to them?
From the article:
No, that's what mathematicians say can't happen. If two things must both happen, and each as a millionth of a chance, then the chance that they both will happen is a million times a million. Add up all the occurences needed, and you quickly approach statistical impossibility.
After 31,500 generations, the bacteria developed the ability metabolize citrate. 31,500 human generations (I'm guessing 20 years each) is 630,000 years. Half a million years for such a simple trait compared to, say, the eye or lung. At that rate, would we develop anything like our bodies in the time frame evolutionists give us?
It's their right to believe what they want", they'd say.
That's essentially true. At least, it's true that the creation of some kind of society where people do *not* have freedom of belief would have bigger problems than people who believe in creationism.
"Gotta respect their beliefs!"
And this is the real point that's not true. No one is required to respect anyone else's beliefs.
It usually helps your case if you treat people with respect, though, even while you're explaining why their beliefs may be an unlikely reflection of reality.
Tweet, tweet.
Caesar was easily documented and talked about because he was the king, his image on money. Paying homage to Caesar was encouraged, if not the law of the time. Do you know what persecution is? People who talked about Christ or him being the messiah were basically put to death or in prison back in the time of Caesar. Oh you must have not read the evidence we do have to support this (The New Testament)? Who back then is actually going to risk death to document Christ and his existance? His Apostles of course. The Jews and Romans wanted his existance erased from history. So it makes sense that people wern't ready to document his existance in fear for their lives. Your perspective of this time period is that Christ was as instantly as popular as a Caesar or a Alexander who were kings and known by every person in humanity by default. So of course there is going to be more documented evidence of Caesar and Alexandar. This is why it took a while for Christianity to spread; it didn't happen overnight like a king is crowned overnight and is instantly recognized.
Whoever modded you up has no perspective of this time period whatsoever.
Sorry, couldn't resist. Just finished watching the cheesy modern remake of The Andromeda Strain last night...
Has anyone actually read the article? The writer and the scientist came to the conclusion that evolution was right and creation wrong without actually proving anything. The article itself cites that the researcher needs to look into what the hell happened. Creation and Evolution aside, lets actually PROVE SOMETHING before we go off on a 600+ post tangent. This article hits home to a lot of people and shows the slanted opinion of the slashdot staff. Lets actually get some solid evidence before we go out telling everybody creation is a hoax because we cannot explain a mutation in a strain of E Coli. If we are going to be scientific... lets actually be scientific. -The Voice of Wisdom and Prudence
Some people on slashdot seem to get confused between Creationists and people who believe in God. One is at odds with evolution. The other isn't.
A scientific theory, by definition, is an explanation that best fits the data. This confuses non-academics who thing the meaning of the word theory 'is just and idea', despite many ideas also happening to be fact.
Indeed ideas are arbitrary. Facts are immutable, and no matter what you believe they don't change. You can believe you see the whole universe is the same shade of pink, that's fine, but you won't be able to move anywhere, your problem.
A scientific theory, put to the test in controlled conditions is what this is.
A creationist friend said 'this is not evidence of evolution, it doesn't prove much'. This is not complete proof of evolution, this is just evidence. This is theory put to the test. There is a difference.
Evolution is the forge of God.
its still bacteria.
"Written on the pages is the answer to the never ending story..."
The results are critiqued by the Intelligent Design crowd here:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2007/0131observation.asp
All in all, if what they say is correct, this mutation is a lot less impressive..
Um, lime juice doesn't kill bactera. Hence why you put lime juice in the fridge. The lime is to keep the flies away from your cervesa.
How appropriate that TFA is about E. coli!
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Everytime something sounds like evolution proof, even the slightest, we will sure to see religion bashing comments. The insecure like to mock others with different beliefs. Oh look, this bacteria mutated, so we must all started of as micro organism, and this must be the proof that God doesn't exist. Take that, religious people! Oh, and we have to challenge religion because if no one challenges them it will be the end of the world! Let's we all mock them.
I, for one, welcome our new Bacterial Overlords.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
If Intelligent Design were not so analogous to Military Intelligence, I might make the effort to click the link. Then again, my mind is not so open that my brain is in danger of falling out.
If you give pregnaut woman some bad drugslike thalidomide. She would have a baby thats a mutation it did not evolve into a new species. it was still human just severly deformed.
... the new evolution which they claim occurred was the ability to metabolize citrate, a substance in the culture medium that e. coli were previously known to be unable to metabolizeThis isn't the first time we've seen evolution in the lab. Andrew Spiers has been doing it for years - e.g.
here (2003) or more recently here.
Basically Spiers grows bacteria in an unstired beaker. As the limiting resource for growth (nitrogen? Oxygen? I forget) is most available at the top of the beaker, it soon evolves a mutation which allows the bacteria to stick together and form a mat at the top ("wrinkly spreader"). Then somewhat later the mat collapses as freeloaders have evolved and come to dominate the population.
Spiers' experiment is highly predictable - the populations always go through the same phases, but different colonies turn out to have used different mutations to get there. This differs significantly from the research here, where it appears a low probability event has occured.
(Warning: the above is primarily based on my memory of a talk he gave several years ago. My memory is known to be lossy.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
well, the Bible says God created all of the creatures on the earth, but it doesn't describe the method by which He did it, does it?
The late pope, John Paul II, said "God" used evolution to create all life on earth.
Having said that, I'm not quite ready to embrace evolution as the origin of species (as opposed to evolution within species, which I do accept), but this discovery is definitely interesting.
Having said that, well I didn't say it I'm only attributing it, I'm not ready to accept any religion. I used to consider myself spiritual but not religious, now I can't even say I'm spiritual. Though I used to believe in a spirit, soul, I no longer do.
Falcon
Ah, I'm so jealous of those who have faith, it's make my life so easy to have some higher power to blame.Should there be a Law?
Lime in beer is a sacrilege. It should carry the death penalty. At least.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
1.) That's not addressing the current paper. They talk of glycerol, and this paper is about citrate utilization.
2.) The logic in that ID response, to put it nicely, is full of excrement.
I understand you were just making a point, I don't think i've ever met a 'godist' with such ridiculous views as those you have given your straw man. A godist would be more likely to believe that God is working through the health workers at the hospital to save his/her son.
Actually some religious groups don't allow life saving medical services. For instance Jehovah's Witnesses are against blood transfusions.
FalconShould there be a Law?
A lot of interesting work has been done in the field of evolution statistics, examining various models for rates of mutations and survival to obtain various levels of differentiation.
Short answer to your point: You're wrong, natural selection doesn't have to work consistently over a given sub-period to show overall advances over a larger period. Some species alive today are essentially unchanged from tens or hundred of millions of years ago; others go back no further than the last ice age or so.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Find me one of Christ's teaching that says it's okay to murder people? "They" are people who do not follow Christ's message of peace but use it to advance "their" own agenda. Though I doubt you've ever read his message based on your preconcieved notions. Christ preached love your enemies.
You forgot to mention that SAUL (not Paul Mr. all knowing historian if you want to get specific with names) of Tarsus was a devout Jew who persecuted Christains putting them to death before Christ appeared to him and asked him "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?." Even the Jews themselfs acknowlege that Saul was a devout Jew before his conversion. Oh how misinformed you are Mr. Historian, Saul did not found the Christain Chruch, why not read Matthew 16:18? Which states: "And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it." This can be interpreted as Christ founding it himself, or Designating St. Peter as the foundation of the Church to spread the message of Christ.
I don't see any evidence he was paraphrasing Rabbi Hillel. Are you saying Rabbi Hillel is the messaiah? Christ's words are far more wiser than Rabbi Hillel who just rehashed existing Jewish law.
Oh, and don't get me started about the Jews having killed millions, both recently and over the centuries, claiming to be 'in the right'. Have you not read the Old Testament where it talks about how the Jews wiped out vast armies claming to "be in the right"?
Where's the "-1 Moron" mod when you need it? There is no such thing as "micro" or "macro" evolution. Just different timescales.
Whilst a lot of criminals convert to a Theistic religion in prison (to escape punishment and get a reduced sentance) many of them were devoutly religious to begin with.
Except some who go through JailHouse Conversions come out a better person. Some justice systems, as some American Indian tribes did, use Restorative Justice wherein the offender works with the injured party, some thus gain an insight that might be called religious.
FalconShould there be a Law?
You're kidding, right?
Sailors knew the earth was spherical long before Jesus came along--it's obvious when you watch ships approaching over the horizon, since they're not only smaller but the bottom is hidden by the horizon.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I've been praying this would happen.
Actually, it's more like driving your car to the MOON. I can drive to another country from where I live on one tank of gas.
Faith and prayer have also been shown in studies they can help. I don't have any faith and don't pray but I will admit they may offer something to those who need it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Michael Behe (author of _Darwin's Black Box_ and others) makes an interesting response to this study.
... all of the beneficial mutations identified from the studies so far seem to have been degradative ones, where functioning genes are knocked out or rendered less active. So random mutation much more easily breaks genes than builds them, even when it helps an organism to survive."
He says, "
There still remains little, if any, evidence of random mutations producing MORE and USEFUL genetic information, a key distinction that ID folks like to make.
RobotBox - Robot projects from around the world
huh? Threatened? Just because someone believes in something? Hell, the most famous scientists where religious. Up until the 20th century religion and science had always co-existed. Oddly, It's also a fact people tend to feel the way you do, ie. Threatened, when they feel their worldview is under attack, not because it's against science.
You also know that science had been around for thousands of years without being "threatened", right? Honestly reading your "rant" and your obvious closed mindedness scares me the most. If this is what science is coming down to, without objectivity, fear to question what we know, emotional outbursts, then ya science in the 21st century is in a lot of trouble.
If a soul exists, when does it come into being? At conception, formation of a brain, or...?
The reason I ask is because if it's at the formation of a brain, that would imply that the "meat" has importance independent of some immaterial artifact.
If it's at conception, what about identical twins where the zygote splits in two? Does the soul split in two as well? If what about when two young embryos (fraternal twins) merge to make a single embryo, a chimera? Do the two souls merge or does one simply go away?
If you look at the natural world in and of itself, these questions don't need to be asked. Zygotes sometimes split and young embryos sometimes merge. Done.
If however you fixate on the lessons of the Bible, you are stuck with an awkward sort of soul arithmetic; one soul divided by two equals two souls (or one half a soul), and one soul plus one soul equals one soul (or two souls in one body).
Citing Occam's Razor, which is more likely? That one zygote into two is simply that or that an immaterial and unproven concept known as a soul inhabits each of us and must under a special arithmetic to follow natural processes?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Either way, the odds that universe would exist in any recognizable, with planets, galaxies, stars and so on, are way too small to be coincidence. (source)
Here is more from the original article:
The fundamental boundary value (or initial condition) problem with the big bang is the criticality of the initial velocity. If this velocity is to fast, the matter in the universe expands too quickly and never coalesces into planets, stars, and galaxies.
Actually I don't see that as a problem. Earlier this year I read an article in I believe Sciam about how the universe is expanding faster than people thought and gave this scenario of how our heavens may look in 100 billion years or whatever, I don't recall. The galaxies fly out so far and fast people on earth will no longer see the lights from them. Meanwhile the stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, grow closer together with nothing visible outside of it. Then last week I read another article on the life span of different living species. Trees can live for thousands of years, humans and whales for 100 years or more, but some insects only live days. In a universe where the velocity is "too fast" for you may not be for life forms that only live in a nanosecond.
THEN you multiply those odds by the odds you speak of with carbon forming and such...
Just because all the life humans know are carbon based how does this rule out life based on another element?
only then do you come up with the odds for our type of life
Ah, I thing I may see, "our type of life". What if there are other types of life? Such as silicon based life that only lives a nanosecond? I don't know the answers, and I heard elsewhere lawyers aren't supposed to ask questions they don't know the answer to, but I'm not a lawyer and I am asking and seeking.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Anthropic Principle. Those words could save your life. Well maybe not, but they could allow your life to come into being in the first place.
Also, the quote you gave seems to imply that the planets are just a hair's breadth away from jumping the rails. Luckily for us, that just isn't so.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
I am constantly amazed at the attitude towards religion that is so predominant here. Each and every time a discussion arises that spans religion and science, I've noticed the athiests become every bit as religious about their beliefs in science and proving there is no God as some of the fanatical religious zealots, and I cannot help but wonder why that is?
Sure, Christianity is mostly observed fanatically especially among those who take no time to educate themselves. But scientists can be very fanatical as well, looking for any proof or theory discrediting religion.
Can religion and science not co-exist, and even compliment each other? I believe they cannot exist seperately. Is it impossible that there is an intelligent being that is so far progressed with the understanding of the laws of the universe as to be able to exist in ways and dimensions that are simply impossible for us to wrap our puny minds around? It's not just possible, it's LIKELY according to the arguments laid forth even in this discussion from scientists themselves about how life evolved here despite the extremely impossible odds of it being able to happen.
Given an infinite amount of space, conditions, and time, EVENTUALLY it's a given isn't it?
"Also, natural selection merely states that those traits which give a reproductive advantage will spread"
Close. Natural selection is a chance thing rather than a law; a trait that gives an organism an advantage may not get chance to spread because of another event occuring by chance, so I think "will" above should've been "will more likely" (although by context I suspect posters wording rather than understanding was incomplete).
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Jesus supposedly died about 33AD (give or take). Thirty to eighty years later, the Gospels are written. And we're to take them on their word?
Right, Paul was written first. He'd get the message out. Except...
Paul wrote nothing of the Virgin Birth, walking on water, water into wine, the Sermon on the Mount, healing the lepers, making the blind see, calming the seas, feeding 5,000 men and their families, raising Lazarus from the dead, or any of the other miracles associated with Jesus. They were really impressive acts, so wouldn't he at least mention them in passing?
In fact, Paul only really makes mention of the fact that Jesus was born of God, was crucified for our sins, and was resurrected. That was Jesus' life according to Paul. Sure, he had a lot of other things to say -- rules to proscribe, people to chastise -- but on Jesus' life, that's it.
Then suddenly, over thirty years after Jesus dies, the other apostles decide to start writing? And they have a perfect memory of all of these things that Paul seemingly forgot? Sermon on the Mount!? Paul forgot the Sermon on the Mount? Or did he simply think it wasn't all that important? During the thirty years after Jesus' death, it just wasn't that important, eh? No one decided to start writing while Jesus was alive apparently either. Is that right?
Without Paul, you've got nothing substantiating the historicity of Jesus. And as it turns out, there's nothing of consequence with Paul added to the mix.
Just wishful thinking.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
At least people made coins with Alexander's face on it. We have no burial plot for Alexander, but that doesn't mean that there is no corroborating archaeological evidence of his existence.
What has Jesus got? A shroud that was found to have been made around 1300AD? The Romans certainly didn't fall over themselves to make mention of Jesus during his life, even to ridicule him.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
....They probably did develop the ability to metabolize a number of other substances....
How would it be possible to differentiate whether these bacteria DEVELOPED an ability or simply switched on an ability already inherent but dormant until it was needed for survival? Most living things have preferred foods, but absent such favored fare, are able to survive on a surprising number of substitutes.
All theory is gray
I see this fallacy repeated a lot. If you flip an ideal coin N times, the odds of repeating the outcome of that run is 1/(2^N) per trial. The initial run has no probability associated with it, because no "success" and "failure" cases were specified: every possible outcome was equally acceptable. There is nothing at all remarkable about the initial run: it simply reached one of the 2^N expected outcomes.
Just in case you've missed the point, here's another illustration. When you shuffle a standard deck of 52 cards, it winds up in one of 52! (fifty-two factorial, which is about 8e67 in scientific notation) possible orderings. Although only one outcome is possible per shuffle of the deck, each outcome is expected equally, so there is no surprise when the deck winds up in one of these states. If you manage to shuffle a deck so that it matches another deck, then that is a highly improbable outcome precisely because every possible outcome was equally expected, and only one of them satisfied the conditions of success.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
....The Roman Catholic church already accepts that microevolution happens...
They would also likely accept that intelligent scientists are able to do things that don't happen randomly in nature. Here some intelligent scientists DESIGNED an experiment and found that bacteria can adapt to using some other nutrients than what they were used to, before the scientists manipulated the nutrient source. Boy, what a monumental discovery! These e-coli bacteria were STILl e-coli bacteria and will forever remain e-coli bacteria, even though under duress from the experiment, expressed their innate ability to thrive on some other nutrients.
All theory is gray
....my brain is in danger of falling out....
Given that you are not willing to even look at information contrary to your made up mind, is a sign that your mind is hermetically sealed shut.
All theory is gray
Ok, I'll bite, given that this is the third post of yours that I've seen adamantly opposing this as proof of evolution.
Yes, it is. First, RTFA, please. If you already did, I ask that you read it again with an open mind because I think you'll see that you missed something. You have continually asserted that maybe they always possessed this ability, but never expressed it until they needed to. However, in the experiment, somewhere around generation 20,000 is when this was enabled. Bacterial lines before generation 20,000 do not develop the gene, but lineages derived from that set do when "replayed." This, along with the fact that none of the other lines of bacteria show it under the same conditions (despite all originating in the same place) shows that this was not simply a case of a dormant gene becoming active. Only bacteria after a certain point in a certain genetic line were able to perform this function. That is adaptation and evolution since it outcompeted the other bacteria which lacked the trait.
Sure it does. Give me one good reason why over the course of generations genes in monkeys couldn't slowly be mutated to stand upright and gain benefits from it. Remember, these bacteria took 35,000 generations to achieve this minor mutation. If we assume that the monkeys had 15 year generations (which I believe is quite long, maybe someone else can chime in who knows more on primate generational times), that is 500,000 years to make 35,000 generations for this beneficial mutation. Current science and anthropology think spines straightened over the course of millions of years, which means that it took even longer. It really is no leap. It just takes longer time scales and more generations than you seem to be able to comprehend (and most of us can't) at one time.
I think you ought to rethink your concept of "evolution" to mean more of the generation of random traits through mutation where beneficial results sometimes arise. Sometimes cancer or miscarriage results, and sometimes it's the difference between blue and brown eyes. But what you need to keep in mind is that all of these complex adaptations are not one single mutation. They are chained mutations that just happened to be beneficial with numerous, uncountable numbers of failures (eg:miscarriages and pre-reproductive deaths) over generational timescales. Your eyes didn't develop from one mutation. Nor did the lens in your eye or even the membrane on the lens. It is all the result of MANY mutations. That's why it's reasonable to make the "leap."
Person B: There is no reason to believe in that unicorn. There is no evidence at all! You can't see, touch, smell, or hear him. He doesn't even give off heat, doesn't make noise, doesn't show up on any kind of instrumentation, etc. There is not even detectable mass! I'm guessing you're just making it up.
Person A: Well, I can't prove I'm right, and you can't prove I'm wrong, so I guess we're in the same spot! Since you don't know any more than me, why are you acting like you're more rational than me?
See what I'm getting at? You have completely turned critical thinking on its head. Believing in something for which there is no empirical evidence (by evidence, I don't mean that which is evident only after you have faith) is not on the same footing as skepticism. Saying that there is no tooth fairy is not a statement of faith.
I'm Australian, you insensitive clod! How was I supposed to know that international car travel was possible? Every experiment I've conducted resulted in failure and sogginess. Just you try driving your SUV over here, ya damn yank! (Be sure to drive on the left side of the road if you do manage to get here, though.)
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Lucky for you, however I am not aware of any experience of God in my life. About 12 years ago I did believe in a spirit or soul, however after I came out of a coma I was in when I had an accident I no longer did believe in one. I don't know whether to cry or laugh, maybe both, but while in the coma the docs told my family it would be a miracle if I lived. Well if they asked me what I think I'd argue with them about that, my life has been a living hell since. For years I prayed to understand. Before the accident I believed in reincarnation so I thought there was something I either had to learn or I had been a monster, perhaps a NAZI guard in a concentration camp, but eventually I gave up. Now when thinking about any supreme deity existing I can only think that if there is one it must be sadistic.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The "virgin" mistranslation alone is enough to establish that they deliberately wrote the NT with an eye to making sure that the story fulfilled OT prophecy. So after stories (legends, one might call them) circulated for decades, persons unknown, of a certain religious faith, wrote a collection of short books that systematically checked off some OT prophecies to show that their guy was "the" guy, to include a prophecy that had been mistranslated about him being born of a virgin. Lewis's false dichotomy just doesn't seem that compelling or interesting once you no longer consider the NT to be a verbatim account.
The facts are the things that provide the evidence to support the theories. Facts are individual, isolated things. Theories weave them together into a coherent story. Facts are events. Theories are things which explain those events. Evidence is a relationship between a fact and a theory.
Gravity is a theory (sufficiently well formulated and reproducible to be deemed a "law"); instances of things falling are facts. The sun-centered (and earth-centred, for that matter) solar system is a theory; planetary motions are facts. Radio waves are a theory; instances of current induced by an antenna are facts. Some of these are really useful theories, aren't they? (Not too sure about the solar system theories, though: do we even care if the solar system has a centre?)
The phrase, "evolution is a fact", is just a really bad way of saying, "history really did happen the way the theory of evolution claims it did". I say it's bad because you can't argue with facts, but you can argue with the assertion that a theory is accurate. In that sense, saying "evolution is a fact" is more like saying, "history really did happen the way the theory of evolution claims it did, la la la can't hear you!"
Evolution is a theory (as is creation or intelligent design); fossils and biological organisms are facts.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
-- thinkyhead software and media
There are problems with falsificationism, but it's a popular stance, so let's adopt it for now. The first problem I see with your argument is that an instance of evolution (ignoring questions of scale, for now) does not falsify Intelligent Design theory, because ID is a theory about the past, and the possibility of evolution (at any scale) in the present does not preclude the possibility of intelligent design in the past. Similarly, although it is a documented instance of evolution, it does not confirm the Theory of Evolution to the extent that the theory talks about historical events. The observation proves that a certain kind of spontaneous change is possible, but that's quite a long way from proving that the same kind of changes (in large quantities over long periods) are responsible for the state of the world as we know it.
As to whether either of these theories can be falsified, they probably stand or fall together. At some broad level, ID and Evolution are binary alternatives, lacking a third possibility. Either intelligence was involved in the creation of life, or it was not. Evolutionists can argue over natural mechanisms, and ID theorists can have debates over the nature of the intelligent designer, but the two camps are mutually exclusive and offer full coverage of the possibilities. Thus if you falsify one, you prove the other, and vice versa. They are either both falsifiable, or both not falsifiable -- and if they are falsifiable, they are also provable.
That doesn't answer whether ID and Evolution are scientific theories by Popper's standards, but it narrows us down to, "either they are both scientific, or neither of them is." That's a valuable outcome, if you can accept it, given the sheer quantity of "we are science, they are not" going on.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Ultimate place: Heaven.
Ultimate thing: I dunno, Thor's hammer maybe? The space missiles of the Upanishads?
-- thinkyhead software and media
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Vince McMahon and David Stern are in charge of the WWE and NBA respectively. In the WWE, Vince knows before the event begins who is going to win each fight--it is preordained, scripted, and under his control.
In the NBA all David Stern knows are who's playing, and the rules of the game. Who actually wins will depend on how the teams play. The latter is closer to the Catholic belief.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This is not a “preferred food” in the sense “I prefer peas to brussels sprouts;” this is “I have no bread, I will eat these rocks instead,” and actually being sustained by them.
We are talking about fractions of a second AFTER the big bang, not the current inflation that the universe is experiencing. In other words, it's not a problem now, but would have prevented EVERYTHING about 13 billion years ago.
Yea, there might be a misunderstanding, but I don't know who's it is. If the universe is expanding faster now than what it was thought it was expanding either what was thought as the initial conditions is wrong or there's an outside force, or one we just don't know of, that's forcing it to speed up.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Our "particular" scientific way of measuring the universe perceives grainy particles in its measurements, but all phenomena - including our immediate experience of consciousness - are holistic and spatially and temporally distributed. That is, we typically need both distance and time to perceive deeper meaning. Likewise, our kind of experience relies on a composite, evolved physical form.
"The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James presents a beautiful psychological view of the qualities of religious experience, and in the end reveals it to be a quality of self-transcendence often brought on by existential crisis. And it points to self-surrender to a "higher power" - a non-self - as an operative mode of self-transcendence. This phenomenon corresponds to the kensho (awakening) of Zen Buddhism and the "being born again" of Christianity.
Examining the universe as it is - and especially observing our own minds - leads to amazing insights about the nature of the self and its connection to the universe, which in our awakened state is experienced as ultimately beautiful and divine. The mantra prescribed by Jesus - the "lord's prayer" as it is called - is one mechanism for apprehending the divine, and of surrendering one's limited self (ego) to the higher being (the self that precedes ego). As Jesus says, "I and the father are one."
It surprises me to no end that more people don't really see the total unity underlying all the religions that mandate prayer and meditation, or see how the psychological effects are so striking that oblique metaphor is the only avenue available to point them out. If more Christians studies comparative religion they would discover a whole world of advanced methods that Jesus could only hint at, in order to discover for themselves that indeed, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Even among devout Christians, there is a lot of frustration with the Sunday mass, which fails to enlighten them to the wealth of spiritual knowledge that lies beyond the relatively impoverished teachings of Jesus and the too-subtle old testament.
None of this stuff requires us to be kooky mystics. Learning to apprehend the divine in every present moment has serious pragmatic consequences, not least of which is the development of empathy and compassion. But perhaps even among Christians, there is so much attachment to the intellectual way of believing - in ideas - that genuine fear arises if you suggest we are all taking part in a single, eternal phenomenon, and that all you have to do is put aside all you think for a little while. I would guess we're too attached to being separate and special - which of course we are - and don't really want to see both sides of the coin if it means losing a little of that.
We humans have evolved as very much fear-driven social animals, so it takes courage to look beyond the conventional beliefs of our social and religious groups and strike out completely on our own. Most people - including myself - run to the familiar material comforts when we feel empty, rather than truly allowing ourselves to become "emptied so that we may be filled again."
Hey, it is a pretty scary thing to be non-self, as anyone who's ever tried Salvia divinorum can attest to. But in coming back to yourself it is striking just how conventional it all seems.
Oh man, pardon me for ranting on, but this is one of those subjects I'm very passionate about. Honestly, every serious Christian should run, not walk, to the nearest yoga or meditation center and start getting hip to what Jesus was talking about, just what this universe is made of, and just who we each are. Then we can stop imagining that there is some kind of infinite distance between God and the Creation. The eternal and divine is right here, right now, and it always will be.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Here I was hoping for something interesting like the bacteria increasing its allele count, sprouting legs, developing language... Instead I find that they've essentially found a mutant strain that makes it non-diabetic (analogous). That's not evolution, that's mutation. This just in! There are black people in Africa and white people in northern Europe! Some people are allergic to milk and some people aren't. Some people understand Chinese, and some don't. Therefore evolution must exist! What's next? Are they going to "prove" evolution exists when they show us how flour evolves into mice and meat evolves into maggots? (leave it out for a few days, come back, and evolution!)
What the hell is wrong with these saps? Is the hypothesis of evolution hurting so badly that they've stopped grasping at straws and are now aiming at pixie sticks?
And what makes it worse is that retarded slashdotters praising this find with some religious debate over whether life was created by Poseidon twirling his finger in a slimy vat of proteins (theory of evolution), or if the I AM truly is what he says he is (theory if bibolution). At least they're all sticking to only 1 major religious text at my threshold.
Both sides have evidence, and neither side has proof. The only people that say otherwise are the group-think wielding tailors of the emperor's new clothes. You're worse than string theorists.
Thing is, we have a lot - and I mean millions - of really stupid, gullible, deceived people who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag. We don't teach people to be pragmatic, skeptical, and creative in our schools, because the forces that be prefer us to be stupid. Educational reform is unheard of here, and when it is proposed it's usually in the form of "standards" and not examining the problems of holistically educating young human minds. The way we are indoctrinated in this country is insidious, and with every passing generation it gets worse.
So, while you're finding this "controversy" funny and hard to understand, we're seeing it as another smoldering hole in the American soul.
I'm certain I speak for all non-biblical-literalist-creationist Americans with what I state here.
-- thinkyhead software and media
If you spent more than a few years having that kind of circular logic drilled into your brain at the threat of eternal damnation for not accepting it you would have a really hard time with that whole science and logic business too. Especially since they start at a VERY young age.
Not all of them start as children. In college a friend and fellow student started dating this guy. Perhaps we shouldn't have said anything but a few of us warned her about him, no body liked this guy except her. Anyway she dropped out of college and moved half way across the country to live with him where his parents lived. There he got her pregnant and dumped her. A few years later I bumped into her. I talked with her a few tymes but she came back as a Born Again Christian always sprouting off about Jesus, so I started cutting my tyme with her short and avoiding her when I could. I felt sorry but I couldn't take what she kept saying.
FalconShould there be a Law?
They say a bunch of things, and most of it is crap.
They call it "adaptation, not evolution", because the change did not create a new species.
Of course, the fact that the division into species is quite an arbitrary one, kind of like the division of languages, escapes them.
Then they argue that this 'adaptation' is the result of loss of genetic information, which is nonsensical. Dawkins argues, quite convincingly IMO, that mutations increase the uncertainty in the system; since natural selection picks one solution over the other, it increases the information content of the system by removing said uncertainty.
It's all just creationist drivel.
Ignore this signature. By order.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I come to slashdot because if I want to know more about a story I can read the comments and usually get a lot of good insight from people who are knowledgeable about the subject matter.
... the comments look a lot like this.
I avoid Digg because, well
or else!
From some other reading recently, it seems that some widely used immortal cell lines HeLa derived from cancer cells have diverged so far from there origin that they may in fact now be a new "species".
You can't out-weird the universe...
Andy
) or from Wikipedia's article on falsifiability: Richard Dawkins said that "If there were a single hippo or rabbit in the Precambrian, that would completely blow evolution out of the water. None have ever been found."
Ever heard of google? It's pretty neat, you can search for stuff(eg. "falsifying evolution"). Check it out.
There is no such thing as "microevolution". The distinction was invented by a Creationist who doesn't even hold a relevant qualification on evolutionary biology, or biology at all for that matter.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The fact that adapted organisms are less equipped to compete in the original environment of their parents is irrelevant, that environment is no longer current, so useless traits atrophy.
Nothing in their logic proves that genetic information is always lost, never gained on the path from simple to complex organisms.
"Yeah, but it's still a bacterium."
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
whoopdeedoo so what,
If your faith is shaken by a couple of details that don't match literally in a book that's choke full of symbolisms. Ask yourself did i misunderstood the symbolism?
If your worldview is scientific, ask yourself what goal is achieved by attacking religious beliefs?
Most comments so far seem to ignore the part to be excited about:
This particular change is a quite complex one, namely the ability to metabolyse a previously unusable food type. The other exciting thing is that when they take unevolved ancestors of the population that evolved this trait, the ancestors evolves again in the same conditions and developed the same complex trait.
You are being stupid.
This in no way "falsifies" intelligent design. They will just say "oh that's micro evolution" or something. Read the posts from the ID'ers above and it is pretty obvious that this does NOTHING to "falsify" intelligent design. "God" could have created the entire earth exactly as-is last Thursday, including us and our memories. We CANNOT "falsify" that. ID'ers tend to ignore this, but they will basically claim that anything we observe is not what god did. Unless we actually create an Earth and cause life to evolve from nothing all the way to a human (and probably not some other intelligent creature) would they perhaps shut up.
Evolution is TRIVIAL to falsify. One species giving birth to an unrelated one would falsify it. A species appearing out of nothing would falsify it. Even if you assume "god" would not do something "obvious", a lack of correlation between dna and observed traits would falsify it. I believe you are confusing the lack of finding any actual evidence to show Evolution is false with "unfalsability".
Of course you are not going to understand any of this.
Isn't this called the dilbert principle, or peter principle?
I still seem to be unable to grasp why there ought to be a problem with accepting evolution and believing in god.
Everyone who has ever build something (anything...) knows that it is easier to calculate/build/program something for a very specific purpose, then to calculate/build/program an algorithm/machine/... that adapts to different tasks it gets presented with.
Humans have yet to create something that is able to replicate even in a basic fashion. (see http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/07/210205 for a basic example) The desert races of autonomous vehicles shows that we know next to nothing about adapting to changing environments.
So maybe it took some god (one, many, whatever one would prefer to believe) to develope something as sophisticated as evolution, a self adapting, self replicating mechanism with the purpose of proliferating "life" as in "alive".
What does sex in a boat and yankee beer have in common?
They're both f***** close to water.
"Student: So which is right, then? Is the bowling ball accelerating towards the earth, or is the earth accelerating towards the bowling ball?
Professor: Which way makes the math easier?"
If your professor had a clue he'd have told you the right answer is they both accelerate towards each other. However the earth being so much bigger its movement is imperceptable.
....Because not having this ability....
How is it possible to tell that these bacteria did not have this ability all along, rather than expressing it at some point due to the extended pressure of the changed environment? Being able to utilize a different food source is nothing more than an adaptation.
Most of us do not normally eat worms, snails, insects, frogs and other creatures. However, people that have been lost in the wilderness have survived on such and other things. As populations have migrated to other regions of the earth, where their food sources have changed, but they have not evolved into some other species because that.
These bacteria were E. coli before and after the experiment and they will always be E. coli no matter what is done to them or how their abilities to utilize various substances is changed. Even after 35,000 generations, they did not evolve into a new species. This experiment is no proof of evolution.
All theory is gray
*This of course assumes that the particular genes for being taller that were used were not also linked to the genes for blindness, in which case they won't see anything, and are just doomed.
So scientists finally witnessed God working his magic. Cool!
"Macroevolution would be if you could drive your car all the way to another country. This is, as everyone in America knows, impossible."
:)
I'm sorry, you mean that US citizens can't drive to Canada, or Mexico, or to other countries in the Americas?
Perhaps if you substituted "Australia" for "America" you might have a valid point, Australia being the only country to occupy an entire continent to the exclusion of any other country (Hutt River Province being a possible exception).
But last time I looked at a map, Google Earth, spoke to a work colleague who holidayed recently in the US and Canada or spoke to my Canadian housemate, you could drive a car across the border from Canada (a country) to the USA (another country on the same continent, North America), or from the USA to Mexico. I believe the latter is why the USA is building a large fence on their southern border?
Or maybe I'm missing the sarcasm?
....the taller monkeys, with their heads up higher, will be able to see farther over obstructions.....
It is true that they would be able to see further, but they would also be seen from further away. The predator might not be aware of the monkey in the underbrush or grass unless its head was sticking up. Therefore, being taller is both an advantage and a disadvantage for the monkey. Whether the advantage or disadvantage predominates depends mostly on the environment which does not tend to be constant over very long periods of time and because many animals tend to migrate from one environment to another environment. Therefore I would say that being taller does not necessarily give monkeys a distinct survival advantage. Furthermore, most, if not all monkeys live in forests, not grasslands. I do not see where a taller upright walking monkey would have a significant advantage over those that walk on all fours across the forest floor when they were not swinging from tree to tree.
All theory is gray
If they really wanted to know shouldn't they just read the article? So they for instance saw how many generations it took and what the pre-requirements was? Sure you or someone else could add that to your post, but well, uhm, why repost the whole article? Can't people just read if it intrest them?
Now if only one of all the Slashdoters could evolve photosynthezis using light from the monitor, picking up minerals with their finger tips and automatic deodorant (s?)he would outevolve all!
I guess there is this sex part which might put a stop to it, but just you wait until one of us can get offspring by growing another one of us in the chair next to us.
I believe this is a *wooosh* moment... GP was sarcasm, we all know close minded people are never going to admit they are close minded. They stick to insults when confronted with truth.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
But what about after 5.000.000.000.000 generations, do you still think they would all be of the same species?
Also since the article say the inability of metabolising citrate was one of the criteria for what was an e.coli bacteria it have in fact already become a new species, or atleast not e.coli by specification.
There are also other places where the added height of standing upright would be an advantage:
Sadly, there are 966 posts below that will never come to the realization that this is where the discussion on this topic should end.
I mean, what more really needs to be said? This does not fall outside of the range of explanation by either theory, so will not serve in changing anyone's opinion.
The entire discussion should have come to a screeching halt in three posts: the Grandparent's, the parent's and yours.
"Give me one good reason..."
Math. If it takes 500,000 years to get a single beneficial mutation, then 20 billion years yields 40,000 possible mutations with no guarantee any of them are beneficial.
The problem I have is not with evolution, but with evolutionists:
"Current science and anthropology think spines straightened over the course of millions of years.."
That's called an "educated guess". They can't actually prove that's what happened, but people keep demanding we teach stuff like that as though it were fact.
Too much in evolutionary theory is based off of correlation (which in itself is NOT proof). And when scientists run around claiming correlation to be truth, they are no better than the radical creationists.
That's not the "Intelligent Design crowd". Those are young-earth creationists who believe Genesis is an actual historical account.
The GP mis-attributes a load of excrement from the bible-as-history crowd to the ID crowd, then the parent points out what a load of crap this "ID response" is.
Like most people I see criticising ID, both of you are totally fucking ignorant of what ID theory actually states.
Because by the common definition of E.Coli, inside how we define species in bacteria, they are NOT E.Coli after this. You can argue against this, of course, but then you need to actually go into how we do species definitions among bacteria, and come with an alternative way of doing classification and argue why this way is (A) a reasonable substitute for the present method, and (B) gives your claimed result.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Finally, an affordable solution to feeding the starving masses.
Heh, Capcha was "deadly"
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Seems strange that the random changes produced the same mutation over and over... I think I would believe this is more than a mutation if they said "we did the experiment 5 time and got 5 different outcomes"
The poke in the eye statement seems to me somebody is trying really hard to make a point... to stick in a creationist eye. Just stick to the science guys and leave the religion out of it. If you don't believe it, stop giving it so much thought and think more about the work you are suppose to be doing.
I for one welcome my Citrate-metabolizing bacterial overlords.
There is no microscope that can see a soul, because no one has determined what a soul actually is or if it exists.
Why believe in the supernatural? If you can sense something, it's either in your head or there is an actual interaction with your body. If it's the latter, it's not supernatural; it's *natural*. If it's the former, seek counseling.
If your goal is really to experience that which cannot be measured, try drugs. Shrooms are great for hallucinatory effects without so many of the jitters associated with LSD. Just don't try to explain to me that those hallucinations are actually real or expect me to "respect" your insight come voting time.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
The sum of your body is a material thing just as a computer program is a material thing even though we like to think of it as an immaterial construct. We can trace the sequence of steps and examine the individual pieces to get a sense of the whole.
If your definition of a soul is just like that of a program, it could be measured, thereby rendering it material, not immaterial.
A material thing (your brain) cannot interact with an immaterial thing (a soul). In philosophy this is referred to as a problem of participation. After all, if you could see or touch something, it wouldn't be immaterial. Conversely, how would an immaterial object "touch" us?
If your answer is, "It just does," you are not rational. You are like a child with their imaginary friend getting indignant because a parent won't set an extra place at the table. Sure, the parent could humor you. Sure, an imaginary friend can sometimes point to emotional issues within the child. On the other hand, the imaginary friend, no matter how comforting that concept may be to the child, is still imaginary.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Nothing can refute evolution. That's the precise reason it isn't a scientific theory at all. It can't be falsified. There is simply no way to disprove the hypothesis that an all powerful evolutionary force willed it to happen that way.
I agree. In humans, a change this dramatic would be something like developing the ability to breathe underwater.
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
That makes absolutely no sense. You need to lay off the crack.
Evolution isn't a theory. It is a fact. It has been observed. Natural selection is a theory explaining the observed fact of evolution. You are so far off base I don't even know where to start correcting you.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
news sure to perplex and confound creationists
I've never met a creationist that would accept anything as evidence contradicting their beliefs. Faith requires a leap. Just the existence of reason alone is proof of evolution. The only thing guaranteed is a creationist would argue against any proof until they die, and more so the closer the information gets to be indisputable fact. My point being, the argument has no merit. The answer has no benefit to anyone but a creationist and, perhaps, the individual that just likes to argue.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
If you want to get them really confused, mention "viral transduction". They probably won't know the phrase, but you can give them a brief synopsis. And suggest that they google the phrase, which should convince them of the reality of the phenomenon.
If they do understand it, they're probably try to argue that it only transfers genes that have already arisen (probably via God's interference) elsewhere. But in fact, this isn't true. Viral transduction generally isn't dependent on gene boundaries, and transfers arbitrary chunks of DNA, not single genes. And in any case, a chunk of DNA transferred from one organism into another will generally not have the same effect in its new home, even when it contains an entire gene.
An interesting aspect of bacterial genetics is that new genes often appear in the small rings of DNA called "plasmids", which can be transferred as a unit from one bacterium to another. This does seem to imply that viral transduction via plasmids is an adaptive capability in bacteria, not some sort of biological accident.
If you can get this far with a creationist, you might ask them why God would have given bacteria the ability to do viral transduction on new genes (such as a gene that detoxifies an antibacterial chemical that we produce), but God didn't give a similar capability to humans. It sure would be useful if, when one human developed antibodies to a new disease, that human could transfer the immunity directly to other nearby humans. Bacteria can do this; why did God so favor them over humans? Does God want to protect bacteria from our pesticides?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Please wait the proscribed billion years.
I will require some funds to continue the pristine state else a rogue element in a few million years will give up and cheat, ruining the experiment.
Since I will need successors, please supply me with plentiful women with child-bearing hips and a ready willingness to have sex for science.
In anticipation,
AC
Ya gotta be pretty smart to live through being raised by them. Fortunately my mum was - hence me being here.
Funny story - although Grandpa walked around with club feet his whole life (praying that condition away apparently takes a very long time); something did happen that finally convinced them to see a doctor. My uncle (who was about 15 at the time) went from being irrational, to disturbed, to homicidal. I guess when you've got a homicidal 15 year old male in the house, and you can't out run him because your "please fix my damn club feet" prayer hasn't kicked in yet - self-interest makes you do crazy things - like call the nice men in the white coats. But as with many things, if you wait until something is life threating before changing your approach - it's usually a bit too late. No, he didn't kill my grandparents or anything - he got the typical "locked up and shocked up" treatment most people in his condition got back in the '50s. I don't know if Granpa asked if he was also too late to get his feet fixed, or just kinda figured it out on his own. The whole experience did cure them of their religion though.
Again, a bit late. The story losses it's "funny" status around the time my uncle escaped from the hospital. He burned down a block of flats for some reason, then later beat an old lady to death with a skillet because he thought she was trying to kill his children (he didn't actually have any children). Later he escaped from prison and showed up at my house with 2 other convicts, and car full of guns (no easy trick in England). My mum set them up and got them caught with no harm done to us (told ya she was smart).
So, to get back to the "Christian Scientists only hurt themselves" question - no, they don't. They can get other people killed at the same time. My uncle could have just as easily been afflicted with typhoid and sent off to school with nothing but prayer just as easily as he was sent into society with severe mental illness (which may or may not have been the result of some other untreated medical condition).
No one likes to take away something that makes people happy (like faith) - but until people take responsibility for their actions, it's the burden of others to deal with the mess. I think it's OK to argue that people should take responsibility for their actions - even if there's no way of doing it that won't offend them.
And while I don't want to see religious discrimination anymore than anyone else here does - I recognize that there's a world of difference between *offending* someone and discriminating or persecuting them. It's OK, when necessary, to offend.
because canada is not a different country...Macroevolution would be if you could drive your car all the way to another country. This is, as everyone in America knows, impossible.
Funny you should mention IP: that's bullshit too. It, like the soul, is a man-made construct. So-called Intellectual Property refers to copyright law, patent law, and trademark law all rolled into one umbrella even though they have little to nothing to do with one another both from a conceptual standpoint as well as a legal standpoint.
But I digress. The running program is still material. Even if it helps you to understand it on a conceptual level, it can still be measured. It can still be examined, and it is still strongly tied to the hardware upon which it runs. It's like saying a stream of electrons doesn't exist. A colony of ants use scent trails to find food over long distances, but that doesn't mean that the scent is immaterial nor the "coded" information the ants can detect from it on the ground and the wind.
Bottom line: we can perceive software (with our normal five senses) and can detect to varying degrees of precision when a program is running (by a process manager, excess heat off the processor, etc.).
Irrelevant to this discussion. Without a carrier such as a disk or memory centers in a brain, the software or information ceases to exist. It has no independent status.
Yes, and until the mid-1990s, strong encryption was considered munitions according to federal statutes. Legal statutes and processes of nature are not synonymous nor at times even correlative.
Incorrect. The software is functioning as expected given faulty hardware. Nothing is wrong with the software only given a perspective of a functioning copy elsewhere. If the carrier fails, the "immaterial" information ceases to exist in its original form. The running program does not continue to exist as a running program in a sort of eternal software heaven. The running program as we perceive it ceases to exist. Kaput!
You *expect* the program to be there. You have your own *idea* of how the program should be there, but the program isn't there. Not anymore. That pattern of electrons is no longer present.
As long as we're taking this (failed) analogy to its logical end, there is no difference between hardware and software. Yes, you read that right. There is no difference. The distinction is an implementation detail. Just because a program executes from RAM instead of ROM doesn't make it special. Just because the algorithm is defined in a DSP instead of bits on a hard drive targeted toward a general purpose CPU doesn't make them completely separate entities. You are pulling from a dry well here.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Are you implying that the bacteria were able to use that food source but did not do so for the first 20,000 generations because it did not suit their palettes? Was that change an indication of some sort of "desperation" on their part?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
You're right, if nothing could do it, an all-powerful something presumably could as well. The problem with your argument there is that we have no evidence of an all-powerful something. All we have is a book (not even the oldest book) which starts off describing a jealous, spiteful, vengeful, egomaniacal, bloodthirsty male chauvinist pig.
Tell me why you don't believe in the Greek pantheon of Gods including Zeus, Apollo, and the others, and you will have your answer as to why I don't automatically accept the existence of your God. You and I are very similar in that we deny all of the Norse gods, the Greek, the Roman, the Zoroastrian, the Mayan, and Aztec, the Egyptian, the Sumerian, etc. The only difference between us is that I deny exactly one more.
Let's talk about that one for a moment. Jesus *had* to come down here to atone for man's sins that He let happen even though he's all knowing and could have prevented them, let Himself be crucified so as to absolve us of the sins He bestowed to us, rose from the dead to join Himself in Heaven, and I'm supposed to take that seriously? Seriously?
If God is omnipotent, why not just proclaim in His loud deity voice, "Changed my mind, you're not automatically damned anymore." I mean, that's effectively what He did by doing the whole Jesus routine.
And about that "Original Sin." When we are in court for some felony, one possible way out of it is to enter a plea of "not guilty by reason of insanity." The principle is that unless you have the mental faculties to distinguish right from wrong, you cannot be held to the same standard as someone who can. So let's look back at Adam, Eve, the Garden, and all that. Prior to eating of the Fruit of Knowledge, Adam and Eve were truly innocent, not knowing of Good and Evil. Satan took "the form" of the serpent. Adam and Eve ate the Fruit in defiance of God. Except that defiance is a Bad/Evil thing. They didn't know what Bad/Evil was, remember? Add to that, all serpents were all made to crawl on their bellies in punishment for Satan's treachery, like punishing all black people because some Asian guy made himself up in blackface makeup.
Not guilty by reason of insanity? No! Eternal damnation, torment, and all women have to bleed monthly to remind them of the Bad thing Eve did long before they were born.
And I'm just supposed to accept this? Because it was written down a few thousand years ago? Seriously, help me out. Why should I accept this? Give me a good reason.
Please don't bring Einstein into this when you obviously don't understand what he brought forth. It smells of "Evolution is just a theory," where it's obvious the speaker is either lying about their intentions or is truly ignorant enough to be unaware that in a scientific context, "theory" means something very different from what it means in the common context. To quote Einstein:
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Almost forgot: science (the body of knowledge) is a completely separate entity from the Scientific Method (a process for gaining knowledge).
Stating that science (the body of knowledge) is not complete is self-evident. You could even (in my opinion) safely assert that it will never be complete.
This doesn't mean that the Scientific Method is not still useful outside of physics, chemistry, and biology. It just means that we acknowledge that we, as humans, are not infallible. As such, we need an objective test to determine whether or not something is false. Note: we cannot establish truth with this, only falsehood. Rather than call it the Scientific Method, we should perhaps refer to it as the Objectivity Method. Then perhaps people would stop confusing science (the body of knowledge) with science (the process).
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Deal with it. On a rational level. Jesus hasn't done shit for you, because he is dead.
Now, you want to talk about God, sure, worshipping God can make some sense. But worshipping another man is just gay, and un-American. (America overthrew kings a few hundred years ago. If Christ is the "King of Kings" then I don't know about you but I'd want to kill him again when he comes back. Kings are bad).
Stand on your own two feet. Stop worshipping other men, you weak-willed sop. Oh, and as if worshipping other men was bad enough, you had to go and pick not a living man to worship but one who's been dead 2000 years? What are you, fucking crazy?
What bacterium, what virus, is responsible for the bizarre irrationality of you religious nuts? You Moslems worshipping a dead guy (Mohamet) you Christians worshipping a dead guy (Jesus) you Jews worshipping a dead guy (Moses).
Can you please all grow the fuck up and grow some balls? Worship the love and the freedom that God gave to you, not ghosts.
....Was that change an indication of some sort of "desperation" on their part....
I don't think that is very likely. I did not do the experiment and I'm not a microbiologist. One of the things I would look at the though, is how consistent the makeup of the food source was over the duration of the whole experiment. It could be that even seemingly insignificant changes allow the bacteria to process different components of their food supply differently. We know that in human nutrition and in animals as well, trace elements can make a huge difference in their health and well-being. Many life processes are extremely sensitive to very small changes in the environment and nutrition.
In any case, even after 35,000 generations, the bacteria was still basically E. coli and not something else. Scientists have raised countless generations of fruit flies. By radiation and chemical means they have induced grotesque mutations in these fruit flies. Even so nobody has ever produced anything but fruit flies. It is a fundamental rule that life begets life and like begets like. Nobody has ever demonstrated otherwise. This is completely and utterly contrary to the evolutionary conjecture that species have evolved from the simple to the complex.
All theory is gray
Funny thing is those results are right within the predictions of ID proponents⦠The only people âoeperplexed and confusedâ are the Darwinists who trumpet this as devastating. Itâ(TM)s the opposite. It provides even more evidence to establish a better estimate for the âoeedgeâ.
And if you don't know what I'm talking about, please read Michael Behe's "The Edge of Evolution".
Or this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK3U696N278Z93O
Or this:
http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2008/06/10/on_the_evolution_of_a_key_innovation_in
So, what do you use to justify your claim that there is an invisible barrier between species? Name a line that cannot be crossed, and fifty other people will provide examples of situations in which that line has been crossed before. Of course, it took 20,000 generations for this to occur, so you can easily come up with examples that would take thousands of years to carry out, but can you name one valid reason to dismiss 150 years of evidence?
Are you an idiot, or did you not RTFA? Citrate is no more edible to normal E. coli than rocks are to you. This is not being forced to choose something undesirable as an alternate food source, this is successfully consuming something that was previously classified as not food, where not food means “provides no nutritive value.”
Drove to Canada for spring break. And while some believe it to be the 51st state...
The problem with all of this fine-tuning stuff is that we don't know the ranges or even the possible variables that we can "tune." There's just no way to insist that our universe is incredibly "unlikely." How can you judge probability when you don't know the odds?
We have no idea what is likely or unlikely for a "universe," seeing as we only have the one that we can look in. For all we know, the most probable outcomes for a universe forming are incredibly more complex and bursting with intelligent order than ours is. For all we know, our universe might be so unlikely that we'd have to appeal to an intelligent chaos-lover god in order to explain why we have so few universal constants, dimensions, and lifeforms.
The Bad Idea Blog - Science, Skepticism, & Stupid
Can't prove? The detailed fossil record of the many steps of human evolution is not good enough for you? Or do you simply choose to ignore the detailed evidence and pretend it doesn't exist?
....The genetic similarities between species seem to imply that the more complex species are often derived from the simpler ones....
Genetic and other similarities are interpreted by evolutionists in terms of descent of one organism from another. This is purely an interpretation. Every one of these similarities whether genetic or otherwise can be explained equally well in terms of reusable design. Do automobiles descend from horse-drawn wagons just because they both have four wheels? No, of course not. The designers and builders of automobiles understand that a four wheeled vehicle is a stable, proven design.
An intelligent Creator worth anything would certainly reapply designs and principles that work, in other applications. Programmers use proven sections of code over and over, perhaps with slight modifications. So why should the programmer of the genetic code not also reuse debugged and working segments of His code where it fits?
Every bit of evidence that evolutionists interpret according to their worldview and logic, can also be viewed through creationist and the logic of design glasses.
All theory is gray
...Citrate is no more edible to normal E. coli than rocks are to you...
That is a bogus comparison because obviously there are living creatures that can digest citrate, but I know of no life form that can live on pure rocks. It is reasonably certain that there are other life forms out there in the wild that can live on citrate. So what is the big deal if this particular life form is able to adapt to eat something that is clearly edible to other life forms?
The bottom line of all this is that these E. coli bacteria remained E. coli bacteria before and after the experiment. Just because an organism can adapt to a different food source does not automatically make it a different new organism. Darwin's finches were always finches, regardless of the thickness or length or other configuration of their beaks.
Evolutionists interpret similarities in genetics and otherwise in terms of descent of one organism from another. In every instance I have ever heard of, these similarities can also be interpreted in terms of common design elements. Horse buggies and automobiles have four wheels in common. Does that mean that horse buggies are the ancestors of automobiles in the evolutionary sense? No, of course not. It is just that any vehicle with four wheels is a stable well worked out design.
Human writers of code reuse sections of it in many places, wherever it may be applicable. Why should the author of the genetic code not also use this principle? Evolutionists say organism X has many genetic similarities to organism Y and therefore organism X is the ancestor of organism Y. Intelligent design advocates say that the designer used code from organism X also in organism Y because the design goals are very similar.
All theory is gray
Interesting experiment and speculation. However, emergent functionality is not the explanation for the Lenski observation. The journal Microbiology published a paper in 2002 (http://mic.sgmjournals.org/cgi/content/full/148/4/1027) containing the following comment --.
... Enzymological studies have indicated that AcnA is adapted for maintaining citric acid cycle activity during exposure to (or recovery from) oxidative stress, whereas AcnB is adapted for the major catabolic role (Jordan et al., 1999)."
"Aconitases (EC 4.2.1.4) catalyse the interconversion of citrate and isocitrate via cis-aconitate in the citric acid and glyoxylate cycles. They are monomeric enzymes that contain one [4Feâ"4S] cluster that is essential for catalytic activity.... Escherichia coli contains two genetically and biochemically distinct aconitases, AcnA and AcnB, encoded by the acnA and acnB genes (Bradbury et al., 1996). Physiological and enzymological studies have shown that AcnB is the major citric acid cycle enzyme synthesized during the exponential phase, whereas AcnA is a more stable stationary-phase enzyme, which is also specifically induced by iron and oxidative stress (Cunningham et al., 1997)
Essentially, the citratic acid cycle (CAC) is a ubiquitious process that metabolizes citrate in all kinds of organisms. In E. Coli -- in the presence of glucose -- the CAC process is "clipped" and instead of being a cycle it becomes two chains that result in different by-products than would occur if the process remained cyclic. This is regulated in E. coli by arcA and arcB processes that are senstive to oxygen. Outside the presence of glucose, E. coli metabolizes citrate just like everybody else. What happened in Lenski's experiment is that E. coli lost the ability to inhibit citrate metabolization in the presence of glucose. To repeat -- E. coli always did not gain the ability to metabolize citrate, it lost the ability to inhibit citrate metabolization because the regulatory (arcA/arcB) process was lost.
For those interested, the CAC is also known as the Krebs cycle. Hans Krebs won the Nobel prize, and spoke about this cycle (and E. coli) in his Noble address -- in 1953. The lecture is accessible at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1953/krebs-lecture.pdf. Importantly, Krebs points says
"at present it is best to regard the terminal pathway of oxidation in yeast, and certain other microorganisms, e.g. E. coli, as an open problem, even though the reactions of the cycle occur in these materials."
No. The similarities exist among functional as well as non-functional DNA. It may make sense, if it were a cut-and-paste job for the non-functional DNA to be an exact replica, to be completely random, or to be non-existent. But, in nature, we have DNA that never gets used. It does not code for any protein, and it is similar to other species.
Then, there are remnants of broken genes. For example, most animals have a gene that allows them to generate vitamin C without having to eat citrus fruit. Humans and primates have that gene as well, but in humans and primates, the gene is broken. And, as with most non-functional DNA, our defective vitamin C gene is most similar to that of the chimpanzee, and less similar to that of primates further away.
And then there's the octopus. The octopus evolved its brain and eyes independently, whereas most other species are believed to have inherited their brain and their eyes from a past ancestor. In some ways the octopus eyes are better than human eyes. So, to use your reuse of code argument, God was reinventing the wheel on this one.
So, to use the programmer analogy, God is applying existing code, misapplying existing code (as in the vitamin C example), reusing code that has been commented out, and that he had no intention of using, and in the case of the octopus, reinventing the wheel for some cases. My point is that if there is a god, he isn't a very good programmer.
....But, in nature, we have DNA that never gets used....
In any given code system, there can be lots of code that never gets executed. How much code is there in an operating systems such as Windows that is just there but is never called? What is so remarkable about that?
That is not the issue anyway. The issue is whether the code just happened by statistical, mindless, processes, or whether there is a programmer. Evolutionists believe the code came into being by a mindless statistical process and creationists say that just as in human written programs, the code of life was written by a programmer. Just as in human programs, if there is a hardware error of some sort, the program may get corrupted. This is not the fault of the programmer is it now?
If you, as most people, who were not so ignorant of what is really in the Bible, God's revelation to men, you would know that there was this thing theologians call the fall. This is where death and corruption entered into God's perfect universe, at least as far as the Earth is concerned. At that point in time, all of nature became subject to what scientists call the third law of thermodynamics, commonly known as entropy. All code, whether created by God, or written by humans, needs hardware wherein it is stored. Even originally perfect code may get corrupted by faulty hardware.
(..The octopus evolved its brain and eyes independently, whereas most other species are believed to have inherited their brain and their eyes from a past ancestor...)
God created the octopus' brain and eyes independently, whereas most other species received their brain and their eyes from the creator immediately.
Can you see, that just by changing a few words of your sentence, the creationists view fits the data just as well? You also are using the word "believed". You are certainly right about that, because in both cases is it simply a belief. The data we have is the existence of the octopus. Evolutionists and creationists simply interpret that data differently depending on their core beliefs.
All theory is gray
....But, in nature, we have DNA that never gets used....In any given code system, there can be lots of code that never gets executed. How much code is there in an operating systems such as Windows that is just there but is never called? What is so remarkable about that? It contradicts your original comment that similarity is simply because of God's "code reuse". It appears that you are trying to make belief in god into an unfalsifiable opinion: God is a sloppy designer who created bad hardware that, for some unknown reason, creates products that appear to be the work of a natural process. That is not the issue anyway. The issue is whether the code just happened by statistical, mindless, processes, or whether there is a programmer. a). That is a false dichotomy. You are assuming that, if a God exists, then he must have used magic at several very specific points in the process. To continue with the analogy, God wasn't competent to create an elegant system. His program constantly crashes, and he must intervene to get it back into a valid state. Many people, inside and outside of science can accept the idea that a God created the laws of nature and watched the universe unfold from there. So this is not about whether there is evolution or God. It is about whether there is evolution.
b). And, if there is a programmer, or a process, then we can learn much about it worked by examining the product. Evolutionists believe the code came into being by a mindless statistical process and creationists say that just as in human written programs, the code of life was written by a programmer. Just as in human programs, if there is a hardware error of some sort, the program may get corrupted. This is not the fault of the programmer is it now? If the programmer built the hardware, then, yes it is. Why did the fall of man happen? Was it because god made a faulty product and then got mad at his faulty product and then damaged it further in a divine tantrum? (..The octopus evolved its brain and eyes independently, whereas most other species are believed to have inherited their brain and their eyes from a past ancestor...)
God created the octopus' brain and eyes independently, whereas most other species received their brain and their eyes from the creator immediately. If he exists, then, yes. So God reuses code sometimes, and sometimes he doesn't. This appears to be more inline with a natural process than with a supreme being. Can you see, that just by changing a few words of your sentence, the creationists view fits the data just as well? You also are using the word "believed". You are certainly right about that, because in both cases is it simply a belief. The data we have is the existence of the octopus. Evolutionists and creationists simply interpret that data differently depending on their core beliefs. Oh. Post-Modernism, now...Funny how the data lead most scientists, who 150 years ago were predominantly creationists to support evolution in massive numbers. If, as you say, it is just a matter of hammering the evidence into your existing assumptions, then the evidence wouldn't change so many minds, now would it? But, evolution is the basis of modern biology. So much so that even creationists are splintering into different groups, with some who cling to a very literal interpretation and an entire spectrum of people who accept science to varying degrees.
The difference is that the scientific view is supported by evidence and the creationist view is supported by an after-the-fact attempt to rationalize the evidence. They are by no means equal.
...Why did the fall of man happen?...
....)
Because, as the creator God tells us, he specifically breathed his Spirit into man, making every human an eternal being with the ability to love. If there is an ability to love, then by necessity there must also be the ability NOT to love. Love is expressed by the lover wanting to bring pleasure and satisfaction in the object of love. Love is oriented toward another, not self. Adam, as every man does still today, chose not to love the object of love, but himself and his own desires. If you wish to learn what God's definition of love is, that you may read 1Corinthians 13.
This estrangement of mankind from the God of love is the root cause of all the crime, war and violence we experience today and throughout history. Religion, including Christianity, has often been used to further the selfish ambitions of the people in control of a particular religion.
It was the religious leaders of the day, who delivered to Jesus over to the Romans to be crucified.
It is instructive to understand that when God gave the first commandment He said: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength". Notice, that he did not say serve or obey. That is because true love serves and obeys since that is part of love's intrinsic nature. Jesus re-itereted this command of God, when he was asked about the most important commandment.
The ability to love, cherish and respect another person is the greatest gift that God has ever given to humans. When Adam chose to depart from the way of love, the greatest tragedy to befall man and all of creation took place. Because God is love, as we are told in Scripture, he could not let this state of affairs remain for all eternity. That is why he chose to enter time and space, to leave the splendor of his eternal existence, cloaked his deity in human flesh, in order to redeem every human being that chooses to respond to his love. Jesus showed that the way of love is through service and obedience, even to the point of death. Because he is the only human being that ever lived without missing once, death had no power over him and God was rightfully able to resurrect Him from death.
(...Funny how the data lead most scientists, who 150 years ago
Funny how 150 years ago, most people were at least Christian oriented, if not true believing Christians. This is no longer true today. After Adam refused to love by disobeying God, God came looking for him, as was usual in order to have fellowship with the man he had made. Somehow out of knew that he had separated himself from God and demonstrated that knowledge by running and hiding from the presence of God.
Ever since that time, humans have been running away from God, avoiding him at all costs. They look at all of creation and can clearly see that it has a distinct order. It is not random. All people of all cultures, somehow sense that there is this "other" with whom they attempt to deal. That is why mankind is incurably religious.
This loving God is still looking for you. When will you stop running?
All theory is gray
An airplane was conceived in a designers mind.
True.
A cell also was conceived in a mind. ...
Just as such a self replicating computer virus arises in some programmers mind, so also, a real living virus or any other living thing originates in a mind.
But that's a leap of logic. No such designer is apparent, nor is one needed to obtain either complexity or sophistication. Complex behavior, including self-propagating and cyclic chemical reactions can arise with no plan at all.
We humans, with our limited minds have not yet come up with a self-replicating physical machine.
Yet. You see, even you seem to realize, as indicated by your use of that little word yet, that our minds are not such a limiting factor in our development of scientific and technological understanding. Today a person of average intelligence can use calculus, even though took a very clever insight to develop it initially. It sounds as if you're trying to say that "since humans don't know how to do it, a deity must have done it" even though you realize that humans are likely to figure it out. That will be yet one more feature of nature that humans understand and that you won't be able to claim "my deity must have done it since I don't know how it happens."
When addressing origins, the question where information comes from must be answered.
Indeed.
Similarly, someone came up with the code stored in the DNA of living things.
That's the same unsupported assertion you made above. The DNA sequence that specifies a species does not need to be arranged in its present-day form in order to reach its present form. DNA is just a long strand of chemicals that gets copied from each generation to the next, and there are always errors in the new copy. This is called mutation, and it is such a marked effect that even individuals within a species have different DNA. (That's how we can, often at least, identify the perpetrator of a crime based on DNA associated with the crime.) DNA changes every time it gets copied; sometimes it produces a simpler organism, but sometimes it produces a more complex organism. That's how there can be simple viruses which require complex life for their propagation That's also why early life on Earth was only simple, but later (present-day) life on Earth has a small fraction of complex life forms in addition to the simple ones.
The fossil records, as well as common observations, clearly show that living things are divided into two distinct groups, usually, but not always called species.
You're conflating two separate concepts here, and you're unclear on both. The first one has to do with the fossile record preserving snapshots of life from different points in time. You could always complain that examples from different times are different, and the complain is hollow because even a continuous stream of adaptations over time would be different if you only looked at different points in time. Each frame in a movie is only a little different from the one before or after it. Your complaint is equivalent to saying that a movie is not a movie because it only has still frames.
The second issue is that of speciation. Life is a tree that branches over time; not a continuum that changes smoothly over time. Members of one species differ more significantly from members of other species than among one another because not every mutation that lead to their differences had an unbroken lineage; only the ones that are alive now have an unbroken lineage. In fact, most of the mutations which might encode all the smooth variation of life forms between two present life forms even happened. If had a million people flip a single coin only 33 times, you would see nowhere near the number of possible combinations. There are more possible sequences than there are humans alive today. With DNA, the coins are 4 sided, and instead of flipping one at a time it flips many exam
It [evolution] is not [a fact].
Yes, evolution is a fact. It is as real as a physical force of nature, or energy: they are abstract, but we can observe them just fine. Even if we don't understand why they are there, it is observational fact that they are there. The geological record is full of evidence, and the very genes of organisms are full of corroborating evidence. With genetics, we even know the mechanism of the evolution of life. We understand how life changes after it begins, even if we do not yet understand how precisely it began. There is no room to argue on this piont, and doing so doesn't reveal some deep insight about reality, but rather shows that reality displeases you. I'm sorry if it does, but it's your problem and not a problem with reality.
First, there has to be a Universe wherein life can come into existence.
You claim that a deity is the cause of the universe, but that's begging the question: what is the cause of the deity? You've tried to answer this by claiming that a deity can exist forever (be "eternal" in your words). But if a deity can, by our own edict of logic, be uncaused, then it's just as easy (one step easier, in fact!) to say that the universe existed forever.
Before that, there was nothing and then it exploded.
You're also pretty fuzzy on what you mean by "forever". First, you argue that a deity can exist "forever" as if extended infinitely forward and backward in time. But later you say that this deity can (and does) exist outside time:
The God who created time itself is not subject to time.
You claim that the universe had a beginning in the sense that there was a time before the universe for a deity to exist (infinitely much such time, you say), yet the very scientific understanding of the universe you cite illustrates how space and time are inextricably linked, and that it is nonsense to talk about "before" the universe. There was no such time and there was no such place; the universe has existed for all the time that ever was, and it will continue to exist for all the time that ever will be.
All explosions we know anything about only cause chaos, never order.
All the explosions you're talking about are explosions of matter within space and extended through time. The "big bang" was not an explosion of this kind; it was an explosion of spacetime itself. Every explosion produces order locally. The local entropy may decrease, but the total entropy always increases. Since you're unclear on the implications of the big bang, you're wrong about what the big bang will "produce". We, and all the order we see in the universe, are not the result. The end result of the big bang will indeed be your naive concept of maximum entropy, which you call "chaos". The universe will experience its "heat death" when it reaches maximum entropy; this will be its end state. All the order that we see, the galaxies and our own being, are temporary and local.
(If you're still unclear on how entropy can decrease locally while increasing overall, think about freezing water to make an ice cube. The water's entropy may decrease, but it can only do so by dissipating entropy into its environment.)
Anyone who can believe in a God who is capable of creating an entire universe out of nothing should have no trouble believing that such a God could control its development after that, including the creation of life.
Such a god would indeed seem powerful enough to affect anything in the universe, but claiming that such a god does meddle with the universe is no different from occasionalism (ask google or better yet a library).
He could take billions or millions of years, as evolutionists tell us, or he could do it in six days, as creationists tell us. The main point is, not how long it took, but who did it.
And now you actually do invoke occasionalism! It is meaningless to claim