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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."
"One in a billion odds" means very, very different things for bacteria than it does for humans.
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
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.
I always figured this would be how we kill ourselves off. Over use of antibacterial soaps and cleaners in homes. At some point in the next few decades we will have an outbreak of a supper bug that can not be defeated with any antibiotics that are available. As more and more people die off civilization collapses.
Of course the good news is that we can then ride around in big honking SUVs made of all kinds of different parts searching for gas and shooting arrows at each other. I wonder where we will get the hair dye for the mohawks that will be in fashion at that time or the leather for the jackets and straps?
Not at all! They'll just say, "That's micro evolution. Evolve me a giraffe in a petri dish and I'll be impressed."
It's funny how they are completely non-skeptical when it comes to their book, and how intensely skeptical they are toward things like evolution.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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
More insightful than funny. Creationism has nothing to do with a balanced look at the facts, and everything to do with strong personal beliefs. No amount of proof will turn the head of a devout creationist, since God, via the Bible (or the creationist's interpretation of it) is the ultimate authority.
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.
Which is fine with me. People can believe what they want. Where I start to have problems is when they want to start forcing others to teach their personal beliefs in Science class.
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Regardless of any other premise, why should I accept your authority that God exists and Jesus is real?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Just ask a Creationist if they've seen an electron. When they try to explain how we can tell they exist from how they influence things that we can directly observe, they've just admitted that inference/indirect observation are in fact useful ways of gathering knowledge. At that point, their whole "you can't see it happening" nonsense evaporates. They'll likely fall back on epistemological nihilism at that point, but since that position trashes their beliefs just as thoroughly as science, I always take that as a tacit admission on their part that they're argument is utterly fucked.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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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.
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I'm willing to concede that there was likely a historical Jesus. But so what? There's more evidence for Mohammed and Joseph Smith, but their mere existence nor their claims or the claims of those who claimed to know them (or claimed to know people who knew them) would convince me that any of these individuals were linked in some way to the Divine.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Which is fine with me. People can believe what they want.
Because every good science article needs a religious debate....For simplicity's sake, let's say there's evolutionists (evos) and creationists (godists). 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.
If I'm a godist, I might believe that God cures all ills, and never take my pneumonia-ridden son to the hospital. Bummer for my son but it was God's choice if he died. If I'm a godist, I might believe that evolution is a myth meant to defeat my faith. I ignore science, I lobby to create laws that ignore science, and I preach to other people to ignore science. I believe science is wrong and I want to convince other people of this truth.
So you can have personal beliefs that very much affect your public actions. Putting your money where your mouth is, so to speak.
The answer to ignorance of science or ignorance of faith is always going to be education - school, word of mouth, whatever. We need to talk it out, show why science is useful, and why the community of religion and other aspects can also be useful, and why either can be detrimental (sure the A-bomb was neat, but geez...).
That certainly isn't the case. The evidence for a historical Jesus is very scant, far less than the amount of evidence for the existence of Julius Caesar and Alexander say, and the majority proponents of the existence of a historical Jesus who are described as Biblical scholars are, by and large, religious believers seeking to justify their faith. While we still need to take seriously and reply to the arguments of religious believers, the number of scholars who claim the historicity of Jesus has been swelled by the number of religious believers in their ranks. The term "pretty well established" is a a claim based on counting such numbers.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Scientists are preoccupied with Creationism because modern American Christianity has degenerated into a freakish, extremist cult that is substantively no different that Wahabism or Scientology - the only difference is that these people are in charge of our government. If that's not a threat you should be concerned about for the sake of your children grandchildren, then I don't know what is.
A-Bomb
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.
Of course "the Universe would not exist as we know it". After all, we are the ones doing the knowing of it. If the constants were different, others would have to be the ones doing the knowing of it. Maybe that knowledge would not be borne by creatures of carbon and water, but to say "life would not form"? That's just an extension of the anthropomorphism we have come to expect from religious grandeur-delusional thinking.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Out of necessity.
Humans are pack animals. We work well in groups of 10, maybe 20 individuals. Anything beyond that isn't in our genes. You cannot easily make more than 20 people work together on a given project. And even those 20 people have to have something in common, most commonly their genes. It is likely that the first "packs" of humans were actually what we'd now call "extended family". Cousins, brothers, sisters and their mates.
If you want to create larger groups, you have to create a reason why they don't go to each other's throat to increase their own pack's strength. It gets worse as soon as a division of work (and the difference in status that comes along with it) sets in, which is another necessity for an efficient group. There's no use when you have 100 farmers but nobody to build you a new plough. And if everyone can do everything, nobody can do anything really well.
With the agricultural revolution you run into a new problem: You need to know when to sow and when to reap. You need an astronomer (the reason why astronomy is one of the oldest sciences). Now try to explain to your people why they should feed someone who doesn't do anything but look at the stars.
All those problems can be solved with religion. Religion is a tool to create order, to make people work together and to keep large groups of people from fighting each other for resources. Every single religion (at least the successful ones) made it an important point that God (or whoever) doesn't like it when you kill your fellow man or steal from him. And since they had no surveillance cams back then, God was usually allmighty, omnipresent and omniscient, so you could rest assured that you'll get your punishment, if not in life then in death.
Check any religion. All of them contain such or similar parts.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think members of The Church of Christ, Scientist might be offended by being called imaginary.
But the quoted text assumes that ALL life MUST be carbon-based with four base DNA proteins that process oxygen and so on.
The problem with the "Everything is so perfect for life that a supreme being did it on purpose" argument is that it makes the assumption that life cannot exist in any form but ours.
That is not the fault of the evolutionary biologists, but those who applied the theories in all sorts of inhuman ways. Since we're already skirting around Godwin's Law anyway, I'll just out and say it: Neither Darwin nor Nietzsche were responsible for Hitler's actions; Hitler was responsible for Hitler's actions.
To use a more contemporary analogy, if I teach someone how to drive a car and he uses that knowledge to deliberately run people over, it isn't my fault; it's his.
(And who cares whether social sciences are truly sciences? They provide us with useful tools, and that is sufficient for me to respect them as areas of study. Computer Science isn't really a "proper" science either, and yet here you are on the Internet...)
Or take a real look at your faith and realize that the natural world around doesn't need a god to exist if one simply agrees that there are somethings that just can't be explained yet, there is no soul, your life has no purpose except to breed (and what you want to make of it), and everything dies.
Then you have nothing to reconcile, and life becomes a lot simplier. If that scares you, work on reconciling that.
Plus, you'll be able to sleep in on Sundays for a change and not have to give part of your income to something that sucks the life out of society and produces nations of sheep.
Christians sure do work hard to believe in something that doesn't exist, when it's a lot less work to just live your life like you are doing now without all that crap.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
One would have thought that Stalin was the more obvious reference here than Hitler. He had more people killed, and (mis)ruled for a longer time, and was more obviously opposed to religious belief and more obviously pro-evolution.
I could even imagine Hitler supporting creationism provided it was a blond Nordic Adam that was created in the Garden of Eden. And belief in God would be fine if his name was Woden or Thor. Stalin's Communism was strictly atheistic and pro-science (even if it was sometimes junk science, like Lysenko).
Soviet Communism was based on some kind of scientific rationalism. Nazism was based on crude nationalistic sentiment (irrationalism). Both were quite content to destroy millions of lives in pursuit of their respective ideals. But Stalin was more "efficient", or at least more successful in holding onto power and killing more people.
Hilter was the amateur. Stalin was the professional. But when you are looking from the West, you see Hitler first.
I am anarch of all I survey.
"just as I can't prove that God *does* exists, so you cannot prove that God *doesn't*" Do you have any idea how that comment has made you look? Lets see here... The Tooth Fairy exists because you cant prove that the tooth fairy doesnt exist The Jaberwocky exists because you cannot prove that it doesnt exist Santa exists because you cant prove that he doesnt exist... shall i continue?
Better yet, it seems that most people (on both sides of any debate) hold with:
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
At first glance that sounds good, but say it different..."I'm a tooth-fairy-ist who really wants to reconcile science and tooth-fairy-ism". It just does not have the same ring.
More to the point, to be viewed as an objective person with no bias towards the evidence, you must first show your objectivity and/or scepticism by stating that the observed evidence can influence your opinion in either direction. Ie, god may not exist and/or evolution may not exist.
Just as any real scientist would say - "I believe what the evidence shows me and I'm willing to throw out all my current beliefs if new evidence arises that contradicts my current beliefs". granted it would most certainly be really really good evidence, but a real objective person who seeks truth has to be able to say such things.
So my point is, your kidding yourself if you think you are trying to "reconcile" anything. What you are doing is trying to find bits and pieces of evidence to support your pre-conceived belief that god exists.
You cannot be objective unless you are willing to admit that all you now believe may be completely wrong. If you cannot, then all you observe in the world will be filtered through your belief system in support of your manufactured reality.
I'm willing to say it. Evolution may be a complete crock of &*^% and totally wrong. God may exist and created everything we see. That was not to hard, it feels good.
Now, can you say that God may not exist and evolution may be completely correct? Hmmm?
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."
I'm an atheist, but I do have to take issue with the following comment:
Plus, you'll be able to sleep in on Sundays for a change and not have to give part of your income to something that sucks the life out of society and produces nations of sheep.Even as an atheist I still volunteer to help at the local Presbyterian church. Why? Because the church provides community services that are not offered anywhere else. The church where I volunteer provides baby-sitting, computer education classes, yard-sales, book readings, community meeting space, discussion groups, and much more. There are so many good things that church groups do that I find it foolish and irrational that so many Atheists automatically discount the very real and tangible benefits of their presence.
I suggest you at least try to respect the good things done by your local church, even if you disagree with the beliefs. It wouldn't hurt to show them up a bit and actually leave your computer for a few hours a week to join a local charity or community group either.