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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."
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....
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
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?
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
We are not bacteria! We are not bacteria! We are not monkeys! I mean we are not bacteria!
You can't even see a bacteria with your own eye, so this can't be real.
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 :)
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Actually it sucks. Now the lime won't kill the bacteria on the beer bottle.
What?
Um, actually, that's been done. Yeast have been producing ethanol from sugar for how many years now? With very little modification, virtually none if you have a FFV, ethanol will work fine in your gas tank,... :-)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
This 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.
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.
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."
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.