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Scientists Discover Proteins Controlling Evolution
Khemisty writes "Evolutionary changes are supposed to take place gradually and randomly, under pressure from natural selection. But a team of Princeton scientists investigating a group of proteins that help cells burn energy stumbled across evidence that this is not how evolution works. In fact, their discovery could revolutionize the way we understand evolutionary processes. They have evidence that organisms actually have the ability to control their own evolution."
can the human race auto-evolve itself larger penises?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Life has evolved to be good at evolving? Sounds logical, organisms that increase mutation speed depending on environment should have an advantage.
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Intelligent design!!! This proves it! Mice have been behind everything all along!
http://www.object404.com
RTFA and you'll see that the Princeton boys have discovered homeostasis in gene expression. The hyperbolic rhetoric surrounding their discovery would be more justified if they had actually found something that altered the haploid genetic information of gametes in a homeostatic fashion. And they're insulting to Darwin when they say that he thought that evolution was "totally random". That's like the argument some of the more idiotic creationists make when they talk about taking a bunch of watch parts, shaking them up in a bag and assembling a watch.
Seastead this.
This was found in the electron transport chain, which occurs in the mitochondria, which have their own DNA (circular DNA to be precise). The cell is repairing damaged DNA, the cell does this naturally. It is a defense mechanism and does not signal that the cell is actively controlling its evolution. This correction of the damage will NOT be passed on to the next generation of offspring unless it occurs in the egg or sperm cells (and if it is the mitochondria the sperm cells will also have nothing to do with it as all our mitochondria are inherited by our mother's egg cells). This seems to me to be a headline grabber with little to no actual relevance to the research within.
How else do you think we were able to evolve this far in just 6,000 years? It wasn't that long ago that the only humans were a gullible man and a rib-woman!
Trolling is a art,
So, the designer is really just a pile of proteins?
PZ Myers had a bit of commentary on this news on his blog, pharyngula.
I'd encourage everyone here to read the post, as well as some of the comments from readers below. The press release is self-contradictory, and extremely vague in terms of details. I'm not expecting too much, but like PZ, I'll give the actual paper a read whenever I can find it.
Who knows, maybe they've found something truly revolutionary... but you can't tell from the press clipping. Ask yourself how often you've seen something science related in the paper, then found out that it bears very little resemblence to reality when you go to read the actual scientist's research papers on the subject? :P
If the feedback doesn't alter the DNA itself, then there's no "smart evolution." It's just an evolutionary consequence to a gazillion random mutations. As an "improved natural selector" it seems less so, as the consequence of this is that organisms are more able to adapt to changing conditions. If the conditions change rapidly enough, maybe the feedback effect allows the organism to live, but not thrive, allowing for further random mutations to allow it to outperform its peers in the new environment.
This doesn't go against evolution at all. It simply means that a system has evolved that checks for errors in a very conserved process (the electron transport chain) because if it wasn't conserved then the species would be less fit (less offspring) and die out. It's important to note that evolution is a change in allele frequencies of a population. So this electron transport problem control system is not actively changing allele frequencies. It is simply accounting for problems that arise and letting the organism be fit when it might otherwise not because of some sort of deleterious mutation.
In other words, organisms are evolving ways to evolve better.
This is interesting because matches what I have seen my own brain doing. When I was young, I only learned by watching, listening, and feeling. Then I learned to talk, and could learn by having people explain things to me. Then I learned to read, and I could learn by going to the library, something that was unavailable before.
These are crude examples, but even now my brain continues to grow and, essentially, learn new ways to learn. Evolution and learning are recursive functions.
Qxe4
From TFA:
No, it was never "completely random".
The changes MUST result in a viable individual.
Stillbirths and miscarriages do NOT contribute mutations to the gene pool.
Please tell me that he was quoted incorrectly.
Mod up this instead. Much more interesting.
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When I was in school they taught us there were two theories of evolution: Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest, and some nutcase's theory that creatures adapt to their environment and pass those changes down to their children. For example, giraffes stretched their necks to reach food and because they stretched their necks that characteristic was passed down to their children. Sure, the school was just trying to discredit Darwin, but now you're telling me that nutcase's theory has merit?
You're thinking of Lamarckian evolution, which is completely unrelated to Wallace's conjecture discussed in the article and remains well-refuted to this day. Lamarckism was supplanted by Darwin's theory of natural selection.
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That's right folks.. a mutant with the ability to first post!
Ok, so I still need to master it, but still.
"[...] concluding that it would be statistically impossible for this self-correcting behavior to be random [...]"
So these so-called "evolutionary mechanics" are found to exhibit a trait we describe with engineering metaphors.
But the article discounts the obvious indications of design by a inventing a self-refuting new term "evolutionary control".
Evolutionary products being "self-correcting" implies two things:
The ambiguity in the language of this report leaves so many possible interpretations that it is impossible to definitively understand what they are even talking about. For example "...proteins were correcting any imbalance imposed on them through artificial mutations, constantly restoring the chain to working order...steering organisms toward evolutionary changes that make the creature fitter."
Restore means to bring back to a former, original, or normal condition, while fitter has three meaning in the Biological sense: 1.being adapted to the prevailing conditions and producing offspring that survive to reproductive age; 2.contributing genetic information to the gene pool of the next generation; 3.(of a population) maintaining or increasing the group's numbers in the environment. The only definition that could work in context is "being adapted to the prevailing conditions." Proteins restoring the original information does not imply adaptation. I would say more of a self-preservation mechanism.
If to say, the cell is repairing itself as mutations are found, is nothing new. As far as I remember correctly, as the DNA is being copied it is also checked for irregularities. So wouldn't that mean the biological system is geared to prevent some parts of the mutation process?
To say the cell is recoding itself to make itself "stronger" or more adaptable to the environment, is that completely logical? Mutations can be caused by accidental DNA replication, or environmental affects. So what stimulus is the process receiving to create a "better" version of itself? What I'm trying to say is that without environmental effects the cell could be reorganizing itself into oblivion.
I enjoy this video. It's a very visual approach for people like me who really don't understand a whole lot about the complexity of the cell. In my opinion, for all the particle accelerators and spaceships we have, nothing comes close to this. And one last philosophical question. What determines randomness and order?
"Evolutionary changes are supposed to take place gradually and randomly, under pressure from natural selection."
WRONG. In fact, this is one of the most common fallacies regarding evolution. It has been known for a very long time now that evolution proceeds in fits and starts... long periods of nothing followed by a burst of changes. This is known as "punctuated equilibrium", and is generally accepted as the standard evolutionary model.
I almost did not even read the linked article... since the beginning of it seems to be saying that evolution works exactly the way we have long known it to work.
There are actually some interesting things, there, though. On the other hand, the person who wrote the article obviously does not understand it.
Isn't it amazing how creationism changes how we use and understand language? The "entirely random" comment shouldn't cause us to recoil. The mutations were thought to be random, but now there's (supposedly) evidence that there's some kind of rudimentary optimization going on at the mutation level.
Now add a fanatical creationist movement that attacks "randomness" and uses bad analogies to confuse people. We all know how to rebut those specious arguments, but in doing so we learn to be wary of words like "random" in the context of evolution. In fact, both articles go through pains to point out that this discovery doesn't support creationism - a fact that should be self-evident.
And now we're complaining on slashdot about how a scientist uses words that were co-opted by creationists. I look forward to the day when creationism is universally recognized as a myth, and we can discuss evolutionary science in peace.
This is describing a self-repair mechanism.
RESTORING a damaged structure is not the same as STEERING the process of evolution, in fact what is being described is a feedback loop that slows down evolution. It's fairly straightforward to see how this can have evolved: if a section of DNA encodes a gene that is easily made inoperative through minor changes, then an organism in which these changes happen less often is more likely to survive.
This is no different than (say) biological structures that regulate the temperature of the genitals, reducing the chance of damage to DNA caused by higher temperatures. Like the scrotum.
This is an interesting mechanism, but it doesn't significantly change the model.
When I went to school, we also had Lamarckism and Darwinism. The point was not to discredit Darwin. The point was to teach you to be skeptical (both do seem "logical" at first), look at the evidence, set up predictions and check the predictions.
Lamarckism was at least a scientific theory since it made predictions and was falsifiable. It was falsified, and in class we did so ourself. (Guided by the teacher, of course...)
The above is the summary for the main stream press, dig a bit deeper and the story is subtly different. The headline could be taken to mean that an organism can control the direction of evolution, this is false: it is the rate of evolution that may be controlled.
This is akin to controlling the accelerator (gas pedal for those in the USA) not the steering wheel.
The ''choice'' on direction (good or bad mutation) will only ever be determined by how many grandchildren an organism has. If the mutation is helpful to survival then the greater number of grand kids will preserve the organism; if the mutation is not helpful then there will be fewer grand kids than for the helpful organism and thus the unhelpful mutation will be out competed by the helpful ones and so eventually drop out of the gene pool.
For many years evolutionists have known that mutation increases in times of stress. They have, however, thought that this was because stress leads to smaller populations in which (beneficial) mutations can propagate more quickly. It is this point that the Princeton paper is all about.
The trouble with discussion on evolution is that there are subtle arguments for which we do not have concise words to convey, we thus tend to use approximate short cuts but these short cuts bring along a baggage of undesirable implication.
For instance ''choice'' - no organism chooses good or bad mutations, if it has a bad mutation then it is more likely to die than a brother that has a good mutation. However we all use the word ''choice'' otherwise discussions on evolution would go on forever.
The response to this article highlights one of my biggest problems with a large section of the science community.
The press release is a loud of baloney, like most press releases geared to the non-scientific community. It's a hard job, explaining such complex ideas to people with no background in the field is always going to be challenging and some fluff will need to be introduced. Only other alternative is to not do it at all, and then the creationists win.
However to attack the scientists who actually did the research is simply out of order. Even if they have overstepped the mark, even if what they have discovered is a load of crap, to mock them is simply not necessary.
I predict that the next big discovery will be that evolution is evolving is evolving.