You're going to have to define information in a reasonable way before that can even be answered. Do you mean beneficial mutations? Those are commonplace. Do you mean just the creation of a different protein from the one originally coded for? Also commonplace. Do you mean mutations that just cause the increase in number of genes (information for sure) in the genome? Also commonplace, and usually fairly nasty. What exactly do you want to see experimental evidence for?
Since all proteins used in a living organism are coded for in their DNA (with the exception that embryos start out with a nice lunchbox packed by mom...which was also produced by transcribing DNA, and those acquired by taking them in from the environment...once again, coded for in somebody else's DNA), the only essential differences between proteins as far as mutations are concerned are the information used to code for them. Why would you think that the mutations to code for any particular protein or set of proteins couldn't occur?
The root of the question as far as I can see it is that you're claiming that certain types of information are "special" in some way that makes it hard for mutation to strike upon them. What evidence do you have for that? If you don't have any sort of evidence that the mechanism that creates new types of proteins out of old ones ISN'T capable of creating the proteins you have in mind, it's not parsimonious to assume that it can't.
I'd say sorta yes and sorta no on that interpretation, myself. Our ideas and culture could certainly be Lamarckian, but as yet our biological evolution is still strictly Darwinian. Once our ideas start altering our actual genotype (probably very very soon), maybe we really WILL see Lamarckian biological evolution.
Whoops, to be absolutely correct, let me ammed that to "differential reproductive success of individuals based on hereditable differences between them. My intro bio teacher would kill me if I left the bit about heredity out.
It was a phenomenon wherein environmental factors caused the differential reproductive success of organisms. That is the DEFINITION of natural selection. The fact that the environmental phenomenon (in this case El Nino) was cyclical is irrelevant, they have proven that the textbook definition of evolution by natural selection occurred. If you think that the cyclic nature of what they observed implies that it's not NS, you clearly don't understand NS very well.
That's a very interesting idea, and one that has been suggested by people who study memetic evolution. I think it's probably a pretty accurate statement, but all of that meme stuff is new and as yet fairly nebulous, imho.
The FACT that relationships between species are not determined in the way you said, and have not been for decades. The discipline is referred to as molecular phylogeny, and is based on sound statistical principles and an insane amount of discrete math.
"Evolution hasn't been proven in any lab, like physics or astronomy"
While I appreciate the general thrust of your statements, that part isn't true. Evolution by natural selection has been proven in the lab many many times. It's why bacteria and other nasties develop resistance to drugs, and crop pests develop resistance to herbicides and insecticides. There was even a guy who tracked the genotypes of his intestinal fauna via poo samples every day for a year to study how his changing diet etc. affected the balance of genes in the population. That in itself is a measure of natural selection. The idea that selection is too slow to be observed hasn't been prevalent in biology in a decade or more, but it still persists in popular perception. That's really not all that surprising, though, I'm sure if you watch this thread you'll see arguments that were refuted a century and a half ago!
"I've already mentioned what that prevailing theory is in biology: intelligent design. The complexity of life simply cannot be explained any other way."
You are out of your farking mind. This must be a troll; I don't see how anyone could seriously believe that crap. I've been a bio student at three universities now, and have yet to meet ONE biologist who buys into intelligent design. The idea that natural selection can't explain the degree of diversity found in the world is an old one, and has been amply proven to be a load of hooey. Grant and Grant (a married research team from Princeton) showed natural selection proceeding at a rate of 2000-3000 darwins (the unit used to describe the rate of evolution) in a real-world situation. The highest rate necessary to explain the FASTEST change ever observed in the fossil record? Ready? 0.1 darwins. Parsimony mean anything to you?
"This states that a species will get stronger, but it cannot explain how a species would turn into another species, such as a lizard into a bird. That's just people who say they're alike, and then try to find stuff to back that up, non-objectively."
Wow, that's a blatant misstatement of fact. The relationships between organisms are almost entirely determined by statistical methods which examine the differences in molecular makeup these days. The methods are far from perfect (it's an extremely nasty NP-Complete problem), but they're also far from arbitrary or subjective. Systematics as you have described it hasn't been in common practice for thirty years or more.
Not only that, he actually had evolutionism in his blood. Check this out:
"Nurs'd by warm sun-beams in primeval caves Organic Life began beneath the waves... Hence without parent by spontaneous birth Rise the first specks of animated earth"
That's part of a poem written by Darwin's grandfather Erasmus long before Chuck himself was born. Fascinating, huh? Anyway, as you mentioned, it's really not even remotely correct to credit Darwin with the advent of evolutionary thought. His contribution was the mechanism of natural selection, which stood up to criticism much more successfully than Lamarck's ideas.
I just started my fall semester, and this guy is my history and philosophy of science teacher! Neat. He's funny as hell in person, by the way. If you ever get a chance to see him lecture, take it!
That's not actually how artificial life works. They don't tell them that they need eyes or bigger muscles or whatever, they just eliminate the ones that are unsuccessful. This process leads to the development of things like eyes and muscles because the ones that developed those by the process of mutation tend to be culled less than those that didn't. Tom Ray's Tierra simulation has absolutely NO global rules and no specifications about what sort of things are expected to develop, and he gets complex ecological interactions such as parasites and hyperparasites.
You have, however, hit on an important point. We know how to objectively judge box-pushing behavior, speed, and other physical measurements, so we can develop rule sets to encourage the development of traits to maximize those things. Quantifying intelligent behavior is much more difficult, making the evolution of intelligent behavior problematic. That doesn't mean it's impossible, it just means that we need to think more on the difference between simple problem solving and true intelligence, and most importantly how to judge what intelligent behavior is without trying to figure out how to create it.
Ooooh! That reminds me! I've always wanted to see an episode about making your own cheeses. I've done a vinegar cheese, feta, labneh, and one insanely over-salted hard cheese that really doesn't fit a category. It's a hard and disappearing art, and I would LOVE some pointers.
I do have an herb garden and have had one several times before. The problem is that I keep having to move right as my garden really starts to get going. I've got some sage, dill, carrots, and lemon basil going right now along with some leeks that are rather dispirited. Hopefully I'll be able to do a lot more when I leave for grad school; I haven't lived in the same place for more than 18 months as an undergrad. Given my ephemeral residency (I'm not an English major, I swear) and general busy schedule, I think it's still going to be at least a few years before I get a good garden started. Thank you very much for the advice, though, I've copied and pasted it for future reference.
Something I've found as a newbie chef is that a good 75.32% of good cooking is good shopping. What tips do you have for finding good, fresh ingredients? Where the heck do you get fresh herbs etc. in a smallish town?
They learn a lot by freezing the brains and putting super-thin slices on slides and examining them with microscopes. There are a lot of things that can be seen that way that you really can't see any other way. Even so, if I was on that project I would've been against killing ALL of them. I'd really like to see if there are any behavioral differences.
I have no idea what goes on in the business world, but I'm actually seeing more and more movement toward java in the biology and CS departments I've been in. As a matter of fact, at both of the schools I've worked at they've recently replaced C with Java as their intro programming language.
Slashdot Mirror
"I've been shot!"
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, but I think it deleted my email."
That would carry more weight if you weren't posting AC. Then we could all come over and make SURE.
That's pretty much what I was trying to say.
You're going to have to define information in a reasonable way before that can even be answered. Do you mean beneficial mutations? Those are commonplace. Do you mean just the creation of a different protein from the one originally coded for? Also commonplace. Do you mean mutations that just cause the increase in number of genes (information for sure) in the genome? Also commonplace, and usually fairly nasty. What exactly do you want to see experimental evidence for?
Since all proteins used in a living organism are coded for in their DNA (with the exception that embryos start out with a nice lunchbox packed by mom...which was also produced by transcribing DNA, and those acquired by taking them in from the environment...once again, coded for in somebody else's DNA), the only essential differences between proteins as far as mutations are concerned are the information used to code for them. Why would you think that the mutations to code for any particular protein or set of proteins couldn't occur?
The root of the question as far as I can see it is that you're claiming that certain types of information are "special" in some way that makes it hard for mutation to strike upon them. What evidence do you have for that? If you don't have any sort of evidence that the mechanism that creates new types of proteins out of old ones ISN'T capable of creating the proteins you have in mind, it's not parsimonious to assume that it can't.
I'd say sorta yes and sorta no on that interpretation, myself. Our ideas and culture could certainly be Lamarckian, but as yet our biological evolution is still strictly Darwinian. Once our ideas start altering our actual genotype (probably very very soon), maybe we really WILL see Lamarckian biological evolution.
Whoops, to be absolutely correct, let me ammed that to "differential reproductive success of individuals based on hereditable differences between them. My intro bio teacher would kill me if I left the bit about heredity out.
It was a phenomenon wherein environmental factors caused the differential reproductive success of organisms. That is the DEFINITION of natural selection. The fact that the environmental phenomenon (in this case El Nino) was cyclical is irrelevant, they have proven that the textbook definition of evolution by natural selection occurred. If you think that the cyclic nature of what they observed implies that it's not NS, you clearly don't understand NS very well.
That's a very interesting idea, and one that has been suggested by people who study memetic evolution. I think it's probably a pretty accurate statement, but all of that meme stuff is new and as yet fairly nebulous, imho.
The FACT that relationships between species are not determined in the way you said, and have not been for decades. The discipline is referred to as molecular phylogeny, and is based on sound statistical principles and an insane amount of discrete math.
"Evolution hasn't been proven in any lab, like physics or astronomy"
While I appreciate the general thrust of your statements, that part isn't true. Evolution by natural selection has been proven in the lab many many times. It's why bacteria and other nasties develop resistance to drugs, and crop pests develop resistance to herbicides and insecticides. There was even a guy who tracked the genotypes of his intestinal fauna via poo samples every day for a year to study how his changing diet etc. affected the balance of genes in the population. That in itself is a measure of natural selection. The idea that selection is too slow to be observed hasn't been prevalent in biology in a decade or more, but it still persists in popular perception. That's really not all that surprising, though, I'm sure if you watch this thread you'll see arguments that were refuted a century and a half ago!
"I've already mentioned what that prevailing theory is in biology: intelligent design. The complexity of life simply cannot be explained any other way."
You are out of your farking mind. This must be a troll; I don't see how anyone could seriously believe that crap. I've been a bio student at three universities now, and have yet to meet ONE biologist who buys into intelligent design. The idea that natural selection can't explain the degree of diversity found in the world is an old one, and has been amply proven to be a load of hooey. Grant and Grant (a married research team from Princeton) showed natural selection proceeding at a rate of 2000-3000 darwins (the unit used to describe the rate of evolution) in a real-world situation. The highest rate necessary to explain the FASTEST change ever observed in the fossil record? Ready? 0.1 darwins. Parsimony mean anything to you?
"This states that a species will get stronger, but it cannot explain how a species would turn into another species, such as a lizard into a bird. That's just people who say they're alike, and then try to find stuff to back that up, non-objectively."
Wow, that's a blatant misstatement of fact. The relationships between organisms are almost entirely determined by statistical methods which examine the differences in molecular makeup these days. The methods are far from perfect (it's an extremely nasty NP-Complete problem), but they're also far from arbitrary or subjective. Systematics as you have described it hasn't been in common practice for thirty years or more.
Not only that, he actually had evolutionism in his blood. Check this out:
"Nurs'd by warm sun-beams in primeval caves
Organic Life began beneath the waves...
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth"
That's part of a poem written by Darwin's grandfather Erasmus long before Chuck himself was born. Fascinating, huh? Anyway, as you mentioned, it's really not even remotely correct to credit Darwin with the advent of evolutionary thought. His contribution was the mechanism of natural selection, which stood up to criticism much more successfully than Lamarck's ideas.
I just started my fall semester, and this guy is my history and philosophy of science teacher! Neat. He's funny as hell in person, by the way. If you ever get a chance to see him lecture, take it!
Those coffee baths friggin' HURT.
And where the hell is the Alton Brown interview?
That's not actually how artificial life works. They don't tell them that they need eyes or bigger muscles or whatever, they just eliminate the ones that are unsuccessful. This process leads to the development of things like eyes and muscles because the ones that developed those by the process of mutation tend to be culled less than those that didn't. Tom Ray's Tierra simulation has absolutely NO global rules and no specifications about what sort of things are expected to develop, and he gets complex ecological interactions such as parasites and hyperparasites.
You have, however, hit on an important point. We know how to objectively judge box-pushing behavior, speed, and other physical measurements, so we can develop rule sets to encourage the development of traits to maximize those things. Quantifying intelligent behavior is much more difficult, making the evolution of intelligent behavior problematic. That doesn't mean it's impossible, it just means that we need to think more on the difference between simple problem solving and true intelligence, and most importantly how to judge what intelligent behavior is without trying to figure out how to create it.
Ooooh! That reminds me! I've always wanted to see an episode about making your own cheeses. I've done a vinegar cheese, feta, labneh, and one insanely over-salted hard cheese that really doesn't fit a category. It's a hard and disappearing art, and I would LOVE some pointers.
I do have an herb garden and have had one several times before. The problem is that I keep having to move right as my garden really starts to get going. I've got some sage, dill, carrots, and lemon basil going right now along with some leeks that are rather dispirited. Hopefully I'll be able to do a lot more when I leave for grad school; I haven't lived in the same place for more than 18 months as an undergrad. Given my ephemeral residency (I'm not an English major, I swear) and general busy schedule, I think it's still going to be at least a few years before I get a good garden started. Thank you very much for the advice, though, I've copied and pasted it for future reference.
"How did you calculate that to two decimal places? :p "
By failing to calculate confidence intervals. That's 75.32 +/- 75.30.
Something I've found as a newbie chef is that a good 75.32% of good cooking is good shopping. What tips do you have for finding good, fresh ingredients? Where the heck do you get fresh herbs etc. in a smallish town?
They learn a lot by freezing the brains and putting super-thin slices on slides and examining them with microscopes. There are a lot of things that can be seen that way that you really can't see any other way. Even so, if I was on that project I would've been against killing ALL of them. I'd really like to see if there are any behavioral differences.
OF these. Dammit. It was a stupid joke anyway, and then I have to go and fark it up.
Imagine a beowulf cluster or these!
I have no idea what goes on in the business world, but I'm actually seeing more and more movement toward java in the biology and CS departments I've been in. As a matter of fact, at both of the schools I've worked at they've recently replaced C with Java as their intro programming language.