The interesting thing about this experiment is not the fact that the bacteria developed adaptatory mutations in a given gene to deal with increased heat, as much as the fact that when the experiment was repeated, the same mutations were observed in the same gene in the DOMINANT bacterial strains at various time points.
Think about it.
It suggests that in a given species, there seems to be an optimal adaptation to a given set of environmental conditions, that is determined by the genetic make up of the population prior to attaining those conditions, and the path that the changes in those conditions take through time.
While that's just a paraphrasing of the definition of evolution, I don't believe anyone has shown that a given evolutionary path is experimentally reproducible.
The title of the aritcle is misleading though. Evolution is not being predicted. But if you've seen it once, it may be predictable.
I suspect that such laws will never get much use, and 50 years from now people will look back and say 'Hey, can you believe some of the crazy computer laws we have on the books!' much in the way people look back today on outdated laws in some states. For examples: http://www.crazylaws.com/
Eliminating acutely dysfunctional researchers who are paid by corporate sponsors to achieve pre-defined results would also be a good idea, but that would eliminate 95% of all researchers, which could cause problems down the road.
I'm not so sure that this would cause problems. Imagine, suddenly scientific research gains credibility in the public eye! (And stories like this nonsense never see the light of day).
Interestingly, they found some adenovirus strains that contributed to obesity in mice. Immediate questions that arise: did they control for the amount of exercise the animals did. Infected animals may be inherently more lethargic than non-infected animals. Especially if you're controlling for caloric intake, ensuring both groups eat the same amount..
And before someone pipes up with the omnipresent: "Do you really think that trained scientists didn't think about that!!!"..
I am a trained scientist, and it's surprising the crap that gets published, even in journals like Nature. The journal they published in is not particularly high impact. If the evidence was more convincing, I'd expect the paper to hit a higher impact journal.
Granted, I'm being synical, since I haven't bothered to read the research paper.
You can download the original article from the european journal of cancer website http://www.intl.elsevierhealth.com/journals/ejca/
Volume 41, issue 18, pages 2904-2910.
I agree with your point above. I'm just saying that spatial and temporal clustering is in and of itself far from sufficient to show causality. The link between infectious agents and ALL, or brain tumors, has been made previously in other studies. I'm not particularly familiar with those. This particular paper provides some further evidence supporting that hypothesis, but they do not analyze any infection data, only cancer history cases.
Mmmm, no. Read the research paper. Temporal an spatial clustering was found between different types of childhood cancers. This study did not do any analysis of infection rates. What they did find was that place of birth caused cross clustering between different childhood cancers. Some of these cancers (such as ALL and some brain tumors) have been linked to early exposure to infectious agents. The fact that place of birth was the spatial factor that caused cross correlation of ALL and CNS tumors, and not place of diagnosis, leads them to suspect some common infectious cause. This is supported by other studies showing increased risk for these cancers due to infectious agents.
Clearly, you've never done any research. I'm not being derogatory. Research costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time because it's RESEARCH. As Albert Einstein said:
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research."
That's just the nature of the beast.
Anyone get the impression that only dipshits run for office in the school boards? It's probably that we only ever hear about these people when they do something wrong (either poor judgement, fiscal mismanagement, or a pig headed inability to compromise on some issue), but I would love to hear some examples of school board / administratiive officials being commended for doing something right.
Anyone.. anyone.. Bueller?
I say this, because the Parent argues that tax payers should be paying the fine. I'm personally not convinced it's the tax payers' faults. I feel that most school board elections give you a choice between Dumb and Dumber. The officials should be run out of town, and the running of schools should certainly be more transparent to the parents who send their kids there.
Imagine this sort of approach being used in other areas of science (e.g. 'We don't yet fully understand the origin of comets, so aliens or gods must have made them') and the results are silly in the extreme.
I agree. This kind of "logic" leads to affirmations that HIV is a punishment from God, and other rubbish. If this type of thinking became widespread in the health sector, we'd all be rapidly doomed. On the surface, an erosion of the theory of evolution, and a redefinition of science may seem like a small deal, but the real issue is that this could be detremental to students by undermining their ability to think critically: a skill that's really necesary to do good science. Grad school hits undergrads like a big slap in the face. It takes them a year to adjust to the realities of research. Nothing is black and white, and it' crucial to be able to think critically about both your own and other people's results in order to be able to generate reasonable hypotheses.
Now students will be learning that ignorance of a phenomenon can be explained away by faith. ID has no testable hypotheses and so must be accepted on faith. Consequently, no resources are put into novel thinking about the problem to try and generate new theories and new hypotheses that ARE testable, and could help prove or disprove evolution and generate new theories. The result is that the science of evolution stagnates in Kansas. Now, extrapolate this to other fields, and you understand the danger of such an approach.
I'm done ranting. I think my point was that I agreed with you, but then I got started..
These experiments amount to "let's see what happens if we put substance X in liquid nitrogen" type of experiments.
About the only mildy useful work done was to make protein crystals for crystallography, and even then, it's questionable whether this couldn't be achieved on earth. "Oooh, bigger crystals!". Big deal. We get all the resolution we need growing them on earth.
Access to education does not correlate with intelligence. While an intelligent parent (in some sense of the word) may push his/her children harder to work hard in school and get a good education, this doesn't mean that intelligent parents have intelligent children, or that stupid parents have stupid children. Don't confuse intelligence with education. Access to education is inversely related to socioeconomic status, the same is true for reproductive success (number of children had by a couple). This does not imply that poor, uneducated people having children will lead to a population that is less intelligent.
Think about the Dark Ages. The majority of Europe was poor, and uneducated. Now look where we are today.
Cheers,
I hardly would consider transcripts of parents' speech directed at 2- or 3-year-olds "intricate".
I speak to my kid like a human being. How do you speak to yours? Actually, don't take that personally, I just have serious issues with people that "dumb down" their speach to children. Kids aren't dumb. They understand a lot more than adults give them credit for, including language. Often children understand the majority of what is said to them before they begin to speak comprehensibly.
And the "rules" of a language are NOT what children "learn". First of all, children acquire a language, they do not "learn" it. That is a large attribute to the child's ability to speak it--not whether or not they understand gerunds and the pluperfect.
If you read the paper, you'll notice that the algorithm doesn't really learn the "RULES" either. It just identifies patterns, with is what children do too, really.
I'm sure teaching a computer Latin is easy. Anytime there's plenty of well defined rules, you can program them. But with that alone you won't be able to get the computer to make sense in it's ouput. For that you need to train (using some algorithm) on a (sufficiently) large body of data. This algorithm can, when trained on a large body of data, can produce output that "makes sense" and follows grammatical rules (at least more often than a Markov model, for example). That is pretty innovative. It's been a shortfall of markov models, that you need a high order markov model to do language learning. These guys use something like suffix trees. It's prett neat stuff.
If you take young children and expose them to rubbish for four or five years while they're learning to speak, they'll speak rubbish too. That's the problem with young children, they can't sort the good from the bad.
But if you expose them to well strucutred language, they'll learn to speak it, without being EXPLICITLY TAUGHT THE RULES. Which is exactly what this paper is about. Unsupervised natural language learning. That's what makes the system good. It's able to build equivalency classes of verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc, with relatively few examples. The paper gives an example of the algorithm using 8 sentences to trian and be able to produce over 500 new, sensible sentences. Even a 4th order Markov chain can't do that (Megahal). The algorithm is really quite impressive.
Your comment begs the question.. why would you train a system on garbage? Finding good quality written language is a non issue. Train it on good data and it'll probably do as well as a Markov model for distinguishing good vs bad language.
It's not that interesting, since they're usually first order systems.
Every n+1st work will make sense with every nth word, but there's no long range (second order or higher) dependency in most of those models. (requires too much space, usually). That's why they do well as recommender systems, but suck for generating comprehensible sentences.
This is the garbage typical of the health care industry.
This thing is put together with tools most developers have never heard of (MUMPS? EasiObjects?), instead of using tested and stable tools used by most open source developers and researchers in the field (ie those that could contribute the most to such a project). The only thing this ensures is that the original developers are going to make a pile of cash doing consulting work.
Swap pill and antibiotic,and you'll have it right.
Antibiotics came into general use in the 40s, now they're becoming ineffective with the rise of resistant bacterial strains. Not that other pills are helping anything, but Viagra, Prozac, and the likes are ever more popular.
Quakers essentially founded the USA. The seemingly backwards view that sex is worse than violence appears to come from their beleifs. This has some interesting history..http://www.answers.com/topic/puritan
Well, you are assuming that the conditions on the primordial Earth were exceptional. I am not aware of anything in particular that supports that assumption.
I tend to agree with you on this point. I was arguing from a rather pedantic perspective.
Experimentally, we've gotten from basic chemicals to amino acids easily given rather simple hands-off conditions.
True enough.
With a million or a hundred million years of chemical selection, the jump from amino acids to proteins and from proteins to life is very short.
I don't agree with you on that one. You're forgotten about DNA and RNA. The machinery to replicate either DNA or RNA, nevermind to translate it to protein is extremely complex. The current widely accepted theory was that RNA was a major player early on. RNA molecules have been identified that are capable of functioning as enzymes, including some with RNA polymerizing activity. (PMID: 2424025). I can believe that selection of such an RNA enzyme may occur in several hundred million years, but to say that the jump to DNA->RNA->protein along with all the required molecular machinery is a short one.. I just don't think that there's any foundation to say so. (maybe it depends on the definition of "short"). Can you show me some scientific papers that support your claim? I haven't found any papers whose central point is to tie together the evolution of RNA, DNA, proteins and membranes on primordial earth, and attach it to some sort of time scale with experimental evidence. Unless you have that, you can't say that it's "a short jump by chemical selection", there's just no evidence for it (as far as I know). It may be the theory everyone would like to believe (since it would imply we're likely not alone). But if you know of some research like this, I'd be glad to hear it.
Cheers,
And I hope a terrorists gets in and blows up tons of people. You will deserve it.
Man, you need to stop and think hard about exactly what you're saying. This is just slashdot, but that kind of reactionary attitude doesn't solve anyone's problems, it just causes them. Grow up and learn to reason rationally.
Slashdot Mirror
The interesting thing about this experiment is not the fact that the bacteria developed adaptatory mutations in a given gene to deal with increased heat, as much as the fact that when the experiment was repeated, the same mutations were observed in the same gene in the DOMINANT bacterial strains at various time points.
Think about it.
It suggests that in a given species, there seems to be an optimal adaptation to a given set of environmental conditions, that is determined by the genetic make up of the population prior to attaining those conditions, and the path that the changes in those conditions take through time.
While that's just a paraphrasing of the definition of evolution, I don't believe anyone has shown that a given evolutionary path is experimentally reproducible.
The title of the aritcle is misleading though. Evolution is not being predicted. But if you've seen it once, it may be predictable.
I suspect that such laws will never get much use, and 50 years from now people will look back and say 'Hey, can you believe some of the crazy computer laws we have on the books!' much in the way people look back today on outdated laws in some states. For examples: http://www.crazylaws.com/
Clean water and food can prevent it, yes. But if you've got it what do you do then?/ 15-6-pr.htm
Clean, pure water is not going to help you rehydrate. Have a look here. http://gastroresource.com/GITextbook/en/chapter15
Exactly how did this get modded insightful? Funny, yes.. insightfull.. that's just scary. And no, I'm not new here.
Ahh, yes.. Carleton University... where the K stands for Quality. ( I suppose it loses somthing when it's written down..)
I'm not so sure that this would cause problems. Imagine, suddenly scientific research gains credibility in the public eye! (And stories like this nonsense never see the light of day).
Interestingly, they found some adenovirus strains that contributed to obesity in mice. Immediate questions that arise: did they control for the amount of exercise the animals did. Infected animals may be inherently more lethargic than non-infected animals. Especially if you're controlling for caloric intake, ensuring both groups eat the same amount..
And before someone pipes up with the omnipresent: "Do you really think that trained scientists didn't think about that!!!"..
I am a trained scientist, and it's surprising the crap that gets published, even in journals like Nature. The journal they published in is not particularly high impact. If the evidence was more convincing, I'd expect the paper to hit a higher impact journal.
Granted, I'm being synical, since I haven't bothered to read the research paper.
Snore... slashdot science articles..
You can download the original article from the european journal of cancer website http://www.intl.elsevierhealth.com/journals/ejca/ Volume 41, issue 18, pages 2904-2910. I agree with your point above. I'm just saying that spatial and temporal clustering is in and of itself far from sufficient to show causality. The link between infectious agents and ALL, or brain tumors, has been made previously in other studies. I'm not particularly familiar with those. This particular paper provides some further evidence supporting that hypothesis, but they do not analyze any infection data, only cancer history cases.
Mmmm, no. Read the research paper. Temporal an spatial clustering was found between different types of childhood cancers. This study did not do any analysis of infection rates. What they did find was that place of birth caused cross clustering between different childhood cancers. Some of these cancers (such as ALL and some brain tumors) have been linked to early exposure to infectious agents. The fact that place of birth was the spatial factor that caused cross correlation of ALL and CNS tumors, and not place of diagnosis, leads them to suspect some common infectious cause. This is supported by other studies showing increased risk for these cancers due to infectious agents.
Clearly, you've never done any research. I'm not being derogatory. Research costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time because it's RESEARCH. As Albert Einstein said:
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research."
That's just the nature of the beast.
Anyone get the impression that only dipshits run for office in the school boards? It's probably that we only ever hear about these people when they do something wrong (either poor judgement, fiscal mismanagement, or a pig headed inability to compromise on some issue), but I would love to hear some examples of school board / administratiive officials being commended for doing something right.
Anyone.. anyone.. Bueller?
I say this, because the Parent argues that tax payers should be paying the fine. I'm personally not convinced it's the tax payers' faults. I feel that most school board elections give you a choice between Dumb and Dumber. The officials should be run out of town, and the running of schools should certainly be more transparent to the parents who send their kids there.
I agree. This kind of "logic" leads to affirmations that HIV is a punishment from God, and other rubbish. If this type of thinking became widespread in the health sector, we'd all be rapidly doomed. On the surface, an erosion of the theory of evolution, and a redefinition of science may seem like a small deal, but the real issue is that this could be detremental to students by undermining their ability to think critically: a skill that's really necesary to do good science. Grad school hits undergrads like a big slap in the face. It takes them a year to adjust to the realities of research. Nothing is black and white, and it' crucial to be able to think critically about both your own and other people's results in order to be able to generate reasonable hypotheses.
Now students will be learning that ignorance of a phenomenon can be explained away by faith. ID has no testable hypotheses and so must be accepted on faith. Consequently, no resources are put into novel thinking about the problem to try and generate new theories and new hypotheses that ARE testable, and could help prove or disprove evolution and generate new theories. The result is that the science of evolution stagnates in Kansas. Now, extrapolate this to other fields, and you understand the danger of such an approach. I'm done ranting. I think my point was that I agreed with you, but then I got started..
These experiments amount to "let's see what happens if we put substance X in liquid nitrogen" type of experiments. About the only mildy useful work done was to make protein crystals for crystallography, and even then, it's questionable whether this couldn't be achieved on earth. "Oooh, bigger crystals!". Big deal. We get all the resolution we need growing them on earth.
Access to education does not correlate with intelligence. While an intelligent parent (in some sense of the word) may push his/her children harder to work hard in school and get a good education, this doesn't mean that intelligent parents have intelligent children, or that stupid parents have stupid children. Don't confuse intelligence with education. Access to education is inversely related to socioeconomic status, the same is true for reproductive success (number of children had by a couple). This does not imply that poor, uneducated people having children will lead to a population that is less intelligent. Think about the Dark Ages. The majority of Europe was poor, and uneducated. Now look where we are today. Cheers,
I speak to my kid like a human being. How do you speak to yours? Actually, don't take that personally, I just have serious issues with people that "dumb down" their speach to children. Kids aren't dumb. They understand a lot more than adults give them credit for, including language. Often children understand the majority of what is said to them before they begin to speak comprehensibly.
If you read the paper, you'll notice that the algorithm doesn't really learn the "RULES" either. It just identifies patterns, with is what children do too, really.
I'm sure teaching a computer Latin is easy. Anytime there's plenty of well defined rules, you can program them. But with that alone you won't be able to get the computer to make sense in it's ouput. For that you need to train (using some algorithm) on a (sufficiently) large body of data. This algorithm can, when trained on a large body of data, can produce output that "makes sense" and follows grammatical rules (at least more often than a Markov model, for example). That is pretty innovative. It's been a shortfall of markov models, that you need a high order markov model to do language learning. These guys use something like suffix trees. It's prett neat stuff.
If you take young children and expose them to rubbish for four or five years while they're learning to speak, they'll speak rubbish too. That's the problem with young children, they can't sort the good from the bad.
But if you expose them to well strucutred language, they'll learn to speak it, without being EXPLICITLY TAUGHT THE RULES. Which is exactly what this paper is about. Unsupervised natural language learning. That's what makes the system good. It's able to build equivalency classes of verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc, with relatively few examples. The paper gives an example of the algorithm using 8 sentences to trian and be able to produce over 500 new, sensible sentences. Even a 4th order Markov chain can't do that (Megahal). The algorithm is really quite impressive.
Your comment begs the question.. why would you train a system on garbage? Finding good quality written language is a non issue. Train it on good data and it'll probably do as well as a Markov model for distinguishing good vs bad language.
It's not that interesting, since they're usually first order systems. Every n+1st work will make sense with every nth word, but there's no long range (second order or higher) dependency in most of those models. (requires too much space, usually). That's why they do well as recommender systems, but suck for generating comprehensible sentences.
This would be an interesting story line for a video game.
There's been some sort of dimensional disturbance, and it's actually April 1st.
Phew.. I was getting nervous. I thought this was serious.
Enough said.
This is the garbage typical of the health care industry. This thing is put together with tools most developers have never heard of (MUMPS? EasiObjects?), instead of using tested and stable tools used by most open source developers and researchers in the field (ie those that could contribute the most to such a project). The only thing this ensures is that the original developers are going to make a pile of cash doing consulting work.
Swap pill and antibiotic,and you'll have it right.
Antibiotics came into general use in the 40s, now they're becoming ineffective with the rise of resistant bacterial strains. Not that other pills are helping anything, but Viagra, Prozac, and the likes are ever more popular.
Yep, true enough.
Man, you need to stop and think hard about exactly what you're saying. This is just slashdot, but that kind of reactionary attitude doesn't solve anyone's problems, it just causes them. Grow up and learn to reason rationally.