Posted on 01/26/2006 11:47:13 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Duly noted.
OK Dokay.
That's what happened to me. I started it, and then I got hooked. But now I'm free! And I don't have to compose a roughly similar (but never entirely satisfactory) answer to the same old questions, thread after thread.
Not fringe at all. I've long been in the midst of the non-random camp, regarding my own work and that of most of my colleagues.
There are selective pressures we don't yet measure well, but cosmic radiation is a potent stressor on animal cellular division, especially during meitotic and meioitc phase. The problem assigning randomness to this process becomes apparent when we look at phenotypical outcomes---there's huge differences in responsiveness by cellular types (e.g. somatic vs gamete cells), and, when these cells of various types are taken in the context of a multicellular organism, the phenotypical expression is clearly biased, as a result of the physiologic response, and is manifested in terms of adaptiveness.
The point is that stressors are stressors only in as they are measured by the response of the life form. Maybe cosmic radiation is random, I don't know. But the response to it is not, and that is evolution.
Clinicians refer to the same concept as "vulnerability," wherein some patients prosper under the same stress which causes others great distress.
Good response! My remark was made in jest, BTW.
This will be an important topic, perhaps the only important aspect of mutational sources, if we ever get around to doing serious space travel.
Empiricism does not define 'hardness' -- any succesful scientific endeavor needs both theory and emprical study, with controlled experiments. Theory without experiment is philosophy, empiricism without theory is merely observation.
YEC INTREP - this defies credulity
That's a tough term to define. Some have pointed out that which I did---that is, the more empirical, the "harder" the scientific discipline. yet others have focused upont eh naure of the dependent variable as the determiner of "hardness:" Those sciences, no matter how empirical, are "soft" because of the naure of their subjects' response variability: Rocks being low in response variability and human behavior being high. Then, others base it upon the instrumentation and the precision of measurement. And there are other viewpoints. How do you define this "hardness?"
-- any succesful scientific endeavor needs both theory and emprical study, with controlled experiments. Theory without experiment is philosophy, empiricism without theory is merely observation.
What's that have to do with hardness? I mean I thought that was assumed for any scientific discipline...not just the "hard" ones.
Lead-shielded Jockstrap futures may be a good investment...
Hmmm...let's see...
Can't find any intermediate species in the fossil record...not a one...so we'll just invent some 'giant leaps for mankind'.
And the evolutionists trudge on, oblivious to how silly they look...
Yeah, but gametogenesis is a 24/7 thingy. I guess it's best to just continuously reside in the "mating" chamber.
For science's sake, of course.
However, I would define it as the level of rigor used in obtaining data and drawing conclusions from it, including the use of well-designed experiments to test hypotheses.
Physics is a 'hard' science because of the clarity of such experiments, economics is a soft science because such experiments are almost impossible to do, especially in the field of macroeconomics. Earth sciences are hard or soft depending on how 'macro' the activity is -- classification of rocks may be 'hard', but earthquake science is 'soft', because theory-testing experiments are kind of hard to carry out.
That's my view.
Well then, it's lead codpieces and chastity belts for everyday wear, to be removed only when in the shielded chamber of joy.
Yeah, that's a good start. I've always appreciated studies that had a good experimental design, and it seems, to me, that has been neglected in some sciences recently.
But, to the chagrin, of many "hard" scientists, biology and experimental psychology would qualify as very hard by these criteria.
Is that the face of Hard Science?
Friedrich Moh already did that.
I haven't read the actual paper, so all I have to go on is the article here. And there's no telling how accurately it might be describing the paper -- I've long been appalled at the ability of reporters to totally garble things when they attempt to report on science.
But just going by the article, it sounds rather questionable.
The first thing that strikes me is that the guy published a mass-market book first, *then* submitted a paper on it. I have to wonder if the main purpose of the paper is to advertise his book.
In any case, the argument sounds muddled (although again, this could be the reporter's fault). While it's true that environmental stresses can trigger higher mutation rates (and this has been known since the 1960's -- see the citations in my post #35), there's nothing "special" about the resulting mutations, they're just more instances of the kinds of mutations that occur anyway.
Also, the article makes a number of inaccurate claims and implications. If they're the reporter's fault, fine, but if the researcher made them, he's revealing a shocking level of incompetence and his "findings" are likely nonsense. For example, it says:
Why does it take an environmental drama to cause mutations? Why don't cells subtly and constantly change in small ways over time, as Darwin suggests?Actually, they *do* change in "small ways over time" even without "environmental drama". Despite the cell's error-correction and preventative machinery, mutations do still happen on a regular basis. So the article's line, "But extreme stress pushes cells beyond their capacity to produce protective proteins, and then mutation can occur" is very misleading, since mutations "can occur" and do occur at any time -- they just occur *more often* when the cell is under stress.
And all the article's comments about how some mutations can be recessive in effect and only manifest effects much later (i.e., after many more generations have occurred) applies to *all* mutations, not just ones that might have been induced by environmental stress. If "dramatic expressions of change" can occur due to stress-induced mutations, they can equally occur due to mutations which occur at times not under stress.
The stress has nothing to do with it -- if "dramatic change" can occur in a "hopeful monster" kind of way, as the article implies, then it can happen with *or* without stress. At most, perhaps a case could be made that they might occur more *often* under times of stress, but the same goes for "regular" evolutionary change as well.
So the article's apparent linkage between stress and "big change" is very questionable, to say the least. He has yet to establish that such "dramatic changes" even actually occur. Certainly nothing about the nature of recessive mutations would make "dramatic changes" any more likely or more likely viable (as mentioned in a previous post, small changes are *far* more likely to be viable and advantageous than "dramatic" ones). The only thing "special" about recessive mutations is that they don't reveal themselves immediately (i.e. in the first generation in which they arise), but that doesn't make their effects any larger, any more "dramatic", or any more viable. And they're no more "sudden" than any other kind of mutation, since whenever they eventually manifest, it's as "sudden" a first appearance as that of a mutation which manifests as soon as it first occurs.
The article also says, "Actually, Schwartz argues, it is the environment that knocks them off their equilibrium and as likely ultimately kills them as changes them. And so they are being rocked by the environment, not adapting to it." This is... odd. Yes, they are being "rocked by the environment", but they are *also* adapting to it -- it's not an either/or thing. In fact, the "rocking" creates additional selective pressures on the population, *causing* adaptation to accelerate. They go hand in hand. They can also go extinct, of course, if the "rocking" is too extreme to survive or if the adaptation can not quickly enough adjust to the new conditions.
Even stranger is:
“You just can't do a quick fix on the environment to prevent extinction because the cause of the mutation occurred some time in the past, and you don't know what the cause of the stress was at that time,” Schwartz said.Um... Where do I start? Even if "the mutation occurred some time in the past", that has *nothing* to do with being able to "do a quick fix on the environment to prevent extinction". So a mutation was introduced into the population as a result of environmental stress... So what? How in the heck does that have anything to do with "fixing" the environment to remove the factor that is causing a population to decline towards extinction? It's not like the population has already adapted to the new environment due to the mutation, or else it wouldn't still be heading towards extinction. Furthermore, the mutation may have done nothing to aid the population in adapting -- it's just a random mutation that's emerging and has yet to be acted upon by selection. It may even *hurt* the population relative to the new environment. So again, why does Schwartz think that the mutation is even relevant in any way when it comes to doing "quick fixes" to save the population from extinction?
If the population is declining due to environmental change X, then removing X and reverting the environment back to its original condition -- the condition that the population was thriving in originally -- should stop the population's decline WITH OR WITHOUT any mutations that might or might not have been induced in the meantime.
Maybe there's more to it than mentioned in the article, but I get the impression that Schwartz has strayed out of his field of expertise, and is making naive mistakes in genetics, population dynamics, and ecology.
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