Posted on 05/18/2006 11:16:00 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Yo, Dave -- you've always demonstrated that you're incapable of understanding the methods of science, but this one is ludicrous even by your usual standards.
Hint: Experiments are set up very carefully in order to *not* influence the particular effect you're studying. Did you not learn this in gradeschool science class?
Yes, they use "human interaction and influence", but to the goal of crafting the experiment to *not* messing with the actual process they want to learn about, *and* of eliminating from the experiment any separate processes (natural or otherwise) that might influence the results outside of the one process being tested.
This is basic Science 101 -- what's your excuse for not having the first clue how it works? Oh, right, you're an anti-evolutionist: You wouldn't want to risk your opinions about science by exposing them to any actual *knowledge* of the topic, right?
Look, the whole *point* of an experiment is to clear away all the things that might contribute to the results beyond the one thing you're trying to study in isolation, in order to learn how *it* works -- and one of the things specifically eliminated from interaction with the "test subject" is the experimenter's "intelligent design" itself.
So your "point" is, in a word, stupid.
A study would just be a hands-off observance. Will they then turn around and tell us "ha, TOLD YOU it doesn't take intelligence"? What does this say about their opinion of themselves?
It tells us that they know a lot more about how to do science than you do.
Dave, don't you ever get tired of constantly misreading science articles like that?
Why don't you go educate yourself on the subject before you try again?
We are the biomass that cares.
I like it!
Note to self for later reply. :-D
I probably care a lot more than you.
Who cares?
Why don't you go educate yourself on the subject before you try again?
Embarrassing oneself by proudly displaying ignorance...it's the Creationist way.
Answering the rest of your post is a bit more complicated.
Would a single cell that reproduces asexually and creates a community of other like organisms that are exposed to the same environmental conditions ended up having the same mutations across the population.
What we tend to see if we culture a starting strain of bacteria and run it through multiple generations is the emergence of multiple strains due to small differences in a number of genes. In this experiment one gene was put under heavy selection pressure. Higher variation tends to emerge in genes that are not under great selective pressure. Genes with high selection pressure are more likely to have highly conserved sequences across species and perhaps even across kingdoms. For instance, our ribosomes have regions that are conserved fairly well across eukaryotes, bacteria, and archae. But it's impossible to put every gene under high selective pressure, so a variety of alleles (possible sequences for a gene) will eventually arise. This is one way we can estimate how old a population is--if it has low variation in alleles, it probably arose from a bottleneck event not too long ago. On the other hand, Africa is thought to be the region that humans first appeared in partly because Africans have a much higher genetic variation than people from other regions, indicating an old population. So my prediction is that if they repeated this experiment they would again have the same mutations appear, and one (possibly not the same one as last time because there's a certain margin of chance if the top two variants aren't very different in effectiveness) would become prevalent. If they then continued the experiment they would see this strain diverging into multiple strains that have the same allele for the gene required for life at high temperatures, but they would have different alleles for other genes. Unless one of these happened to have some other advantage (better at segregating rare metal ions, for instance) disappearance of various alleles would be driven by random genetic drift and new ones due to mutation would replace them.
Darwin tended to emphasize competition, but sometimes lack of competition can kickstart the process of evolution. Some of the most dramatic radiations we see occurred after mass extinctions emptied a variety of niches and allowed replacement by new species.
Good catch! Thanks for the ping.
Your comments, Moth, inspired me to go and look at Dave's profile. In it I found this shimmering prose:
"DLR appears to have a severe short-term memory problem, to go with his reading comprehension and simple logic difficulties." - Thatcherite, FreeRepublic.com
Dave, I see you are including my words on your profile page. In fact I am delighted, in principal, that you find my words quotable, though I am perplexed by your motivation in demonstrating the fact that so many Freepers and posters on other sites have an extremely low opinion of you. If I attracted as much open contempt as you do I would ponder whether or not the fault lay in me rather than my correspondents.
However, I respectfully request that if you wish to quote me that you include a link to the post where I wrote those words. That will give readers the opportunity to see whether or not the comments I made about your memory, comprehension, and logical skills are warranted by the evidence of your posts that I was replying to. If you do not wish to include such a link then please remove my words from your profile page.
What mechanism are you suggesting for slowing the point mutation rate?
Now a question for you, out of curiosity. :-) I looked at your profile just now, and you have a very nice essay on the purpose of the science threads on FR. I loved it, but I'm curious... you seem to be from the UK... why do you choose to speak from the perspective of an American?
My profile page is a copy of PatrickHenry's. It used to just contain a short vanity piece about me that would have been of no interest to anyone.
PatrickHenry has gone to great trouble to compile his profile page which is a fantastic crevo resource from the science point of view; packed with interesting articles and evidence. A few months ago his homepage was mysteriously deleted. He restored it from a text backup, and it was deleted again a few hours later. Queries to the mods about what was going on elicited no response (as far as I am aware). Quite a few of the pro-science Freepers, including me, decided to duplicate PHs homepage. I've kept it there out of laziness.
Incidentally, hence my tagline.
I was wondered why people were mirroring his profile page.
??
Some Christians on this site must be very, very correct indeed.
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