Posted on 05/08/2003 10:11:06 AM PDT by Nebullis
Arlington, Va.—If the evolution of complex organisms were a road trip, then the simple country drives are what get you there. And sometimes even potholes along the way are important.
An interdisciplinary team of scientists at Michigan State University and the California Institute of Technology, with the help of powerful computers, has used a kind of artificial life, or ALife, to create a road map detailing the evolution of complex organisms, an old problem in biology.
In an article in the May 8 issue of the international journal Nature, Richard Lenski, Charles Ofria, Robert Pennock, and Christoph Adami report that the path to complex organisms is paved with a long series of simple functions, each unremarkable if viewed in isolation. "This project addresses a fundamental criticism of the theory of evolution, how complex functions arise from mutation and natural selection," said Sam Scheiner, program director in the division of environmental biology at the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the research through its Biocomplexity in the Environment initiative. "These simulations will help direct research on living systems and will provide understanding of the origins of biocomplexity."
Some mutations that cause damage in the short term ultimately become a positive force in the genetic pedigree of a complex organism. "The little things, they definitely count," said Lenski of Michigan State, the paper's lead author. "Our work allowed us to see how the most complex functions are built up from simpler and simpler functions. We also saw that some mutations looked like bad events when they happened, but turned out to be really important for the evolution of the population over a long period of time."
In the key phrase, "a long period of time," lies the magic of ALife. Lenski teamed up with Adami, a scientist at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Ofria, a Michigan State computer scientist, to further explore ALife.
Pennock, a Michigan State philosopher, joined the team to study an artificial world inside a computer, a world in which computer programs take the place of living organisms. These computer programs go forth and multiply, they mutate and they adapt by natural selection.
The program, called Avida, is an artificial petri dish in which organisms not only reproduce, but also perform mathematical calculations to obtain rewards. Their reward is more computer time that they can use for making copies of themselves. Avida randomly adds mutations to the copies, thus spurring natural selection and evolution. The research team watched how these "bugs" adapted and evolved in different environments inside their artificial world.
Avida is the biologist's race car - a really souped up one. To watch the evolution of most living organisms would require thousands of years – without blinking. The digital bugs evolve at lightening speed, and they leave tracks for scientists to study.
"The cool thing is that we can trace the line of descent," Lenski said. "Out of a big population of organisms you can work back to see the pivotal mutations that really mattered during the evolutionary history of the population. The human mind can't sort through so much data, but we developed a tool to find these pivotal events."
There are no missing links with this technology.
Evolutionary theory sometimes struggles to explain the most complex features of organisms. Lenski uses the human eye as an example. It's obviously used for seeing, and it has all sorts of parts - like a lens that can be focused at different distances - that make it well suited for that use. But how did something so complicated as the eye come to be?
Since Charles Darwin, biologists have concluded that such features must have arisen through lots of intermediates and, moreover, that these intermediate structures may once have served different functions from what we see today. The crystalline proteins that make up the lens of the eye, for example, are related to those that serve enzymatic functions unrelated to vision. So, the theory goes, evolution borrowed an existing protein and used it for a new function.
"Over time," Lenski said, "an old structure could be tweaked here and there to improve it for its new function, and that's a lot easier than inventing something entirely new."
That's where ALife sheds light.
"Darwinian evolution is a process that doesn't specify exactly how the evolving information is coded," says Adami, who leads the Digital Life Laboratory at Caltech. "It affects DNA and computer code in much the same way, which allows us to study evolution in this electronic medium."
Many computer scientists and engineers are now using processes based on principles of genetics and evolution to solve complex problems, design working robots, and more. Ofria says that "we can then apply these concepts when trying to decide how best to solve computational problems."
"Evolutionary design," says Pennock, "can often solve problems better than we can using our own intelligence."
It is not a paradigm, it is an example. It shows that one can do whatever one pleases with a computer program and prove 'anything' one likes. I have already shown the fault in this program in modeling reality which of course you are trying with verbiage to forget. In addition, a model for the entire set of facts which affect life is far too complex (and indeed unknown in its entirety). So any model of such a reality is perforce not a true one.
In addition, see the post above. If evolution is true, why does it need models as proof? Why cannot it prove itself from real life? Science is about real observable things so by saying that evolution requires a simulation to give proof of itself you (and all evolutionists) are admitting that evolution is not science.
It's just one of his moronically-recycled word games, where he equivocates the meaning of "proof." He'll use it as though it meant "demonstration of metaphysical certitude," but when challenged, he'll claim he only meant "evidence." He's used this bait'n'switch tactic dating back two years, and was called on it back then.
Yet he's back yet again to make a raving fool of himself, using the same tired, fallacious argument......
But what can one expect from a person who thinks that nuclear fission is a "chemical reaction," that "a circle is not an ellipse," that "1720" is a really big number, that the planets whiz around in "wildly elliptical" orbits, and that infrared radiation causes sunburn?
You're Popeye the sailor man? toot! toot!
You are into asking questions. How about answering one? Where do prions fit in your scheme of things?
Patrick answered this charge yesterday, in post # 1830 of this thread, in which he referred you to his posts # 1045, 1120, 1123 and 1127, all of which are substantive discussions of the topic, and none of which are either insults or placemarkers. Yet you repeat your slanderous attack on Patrick today. So who is the "thug," you or Patrick?
No need to go "bigger" to the virus since you already asked the question.
At any rate, is it acceptable to deflect questions with more questions?
No, the question remains for the intended person to answer. Is your question of that type?
By the way, are you upset Gore has co-opted your trademark red font every so often now?
No, I don't own black or white either.
Don't forget that "there are no plant phyla."
Spare the rod, spoil the evolution?
It's okay. No one cares. No one even reads his stuff, except for the amusement value of finding bloopers.
Well, then, little bubblehead, my attempt to save you from appearing the total idiot has failed. Any simulation program, and there are hundreds of them, is designed explicitly as an approximation of reality.
If evolution is science, how come evolutionists cannot prove their theory from real life?
If astronomy is a science, how come astronomers cannot prove their their theories from real life?
In exactly the same manner that the experimental processes of science allows scientists to promote whatever agendas they wish. The tendency toward accuracy in science arises from human moral constraints manifested in journalistic rigor and self-critical analysis, not from the nature of scientific experiments.
The present one, as I have already shown, conveniently fails to punish for useless and non-working functions which should normally be destroyed in real life by 'natural selection'.
Since you keep saying this, I decided to go back and figure out why. I can't see it. Only keeping the winners (which is what they did) and punishing the losers are just two sides of the same coin. It still means the losers have no issue in the next generation, and the winners do.
It is therefore just more evolutionist garbaaaage.
It is therefore just another Gore3000-pseudo-factoid exploding abiogenically from the Gore3000 void.
I read it religeously--it's the best entertainment in town. It appears that I read his stuff a great deal more carefully than he reads his stuff, in fact.
Fess up, y'all can't wait to see what new theory of science he will evolve next. Yer just to shy to admit it.
Well, I confess I'm stunned to learn that the whole field of computer aided design is bogus, that computer testing aircraft designs is bogus, ditto for lots of other industrial applications. A google search on CAD will amaze you. Well, it won't. But it might amaze some people around here.
He makes so many bloopers, and there is so little time to catalog them all..... I fear no matter how assiduously I work at keeping an up-to-date list of his scientific blunders, he will always be a step or two ahead of me.
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