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."
What point. Cost was not part of the design, compactness was. 9 is less than 17. 17 is less than 55,000,000. Gee isn't that easy.
No it hadn't!! The article was written in Feb 2003. The quote was in the article. I saw no evidence of a granted patent for the tuning algorithms or topology.
Red Herring. Comma and period both are a single character.
Now there's a universal you'd have some difficulty supporting.
I take it you're not a scholar of koine Greek? Fine, neither am I.
A scholar, no. I can read it and understand it which I suspect is something you are unable to do.
Let's stick to the plain English meaning. And in English, a matter that is proven by the preponderance of evidence does not require faith.
??!!!??? That only works if you define faith to suit your own bias. Perhaps those who saw Christ's miracles no longer could have faith in Him. Did Thomas lose his faith when he touched Christ's wounds? No! He had absolute proof and his response was, "My Lord and my God!"
Bottom line: Your definition of faith doesn't square with the Bible. Since we all know who the Author of faith is, it only makes sense to apply the meaning He intends rather than an unbeliever's personal fancy.
If the universe were inanimate, the question would be 'how', not 'why'. Stipulating that this has nothing to do with evolution. I think the best answer which is in accordance with modern physical theory would be that the vacuum is unstable with respect to non-vacuum. A vacuum is the most symmetric possible state; but universally in the physical sciences we see phenomena where more symmetric systems spontaneously break symmetry and become less symmetric.
Nice swing-and-miss. Materialistic cosmology denies the existence of said vacuum before the BB. So where did the vacuum come from?
There is no satisfactory alternative to Creation.
I've seen a large number of patents (and patent applications) in the electronics field. The one quoted in this thread is typical in its detail and style. The patent lawyers I've known are indeed engineers (who for one reason or another went on to law school). It's nerd city, usually, with pocket protectors, and probably a youth spent wearing propeller beanies, but they're amazingly bright. They are quite capable of writing such descriptions after briefly consulting with the inventors. It's the drawings, in my experience, that are done by a specialized technical person.
I'm trying to determine where in your pea brain something is no longer compact.
Is it 100 square microns? 200? 300?
For scale, a hair has a cross section of about 5000 sqµ...
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