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."
But, we would think it's us that are OK, wouldn't we...
I have a reasonable acquaintance with Attic Greek. OK, so let's rock and roll.
What looks like a reputable source
http://www.biblestudytools.net/Lexicons/Greek
gives this definition of blepo
So it appears that your claim, that 'ou blepomenon' means "things not being seen with the eyes" like wind and gravity, is far too narrow. In fact, the usage of blepo in Heb. 3;12, 3:19, and 10:25 clearly doesn't refer to seeing with the eyes. How do one's eyes 'see the day approaching', for example?
Materialistic cosmology denies the existence of said vacuum before the BB. So where did the vacuum come from?
The vacuum is nothingness, the void. Are you asking where nothing comes from?
The Koran says when you can distinguish a black thread from a white one...
If you know a little Greek, you know a lexicon lists the various meanings and tries to give the context in which the meaning might be found. It's much like English in that regard: context determines meaning. What does "ball" mean without a context? Like I said before, the Author of faith gets to write the definition. It does not hinge on your interpretation of Heb 11.
The vacuum is nothingness, the void. Are you asking where nothing comes from?
A vacuum is something. Space is something. Nothing is nothing. Nothing is not the same as something. Therefore a vacuum is not nothing. Where did the vacuum come from? Where did the space in which the vacuum could exist come from? Before the BB there was no space. How does an explosion create space? How does an explosion happen without space? What are the laws of physics that allow for such a thing?
A coma is what describes your mental condition. Your Ad Hominem is noted and further replies from you will be ignored.
Ah, but from the point of view of Intel or AMD or Motorola, you bought another chip when you already had one. Since the manufacturing cost of a single chip is zilch compared to the development cost and the capital invested in the factory, they just effectively doubled the sales price of their goods. Every time a performance enhancement convinces someone to purchase a new product, the money rolls in.
You could get into pointless arguments about whether someone was exaggerating about the price of a chip or the effect on market share, but it is a fact that sales in technology are driven by incremental enhancements in performance.
And the Pentium IV has perhaps five times the transistor count of a 486 chip, but isn't significantly larger.
Why would the person who was involved in the process make the referenced statement in 2003? Why would the following be written in the February 2003 Scientific American?
The first patent for an invention created by genetic programming may soon be granted.
LOL, thank you for the sanctimony and edumacation.
Now why don't you define murder. Then you can take a position as to whether murder is absolutely wrong.
Or not.
Sounds like someone's been listening to cable TV commercials, and has some very expensive pieces of paper on the wall.
f.C is right when he asserts that most patents are worthless. And some very good ones are simply ignored by big corporations. FM radio was in the courts until at least a decade after the inventor died. My current company has a patent that is being infringed, but the offending company has calculated that the legal costs will prohibit any successful challenge.
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