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."
So much for honest discussion. The ideologues of evolution cannot discuss the facts so all others must be kept away.
Don't touch that dial. I can't
Then perhaps you should have let someone who does respond instead of making vague allusions (as usual) that the question has been answered numerous times. Where has it been answered? If you read it numerous times how come you do not remember the answer?
Yes, since the 'scientists' of evolution cannot support their theory with scientific facts, then let's turn the thread over to Christianity bashing, at which they are really good at (but of course they will not admit that they are atheists).
Please donh, you do not believe in God, a Creator, in Christianity, in Budhism, in Islam, in Judaism, or anything that comes close to a religion so please at least be honest with us.
Probably because of an express desire to become a patent attorney, I imagine - the easiest way to be permitted to sit for the patent bar exam is to have an undergraduate degree in a specified scientific or technical field, as I'm sure you know.
Insults are not science and the evolutionists are only insulting. Perhaps it is you who should stop with YOUR personal mythology, ideology and rhetoric and start discussing the facts.
Of course it is relevant. Not only has church attendance been shown to lead to longer life as the study showed, but such things as the will to live have strong influence on longevity and overcoming illnesses as any doctor will tell you. There is something in humans which cannot be measured, quantified, or observed. It has no possible material explanation and serves to destroy your petty, simple minded materialistic/atheistic beliefs.
You claim to be a scientist and to know what you speak of while the person you attack does not. So why must you insult instead of taking apart his argument? Why don't you try again and give facts instead of insults to support your position???? Perhaps it is you who is ignorant and are try to bluff those who disagree with you into silence as most evolutionists here try to do?
Man, a reasoning, although not necessarily reasonable, creature shall abandon hope and paradise for more time to look forward to machines smarter than himself?
Alas, an honest statement by an evolutionist! Seems to me that if evolution is conjecture, an assumption, and unproven, then there is absolutely no reason to believe in such an atheistic/materialistic ideology.
Sure sounded like it when you said to andrewc in #965:
You DO NOT know a thing about genetic algorithms, artifical intelligence, or artifical life (of which is a "speciality" of artifical intelligence).
If you are not a scientist and cannot refute his statement except by insulting him then it seems to me that you know less than he does. At least he can discuss the question with facts instead of invective.
I'll thank you not to tell me what I think.
Indeed, science is about discovering how nature works. However, since the article itself admits that:
"This project addresses a fundamental criticism of the theory of evolution, how complex functions arise from mutation and natural selection,"
Then evolution is not science and has never been science since it has for the 150 years it has been making that claim been unable to show us how nature works.
Well, so tell us then how the universe came about considering that in science it has been thoroughly shown that nothing comes from nothing. Also you might tell us how life arose in a completely material way since no scientist has been able to show how such a thing could occur.
That you jump to conclusions. "It" was evidence that believing in a certain something was useful. It was not proof of anything.
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