Posted on 04/11/2006 5:11:24 PM PDT by LibWhacker
New research chips away at the "irreducible complexity" argument behind intelligent design.
Lehigh biochemistry professor Michael Behe and his cronies in the intelligent design community have attempted to poke holes in evolutionary theory using an idea dubbed "irreducible complexity"—the notion that complex systems with interdependent parts could not have evolved through Darwinian trial and error and must be the work of a creator, since the absence of any single part makes the whole system void. However, a paper published in the April 7th issue of Science provides the first experimental proof that "irreducible complexity" is a misnomer, and that even the most complex systems come into being through Darwinian natural selection.
"We weren't motivated by irreducible complexity," said Joe Thornton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the paper. "How complexity evolved is a longstanding issue in evolutionary biology per se, and it's once we saw our results that we realized the implications for the social debate."
Thornton's team has been studying one example of a complex system in which each part defines the function of the other: the partnerships between hormones and the proteins on cell walls, or receptors, that bind them. The researchers looked specifically at the hormone aldosterone, which controls behavior and kidney function, and its receptor.
"[This pairing] is a great model for the problem of the evolution of complexity," said Thornton. "How do these multi-part systems—where the function of one part depends on the other part—evolve?"
Thornton and his co-investigators used computational methods to deduce the gene structure of a long-gone ancestor of aldosterone's receptor. They then synthesized the receptor in the lab. After recovering the ancient receptor—which they estimate to be a 450-million-year-old receptor that would have been present in the ancestor of all jawed vertebrates—Thornton's team tested modern day hormones that would activate it. Although aldosterone did not evolve until many millions of years after the extinction of the ancient hormone receptor, Thornton found that it and the ancient receptor were compatible.
This cross-generational partnership is made possible, Thornton explained, by the similarity in form between aldosterone and the ancient hormone that once partnered with the receptor.
"The story is basically that a new hormone evolved later and exploited a receptor that had a different function previously to take part in a new partnership," said Thornton.
The principal at work in the evolution of complex systems is molecular exploitation: when an individual component casts around for other materials that might work together with it, even though those elements might have evolved as parts of other systems.
"Evolution assembles these complex systems by exploiting parts that are already present for other purposes, drawing them into new complexes and giving them new functions through very subtle changes in their sequences and in their structures," Thornton said.
While the mutually dependent parts do not evolve to be perfectly complementary to one another, after molecular exploitation, they cleave together and create an illusion of irreducible complexity.
"Such studies solidly refute all parts of the intelligent design argument," wrote Christoph Adami, of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, in an introduction to the Science paper. "Those 'alternate' ideas, unlike the hypotheses investigated in these papers, remain thoroughly untested. Consequently, whatever debate remains must be characterized as purely political."
Are you sure? What do we need at 3.5 billion years ago for a genome? Source?
(i.e. the one that doesn't get corrected by correction enzymes....oh, by the way, where did THEY come from?)
Looks like an advantageous mutation to me. What were you going to suggest and what's the evidence for your idea?
DE-EVOLUTION
Change is change, although if you start as simple as you can get there's simply more room to experiment in the direction of increasing complexity.
P.S. what was the food source of the original bacteria...
If you've actually been following this stuff (BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!)...
Well, if you don't know what science even says on the subject, how do you know it's wrong?
But I digress. You have something called RNA World, a bigger-than-cellular system-as-organism. The first cellular animals form as parasites off of RNA-World. As RNA-World gets eaten up, two things are happening. Photosynthetic plants are evolving from animals, and animals are learning to eat plants and animals. You can Google, right?
Anyway, my comment to eddie2 would seem to apply to you. You don't rebut science by being dumb as a stump about what science is even saying.
If you don't know what it says, how do you know it's wrong?
ping
The only evidence that it has no advantgage for the poppy is that you don't know of one, right?
Calling attention to oneself with mindless drivel... is definitely NOT the Darwinian way to happiness and success. Instead, might I suggest throwing a dinner party for your friends? There is a lovely recipe for pastry puffs in the "downhome cooking" thread.
Good article but they're not going to give it up anytime soon. There's quite a few anti-science descendants of monkeys around here who are irreducibly ignorant and quite proud of it!
Im not an expert (despite the name ;) but I would imagine that opiates are alkaloids which act as a natural insecticide of sorts, much like nicotine does for tobacco.
Someone correct me if I am wrong.
I suppose someone could have put that diagram together "in a lab"....
I frankly stopped reading the article at "cronies." No agenda there....
love the name..but As another posted here just because you do not know one..well thats why I posted the question-and as a natural insecicide no that does not hold up- most plants produce toxins that paralize some insects ..ragweed for one, which we use for killing of human pests such as
lice.
Validation of computer modeling simply cannot be done unless the models move from the computer into the "real world" so that the models can be validated. That simply has never happened in the use of modeling to study evolutionary processes.
If you were posting in jest, my apologies.
On some threads its hard to tell.
You can have him VR. It'd take me a year to straighten out this mess.
Well, after reading that story, I am totally convinced we and the rest of the universe are here by chance.
"...and must be the work of a creator, since the absence of any single part makes the whole system void."
That's one extremely large assumption. How, exactly, does the absence of a single part voiding the system prove the existence of a creator?
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