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."
That one is real easy. The Cambrian explosion drove Gould and Eldredge out of Darwinian evolution, science showed that the fossil record disproves evolution. In addition, Mendelian genetics disproved Darwin's moronic 'melding' of parental traits. Science has also disproven Darwin's racist brachocephallic index and his racist claims about inferior races. Most recently science has disproved the totally arrogant and moronic claim that 95% of human DNA was junk. Science has shown that it is the DNA which is not in the genes which is the real engine that makes organisms work.
Now after you refute the above, and the other posts I have made which all the evolutionists here have carefully avoided addressing (except donh who keeps skirting the points made), then we can go on to the other points you think are outrageous. However, in the meantime, you and others can look at Evidence Disproving Evolution where you will find ample proof of many of what you call 'outrageous' statements.
How about that! You insult people and they dare to call you on it. Let's see, of the last dozen or so posts not a single one is regarding any of the discussion. They have been all insults or personal attacks on someone or other. So again I must ask - what is it like to spend your life insulting people? Is your life that empty?
Easy. By passively submitting to government school indoctrination. I know how it is, having been there before.
Yes, it is shameful how atheists have gained control of our schools and seek to separate us from our religious beliefs.
Your semantic games do not change the fact that the evolutionists here are thoroughly opposed to Christianity and to any explanation of anything that involves God the Creator.
You are no Christian.
The left talks of doing everything "for the people" but they don't believe it. Instead they believe "public school" is their private laboratory in which they have a sacred right to indoctrinate the children of others using funds coerced from their parents. That's why they fight so hard to prevent the taxpayers from leaving government school with their tax dollars.
Indeed, for the left ,government schools are churches. They're temples to the sovereign state, before which all subversives (e.g. homeschoolers) must be brought to heel and bow down in the sight of their more malleable peers, who will thereby learn never to stray from secular orthodoxy.
This is intelligent design.
Okay, now I know what you are. You are an evolutionist atheist and you have proven my point.
Like all the others you are sliming instead of discussing. In post# 1271 I asked you to refute my statement about most evolutionists here being atheists and challenged you to do the following:
This thread is over 1200 posts long. How about pointing out one (1) post in which evolutionists say something good about Christianity and Christian beliefs. Just one.
In 1323 I asked you:
How can a good Christian who believes in an Allmighty God, say that evolution is the only viable explanation for man, species, and living things?????????????
Of course you do not respond to the above and indulge in personal insults. You cannot argue with the truth, so you follow in the steps of your fellow evolutionists and refuse to meet the challenges put to you to back up your statements with facts and to respond to questions.
That's like saying that when Milton Friedman gets an article published in the People's Daily he will be a legitimate economist. Nature is a biased evolutionist magazine.
As to the genesis of life on earth, the materialist/atheists have absolutely not a clue about how it could be possible while fullfilling the known scientific requirements for life on earth.
You simply MUST update your sense of outrage. The term currently in vogue among the pathologically-paranoid is "tormented" and "tormentors."
Try working those into your monologue; it'll give it a new-found sense of realism.
How about no taxpayer dollars should be spent to support theories?
Got any clues on how they become "innate"? You're not pretending humans lack instincts, are you? Worse, you don't believe something as silly as that, do you?
Humans are different from animals in numerous ways.
No. Other animals are different from the human animal. That's why they're not the same species.
[Humans] are not driven by their material nature,
Tell that to Bill Gates, okay? Or Bill Clinton.
but by their will, their mind, their thoughts, their reason, their logic.
Hmmmm...Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao See Dung, Stalin and Lenin and Kruschev, Castro, all the millions of their followers, Jeffrey Dahmer, Pope Alexander II (?), pedophile priests, 19 lunatic Muslims on four airplanes, any fool that voted for Gore (we pause to give thanks to those incredibly intelligent people in Floriduh that voted for Ralph Nader in 2000). The list is as long as the human population of the planet. Everyone uses what they possess of skill will logic reason creativity guile and personality to establish material things. At a minimum, they have to eat and drink every day.
Nevertheless, evolution still proposes randomness. As to 'a store of previous results', that is total nonsense. Where is the store? The fact that there are numerous deleterious mutations which try to reverse what already works shows this to be absolutely false.
Second, the process of evolution does not "guarantee" any single result, therefore it does not violate the rule of science that an evolutionary process must be reproducable.
That evolution 'does not guarantee" any single result just verifies my statement that it is not predictable. Predictability is a requirement of science, it is what makes science useful. Evolution is totally useless.
That is a false analogy. No one is forced to go to church, there are hundreds of different ones to choose from also. In addition, the government does not force anyone to pay for churches. Schools are preaching atheism and trying to take away the religion of the children attending. This is unconstitutional. The government is interfering with the religion of the people. Just because the religion being preached is atheism, does not mean it is not a religion.
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