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."
The scientific facts about the Cambrian are as I stated them to be. Not a single evolutionist has been able to come up with a legitimate evolutionary explanation that fits the facts. The Cambrian disproves gradual evolution completely. My beliefs (and yours) are irrelevant as to the facts in this matter or any other scientific matter. The facts speak for themselves. What you are trying to do is what the evolutionists here try to do all the time - to change the subject from the facts in the discussion to the person showing up facts against evolution. All you and your friends are doing is showing that my statement is correct - evolution is bunk and the only proof it can provide is: lies, doubletalk and insults.
Yes, men build pens to keep animals in for later consumption, and use swords on each other.
Well, at least you try to evade the point in a funny way. However, you know quite well what the point is - that man is much more than a beast. He strives for more than to just satisfy his material needs. He seeks to build, to create, to leave a legacy, to make the world better not just for himself but also for others and many other things which beasts do not even dream of. Man is far and away different from the beasts not in degree, but in kind.
Well, all the above is disproven by the cave paintings in Northern Spain and Southern France. Who do you sell a cave painting to? The caves were so hidden that it took thousands of years to find them, so who was he showing up for? No one.
Further, many people paint and do artistic things for the pleasure of it. Some women knit, sew, some men do things from wood and other materials. They do it for the pleasure it gives them, not for profit and not to satisfy any material need. Mankind is the only creature that does this.
Oh, I see, you call me ignorant for not having read it, yet you yourself have not read it. You claim it proves that non-living matter can create a turing machine but you cannot back it up. Thanks for showing all of us your mode of discussion is just one bluff after another and that your words should not be taken seriously.
Really? Evolution does not say that natural selection is the agency by which the good and the bad changes in organisms are sifted???????????
The above is the reason why the evolutionists will never state exactly what the theory of evolution is and how it works. As soon as a refutation is given for what it obviously says and for what evolutionists have been saying for 150 years, they say that evolution is not about that. They are thus always saying what evolution is not, but never what evolution is since just about every single statement in it has been totally disproven.
Nonsense. They concocted a program that would do what they wanted to do. Anyone can do that. A program can only be called a valid simulation if it behaves in the same way that the thing being simulated does AND takes into consideration all the relevant factors of the situation.
This program fails as a simulation on two counts:
1. It is totally impossible to simulate all the factors involved in living things and their environment. The program must therefore had to have been selective in what it chose to simulate. Therefore it is not a simulation of real life.
2. As I already pointed out, by evolutionist's own admission:
It's a truism of entomology (been demonstrated in sealed mason jars thousands of times) that when two nearly identical species occupy nearly the same contained biological nitche, one or the other will eventually prevail entirely, no matter how tiny its differential advantage.
1,012 posted on 05/09/2003 9:59 PM PDT by donh ).
that fitness cost is very important to evolution. The program did not exact a fitness cost for non-working functions. This makes the program total bunk.
Furthermore, as I have said, with so many experiments going on all the time, so much money poured into biology not just by the US Government, but by private foundations, medical firms, drug firms, hospitals in the US and throughout the world - why is there a need for a program to prove that evolution is science? If it were science the proof would be coming out on a daily basis from all the scientific research going on.
Finally, something we can both agree on wholeheartedly.
Where did I call you ignorant for not having read it?
If you were ignorant, at least there'd be an anemic excuse for your creative approach to generating data.
yet you yourself have not read it. You claim it proves that non-living matter can create a turing machine but you cannot back it up.
I never read the bible. That doesn't mean there's a law against me quoting from it, now does it? I never finished Euclid. Does that mean I can't provide a geometric proof out of Euclid's geometry? As usual, you are making up laws and data as you go along.
Thanks for showing all of us your mode of discussion is just one bluff after another and that your words should not be taken seriously.
Thanks for showing us once again what an opportunistic, self-aggradizing lightweight dissembler you are.
The theory of evolution is about prokariotes or better, as you know. The theory of evolution is mute about what might have happened before we got to prokariotes. As you know, on those rare occasions when you aren't deliberately misrepresenting what claims science makes.
The above is the reason why the evolutionists will never state exactly what the theory of evolution is and how it works. As soon as a refutation is given for what it obviously says and for what evolutionists have been saying for 150 years, they say that evolution is not about that. They are thus always saying what evolution is not, but never what evolution is since just about every single statement in it has been totally disproven.
As usual, you do not give the appearance of person with the slightest notion of what a proof is. And as usual, every claim you've made here is totally irrelevant, to anyone that's been to a natural history museum in the last 20 years or so, with his brights turned on. It is not science's job to jump through any hoops any lame idiot with a bee in his bonnet raises for it to jump through. The basic laws of physics aren't the same as they were 100 years ago, and I don't see you complaining about that. Science changes as we learn more. This is not, contrary to your nonsensical skreed, a jailable offense.
Thanks for your effort. Here is your good news. The paper has a genetically programmed virtual circuit that has an simulated performance edge over another virtual circuit in an average consisting of 4 fitness cases.
The bad news is that:
So what is to be gathered from this? Well, there is evidence that a genetically developed simulated circuit can, on paper, outperform a human designed simulated circuit in some specific data points, but the patented circuit still remains unchallenged when it comes to a non-simulated circuit operating in the frequency ranges for which it was designed. More to the point, the following assertions still hang.
In this case, it made a cubic function generator circuit which outperforms the best that all electronic engineers were capable of producing in all the history of electronics.
The circuit at the top was patented in 2000, and is the current state of the art. The circuit at the bottom was produced by pure unaided evolution, and outperforms the human version.
uri geller now!
So...(I should know better than to ask) you think the basic laws of physics haven't changed in the last 100 years?
Which, of course, makes the case under discussion, whether or not your deponent's representation of it was overblown.
That's a silly quibble. The universe does whatever it damn well pleases, and hasn't the slightest demonstrated notion of what a law is to constrain it. Insofar as what is demonstrable, natural laws are human inventions to help us think more effectively about nature. The claim that they are objectively existing things in and of themselves, is unproven and probably unprovable--as is likewise the claim that there is such a thing as "science" which exists independently of "the study of science".
Do tell.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.