Artificial Life Experiments Show How Complex Functions Can Evolve

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."

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."

"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."

gore3000: "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. "

First you contradict yourself and say that storage of previous results is "nonsense" but in the next sentence claim that deleterious mutations are in fact stored.

Second, you once again fail to grasp the simple concept of evolution by focusing on just bad mutations stored in DNA as negating the possibility of evolution, when in fact good, bad, and irrelevant changes are all stored. The part you omit, however, is that evolution includes a third component: natural selection that predicts that only the good changes are likely to be carried forward.

Gore3000: "That evolution 'does not guarantee" any single result just verifies my statement that it is not predictable."

Evolution is process that does not predict a specific result or even a specific result set; rather it predicts the probability that a result set will meet a certain set of characteristics. That is, it predicts that given a set of random changes to a string and a selection of good strings from that set, it is more likely that subsequent result sets will meet the selection critereon.

If you want to talk about strict repeatability in mathematical terms, then you can pretty much wipe out everything except for pure mathematics. Because at the sub atomic level, everything is purely random; however the likelyhood that all the electrons in grain of sand will randomly decide to bounce in one direction at the same time causing that grain of sand to leap up in the air is so infinitesimal that it is not introduced into equations governing the behavior of matter.

gore: "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."

Schools do not teach athiesm and athiesm is not a religion.

Ichneumon: "The most you could possibly support is the statement that for those phyla which *are* known to exist in Cambrian times (which is *not* all of them, contrary to your claim), most of them (*not* all, contrary to your implication) have no obvious ancestor in the *currently known* pre-Cambrian fossil record (which at this time is *extremely* few and far between). So your conclusion from that limited data set would be... what?"

Ichneumon, excellent rebuttals. I don't think I've ever seen anyone give a wedgie to someone online before :)

The article FROM AN EVOLUTIONIST SITE clearly states that any claim that these vendian fossils are animals is pure desperation from atheist/evolutionists.

No, it doesn't say *that*, either. You really need to work on your reading comprehension. But speaking of "clearly stating", let's examinine another passage from THE SAME WEBSITE THAT YOU YOURSELF CHOSE AS AN AUTHORITY:

"Soft-bodied relatives of the arthropods, as well as trace fossils that were made by some arthropod-like organisms, appear in the Vendian."

Now, how are you going to misread *that*? Arthropods are animals. They are neither worms nor sponges. They appear in the Vendian (which is pre-Cambrian).

Or let's go for a second opinion from another website:

The Ediacara are soft-bodied, multicellular animals that are similar jellyfish, coral, sponges, cnidarians, worms, and soft-bodied relatives of the arthropods.

Now, would you care to revise your goofy claim that "Aside from sponges and perhaps worms there were no other multi-cellular animals before the Cambrian"? And would you care to retract your insult that I was "really going off the deep end" for stating the truth?

'Could be' is not a scientific term,

Funny, it was good enough for you when *you* gave that quote in support of *your* claim (although then you somehow managed to interpret "could be" as "certainly was not"...)

WHERE ARE THE EXAMPLES OF MATTER ASSEMBLING ITSELF WITHOUT HUMAN INTERVENTION???? -me-

Even if you have lapsed into cap-shouting, there are examples.

The above is a perfect example of evolutionist lying by links. They hope that no one will read their links and just accept their claim that the link does give the proof that the poster claims they give. The link is a lie for several reasons. The first one is the plural used in naming of the link. The link only discusses one situation. The second problem is that what it discusses does not deal with the self-assembly of anything. What it discusses is the supposed (but not proven) existence of a large amount of nuclear material which might have produced a nuclear reaction on earth:

Uranium contains only one naturallyoccurring isotope, 235U, which will sustain a nuclear chain reaction using normal water to moderate and reflect neutrons. At present, this isotope is present in low abundance (0.72%), requiring enrichment to 3% or greater for effective use in commercial nuclear reactors. Two billion years ago, however, the natural abundance of 235U was approximately 3%. Evidence indicates that a rich uranium deposit in Gabon, West Africa achieved nuclear criticality and operated for tens of thousands of years or longer.

So you have been caught in another lie Doctor and you have not provided an example of matter assembling itself. In the future kindly do not waste our time with link-o-lies.

>i> Nowhere does Gould say, or even imply, that the Cambrian explosion is, in your words, "unexplainable".

Another example of your dishonesty. Lying by misquotation. My statement in post#123 said:

Seems I am not the only person that says that it is unexplainable by Darwinian evolution.
The quote from a recent book by Gould completely justifies the statement:

Contrary to Darwin's expectation that new data would reveal gradualistic continuity with slow and steady expansion, all major discoveries of the past century have only heightened the massiveness and geological abruptness of this formative event..." (Gould, Stephen J., Nature, vol. 377, October 1995, p.682.)

As usual you are just plain lying and are showing your complete disregard for the truth by distorting my statements and distorting the evidence. Further, both he and Eldredge split completely with Darwinian evolutionists on account of this and proposed the totally moronic, punctuated equilibrium theory which postulates that no evidence of evolution is proof of evolution (btw it was Gould himself, not his opponents that called it 'punk-eek'). That on occassion he might have tried to speak nicely to Darwinians, does not change the fact that he dedicated the whole last decades of his life to justifying a non-Darwinian, non-gradualistic theory of evolution.

Perhaps you know of a way to go back in time or speed up the reproduction of organisms?

What's your point?
If it's extraordinarily difficult to to produce experimental confirmation of evolution, so what?
This artificial petri dish experiment is a joke. I happen to believe that the circumstantial evidence argues strongly that evolution of some sort is at work in speciation. I don't think we've come close to nailing down the mechanism for it.
One could construct artificial petri dishes where, rather than random mutation and natural selection, Lamarckian assumptions drove the virtual speciation, or invisible genetic elves. What would be proven, exactly?

Showing your ignorance again. They were missing from the Cambrian fossils until just a few years ago.-me-

That doesn't make them a "missing phylum", son. There are plenty of other phyla which haven't been traced back to the Cambrian,

As usual cutting off my full statement and arguing against what I did not say. They were missing from the Cambrian and were the last known phyllum of animals which had not been seen by the time of the Cambrian explosion. Now if you can show any phyla which has appeared after the Cambrian, kindly back it up with appropriate references. You cannot because there are not any as I said so you just blather and lie as usual.

the chordate Pikaia was discovered in the Cambrian Burgess Shale fossil deposits and recognized for what it was at least as far back as the 1980's.

Vertebrates are chordates, but chordates are not vertebrates and both phylum have now been found to have arisen during the Cambrian explosion during a period of less than 10 million years apart for the whole wide range of phyla present. Now when one considers that it took more than 200 million years for the (supposed) evolution from amhibians to reptiles to mammals - a far smaller change than that required from any of the prior existing phyla to the ones found in the Cambrian (or even to the changes required for one of the Cambrian species to arise from another), the evidence shows clearly the impossibility of evolution. The time involved for the numerous and dramatic changes required for all those changes is simply not enough for them to have occurred according to gradualistic Darwinian evolution.

This is especially so since many of the phyla we are speaking of were sexual creatures and the problems created by sexual reproduction for evolution are quite dramatic. It requires that not one, but at least two organisms of the transforming species continually have sufficiently close mutations to allow them to continue reproducing. That such dramatic changes could occur in several organisms at the same time to allow them to maintain reproductive viability is totally ludicrous and shows Darwinian evolution to be what it always was - charlatanism, not science.

Finally, you're probably not aware of it, but the creationist emphasis on the rapid arisal of *animal* phyla (conveniently for them, at a time in Earth's history when earlier fossils are quite hard to locate) is a sleight-of-hand attempt to distract attention from *plant* evolution,

Actually the term 'phyla' only refers to animals. My speaking of 'animal' phyla is merely for the benefit of the non-technical reader that may not be aware that I am only speaking of animals not plants. I also use it because ignorant (and dishonest) evolutionists, ever trying to create confusion tend to bring out plants as a contradiction of the uniqueness of what happened in the Cambrian. Further, your statement that plant evolution continued according to Darwinian postulates is false. The only major classification of new plants in hundreds of millions of years is flowering plants which arose some 135 million years ago. Flowering plants are a problem for evolution also since they require a symbiotic relationship with animals which is difficult to justify in evolutionary terms.

At any rate, you remain the same old transparent nudge you have always been. Of course, the issue is that the you support abiogensis in the sense that you insist that that's the only way prokariotes could have come into being,

Your blatant lying is reaching ridiculous proportions. I am the one that has been arguing with YOU against the possibility of life from non-life. It is I who many posts ago (Post# 1329) asked you to show how abiogenesis was possible:

Science has determined that all the below are essential for a living organism. I asked you to show me a theory that surmounts all these problems of life arising from non-life. You cannot even give me a theory of how such a thing could be possible, so yes, I have proven my point. Here it is again in case you wish to address the challenge instead of avoiding it:

1. the problem of arranging some 500,000 pairs of DNA in exactly the correct way to make life possible.
2. the chicken - egg problem - you need DNA for life to exist, however, you need the products of DNA - the proteins, etc, in order to have an organism and for DNA to be able to work.
3. the DNA/RNA symbolism problem. You cannot have life without DNA coding for the amino acids which RNA translates into the amino acids which make the proteins of life. There is no chemical or other reason for the translation of these codes into specific amino acids. It is purely conventional as our letters represent sounds. So your theory also has to answer to how RNA was taught to interpret the DNA code.

Let's see you (or anyone else here) take up the challenge.

Since you are unable to meet the challenge above you resort to the usual 'proofs' of evolution given here by evolutionists: lies, insults and doubletalk.

Actually the term 'phyla' only refers to animals.

For the benefit of the non-technical reader: Mosses belong to phylum Bryophyta, Leafy Liverworts belong to phylum Hepatophyta, Hornworts beong to phylum Anthoceraphyta, Frens belong to phylum Filicinophyta, Ginkos belong to phylum Ginkgophyta, Ephedra belongs to phylum Gnetophyta, Conifers belong to phylum Coniferophyta, the flowering plants belong to phylum Angiospermophyta, to mention a few.

So are you denying that the reactor existed? Are you claiming that someone put the parts together? Your quote from the website supports my position.

The quote from the website plainly says that if there is enough uranium concentrated in one spot a chemical reaction is likely to occur. We believe that that is how the sun produces light. There is no assembly required here. As I said, your link was a plain lie (if you bothered to read it).

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