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."
I completely agree. :-) Could you imagine erasures in a research notebook? A simple line through with an explanation is, IMHO, the preferred method. This way others can follow the exact chain of events preventing even the hint that data may have been “fudged”.
PE does not require anything except an atheist turn of mind.
Ad hominem attack.
It denies the need for evidence since there is no way to tell that anything transformed itself into something else.
Nonsense. Horse manure, in fact. Genetic studies, for example, can easily trace ancestry trees, and are further confirmed by fossil evidence.
It just 'happens'.
Straw man misrepresentation -- there's far more to evolutionary biology than such empty statements.
It is therefore not science, but absolute garbage.
Unsupported conclusion from false premises.
The problem of a whole species, or a large portion of it evolving at once is a difficulty which evolutionists have not explained very well.
"Whole species" do not evolve -- straw man misrepresentation.
The problem of random changes spreading through a population is quite difficult.
False, there are many proven mechanisms for them to do so, as well as field studies which have seen it occur.
Even Darwin thought that evolution could more easily take place in small populations.
You're undercutting your case, that *supports* punctuated equilibrium.
The problem is that any change has to be small so that the individuals can still mate with each other.
Trivially disproved nonsense: Many large changes would not intefere with mating.
The changes also have to occur evenly throughout the population. In other words, the whole species sort of has to evolve together.
Astounding ignorance of actual evolutionary biology. No, it does not. Splinter groups can evolve away from the main population.
This is all much easier said than done, this is especially problematic when we come to sexual reproduction. In fact, this problem by itself, seems to me to completely destroy Gould's punk-eek.
The evolution of gender has already been explained to you, don't pretend it's an insoluble mystery.
Final score: Strike out.
Absolutely! :-)
Absolutely not. Your transparent attempt at squirming out of your hypocritical and B.S. revision of the clear meaning of actuality does not work. I added another method of adjoining diodes since you cannot fathom soldering despite your alleged E.E. training. You could superglue the things togther if you like. They are still not a transistor. You claimed, counter to my statement that in a sense that a transistor was 2 diodes back to back, that a transistor was in actuality 2 transistors back 2 back. It is your claim that falls flat on its face. I merely challenged you to make a transistor out of 2 diodes in actuality as you claimed. And your red herring attempt at changing the discussion to mating semiconductor layers won't work. Here is the definition of the words again.
in a sense
adv : in some respects; "in a sense, language is like math" [syn: in a way]
Your words ---> I think you're misreading the point being made. A transistor is "back-to-back diodes" in the sense of its internal construction at the semi-conductor level. A diode is a single PN junction:
You even put quotes around the back-to-back.
What a hypocrite.
In a sense, you should insist on a refund. A transistor is a transistor. Absent the potential of a bias on the base your "back to back diodes" are as useless as a tit on a bull.
Did you take a course on "bull" in college as well? I hope the doping lecture was for the benefit of the general public because if it was intended for me, I can only chuckle.
Ad hominem attack.
No, a fact. Both Gould and Eldredge are /were virulent atheists and there is absolutely no evidence required for Punctuated Equilibrium. In fact it is based on lack of evidence.
Nonsense. Horse manure, in fact. Genetic studies, for example, can easily trace ancestry trees, and are further confirmed by fossil evidence.
False. Not with PE. The central theme of PE is that we cannot find the fossils. It also does not even postulate how the changes may have taken place so there is no way to determine if a change was PE or not. It is thus pure charlatanism.
It just 'happens'.-me-
Straw man misrepresentation -- there's far more to evolutionary biology than such empty statements.
Here comes the doubletalk. Mixing PE with Darwinism. PE says that we cannot find the fossils which transformed because they changed suddenly and were in a small out of the way place. It postulates therefore that lack of evidence is evidence. It is pure charlatanism.
It is therefore not science, but absolute garbage.-me- Unsupported conclusion from false premises.
Nope. Science requires evidence, PE is just an attempt at ignoring the lack of evidence.
The problem of a whole species, or a large portion of it evolving at once is a difficulty which evolutionists have not explained very well.-me-
"Whole species" do not evolve -- straw man misrepresentation.
More evolutionist doubletalk. On one side evolutionists claim that random change can create complex new organs and functions because there are numerous individuals in a species acting as a testing laboratory for these new changes. That these new changes get bit by bit added on to and from those the new fucntions are gradually built up. So yes it takes a large number of individuals in a species to make it work. And yes it takes a large number of individuals in a species to change together to make the evolution model work. This is especially so in sexual species where if a large group does not change together there will be no one to mate with along the way because the organism will become too far different to reproduce with anyone. In fact, it is a necessity of evolution for a group to change together in sexual species because evolution postulates that eventually a new species which can no longer mate with the original species will arise.
It should be noted that you have not provided a single bit of explanation for your statements. All you have done is say 'it is not so'. This is not evidence, it is not even decent discussion. It is just arrogant blather.
Another bald faced lie from you. It says no such thing in the article above and that is why you cannot give a quote which says that. It is a completely a figment of your imagination. A totally made up statement with no basis in fact. Since it was completely concocted out of thin air, it is legitimate to call it a lie and not an error. -me-
Ahem: 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.
Which in no way refers to the statement made by me above. Id did not punish useless functions, it allowed them to hang around without punishment. This is strongly implied by the quote given from the article:
Some mutations that cause damage in the short term ultimately become a positive force in the genetic pedigree of a complex organism.-article-
So yes, you lied, and now you are mistating the issue to try to get away from the lie you purposely concocted.
I'd bet on about an 85% hit rate on "lie, lies, or liar"; next would be atheist, then probably "Hitler, Stalin, or communist" (or would that be Phaedrus' pattern?), and then some "arrogant slime" type phrases.
Of course, the other post-before-thinking Creationists would probably hit significantly above average on the same phrases, so perhaps we should consider implementing such an anti-SPAM filter for our own use. It might even be less tedious than just skipping over certain posters' repetitious name-calling non-arguments.
Don't forget "dishonest" and "insulting." Lately they've started accusing me of "stalking." Anyway, I wouldn't enjoy creating such a database. Easier just to skim over such stuff.
In your case a more apt word to use would be slither over such stuff.
Yes, I know the message was not addressed to me, but it was at the tail end of the thread and I did not reply to your last post to all. I am making amends.
The one-l lama,
He's a priest.
The two-l llama,
He's a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn't any
Three-l lllama.*
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.