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."
All rational observers agree. Nevertheless, the same, tired old discredited claims will soon re-appear. Count on it.
What did you expect from someone who thinks that nuclear fission is a "chemical reaction?"
- that 1720 is a really big number?
- that infrared radiation causes sunburn?
- that circles are not ellipses?
- that the planets have "wildly elliptical" orbits?
...... ad nauseum.
No he has not. For example, nowhere in his screed does he tell us what the punk-eek theory is, all he say is 'that is not so'. He also does not say what evolution is, although throught his screed he says 'this is not so'.
Further, as I said in my post, and neither you nor anyone has shown how it can be otherwise - it takes numerous attempts at changing a species to achieve a single beneficial mutation - even according to evolutionists. To achieve it, it requires numerous individuals to serve as guinea pigs and die trying. So this is not the attempt of a single individual miraculously (for it would be a miracle for a species to transform itself in one generation into another more advanced species). This is why evolutinists call on 'natural selection' as their deux ex machina to solve the problem of sifting the good mutations from the bad. Evolution needs the sifting to work and it takes numerous (millions upon millions) of failures to achieve a single good outcome. So yes you need a large group to achieve this. However, as I stated, the problem is greater than that. A single mutation cannot transform a species. It takes a long chain of mutations in order to achieve that. In order for that to occur, you again at each point in the long chain you need a large amount of guinea pigs for the testing. So yes, you need a large group in order to do that. What is worst, the whole group, in a sexual species has to change together, otherwise the group would be split by becoming sterile to part of the group. So yes, you do need a large group to mutate together in a sexual species in order for evolution to work. This makes punk-eek totally impossible and Darwinian evolution ludicrous at best.
Lots of water is not an example of self-assembly. Neither are snowflakes which are just the result of freezing of water and perhaps the power of the wind in giving them different shapes. They lack complexity. They are totally due to natural forces, and very simple ones at that.
The DNA in the simplest organism however, the arrangement of it is not only not due to any natural forces, but it cannot be due to it. Otherwise we would not be able to find all the possible ways in which 3 different bit pairs with 3 possible values (64 in all) appear in the DNA sequences of all species. Such self assembly is totally unknown anywhere in the natural world. For anything even close, one must go and look at humanly designed things.
Because you are. You keep lying in wait for an opponent to say something against evolution to post your 'placemarkers' calling for a slime attack on the person who just posted. You certainly are stalking, and insulting at every post. In fact, anyone here (including you) would be really hard put to find a single post by you where you even discuss the subject at hand. As I have said before, all you do is spend your life insulting people. What a life!
Quoting PatrickHenry:So what can I say, except PLACEMARKER
Lately they've started accusing me of "stalking."Comment from Creationoid:
Because you are. You keep lying in wait for an opponent to say something against evolution to post your 'placemarkers' calling for a slime attack on the person who just posted. You certainly are stalking, and insulting at every post. In fact, anyone here (including you) would be really hard put to find a single post by you where you even discuss the subject at hand. As I have said before, all you do is spend your life insulting people. What a life!
1,688 posted on 05/20/2003 11:41 PM EDT by gore3000
That is due to the continuity of the patent. The patent uses a series of diagrams. One of which is an example of a previous circuit using 3 diodes connected head to tail in series and three transistors cascaded to produced a cubic function output. Thus a circuit already existed to perform the cubic function. However, since this circuit was 3 PN junctions deep, it would not function in the low voltage range for which the newer design was aimed. In describing this older circuit the transistors and diodes were designated with the lower numbers. The actual circuit that the patent described then used the higher numbers.
A prior art circuit 300 used to provide a cubic function to compensate for these power amplifiers is shown in FIG. 3. The circuit 300 comprises diodes D1-D3, transistors Q1-Q3, and current sources I.sub.in, I.sub.1 and I.sub.2.
...
However, the circuit 300 only functions at voltages at or above approximately 3 volts. This is because the topography of the circuit requires a voltage of 3*(V.sub.be,+V.sub.ce(sat)), and the value of V.sub.be may be as high as 0.8-0.9 volts, while the value of V.sub.ce(sat) is 0.3 volts. The 3 volt limit makes the circuit unusable for many applications.
...
A cubic function generator 600 according to the present invention is shown in FIGS. 4-6. The cubic function generator 600 is designed to work in high-frequency, low voltage applications. In FIG. 4, the first portion 400 of the cubic function generator 600 is shown. The first portion 400 comprises diodes D4 and D5, transistors Q4 and Q5, and current sources I.sub.c and I.sub.3.
...
The second portion 500 of the cubic function generator 600 is shown in FIG. 5. The second portion 500 comprises diodes D6 and D7, transistors Q6-Q8, and current sources I.sub.par and I.sub.3.
If you want to discuss the evolved circuit and why I was fairly certain that it was only a simulation and why I suspect the evolved circuit is not up to the task of the patented circuit. I will do so only if the exchange remains without Ad Hominem. It is simple enough and polite enough just to say, "I disagree" or "I don't see your point."
Proofread, Proofread, Proofread.
Looks like what he wrote is true. You don't seem to be calling out the crowd for a civil discussion and I'm fairly certain that the evoked comments will be attacks on gore3000 rather than any other subject.
Imagine that! The king of slime works in not-so-mysterious ways. The personal attacks are one thing, but the constant thread derailments and childish bantering, along with the stomach-turning games of "slap-ass" he and his 'buddies' play are almost enough to drive people away from this forum. If he or any of his ilk believe that they are convincing any of the lurkers that evolution is true, they are sadly mistaken. But, then again, perhaps they are in a roundabout way furthering the case for ID, which in the overall scheme of things is good. :)
FRegards, MM
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