Artificial Life Experiments Show How Complex Functions Can Evolve

NSF ^ | May 8, 2003 | Staff

[whattajoke]

I have alerted the Evilooshun Sleeper Cell. Await embedded instructions within the source code at DU.com.

[Junior]

Hey! RAH says it's perfectly all right, as long as I do it in private and wash my hands afterward... No wait, he was talking about writing. Never mind.

[jwalsh07]

Hey Mr Wizard, how many transistors are illustrated below?

[whattajoke]

For what it's worth, I see a bunch of those nasty italian cake-cookie things you get at italian weddings. god, I hate those things.

[jwalsh07]

Well, one thing I'm sure of, your answer will be better than Itchy the Ingineer's.

[jwalsh07]

I'll concede two points to you. First of all you are verbose, an indication of being full of crap. And second, you write like William Buckley speaks, sort of nasally.

What really must twist your panties however is that a blue collar guy like me is at a minimum your "intellectual" equal.

:-}

[jwalsh07]

How about you Andrew, how many transistors do you see in 1783?

Mind you now, they are "special transistors".

[freeper4u]

G3K: "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."

Even though this argument is only tangentially related to evolution (evolution does not deal with the origins of life, just the process by which life adapts over time to the environment), what about viruses? They can be observed self-assembling in a test tube without any evidence of little angels pushing their little molecules around. Likewise for every single celled organism. We have seen the mechanism of self-assembly. We have never observed a miraculous creation. Which one makes more sense scientifically?

G3K: "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."

First, DNA is not an organism. Second, there is no need for anyone to "find all the possible ways" to make a certain sequence to exist in all species. In fact, with evolution you would expect to find common sequences among organisms with common ancestors.

For bookkeeping purposes, we're still waiting for your definition for what passes as self assembly since you've rejected so many examples. And we are still waiting for the reason you claim that all members of a species must evolve together because any genetic difference within the pool will prohibit mating.

[Lurking Libertarian]

Self-assembling placemarker.

[PatrickHenry]

PLACEMARKER (Hee hee.)

[freeper4u]

G3K "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."

Not necessarily. There's an infinite spectrum of possible effects of mutations that are not immediately beneficial.

G3K: "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."

G3K, the next few sentences are fine up to this one. If this were true, you would have to show that all mutations break reproduction. That's simply not true. There are hundreds of breeds of dogs. Even though the significance of the changes between them is huge, most of them can interbreed. If your hypothesis were true, instead of getting a mutt, the offspring would die.

If you consider the node just before two species branch, there should be a range of creatures with different characteristics at different geographic locations, all of whom can technically interbreed. At the time of the branch (it is not a moment, but a period of time), you will see some kind of failure divide the species between those that evolved one set of traits, and those that evolved another. However the populations at both ends of the spectrum can still mate with each other, just not from one end to the other.

As a hypothetical example, you may have a frog that has done particularly well in one region by eating mosquito larvae that has overflowed into a new territory with less mosquitos. The frogs in the first area continue to optimize for eating mosquito larvae and avoiding water preditors while the same frogs in the new region start to optimize for climbing and catching new types of of prey such as crawling insects. At some point, the frogs in the new territory become so different that they cannot mate with frogs back in the old territory, but at that point, there are already two entire populations of frogs who can continue to mate within their own groups who share the same ancestry.

[gore3000]

What makes an atheist virulent? Is it a recognized sect of the church of Darwin that we so often hear about?

Are you denying that Gould was an atheist? This is the typical doubletalk garbage from you and your friends. That Gould was an atheist is well known and well documented. Like the Clintonites you attack people for telling the truth because you do not like to hear the truth.

[balrog666]

I'll concede two points to you. First of all you are verbose, an indication of being full of crap. And second, you write like William Buckley speaks, sort of nasally. What really must twist your panties however is that a blue collar guy like me is at a minimum your "intellectual" equal.

Wow, you must be unlucky since you went 0 for 3. Or maybe you're just stupid. Gee, which one would I bet one?

In case you didn't get it, that was a rhetorical question.

[jwalsh07]

Ah, the court jester speaks and as always plays the fool. Nice to know somethings never change.

[balrog666]

Nice to know somethings never change.

Ah, yes, that would the your viewpoint of the world from out of your anal sphincter.

[jwalsh07]

Ah, yes, that would the your viewpoint of the world from out of your anal sphincter.

Not only a court jester but an anally fixated one at that.

Any opinion on two diodes back to back equalling a transistor?

[gore3000]

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. -me-

Fascinating bit of personal opinion

Excuse me? That water does not self assemble itself into a lake is personal opinion? Your arrogance shows your total dishonesty and idiocy. Only a total fool would think that he can deny obvious facts as above and fool others into believing as he. All the above are created by simple well known forces.

As usual you and your friends dishonestly forget to address the meat of my argument which is (from the post you are supposedly responding to):

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.

Let's see you or your friends refute the above.

[jwalsh07]

I didn't think so.

[gore3000]

I expect that he would attempt a campaign to drive his debate opponents from the website.

The slimer gives us another example of his total hypocrisy. It is the evolutionists which EVERY TIME an opponent starts showing that evolution is total bunk that start with the insults. For example, soon after I started posting on this thread (and getting no replies of course as is usual from the evolutionists since they cannot deny the truth but just insult the bearer of it).

I have often challenged you to show a single post from you on this thread which is not an insult. A single post from you discussing the subject at hand. There are none such because you do not discuss, you insult and encourage your friends to do the same and turn threads into shouting matches so that they will be pulled.

[gore3000]

They do just what they say: they mark our place in a discussion.

Yup, they mark the place to stop discussing and start insulting. They mark the place to start spamming the thread with irrelevancies. They mark the place to start indulging in personal attacks.

They have nothing to do with discussion. They have everything to do with NOT discussing the topic as you are doing right now.