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."
One word too many from you.
Plus the golden tinge adds a touch of class.
Again, nobody died and made you the conversation monitor. You've earned my contempt quite on your own merits, PH is not responsible for your underhanded argumentative behavior.
If you would take a second to read your own words for understanding, instead of for decibel level, you might fathom why this is such a silly statement.
...
What you mean to suggest, I expect, is that you cannot model reality with perfect fidelity and detail, which is, indeed true, however irrelevant.
Face it; he either doesn't understand the meaning of the word "model" or he's intentionally misrepresenting it.....
Not that doing so would be anything knew for him....
The slimer [note the insult] gives us another example of his total hypocrisy [note the insult]. It is the evolutionists which [sic] 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).Let's take these one at a time: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.
1,799 posted on 05/21/2003 11:28 PM EDT by gore3000
It is the evolutionists which EVERY TIME an opponent starts showing that evolution is total bunk that start with the insults.I would respectfully suggest that factual rebuttals to some creationist argument, and pointing out that there have been innumerable rebuttals to the same argument in the past, do not constitute "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 would respectfully suggest that not responding to arguments deemed unworthy of response does not constitute an "insult."
I have often challenged you [PH] 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.I would respectfully direct the reader's attention to the following posts in this thread: 1045, 1120, 1123, and 1127. They deal with the substance of evolution. There just hasn't been all that much going on that required any more effort. Anyway, the "challenge" was to produce one such non-insulting post. Easily done.
Question: why am I being stalked and insulted like this?
Because, trying to teach a pig to sing wastes your time and annoys the pig!
Because you irritated the snot out of the ignorant lunatic fringe element* who are drawn to these threads like a moth to a flame. What's worse, you refuse to engage them, and thus deny them the satisfaction of the illusion that their ill-informed notions and ideas are of equal standing with those of educated people. You refuse to play their delusional game, in which every thread starts over tabla rosa and they get to trot out their trite, already refuted arguments and pretend that they've never been assailed. You refuse to cater to their fantasy-reality, in which their ill-informed, recycled arguments are deemed to have merit, and their intellect and knowledge is on par with normal, well educated, well-adjusted people.
IOW, you are ruining their delusion, and they hate you for it. They are convinced that what they are doing is important, substantive, and deeply profound, and given the profundity of their cause, they, in their paranoid view of reality, are convinced that "evil forces" are "conspiring" to thwart them.
They are convinced that YOU are the manifestation of their imaginary conspiracy, and that you are sending out secret messages embedded in your "placemarker" posts, coordinating with other conspirators who are out to thwart and "torment" them. This is the twisted thinking of the paranoid mind.
That is why they stalk you, attack you, and accuse you of the very things that they themselves are doing, transferring their guilt to an external person, thereby giving themselves the absolution they so desperately seek for the compulsive actions the are unable to resist.
*the phrase "the ignorant lunatic fringe element" does NOT refer to all people on these threads who reject biological Evolution. It refers to a very small minority, who exhibit bizarre characteristics in their posts, who would, among their many other bizarre undertakings, create out of whole-cloth the delusion that PH is actively attempting to disrupt the discussion, "get threads pulled," etc., ad nauseum. It refers to certain anti-Evo Freepers of whom even thoughful Creationists are getting sick and tired.
A recent issue of Scientific American describes a new material fashioned from an amalgum of plastic and metal dust that shields effectively against medical x-rays and most radioactive isotopes. The metal content transmits heat, so full body suits made of this material can be worn continuously, even while exercising. A nice outer layer of mu-metal would shield effectively against radio frequencies and low frequency electromagnetic radiation.
The inventor says tents could be made of it also. I recommend this to the entire ID community. Perhaps one large tent would hold them all, if they are large tent conservatives.
Thank you. Much more specific than what I was contemplating.
Speak for yourself. Many people do a good job of modeling reality on a computer. If you really believe that they are wrong you should never: fly in an airplane, especially the 757,767,777; never go near a nuclear power plant; never go near the power grid; never drive an automobile; etc.
Your paradigm of "The Sims" is just a game. You may believe that "The Sims" or "Sim City" (mark whatever) is a model of reality, but most people can tell the difference between games and models.
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