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."
Oh. Light, energy and matter exist in nothing. Space is nothing. The universe is therefore nothing even as it expands. OK, real good....
Do you think a vacuum requires space? Space is something-- even your naturalistic cosmologists admit that. A vacuum is the absence of something like a steak dinner is the absence of chicken. Things can exist in a vacuum. Things cannot exist in nothing.
I find the great lengths at which you evos will go to deny the obvious nothing short of astounding-- especially when creationists are accused of the same thing.
A Theist "knows" there is a God/Gods.
An Atheist "knows" there is no God/Gods.
IMHO, it requires every bit as much faith to believe there is no God as to believe there is...
If you mean these endlessly repeated, feeble, ignorance-couched creationism debate ploys, I half-heartedly concur.
If you mean artificial life experiments, I whole-heartedly concur. I think Chastein and Wolfram have got a tiger by the tail. In the next 50 years, I expect the debate about origins to move heavily in the direction of their research into uncomputability and a-life. And I hope to be still around to see how their work manifests itself on the factory floor. It will move us beyond programming to some other mode of interaction with our programs that more approximates a partnership and it will leave the tangential AI stuff I now employ in the dust.
The relevant assertion is that a circuit patented in 2000 providing a certain output was replicated in function by a genetic algorithm. This novel circuit is alleged to have improved upon the performance of the patented circuit in some unsubstantiated way. The circuit achieved by the human designer had as a requirement compactness. Also included as a requirement was sustained operation into the gigahertz range. If you look at the design in the patent, there are no resistors within its design or description. There are a total of 9 semiconductor elements in the design, five NPN transistors and 4 diodes. The genetic design "competed" against the patented circuit in a modified version. It introduced 2 resistors and used transistors to act as diodes. This will have an effect on the operation of the circuit.
A Patent for a varation on the theme of Peanut Butter and Jelly, UP Patent #6,004,596
James Randi on PB & J:
When I found out they'd issued a patent recently on "toast" and on a variety of the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, I was sufficiently stunned, but this one is The Winner in the Stupid Field, hands-down. I cannot, in my widest imaginings (and I'm adept at that art, I assure you) come up with any means of turning a profit on 6,368,227, unless the intent is to close down playgrounds all over the globe.... Look it up, but be seated when you read it....
Usually, when someone does that, the person with the last word knows better than to use it for a put-down. Next time, be gracious, and I won't change my mind.
Ok. That means evolutionists won't object when it is posited that God created the universe and God caused life from non-life. You can't object because you just said your theory has nothing to do with those two miracles.
Let it be known here and now that Dimensio insists evolution has nothing to say about God's creation of the universe or His bringing forth of life from non-life.
That evolution is an attempt to remove God from every aspect of human life is a creationist strawman
That happens to be your straw man argument since I have never seen a creationist put it forth.
I'm not so sure of that.
Artificial life is life with a creator. Life, as we live it, is life with a Creator. If anything, artificial life demonstrates a parallel that bolsters the case that God exists. It's only artificial, if you want to say that what God creates is real, but what man creates is not.
There was no put-down. I invite you to read it again.
That's why one shouldn't introduce the concept of "belief" or "faith" into the discussion. Establish your atheism as a scientific theory, and let your oppeonents prove your theory false.
The good athiest says, "There is no God". It's up to the person insisting a God exists to pony up his proof.
So far, no evidence to contradict the theory has been provided.
But wait, what's a void, and what is nil? Is a nil argument in c++ an example of nothingness[sub2]? And with this tool, perhaps we can address a classic question: how many vacuums can you fit in a void?
I'll be applying for a Kirby Nothingness Duplicator patent shortly. If mickey mouse can belong to Disney forever, there's no reason I can't patent a technique for nothingness-stuffing.
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