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New Findings Confirm Darwin's Theory — Evolution Not Random
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Jan 18, 2008 06:08 PM
from the water-also-wet dept.
from the water-also-wet dept.
ScienceDaily is reporting a team of biologists has demonstrated that evolution is a deterministic process, rather than a random selection as some competing theories suggested. "When the researchers measured changes in 40 defined characteristics of the nematodes' sexual organs (including cell division patterns and the formation of specific cells), they found that most were uniform in direction, with the main mechanism for the development favoring a natural selection of successful traits, the researchers said."
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Ah, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, but did this deterministic development mechanism evolve deterministically or randomly?
Re:Ah, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Referring to scientific facts in terms of 'faith' and 'belief' is rather an unfortunate choice of terminology. There's no need to believe in facts. There's no need to 'have faith' in random mutations--you can prove to yourself that such things happen, and thus have no need for 'faith'.
Re:Ah, but... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
You offered a German proverb, I'll swap you an English one: you threw the baby out with the bathwater.
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hume--and Kant--are also a lot 'smarterer' than me ;-)
However, Kant did come up with quite a plausible theory for why Hume was not quite right about that (and in doing so, essentially invented epistemology as a separate area of study). Whether or not he successfully demonstrated that his theory was correct is (still) an open question.
Very briefly what he supposed was that any experience whatsoever of the 'world' is only accessible through certain features of our perceptual and cognitive apparatus. Chief among these are time and space, but in addition, there are twelve a priori categories, including "causality and dependence" according to which experiences are ordered.
To put it in plainer language, time and space have to do not with reality as such, but with how we perceive reality, while the categories (including causality) and reason allow us to systematize our experiences. It's possible to think of time and space as analogous to being stuck in a space suit with a yellow-tinted visor. You can look through the visor, but everything will look yellow. You can't really be sure that everything--or anything--is yellow, but the only way you can see anything at all is to see it as something yellow.
The practical upshot of this is that according to Kant, while (contra Hume) genuine scientific inquiry is possible without recourse to faith in causation etc, and while our experience is of a real world, there are definite limits to human knowledge:
For more information, you can go to the Stanford Encyclopedia [stanford.edu], or to the source [cuhk.edu.hk], but when reading Kant, always be sure to take the proper precautions: take adequate food and water, allow plenty of time to get back before dark, and always let somebody know where you're going...
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I have faith that the first instance of a long neck was due to one or more coincident random mutations.
Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, there's no reason to have faith in this. Leave faith to the religious folks--these are facts, which are true whether or not you 'believe' them.
Parent
Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Two points:
While I don't think that this experiment wasn't worth doing, I don't think it's news. It's like going out to measure the mass of a photon and discovering that it's less than you can measure (yes, I know this has been done; it wasn't very exciting). It doesn't break anything we thought was fine, and doesn't prove anything we didn't already know: it simply puts limits on how wrong our theory can possibly be.
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Is the following a fact or faith?
What say ye?Hint: ISATRAP
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I would find it much less insulting as a deity if people realized I was an absolutely incredible systems programmer able to start a ball rolling with some precursor components and have all of earths current life unfold from them as planned. It would kind of belittle the effort to say He just snapped his fingers.
I hear the rebuttal constantly that the words of mankind are unable to contain the meanings God would be trying to impart on the writers, and this type of complexity would be EXACTLY the kind of thing mankind would be unable to even conceptualize millennia ago.
Creationism and Evolution are not mutually exclusive. The roots of creationism are simply unable to be tested or verified by humanity currently so it remains a leap of faith to believe that God designed the layout of dominos. We can't even say if there was a START to the universe, or whether it is some bizarre infinite system, or a finite-yet-recursive system or what.
For the die hard ultra-fundamentalist AS WELL AS the hardcore ultra-atheistic, keep in mind that NOTHING can be known to be 100% accurate, maybe a bunch of nines of significance based on what we know but never 100%. Even the probability we determine based on what we know would be in the same boat (IE: see Newtonian mechanics, almost correct, 'works' depending on frame of reference).
If we could, humanity would have no need for faith, as everything would simply be. Seeing as that would leave even less room in existence for free will, I'm definitely glad things are not that way (despite some things done in the name of faith or in the name of science).
DISCLAIMER: I'm still one who prefers the random swerving to being a gear in a deterministic system, but that doesnt mean what i'd like the model of existence to look like is correct.
Parent
Re:Ah, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes they are, at least for the standard dictionary definition of creationism [reference.com]:
creationism:
1. the doctrine that matter and all things were created, substantially as they now exist, by an omnipotent Creator, and not gradually evolved or developed.
2. the doctrine that the true story of the creation of the universe is as it is recounted in the Bible, esp. in the first chapter of Genesis.
Keep in mind, "Creationism" != "Religious faith". There are plenty of people who believe in God and who accept the scientific theory of evolution. But they are not creationists.
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
You may want to reconsider reference.com as a reliable source of unbiased information on controversial subjects.
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
For the "creationists" who believe God coded up the source for the universe in one marathon 6-day hacking spree and then typed "root#make universe" which set off the Big Bang, well, where's the point of argument? The lesser "why" of the mechanics is pure science, and the greater "Why" of the motivation for making it that way is pure abstract philosophy. The two never conflict, or even really overlap.
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
"If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part."
Richard Feynman
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
-- Albert Einstein
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Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Informative)
I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind. -- Einstein
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. -- Einstein
Parent
Re:Ah, but... (Score:5, Informative)
But the sources for relevant Wikipedia articles [wikipedia.org] are credible primary sources. (Brian, Dennis (1996), Einstein: A Life, New York: John Wiley & Sons, p. 127, ISBN 0-471-11459-6 [wikipedia.org]) To save you some time, I've added some line breaks but retained the context [aip.org].
Now for the second quote [wikipedia.org]:
Parent
Re:Ah, but... (Score:4, Informative)
A hypothesis doesn't get called a theory until it has demonstrated substantial predictive power, and so is almost never found to be "incorrect" later. Instead conditions are discovered under which the old theory doesn't make useful predictions, and the new theory is "more general", or accurate to more decimal places, etc.
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Who comes first? (Score:5, Funny)
The chicken leans over to the egg and says; "I guess we answered that question."
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In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Evolution is part of the larger picture, and isn't really possible to test or reproduce, as it explains the consequences of natural selection. "Proving" evolution requires lots of indirect/consequential/incomplete evidence, and the extensive use of statistics (which helps indicate trends and correlations, but can't actually *prove* anything) to interpolate/extrapolate what evidence we have.
It follows from logic that if species breed randomly, and the mutation doesn't greatly affect an organism's ability to reproduce, the short-term effects of natural selection won't propagate to the long-term, which leaves us with a paradoxical situation wherein Natural Selection is required for evolution to occur, but that the population dynamics associated with natural selection simultaneously prevent long-term evolution from occurring.
The significance of this study is that we now have some evidence that the "species breed randomly" assumption might not necessarily have been a good one.
As always, further study on the matter should be pursued.
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Re:In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Thus eliminating the usual trite rhetoric (Score:3, Interesting)
O'course, it'll probably be misquoted endlessly by the 'intelligent design' folks, given that--at least superficially--it could be seen to "endorse" the concept of a directed design, rather than being an inevitable consequence of the process.
God Recycles (Score:3, Funny)
Re:God Recycles (Score:5, Insightful)
Whats really intresting then is that while a whole bunch of stuff is recycled, the pattern makes a tree where recycling never seems to occur among plants-mammals-birds, so no four cycle breathing for mammals, no bird milk, no bat fruit.. really strange that with all the shortcuts that were taken, so much separation would be faithfully preserved.
Storm
Parent
Re:God Recycles (Score:4, Funny)
-- GOD
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Wait... what's different here? (Score:5, Informative)
From what I picked up in bio, it was known to work as such:
Assume Mutation
(1) If mutation not hindrance, animal likely to live and likely makes babies.
(2) If mutation is boon, animal more likely to live and more likely makes babies.
(3) If mutation is hindrance, animal less likely to live and less likely to make babies
From there, you consider whether or not the mutation is recessive/dominant which determines if the babies get the mutation (then referred to as a trait).
Repeat many many times and you get a separation of a special line.
The proper combination of factors being: mutation = beneficial, mutation dominant, mutated animals screw like proverbial rabbits.
How is this different from the new findings?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wait... what's different here? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Wait... what's different here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Karin Kiontke, Antoine Barrière, Irina Kolotuev, Benjamin Podbilewicz, Ralf Sommer, David H.A. Fitch, and Marie-Anne Félix Trends, Stasis, and Drift in the Evolution of Nematode Vulva Development [current-biology.com] Current Biology (November 2007), 17, p. 1925-1937.
TFA [sciencedaily.com] seems to be misrepresenting the research somewhat. They claim that there is a divide in evolutionary theory between "random inheritance" and "deterministic inheritance." However, the actual article is describing the difference between unbiased (stochastic) and biased (selected or constrained) evolution of variation. In both cases the usual random genetic variation with fitness selection would occur.
The scientists are not claiming that evolution is deterministic or guided, but rather that there are strong selections and constraints that bias some variations to be more likely to appear than others. In their words: As an example of a constraint, they mention "generative constraints" (i.e. fitness is selecting for a certain feature, and there are multiple ways of achieving that feature, but one's genetic heritage will bias one implementation over another). Their evidence for the drift in variations being generally "biased" is based on the occurrence (over generations) of various traits: for instance they observe fewer "reversals" (reappearance of traits that were previously common) than would be expected if the variability were entirely stochastic/random.
This is, in any case, my understanding of the paper... but I'm a chemist/physicist, not a biologist! (So hopefully a biologist in the crowd will further explain this paper.) Overall, however, I think the article doesn't summarize the work properly, since they are suggesting that evolution is highly directed and deterministic, whereas the paper is instead analyzing the "degree of bias" that is inherent to the selection effects of evolution. For instance, the scientific paper doesn't claim that evolution can't produce non-advantageous mutations.
Parent
Re:Wait... what's different here? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always thought that the rate of mutation should be alterable as well.
Depending on the creature, it may take more effort or less effort to ensure the integrity of its DNA. Some creatures can take massive doses of radiation and survive, some can survive massive exposures to what would be carcigenic in humans, etc.
So shouldn't evolution heuristically arrive at a rate of mutation that is beneficial to a species?
I thought this was obvious, but maybe I should write a paper on it. :p
Parent
Am I missing something? (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems to say that the mutations aren't random, but that they are biased into a specific direction - one that is more advantageous to begin with. As an example, this would indicate that instead of there being random variations of the length of the neck of the giraffe, the mutations tend, on average, to favor a longer neck to begin with.
I'd say that's pretty new and spiffy. Did I miss something?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
My understanding of natural selection is that it's more or less a random walk with drift toward a point determined by the nature of the selection pressures. Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that this new research shows that the drift term of the process is much larger than the error term, not tha
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Note: mutation is definitely not always random, either. Organisms have developed extensive systems for modifying and altering how much mutation they incur, and what part of the genome receives those mutations. Look up, for example, the bacterial SOS response, in which bacterial colonies under stress will suddenly
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Finally, there is an answer (Score:3, Funny)
They might even be able to write a mathematical expression for it.
interesting career choice (Score:5, Funny)
Link to cited paper (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS0960982207021938 [current-biology.com]
The Recursive Nature of Life. (Score:3)
WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
-jcr
What the article is REALLY about (Score:4, Informative)
This really isn't about Darwinian evolution which involves random mutations and selection of the favorable ones. However, there are some characteristics which are neither advantageous or disadvantageous. There is a debate about how many characteristics are "neutral". For example, did large noses appear because they are advantageous (for warming air perhaps) or because they just worked out that way by chance. So the original paper asked this question about worm vulvas and found that nearly all the characteristics that they looked at did NOT arrive by chance but were selected for (i.e. were advantageous in some way).
It is important to note both possible results would be consistent with Darwinian evolution. The only questions being addressed are the mechanism (does evolution go through mostly neutral phenotypes before a favorable phenotype is selected) and the extent that characteristics are neutral. For worm vulvas, it appears that the vulvas that form are biased towards the most favorable ones.
This is not what you all think (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Missing the point DNA never really evolved ! (Score:5, Interesting)
You bring up a point that many do not understand. Evolution says nothing about how life or DNA started. It simply explains how once life started with DNA, the process by which it evolves. Similarly the "big bang" theory says nothing about how the universe started. It explains how it expanded and changed from a hot, dense, nearly uniform state to its cold, sparse, unevenly distributed state. There are hypotheses about life starting with an RNA world, or starting with undirected metabolism, but these are completely separate from the theory of evolution, for which we have ample evidence.
Your other point seems to do with the fact that some evidence is not completely explained by evolution. In science, there is always some observation left unexplained, which is why Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum theory superseded Newton's laws. It does not mean that there must be a supernatural explanation for the observations that are currently unexplained.
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