Evolution in the lab

[wautd]

It's a long article so I'll just post the link. Quite interesting to see they're busy with this experiment for 20 years now

Link

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[The Vortex Empire]

And to think so many people think evolution is fake. Ha.

[CaptJodan]

That's a cool study. I love seeing stuff like this.

[Kanastrous]

Just because it works this way with bacteria, doesn't mean anything about humans.

/fundiewank

[Count Dooku]

I've run across a fundie who, literally, thinks that all the information was 'already' there, and that gene recombination accounts for what we see as the pronouncement of new genetic information. I cannot stand the person I speak of.

[Mayabird]

It IS a cool study, of course.

However, a experimental evolution studies have been going on since the 1880s.

One of the first to carry out a controlled evolution experiment was William Dallinger. In the late 19th century, he cultivated small unicellular organisms in a custom-built incubator over a time period of seven years (1880-1886). Dallinger slowly increased the temperature of the incubator from an initial 60 °F up to 158 °F. The early cultures had shown clear signs of distress at a temperature of 73 °F, and were certainly not capable of surviving at 158 °F. The organisms Dallinger had in his incubator at the end of the experiment, on the other hand, were perfectly fine at 158 °F. However, these organisms would not grow anymore at the initial 60 °F. Dallinger concluded that he had clearly found evidence for Darwinian adaptation in his incubator, and that the organisms had adapted to live in a high-temperature environment. Unfortunately, Dallinger's incubator was accidentally destroyed in 1886, and Dallinger could not continue this line of research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution


It's been done with fruit flies, fish transplanted to ponds without predators, heck, lots of things. It's hardly a new field, though it really needs more advertising. Especially to the idiots who claim that we don't see it in the lab.

[Jaepheth]

Just because it works this way with bacteria, doesn't mean anything about humans.

/fundiewank

No, no. This is just micro-evolution, not macro-evolution! The e. coli are still e. coli don't you see?

[Darth Wong]

I've run across a fundie who, literally, thinks that all the information was 'already' there, and that gene recombination accounts for what we see as the pronouncement of new genetic information. I cannot stand the person I speak of.

Even if there were no such thing as other mechanisms (which is not the case), his argument seems to hinge on the idea that recombination is not "information". Has he ever asked himself what happens when somebody builds a structure out of a pile of Lego blocks? That's recombination too.

[Darth RyanKCR]

I've run across a fundie who, literally, thinks that all the information was 'already' there, and that gene recombination accounts for what we see as the pronouncement of new genetic information. I cannot stand the person I speak of.

Even if there were no such thing as other mechanisms (which is not the case), his argument seems to hinge on the idea that recombination is not "information". Has he ever asked himself what happens when somebody builds a structure out of a pile of Lego blocks? That's recombination too.

As someone who still builds out of LEGO brick, the answer is that it is not recombination. For one thing, intelligence, is required to purposefully put the bricks together and to arrange them in a meaningful way.

So that would not be a good way to look at it.

[Darth Wong]

I've run across a fundie who, literally, thinks that all the information was 'already' there, and that gene recombination accounts for what we see as the pronouncement of new genetic information. I cannot stand the person I speak of.

Even if there were no such thing as other mechanisms (which is not the case), his argument seems to hinge on the idea that recombination is not "information". Has he ever asked himself what happens when somebody builds a structure out of a pile of Lego blocks? That's recombination too.

As someone who still builds out of LEGO brick, the answer is that it is not recombination.

Yes it is. Same parts, different combination.

For one thing, intelligence, is required to purposefully put the bricks together and to arrange them in a meaningful way.

The agent of recombination is irrelevant to the fact that it is recombination.

So that would not be a good way to look at it.

Yes it would, judging by your feeble red-herring attempt to refute it.

[Surlethe]

The whole "information" argument is a red herring, anyway. How much information the genome stores, and whether or not it increases, has absolutely nothing to do with evolution. It's just another way of phrasing "Doesn't this have so much complexity? Nothing could have become this complex without an intelligent cause. Therefore, Goddidit." - replace "complexity" with "information" as appropriate, and it pops right out.

[Alyrium Denryle]

The argument fails for several reasons. The first is the most simple. If I scramble the letters for the world Simple, there is not information content contained in the string of letters.

mlipes is gibberish.

Simple has meaning. And all it is, is a recombination.

The most important difference however is that DNA gets codons added to the system through mutations. The ones that do this are insertions, transpositions, and duplications. DUplications are the most dramatic, they can either be gene duplications, chromosome duplications, or entire chromosome duplications. That happened in fish twice. All of these have been documented. If that is not an information increase, I dont know what is.

[Johonebesus]

An even simpler example would be letters forming words. You may be stuck with the same small set of letters, but you get new words by recombining them. People like that love old wives tales, so compare the process of recombination to the fabled monkeys playing with typewriters. Over a couple of billion years, lots of complicated sentences could be randomly spelled out.

Logically the agent of recombination should be irrelevant, but isn't that one of the sticking points with these types? They just can't understand how natural, mechanical processes can create order. Nature must be totally random, so order must be the result of intelligent direction.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

[snip wiki quote]

Since the high-temperature flies cannot survive at the same temperatures as the originals, and are thus physically incapable of mating, doesn't that count as speciation, a "form" of "macroevolution"? Why isn't this study brought up more often as a definitive counter to the "no evolution seen in labs" claim?

[Molyneux]

[snip wiki quote]

Since the high-temperature flies cannot survive at the same temperatures as the originals, and are thus physically incapable of mating, doesn't that count as speciation, a "form" of "macroevolution"? Why isn't this study brought up more often as a definitive counter to the "no evolution seen in labs" claim?

No, don't you see, they're just damaged flies! They wouldn't survive in the original 60 degree area, thus they've just hurt themselves in order to work with the new environment...they're still flies! >_<

(Yes, I HAVE had someone use that argument against me, specifically with regards to drug immunity in bacteria. Apparently said immunity only comes from the bacteria being 'damaged' with relation to normal bacteria...and that's not evolution somehow.)

[Darth RyanKCR]

The agent of recombination is irrelevant to the fact that it is recombination.

But LEGO bricks on their own do not recombine, it takes an intelligence to move the pieces into place and into meaningful positions. That is why it is a bad example.

[Patrick Degan]

The agent of recombination is irrelevant to the fact that it is recombination.

But LEGO bricks on their own do not recombine, it takes an intelligence to move the pieces into place and into meaningful positions. That is why it is a bad example.

You are deliberately missing the point, as well as showing an ignorance of basic biology. Gene sequences don't recombine "on their own" either but are shuffled and moved about by a particular enzyme which directs the process. The argument still stands: if pieces are disassembled, moved, and put back together in different patterns, it is recombination. Kindly stop picking nits.

[Surlethe]

They don't recombine on their own? No doubt Darth RyanKCR will point out that a person made the factory, but that is immaterial, just as it is immaterial that legos don't usually recombine on their own: the point is that recombination does represent an increase in information. It is false to draw the analogy any further; legos aren't supposed to be a perfect analogy to DNA, they're supposed to illustrate that recombination can lead to an information increase.

[Darth Wong]

The agent of recombination is irrelevant to the fact that it is recombination.

But LEGO bricks on their own do not recombine, it takes an intelligence to move the pieces into place and into meaningful positions. That is why it is a bad example.

Irrelevant to the "information" argument, which claims that recombination is not information, regardless of whether an intelligent agent does the recombination.

You're trying to change the subject. Do you concede that recombination is information?

[SylasGaunt]

Since the high-temperature flies cannot survive at the same temperatures as the originals, and are thus physically incapable of mating, doesn't that count as speciation, a "form" of "macroevolution"? Why isn't this study brought up more often as a definitive counter to the "no evolution seen in labs" claim?

Because the flies didn't turn into chickens.