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The Limits of Adaptability

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A colleague of mine posted this on list to which I subscribe. It raises some interesting questions about the limits of adaptability, the limits to preadaptation/exaptation, and the extent to which selection presupposes adaptability. I’m not sure I buy the entire argument here (see the post on this blog about the evolution of nylonase), but I would like to see the insights below vigorously discussed on this blog.

Are organisms simply more adaptable than can ever be explained on a purely evolutionary basis?

For example, we’ve all heard of the experiments where human subjects wear goggles that flip their visual experience upside down. After some period of time the brain/mind/soul flips things upright. Since never in evolutionary history could anything of that sort ever occurred on a sufficiently regular or long-term basis to give rise to that ability, that ability alone shows that Darwinian evolution is a false (incomplete) theory. The same could apply to birds’ abilities (assuming they exist) to “flip” their directional senses within (say) a single generation.

Speaking of which: I think the list has underappreciated (if I may sound a bit peevish a point I’ve made several times, namely, that any ability that an organism has to adapt to a highly, highly artificial constraint is a de facto disproof of the (complete adequacy of) neo-Darwinism. If an organism can adapt readily to an artificially induced change that has no analog in nature, than that adaptability cannot be explained (or explained away, or hand-waved-over) by random variation and natural selection. By hypothesis there is no place in natural history where such a capability could have arisen “naturally” (in the Darwinian sense).

It seems to me that such abilities are relatively commonplace. I.e., that there are many examples of adaptability under experimentation (artifice) that “just happen to work” and are absolutely inexplicable on Darwinian terms. They show the ability of organisms to transcend their own history, to so speak, and thus their irreducible to history/Darwinism.

For example, consider how SCNT (somatic cell nuclear transfer) works. You take a mammalian egg (which “just happens to be” a HUGE cell, very easy to experiment on). You take out the nucleus. (Think about how INCREDIBLY ARTIFICIAL that is.) You take an ENTIRE SOMATIC CELL (not just the nucleus — that’s one of the “tricks of the trade”) and you insert it into the enucleated egg cell. The “headless” (no nucleus, no genome, etc.) egg cell proceeds to break down/destroy the non-nucleic parts of the somatic cell. It then “gets ahold of” the somatic nucleus. It then proceeds to “reprogram” the nucleus to express the appropriate genes for embryonic life.

If all goes well (and often it doesn’t — in this case, nature fails to act “always or for the most part” in the famous phrase of Aristotle), a [fairly] normal embryo starts developing. But how can an enucleated egg possibly “know how to” do that? Such an occurrence has never happened in the entire history of life on earth. And yet it works — yes, only once in awhile, but it’s absolutely impossible that it could work AT ALL on Darwinian principles because the organism has never before encountered a circumstance in its natural history where this capability could have been selected for.

Comments

Dave, I'm sure some of your detractors will take that as permission to call you a prick all the time now. ;)

You say that almost like they needed either permission or added incentive... :-) -ds Patrick
May 20, 2006
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Hello Dave,
What do you percieve to be the role of the environment over the course of geological time in the playing out of LUCA's front-loaded phylogeny? As I see it, you could argue that: 1) the environment plays no role in the preprogrammed course of evolution; 2) the LUCA genome was sufficiently plastic to allow for the adaptation of some descendents to extreme environmental changes; 3) events in the physical evolution of the earth itself were anticipated in the design of LUCA's genome.

Thanks

I think a better question is what was the role of life in shaping the environment. Early life oxygenated the atmosphere which paved the way for fast metabolisms of multi-cellular life and with the oxygen came the ozone layer which blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation making it possible for life to move from the water to the land. Life continues to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere creating a greenhouse gas blanket which prevents a snowball earth from becoming permanently established as the sun's output has diminished significantly over geologic time, the heat of the earth's formation has escaped, and radioactive elements that help keep the earth warm by their decay have diminished in quantity. One might also go a step further and speculate that life layed down vast petroleum reserves for a specific reason - so that life could have an energy source for industrialization. Looking to the future, one might presume that the ultimate goal of life on this planet is to reproduce and transport itself to a younger planet and start the cycle all over again. The transport would require a technological civilization able to send artificial spacecraft to new solar systems. In fact the spacecraft "Voyager" just recently exited our solar system. It would be surprising if some microbial spores didn't hitch a ride on it. The ability to locate suitable young planets also requires industrialization to build telescopes big enough to resolve earth-size planets around other stars and use spectral analysis to determine their makeup. In point of fact the next generation of giant telescopes should be able to do just that - it's the hottest area in astronomy today. I just finished reading an article about the latest generation of telescopes in SciAm. You have to subscribe for the full article but these behemoths have planned construction costs north of $1 billion and up to 10 years to fabricate all the adaptive optics. Consider the entire biosphere as a single organism. Its goal, like all organisms, is to reproduce and get its progeny to fertile ground so they may prosper. Like all organisms, the planetary organism will devote whatever resources are necessary to reproduce as, like anything else, it is going to die whether it reproduces or not. The only question is whether it manages to reproduce before dying. In that view, the human species becomes the planetary organism's reproductive organ. We're like the fluff on a dandelion seed which enables transport of the seed to fertile new ground, only in this case the transport is across light years of vacuum. So if someone calls me a big prick I take it as a compliment as being a big prick is really the purpose of our species - a prick big enough to deliver seed across light years of empty space. -ds

Michael Tuite
May 19, 2006
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Chris Hyland

Here's the problem for me, Chris. I'm a computer hardware/software design engineer and have a lot of experience in factory automation. So I gravitate towards the programmable protein assembling machinery (DNA/ribosome) as the thing I want explained because 1) I understand the architecture of robotic assemblers and 2) the machine is present in every living thing and is programmed using virtually identical digital code and 3) it is probably the most complex machine in a cell. If its origin can be demonstrated with reasonable certainty to be possible absent intelligent agency then I'll concede everything else that follows after it requires no intelligent agency.

But here's the nut. If design isn't ruled out prior to the appearance of the first DNA based cell then one cannot rule out the possibility that the first cell contained a very complex genome that was designed to diversify along a preprogrammed path much as a fertilized human egg cell diversifies into myriad specialized cell types, tissue types, and organs. I coined a term for a hypothetical LUCA with a front-loaded genome - a phylogenetic stem cell. A front-loaded evolution, which by definition must be designed, fits all the empirical data as near as I can tell. The best objection is that genetic information that isn't under selection pressure can't be preserved long enough to be passed down intact over billions of years. However, that's nonsense and anyone that knows anything about information processing in modern computers knows that there are many ways to preserve data with any level of required fidelity over any number of copy and store iterations. There are FAR more complex things happening at the molecular level inside cells than simple error detection and it's certainly not a problem for a designer capable of creating the system to incorporate the necessary algorithms to protect critical data against copy errors for as long as they need such protection.

DaveScot
May 19, 2006
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"This seems to be more of an origin of life problem than an evolution problem." Quite true. As I said before, ID is perfectly compatible with many modern conceptions of evolution. It's pretty much just the synthetic theory that it has problems with. I think that the problem is that there are more biologists who hold religiously to the synthetic theory than you may realize. But yes, there is nothing in ID which specifically states that there had to be continuous intervention. Many in the ID community think that there was only one intervention event -- at the origin of life. The point is that at some point a symbolic coding system and specified information had to arise, and the only known cause of those two things that we know of are intelligent beings. The main difference that ID brings into evolutionary theory is that information generally comes from a larger pool of information, not a smaller one. While non-ID evolutionary biologists believe that information builds up from non-information, ID'ers think that information either specializes, degrades, or stays the same. Therefore, current information probably came from a _larger_ pool of information, not a smaller one. In addition, for the origin of life, if you assume that the origin came about by non-Darwinian means, then you get a vastly different conception of early life. Much of the conceptions of universal common ancestry come from a specific point of view of the origin-of-life. For example, if we did not hold to the Darwinian conception of the origin of life, what evidence is there that the different phyla had common ancestors? All we have is a (putative) time sequence, which do not show ancestry, nor even evidence of ancestry (I say putative, because, being a Creationist myself, I hold to the fossil record having a cause in physics [the flood] rather than time). In fact, even secular views of the origin-of-life, if not viewed in the Darwinian model, have this same problem. For an overview of the situation, see my blog post about Gordon Malcon's essay on Monophyly: http://crevobits.blogspot.com/2006/02/monophyly-in-biology.html So, the two theoretical differences that ID bring to the table are: 1) The origin-of-life (which, as I've pointed out, DOES have more impact on evolutionary thought than most evolutionists admit) 2) That information specializes out of larger pools, it does not build up from smaller pools [except on a very limitted basis, and even those are questionable. The theoretical limit for a single jump in information is a step 500 bits long. Still, I would personally consider this specialization rather than actually information-adding.] A major practical difference that ID brings to the table is that viewing systems from a historical perspective may not be as useful as viewing them from a holistic perspective. This is the essence of Jonathan Wells' work on Centrioles, Behe/Minnich's work on the flagellum, and to a much, much, much, much, much, much lesser extent, my own work on the immune system. I have an essay that talks a bit about information change from a computer programming perspective, if you are interested: http://www.issuesthatmatter.com/genomicchange1.html The part that may interest you starts with the heading "The Nature of Computational Systems and Programs". Other than that, ID has no real conflict with modern evolutionary theory. It's the Darwinian Fundamentalists who have a problem with it, because of its implications (there needing to be a source for the information). Also, there are a number of people against ID because the Darwinian Fundamentalist propoganda has convinced them that ID is something that it is not. The same thing happens with Creationism, with the exception that at least some of what is said about Creationism is true :) [defensible, I think, but true nonetheless]johnnyb
May 19, 2006
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"So the question is, where did all this information come from? More importantly, can a symbolic coding system even begin to develop on its own? The answer that the Darwinists have is to simply push Darwinism back further in the pipeline. “Yes, these are not Darwinistic mechanisms, but there is no reason to think that they can’t be produced by Darwinian mechanisms” is what they’ll say. But is that true? The fact is, Darwinism has not been any help at all in determining how these guided change processes came into being. And, optimization theory indicates that it won’t be able to." This seems to be more of an origin of life problem than an evolution problem. When thinking about evolution I have to assume some information is already present, but I make no assumptions about where that information comes from. People talk about LUCA, as a hypothetical starting point, but no one expects this to be the first life form. I know this will be an unaceptable position to people, but we just don't have enough information about the origin of life.Chris Hyland
May 19, 2006
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I wrote: “Throw in the fact that the SCNT could only happen in the presence of intelligent agents” Chris Hyland asks: How is this again sorry? SCNT requires living enucleated mammalian eggs which are then fed somatic cells. Only humans working in laboratories (intelligent agents) can bring this experiment about; hence the most reasonable assumption is that the cell's cytoplasm has this latent potential within it (and one could add, this came about 'outside the reach' of NS).PaV
May 18, 2006
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"This would be unfortunate, and scientists should be doing more to change it, but a really fail to see what this has to do with intelligent design. Sure there are questions with the modern synthesis, but evo-devo, phenotypic plasticity, epigenesis etc are answering these questions." Also remember directed mutagenesis. This is a good question, and it deserves answering. I think the issue is is that all of these processes require a pre-established repository of information to work. The "beauty" of neo-Darwinism to those that held it, was that it purported to offer a change process that did not require _any_ existing information in the genome to work. What all of these new ideas within biology are saying, however, is that all of these change mechanisms that we are discovering require already existing information in order to proceed properly. Evo-devo requires that the different pathways which are switched on and off already be there in order to be available to be switched on and off. Adaptive mutagenesis requires that the organism includes information about which changes are potentially useful and which ones are not. So the question is, where did all this information come from? More importantly, can a symbolic coding system even begin to develop on its own? The answer that the Darwinists have is to simply push Darwinism back further in the pipeline. "Yes, these are not Darwinistic mechanisms, but there is no reason to think that they can't be produced by Darwinian mechanisms" is what they'll say. But is that true? The fact is, Darwinism has not been any help at all in determining how these guided change processes came into being. And, optimization theory indicates that it won't be able to. See the following for information on that: http://www.4truth.net/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=hiKXLbPNLrF&b=784461&ct=1742245 http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.03.Searching_Large_Spaces.pdf The only model available which deals with presently-acting causes is intelligent design. We humans are able to create information systems as intelligent designers. In fact, intelligent agents are the _only_ known cause for producing symbolic systems. See Albert Voie's paper: http://home.online.no/~albvoie/index.cfm The model of evolution currently favored by ID'ers is probably this one: http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/21st_Cent_View_Evol.html The model of evolution currently favored by Creationists is probably this one: http://www.grisda.org/origins/54005.pdf [by the way, if you live near Dayton, Ohio, you should come out to Cedarville University on June 5th-9th for a Creationism Research conference -- see what such people are actually talking about -- http://www.bryancore.org/bsg/ ] Anyway, let me know if I failed to fully explain something. Oh, just to point out, one of the things that is rarely brought up in the ID debate, but is of central importance, is whether or not intelligent agency is distinct from (though limitted by) material causes. A lot of evolutionists discount ID because they don't believe in any other kinds of causes than material causes -- intelligent causes are simply complex combinations of material causes. ID has a view of causation where intelligent causes, while limitted by material circumstances, are of a different kind of cause than material causes. To a materialist, there is only chance and necessity. To an ID'er, there is chance, necessity, and agency -- all interdependent and interacting, but fundamentally different in their natures.johnnyb
May 18, 2006
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"When people refer to “Darwinism” they are referring to the synthetic theory. It is not necessarily true that they are referring to the modern theory of evolution (different people have different conceptions of what this is). That is what the PT-people want you to think. “Darwinism” specifically refers to RM+NS as the primary cause of organismal form. This is still how evolution is presented to the public, despite the fact that this is not what biologists are actually working with." When I go home to visit the folks next week, I am going to have a flick through my old science books to see exactly what I was taught, I have also asked them to get a copy of a current textbook from my school. I suspect that what is taught could be very different from what I regard to be the modern theory of evolution. This would be unfortunate, and scientists should be doing more to change it, but a really fail to see what this has to do with intelligent design. Sure there are questions with the modern synthesis, but evo-devo, phenotypic plasticity, epigenesis etc are answering these questions.Chris Hyland
May 18, 2006
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"I am assuming that when people say ‘Darwinism’ they are referring to the modern theory of evolution. Please correct me if I’m wrong." When people refer to "Darwinism" they are referring to the synthetic theory. It is not necessarily true that they are referring to the modern theory of evolution (different people have different conceptions of what this is). That is what the PT-people want you to think. "Darwinism" specifically refers to RM+NS as the primary cause of organismal form. This is still how evolution is presented to the public, despite the fact that this is not what biologists are actually working with. More generally, "Darwinism"'s central idea is that all genetic change occurs without respect to organismal fitness. This is what "teach the controversy" is about -- telling people that this model of evolution is not the only valid one, and in fact there are serious problems with it. Any somatic feedback to the germ line is incompatile with neo-Darwinism. Any guiding to focus mutations on adaptive changes is incompatible with neo-Darwinism. Phillip Johnson has a great lecture on this. Instead of "Darwinism" he refers to the "Blind Watchmaker Hypothesis" which is essentially the same thing. http://www.uctv.tv/library-test.asp?showID=6444 The idea that ID is against all modern evolutionary theory is simply an attempt to paint ID as the "bad guy" for science. It has no real basis in the truth.johnnyb
May 18, 2006
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Adaptationalism at least provides sufficient content to the label "Darwinian Evolution" for the concept to be criticized at any level in principle.jaredl
May 18, 2006
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dickatkinson: "All these references to the adaptation (or pre-adaptation, exadaptation, etc) of ORGANISMS is off the point. It is implicitly Lamarckian." Not really. Larmarckianism is the idea that traits can be acquired during the organism's lifespan (depending on what they're exposed to) and these traits can subsequently be inherited. To a limited extent (retroviruses,epigenetic modifications, genetic assimilation in microbes, etc) lamarkian inheritance has been demonstrated *in principle*. Personally, I don't like using the term because these examples are not entirely analogous with what Lamark originally proposed. But to each their own. In either case, simply discussing how an organism's physiology might respond to diverse and/or completely novel environments is not explicitly or implicitly Larmarkian. The level of biochemistry complexity does pose some interesting questions for evolution and ID, but I see that as no reason to ignore the interaction of the entire organismal phenotype with the environment. A lot of interesting and meaningful stuff goes on at the organismal level that can not be appreciated from the biochemical level. One of these things, which was the subject of the original thread as I understood it, was the observed flexibility of organisms in the face of changing and/or completely novel environments. Unless you're a microbiologist, focusing exclusively on the biochemistry here would be a bit myopic. Also, I'd like to avoid discussing "pre-adaptation" as well. It is a bad term and has largely been dispensed with in the evo. community. It's teleologically loaded and implies evolution can forsee what is to come. In the modern scientific formulation it can not. The term has been replaced with "exaptation," which indicates that a trait that was either a) selected previously for some other reason or b) present for no adaptive reason and, in virtue of some change in the environmental or genetic landscape, it subsequently became functional. Finally, I think it is very unfortunate that a preponderance of the pro-evolution pundits appear to be of the adaptationalist (darwinian fundamentalist) mindset. In my experience, these people--typically, but not exclusively, from England--have become largely irrelevant in the active research community. (at least the molecularly oriented community) That is probably why they have more time to take on ID in public forums. Unfortunately, they have helped shaped the minds of what many individuals believe evolutionary theory to be. No one in their right mind, in my opinion, is arguing that every response of an organism to "whatever" in an environment is *adaptively* selected for and evolved to be there. The more interesting question is the engineering question. Given the organism, what are its environmental tolerance parameters and are these consistent with darwinian evolution?great_ape
May 18, 2006
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Just what is the selection advantage for inverting the visual input from the eye anyway? Let's say we have this newly evolved eye attached to a neural net, the brain. Saying a "neural net based vision system would be able to right a flipped image quite readily" isn't an answer. It's not a question of capability, it's a question of why would this neural net want to solve this problem (or even recognize it as such) in the first place. How does the neural net know that the visual input is upside-down and needs to be corrected on the fly? We know this isn't a hardwired solution, but when we wear those vision-inverting goggles how does the brain recognize the image as being upside-down? If you've ever been to a children's science museum you may have run into one of those games where you're required to trace a path while viewing a maze through a mirror. It may take a couple minutes but eventually you'll get used to working backwards. If an organism is born with inverted vision it'd learn to mesh the sensory input from its body with that from its eyes; that'd be its "normal" state of being. Would living with one's vision being upside down harm an organism's survivability? How does evolving the ability to correct the inversion increase an organism's survivability?Patrick
May 18, 2006
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I am assuming that when people say 'Darwinism' they are referring to the modern theory of evolution. Please correct me if I'm wrong.Chris Hyland
May 18, 2006
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What is in direct odds with Darwinism?Chris Hyland
May 18, 2006
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"In the sense that mutations will tend to fix the new phenotype after a certain number of generations? I agree that genetic assimilation is involved in evolution, so do a great deal of evolutionary biologists." And there is a great deal in evolutionary biology that is in direct agreement with both Creationism and Intelligent Design, and at odds with Darwinism. It's just that evolutionary biologists have trouble admitting this fact.johnnyb
May 18, 2006
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All these references to the adaptation (or pre-adaptation, exadaptation, etc) of ORGANISMS is off the point. It is implicitly Lamarckian. Both mutation and selection are biochemical processes, and it at the biochemical level that they are most problematic. Richard Dawkins, for example, conveniently switches to the organism level when the biochemical challenge is tricky. (Apart, that is, from his disastrous "Methinks it is a weasel" argument.) It is as if one were to argue that a Model-T "just" evolved into a Mondeo, without reference to the design stage, R&D, production technology and so on. Much more of a problem is deciding which is the appropriate level to locate the "intelligence" of Intelligent Design. Is it anywhere in the reductionist spectrum of physics-chemistry-biochemistry-biology, or off the scale at one or other end, or "somewhere else" (in which case, what can "somewhere else" even mean?) The modern Christian view, a kind of Slow Creationism (which might unkindly be called The Little Whimper in contrast to The Big Bang), has a serious conceptual flaw. A truly omnipotent God would not need to create all those staphylococci, insects, nematodes and the like. If His aim was to make human beings, He picked a particularly wasteful method. Of course you could just say that human beings should not attempt to understand the Almighty: "He moves in a mysterious way." But that is not dissimilar to the attitude of Galileo's inquisitors, who simply refused to look through the telescope. dickatkinsondickatkinson
May 18, 2006
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bFast, Great Ape, et. al., We keep talking about "ultimate survivability", "come what may", etc., as though "general survivability" is some kind of evolutionarily selectable trait. I don't think it is or can be. Nothing survives generally, only particularly, and survival requires a balance of traits suited to particular environments. Take bFast's examples of extreme cold, floods and forest fires. A killer whale will do very well in the first two but very poorly in the last. A sparrow will do well in the latter two but have trouble with the first. And it is the very traits that make the killer whale survivable in the the first two that make it vulnerable to the last. Same with the bird. The light weight and low body fat that permit it to fly, and so survive floods and forest fires, make it less survivable in extreme cold. Survival is always a tradeoff between traits. There is no such thing as "general survivability". As an analogy, there is no such thing as a "generally great" major league baseball player. A player who can pitch 80 mph, hit .200, play a little catcher, is a mediocre shortstop, an OK center fielder, and play a little first base, will rarely make the major leagues. The player who can't hit at all or field anywhere, but can pitch 95 mph will make it over the first player everytime. Similarly, a player who can't pitch at all, can't play catcher or shortstop, but can hit .330 with 45 HRs/year, will get paid big dollars. That's because baseball players don't play a "position in general", they usually play one particular position or a small set of positions. They need to be very good at a couple things, not mediocre at a whole lot of things. Similarly, organisms do not live in environments-in-general. They live in a few particular environments, and evolution will select for survival in those, not for survivability-in-general. Cheers, Dave T.taciturnus
May 18, 2006
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"Throw in the fact that the SCNT could only happen in the presence of intelligent agents" How is this again sorry? "I agree that this is the correct in the light of evolution, however I think what’s really being questioned the unlimited genetic flexibility." What has unlimited genetic flexibility? "While I agree that development does affect morphology to a great deal, I also want to suggest that perhaps genetic assimilation (which you alluded to, but did not name earlier) may be a directed mechanism for genomic change. " In the sense that mutations will tend to fix the new phenotype after a certain number of generations? I agree that genetic assimilation is involved in evolution, so do a great deal of evolutionary biologists.Chris Hyland
May 18, 2006
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@ great_ape "In that case, the sub-optimal (for this particular short-term environment) yet ultimately more robust/flexible genetic makeup will survive over the long-term" I agree that this is the correct in the light of evolution, however I think what's really being questioned the unlimited genetic flexibility. I personally, don't like the reverse prism cerebellar adjustment argument, but I like the main point of that arguement. Evolution is schizophrenic, b/c in its easy to come up w/ any mumbo jumbo story about a specific ie flexibility of the cerebellum and b/c its evolved so much reverse prisms are essentially solvable problem, although the organism never encountered that in nature, but the it switches gears to generally ascribe genetic flexibility to almost ALL FACETS of an organism giving it the benefit of the doubt. This is something totally different, one RM + NS is not accounting for, yet I see time and time again. Example: Today CNN reported that Harvard and MIT have completed their first round of comparison of the genome of humans and monkeys and conjectured divergence 6.3 million years ago. They were looking mostly at mating compatability (according to the article) to make their decisions. Using mating as their (the scientists) tool, they believe several lines were isolated, came back after a couple of millenia and started mating again. It's easy to make these kind of conjectures looking via tunnel vision at just one trait (mating wouldn't be a "trait" per se but you get what I mean). Instead of this, I'd really like to see how during the "mating" RM + NS how, phonation, posture, hairless bodies, silent ovulation, psychology, molecular changes of the sperm and ovum, etc. were all evolving at the "same time" w/ just RM + NS, to the specificity it shows today. Note, if you say preferential mating took care of all those things, you're gonna run into the same if not bigger prbs...jpark320
May 17, 2006
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Dave T.: "Differential survival in a particular environment, or series of environments, spreads traits that promote survival in those environments, not a generalized tendency to survival (which I think is an empty concept anyway, evolutionarily speaking)." The point Dave T. mentioned above should be carefully considered. He is correct that evolution, at least in its modern formulation, is extremely short-sighted. It's not sighted at all, in fact. If an organism were to find itself in an very static environment (i.e. no noise in the system) over a long period of time, it would presumably LOCK onto that environment genetically and possibly be ill-equipped to endure serious pertubations in the future. If, on the other hand, the environment was always subject to some degree of pertubation, the locking may never occur. In that case, the sub-optimal (for this particular short-term environment) yet ultimately more robust/flexible genetic makeup will survive over the long-term. Consider a 3-D adaptive landscape. There's a really high peak representing super-fitness for a given environment. But it's also a steep peak. Being on top certainly has its advantages, but if the wind of change blows and the landscape shifts slightly, it's very easy to fall off such a peak. Sure if the wind never blew, a population may eventually wander onto that peak, lock onto it, and find itself in a a rather precarious situation genetically/phenotypically. But if the wind does blow from time to time, and the adaptive landscape trembles and shifts a bit, it's best to be on a wide mound. Maybe it's not as high, but it's a lot harder to fall off.great_ape
May 17, 2006
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"A somatic cell has the the same genome as a cell that will develop into an egg cell." This is not entirely true. Some somatic cells undergo specialized recombination events which modify the genome for that tissue. V(D)J recombination is the prime example.johnnyb
May 17, 2006
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Heh, the insecure atheistic simpletons over at MZ Peyers blog are having a field day with this one. Lot's of remarks about Dr. D's "bad math", complete with links to obscure sites which attempt to refute said math with bogus explanations that demonstrate a failure in understanding the relevant math in the first place. Good times, gotta love it. :)

Scott
May 17, 2006
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(I pressed the wrong key, and, presto, up went the post. I'll continue now. Sorry.) Anyone who's worked with computers knows that if your BIOS goes bad, you're dead in the water. It would appear that the 'cell' plays the same part in the biosphere that 'hardware' plays in information-processing machines. I think it is John Davison who says (or quotes someone as saying) that everything living comes from an egg. The proverbial taunt for Darwinists is: "What came first, the chicken, or the egg?" This SCNT seems to strongly suggest that the answer is the 'egg.' Taking all this a step further, scientists are now talking about heritable epigenetic 'markers', and an 'epigenetic code.' If, indeed, such a 'code' exists, then its existence intimates that a 'code' exists, over and above that of the genome, that 'directs' the processing of the genome (after all, the enucleated egg 'reprogrammed' the inserted genomic material). It would seem that this would be the far more elemental and important code. And its presence brings into question, at least some extent, the whole notion of RM, in that it would be easy to postulate that this more fundamental 'epigenetic code' simply reprograms the existent DNA, and what appears to be 'random' is, in actual fact, a 'programmed response.' Throw in the fact that the SCNT could only happen in the presence of intelligent agents--and hence, outside the reach of NS, while not completely dismantling NDE, it makes a very powerful argument for teleology: ie, the mammalian egg is going to become an embryo come what may----just as everything tends to its end.PaV
May 17, 2006
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Perhaps I can take the discussion back to an earlier point--epigenesis.

What the SCNT (somatic cell nuclear transfer) seem to demonstrate is epigenesis to the n-th degree. The cytoplasm is directing the nuclear material. To me, the critical language is this: "The “headless” (no nucleus, no genome, etc.) egg cell proceeds to break down/destroy the non-nucleic parts of the somatic cell. It then “gets ahold of” the somatic nucleus. It then proceeds to “reprogram” the nucleus to express the appropriate genes for embryonic life."

What's critical is the "reprogram"-ing part. A somatic cell has the the same genome as a cell that will develop into an egg cell. The difference between the two cells is what part of the genome is being activated and expressed. This experiment seems to strongly suggest that it is the 'cell' (cytoplasm) that is more critical, more fundamental to life than even the DNA.

It is rather natural to compare the genome to a 'program'. But we all know that 'software' has to have a 'hardware' component. Even in PC's, your computer wouldn't boot up if you didn't have a BIOS

BIOS is technically called firmware - neither software nor hardware. My main responsibility at Dell was laptop BIOS programming. In more modern BIOS stored in reprogrammable FLASH ROM there's a protected (in hardware) FLASH segment that never gets reprogrammed and its sole function in life is to load a new main BIOS in the happenstance that the existing one is somehow corrupted. Nature probably has a similar mechanism and SCNT might be exposing it. It seems that for everything humans invent nature has an antecedent. -ds PaV
May 17, 2006
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Chris -- While I agree that development does affect morphology to a great deal, I also want to suggest that perhaps genetic assimilation (which you alluded to, but did not name earlier) may be a directed mechanism for genomic change. You might be interested in my comments on Scott Gilbert's work: http://baraminology.blogspot.com/2006/02/new-science-of-eco-devo.html I've also summarized another relevant review article here: http://baraminology.blogspot.com/2006/04/genetic-assimilation-and-directional.html But the really important thing I wanted to point out was Sternberg's hypothesis of teleomorphic recursivity: http://www.annalsnyas.org/cgi/content/abstract/901/1/224 We have generally been studying genomes in one direction only. Perhaps it is time to view genomes and form as mutually modifying each other.johnnyb
May 17, 2006
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Hey, that's the ticket! I'm starting to think like a genUINE Darwinist now! Let me at some of that research money.es58
May 17, 2006
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no problem for darwinism, it explains everything, so, at some point, it evolved "generic shortterm adaptability" because who can think of a more necessary requirement than that (except where it doesn't have it of course, in which case, it wasn't necessary there,don't you see?) presto chango!es58
May 17, 2006
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"Let me suggest that every time there is a particular environmental surprise, the creatures that happen to have an allele mix which is particularly suited to that surprise will survive better than those who don’t" Changes in morphology in response to environmental change have little to to do with allele frequencies, it's to do with development. Because the developmental cycle relies in part on the environmental conditions, if the condidtions are different then the cycle may be altered without any genetic change. That is, patterns of gene expression that affect development are altered.Chris Hyland
May 17, 2006
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Tiax: It’s suggested that babies see things upside down for the first few days, until their brains adjust to the need to flip things. If a baby’s brain can make that adjustment, I suspect my brain could handle the task just as well. If a baby’s brain can make that adjustment, I suspect my brain could handle the task just as well. Don’t flatter yourself. I’d put the odds at 50/50. -ds Ds, having studied child psychology on the masters level, I have seen evidence that the former -- babies seeing upside down -- does seem to be a documented phenomenon. (Sorry, can't put my hands on it.) As those who have been studied with inverting glasses all seem to have developed the ability to naturally correct for the circomstance, I seen no reason to believe that Tiax would not as well. Tiax may not be as quick at it as a baby is, but that's hardly the point, is it.bFast
May 17, 2006
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Dave T.:"Differential survival in a particular environment, or series of environments, spreads traits that promote survival in those environments, not a generalized tendency to survival" Let me suggest that every time there is a particular environmental surprise, the creatures that happen to have an allele mix which is particularly suited to that surprise will survive better than those who don't, but the creatures who happen to have a "tonacity" mix, a "come what may" mix will also survive better than the "average". (I would suggest that in each surprise event, the "particularly suiteds" will do better than the "come what mays".) In the case that "environmental surprises" are each significantly different, I would suggest that the tonacity mix, being favored above par in each event, will rise above the mix that is ideally suited for each surprise. If a "come what may" gene is possible, then the "come what may" gene will do very well indeed.bFast
May 17, 2006
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